What Fairy Tales Know About Real Life

I don't know about you, but I think fairy tales often get underestimated.

They're filed away as children's entertainment. Charming, simple, suitable for bedtime. Every now and then, they get dug out to appease the request of a child or to dazzle a group of children in a reading circle at the library.

But personally, I see fairy tales enduring because they're built on something true. Not literally true, obviously. But they map onto real experience and land somewhere deeper. Somewhere our hearts simply recognize. It's why the same core stories keep resurfacing in new forms across generations and cultures.

And it's why I decided to try my hand at retelling a few of them. Magic of the Swan is the first.

What Fairy Tales Carry That Other Stories Don't

Fairy tales deal in archetypes, which means they deal in the most compressed and universal version of human experience.

• The curse that distorts reality and makes the true thing appear false.
• The quest that requires more than the hero initially has to give.
• The love that is tested by the willingness to see clearly when everything conspires against clarity.
• The transformation that costs something real before it gives something back.

These are not just plot devices. They're descriptions of actual human experience, rendered in a form that makes them visible and survivable and meaningful. The person reading a fairy tale about a curse isn't just reading about a magical enchantment. They're reading about every situation in their own life where the true thing has been obscured by something false, where they've had to fight to see clearly through distortion. The story gives that experience a shape, and giving something a shape makes it possible to hold.

That's what good stories do, and fairy tales have been doing it longer than almost any other narrative form we have.

What Faith Sees in Them

When I read fairy tales through the lens of my faith, I find something that looks more like deep pattern.

• Darkness
• Testing
• Transformation
• Restoration

The structure of so many classic fairy tales highlights the idea that things are not as they should be. That something real and valuable can be hidden or distorted or put under a kind of curse. That love willing to pay a real cost has power that other things don't. That restoration is possible even after what seems like an irreversible ending.

I don't think fairy tales are secretly Christian, but I do think they're tapping into something true about the human experience. And the resonance between that and faith is part of what makes both so enduring.

When I write fairy tale retellings, I'm going to do my best to follow the truth that's already present in the original and ask where it leads when you follow it all the way. There may or may not be an overt faith element, but the stories will come from the shared foundation of faith along with the human experience borne of a Creator.

Fairy tales know things. They've always known things. I'm just trying to put my own little spin on them.

Is there a specific fairy tale that has always felt real to you? Something in the tale that resonated beyond the surface of the story? Which one, and what did it touch in you? I'd love to hear about it.