"You Have Revealed Them to the Childlike"

Mystery and Nonsense in Fairy Tales

Ever since publishing my book this year on The Lord of the Rings, I have felt inspired to dive even deeper into the world of Faerie. Fairy tales have always held a special place in my heart. I grew up on Narnia, and some of my earliest experiences of being pierced by beauty came from reading tales such as The Little Mermaid.¹ There was something indescribably poignant about those early experiences with fairy tales that kept me coming back to them.

As an adult I have developed a “pseudo-scholarly” interest in these stories. At times however, particularly when I am waist-deep in some intellectual theory about fairy tales, I have noticed that their magic seems to fade a bit. It is only when I pull away from the high-brow analyses and humble myself again by sitting at the feet of these stories that they open themselves up to me with all the wonder they once held. After reading some of G.K. Chesterton’s writings on the nature and purpose of art, I believe I have identified the culprit.

If we take Chesterton’s view of the matter, we would have to accept that fairy tales ought to be mysterious. They ought to “not make sense.” After all, the purpose of imagination, according to Chesterton, is “not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.”² There is a wisdom, says Chesterton, to viewing the world as mysterious. When we encounter the strange and illogical in fairy tales, it conditions (or rehabilitates) us to seeing the world again with the eyes of wonder. Children are especially good at this. Adults have to work a little harder to recover it.

According to Chesterton the child is the great teacher for how we ought to view fairy tales, because childhood has a “white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather emphasizing their solidity.”³ This “white light” he refers to is the light of wonder. It gives us access to the real meaning of things because it sets us free from the broken images we have of the world. As a Christian Chesterton believed that original sin had marred our ability to grasp the true meaning of the world. This is precisely what the “nonsense” of fairy tales helps us to recover. In Chesterton’s estimation the task of the adult is to imitate the child’s humility towards the grandeur of creation in order to understand again the true meaning of existence and our participation in it.

The present day affinity for fairy tales and the subsequent attempts to make sense of them in reference to deeper theological, spiritual, and sociological theories, while certainly interesting and worthwhile, are really not essential to the purpose of fairytales.⁴ The fairytale achieves its purpose through an entirely different route. It is primarily meant to enchant, and in order to enchant us it has to retain its sense of strangeness, of “otherness,” inexplicable within the laws of our world. When we try to make sense of the fairytale on our own terms, its true meaning slips through our grasp.

Sometimes I wonder if, in our adult desire to plumb the depths of fairy stories from an intellectual perspective, we might be unconsciously showing ourselves to the door. We have not mastered the story when we have dissected it. In fact, to strive for perfect knowledge of the fairy tale is to strip it of its very essence as something mysterious. If we become too much of an “expert” on fairy tales (and I mean “expert” in the modern sense of the term, not in the sense of Smith of Wootton Major, who was an expert on Faerie in the sense that he was a frequent and humble visitor), we may go one day to look for the door only to find that it has been closed to us forever. The door to Faerie is small, and only the childlike can enter.

We must remember that these stories were precious to us long before we could understand them. We did not need to know why the Little Mermaid had to sacrifice her voice in order to walk on land before we could participate in her sorrow. Nor did we need to dissect the “real meaning” of the splinter of ice in Kay’s heart in order to feel its chill. We did not possess perfect knowledge of these stories as children, and yet we instinctively understood their profundity. They taught us something about the world and about ourselves, even if we couldn’t articulate what it was.

The key that unlocks the door of the story’s meaning is not our intellectualism, but our humility. Mystery and wonder, a sense of awe, these are the fundamental ingredients to accessing the meaning of fairytales. The quest for knowledge is good, but it is meant to serve our sense of wonder, not the other way around. The very moment we over-analyze the fairy story it becomes a lecture; and then it ceases to be a fairy story.

As I continue to explore the wonderful depths of fairytales, I want to wade carefully, so that my grown-up zeal for knowledge does not rob me of my humility and innocent delight. I want at all times to maintain that wonderful trait of the child who gazes at the night sky with wonder, and who sits wide-eyed on the hearth, wrapped in a blanket, heart and mind open to all the possibilities of the tale unfolding in front of him. It is the child who trusts without understanding, and in doing so is rewarded with knowledge of the highest kind. It might be said of fairytales that while their meaning may be hidden from the great thinkers of the world, it has been “revealed to the childlike.”⁵

1. I still remember the first time I read The Little Mermaid. I was around 6 years old, and it was so beautiful that it made me want to cry. Even at a young age, I perceived that there was a profound beauty in the story that could coexist with profound suffering and longing.

2. Thomas Peters, The Christian Imagination: G.K. Chesterton on the Arts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 97.

3. Peters, Christian Imagination, 37.

4. I say this as someone who is incredibly interested in the more academic explorations of fairy tales. It’s not wrong to explore them in this way, but I think we need to be careful to not let our adult intellectual interest overshadow our initial, humble appreciation and wonder for the tales themselves.

5. Matthew 11:25