Happy-happy-joy-joy! In today’s mail is the latest WQ magazine – the Adaptation issue.
My excitement? Is caused by seeing the article I wrote about the enduring power of fairy tales.
Critic and writer Marina Warner says that old storytellers used to finish their stories with: ‘This is the tale you asked for, I leave it in your mouth’. Perhaps, ultimately, the fairy tale’s ability to adapt is embedded in this idea. That a tale is given to us all, but the words will sit differently on our tongues, tasting novel to each person; and that tale will be repeated, reproduced in manifold renderings each time it is told, each time it trips from diverse lips. Perhaps the possible adaptations of fairy tales are as many and varied as the number of people who might tell them, passing them on, changed and shifted, Chinese-whisper fashion, generation after generation.
The fairy tale is fluid, shaping to the teller’s needs; its communal nature means it is constantly shared and in that sharing it’s invariably, however infinitesimally, changed for we all have tales in our mouths.