The beginning of fairies

Texture by Nancy Claeys: 0416 Hard Light 100%

When the first baby laughed for the first time,
its laugh broke into a thousand pieces,
and they all went skipping about,
and that was the beginning of fairies.
~Tinkerbell, from the fairy tale Peter Pan

Kaylene chose Fairy Tale for week’s Quotography theme. And true to form, I’m interpreting it a bit loosely. Try as I may, I just couldn’t find a photo that depicted a fairy tale in the literal sense. So, since mother is the necessity of invention, I thought a bit outside the box.

Did you know fairy tales do not require a fairy to be present? Seems odd, doesn’t it? The typical fairy tale usually has some combination of goblins, gnomes, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants, witches, wizards or mermaids. And they almost always contain magic or some type of enchantments. And talking animals to boot.

Why do fairy tales enchant us so? Why are they irresistible to our imagination? We may look out to sea and think of The Little Mermaid; walk in the woods and think of Little Red Riding Hood; eat a red apple and think of Snow White. Sometimes they have happy endings…sometimes the ending is but happy.

If you wan to know the historical origins of the genre, there’s plenty of places on the InterWeb to research how the stories evolved into what they are today. It’s said that the first fairy tales originated in ancient Egypt, somewhere around 1300BC. I don’t have the time or patience to read all the history, so here’s the Reader’s Digest abridged version.

The fairy tale is a universe in miniature. ~Max Lüthi

Fairy Tales are always rooted in some life lesson or truth. There is usually a moral to the story and the characters are always transformed in some way by their experiences. They are stories told in a fanciful way about life and what we should learn from our experiences.

From Hans Christian Anderson, The Brothers Grimm or Aesop’s Fables…to The Arabian Nights  and Canturbury Tales….to the Disneyfied versions of these stories…fairy tales enchant because they are stories about US!

Fairies are just a bonus.

Linking up with Quotography