Fairy Tales
Many European fairy tales begin when golden apples are stolen from a king, usually by a bird:
- Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf, Russian
- The Golden Bird, German
- The Golden Mermaid, German
- The Nine Peahens and the Golden Apples, Serbian/Bulgarian
- Prâslea the Brave and the Golden Apples, Romanian, where the thief is not a bird but a zmeu
- The Three Brothers and the Golden Apple, Bulgarian, where the thief is not a bird but a zmey
- The White Snake, German
Read more about this topic: Golden Apple
Famous quotes related to fairy tales:
“And in their fairy tales
The warty giant and witch
Get sealed in doorless jails
And the match-girl strikes it rich.”
—Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)
“What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child’s questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won’t be able to related them in a way which would enrich the child’s life.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because—despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content—these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“One might get the impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction by counterinduction and uses a multiplicity of theories, metaphysical views, fairy tales, instead of the customary pair theory/observation. This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is rather to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.”
—Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994)