Fairy Tales Glimpses at Society

 Fairy tales are filled with wonder. Strange creatures’ dwell within those realms. Fairies, dwarves, and elves populate the landscape. Although works of fiction they still take us away to another reality. Good literature places a mirror in front of us giving us a view of who we really are. These fairy tales are exactly that a mirror in which to view ourselves and society. 

The first tale is about a fairy who strives to eliminate hatred and prejudice by summoning a spell to keep people from acting out their base hatreds. But in the fairy’s efforts to enforce equality the people in this tale cannot be proud of their achievement as it may make others feel bad. Making all the same is not equality. 

The pursuit of knowledge can lead to disastrous consequences if one is not aware of the pitfalls of their journey. Two of the tales displays this. Once is about a moth who ventures to close to a source of light, and another is about a robin who wants to find the secrets of life. Seeking the wise old owl might not be the smartest move. 

The Savior from Over the Sea has a fairy queen deliver a curse to a town. The curse is to see their own wickedness and greed reflected to them to the point where they want to blind pout their own eyes. The Rose Garden shows how are needed to possess things we find beautiful ultimately ends up with us eventually destroying the thing that we want to possess. There is a race of fairies in these tales called “Blamekin” These fat useless fairies justify their existence by criticizing everyone and everything. The complaining eventually destroys their society with intense litigation and senseless laws. 

The Tower of Glass tells a tale of how fairies in a large glass tower look down upon the humans and their hovel. The fairies thinking, they are superior talk about ways to help the suffering humans, but nothing ever comes of it. In the end there is a war and the faeries realized that the humans were just like them and that they are in fact brothers. The superiority was just an illusion. 

The last faery tale is about a group of gods who are bored and decide to inhabit mundane bodies to experience limitation. 

This set of fairy tales holds the mirror to societies face and lets society see its own reflection. As a society we are afflicted with political correctness that it does in fact limit what we can say. We are so afraid of offending others that we are afraid to mention our accomplishments or offer criticism for fear of offending other. Our world is filled with pitfalls as the Owl and the Sparrow illustrates. In our quest for knowledge, we must be wary of those tricksters who pretend they want to help us only to take advantage of us when our guard is down. The Myth of Total Equality points out how we as a society in our quest for equality has sought to eliminate any differences and tries to make us all the same. Equality is allowing others to be different and accepting that difference. A very short but enlightening read.