I fell in love with folklore from a very young age. My mother read to me from Mother Goose- I knew my nursery rhymes and learned the stories of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Jack and the Beanstalk. My childhood was rich in magic. Fairies, elves, witches and trolls populated the deep dark woods of my imagination. But as I got older, I outgrew my belief in magic and stopped seeing the faces of trolls in rocks. I became evermore confident that the world was no longer like it had been, “Once upon a time”. And though I continued to visit the land of Dungeons and Dragons with my friends through role playing and alone through the fantasy literature of C.S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Tolkien, Piers Anthony and David Eddings among others, I was keenly aware that these worlds were unlike the one I was living in. Fairy tales do not tell children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales tell children that monsters can be killed. - G.K. Chesterton It wasn’t until I was in my third year of university that I rediscovered folklore. I came across a book of folktales, the Red Fairy book by Andrew Lang and started reading them and sharing them with my friends over pizza after work. There is something intoxicating both in hearing and telling a good story. I was hooked. I fell in love with the simple intricate plots and the themes that emerged. Themes like the strength of courage, the transformational power of love, the importance of loyalty and the value of a little trickery. I found the characters were struggling with many of the same challenges I was facing as a young man. They struggled to live up to their parents expectations,to become independent and mature, to resist easy temptations and to take on responsibility for others. They struggled to survive against an indifferent world, against villains who were possessed by jealousy, ambition, hatred or greed. These are all mature, complex themes that are found throughout all literature, but here in folklore they were explored simply yet thoroughly in a language that was easily understood by even children. The thematic richness and depth of folklore is not particularly surprising. For thousands of years before the invention of the printing press, folklore was passed down orally from one generation to the next. It has formed the basis of culture since the very beginning. Even Shakespeare himself borrowed heavily from it. These stories represented the collective wisdom of peoples and were a great source of both moral and practical life lessons. More than simply entertainment, they fostered a stronger sense of cultural identity and created an understanding of a shared heritage.
The act of telling stories and hearing stories in this way, strengthened memory and fostered discipline as well as listening skills. Most importantly, it engaged the imagination, which according to literary critic Northrope Frye is the seat of both empathy and innovation. “No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself”. The capacity to see fairies in the dappled sunlight of a meadow is no different from the ability to see horseless carriages before they exist or envision riding in a metal bird. Every great leap in history whether technological or social began because someone imagined that the world could be different, better, than it was. Carl Jung saw the importance of folklore and myth in a different light. He made is the cornerstone of his psychology. He posited that we all interpret the world through constructed narratives that we borrow from stories deep in our unconsciousness. At times you might be Robin Hood, fighting to protect the helpless against tyrants. Other times, you will be the biblical Job- enduring suffering upon suffering at the hands of an ineffable God. There are times in your life when you will face the choice of Faust or find yourself flying too high like Icarus. Perhaps your life story isn’t so specific, but if you think about it for a moment, I am sure you can look back on the past year and easily tell whether it was a comedy, tragedy or romance. This structure is part of what gives our lives meaning. Try as we might, it is difficult to shake the belief that there is not some kind or order in the world. Whether it’s true or not, we all want to believe that there is a purpose to suffering, that good things happen to good people, that we should strive to be heroic and that it’s possible to live “Happily Ever After”. This is the wisdom, the practical and moral life lessons that these stories contain and this is why we must continue to tell them.
0 Comments
Dwight A. Loftis (R-District 19) and James Mikell "Mike" Burns (R-District 17) sponsored House Bill 3826 in South Carolina's legislature on January 31st, 2019. The bill, among other things would "require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science as part of the course content." That's not a science with which I am familiar. And lest we get too smug with ourselves North of the 49th parallel, I would direct your attention to this story in the Globe and Mail last week that predicts we are likely to see a large measles outbreak in Canada in the very near future (similar to the one that has spread throughout Europe over the past year). There have been two reported cases in Canada thus far in 2019 and more will follow due to declining immunization rates. While many view the disease as pretty harmless, it killed 110,000 people in 2017- the last year for which the World Health Organization has published statistics. That’s good enough for 1st place on the list of vaccine preventable deaths. Now to put these stories in a broader context, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” was published by Charles Darwin in November of 1859. That’s almost 160 rotations around the sun ago (assuming you subscribe to the heliocentric theory of the solar-system). Darwin’s theory of evolution that has since been confirmed by archaeologists and geneticists the world over. Likewise, John Enders and his colleagues created a measles vaccine in 1963 that should have eradicated the disease. Instead, a growing number of people are voluntarily choosing to put their children and their neighbours at risk because a) it’s God’s wish, b) diseases are good for kids or c) vaccines cause autism or ADHD or <insert absurdity here>. How is this possible? First off, I can tell you with great certainty that educators are doing their best, but clearly there are a lot of people coming through the school system that fundamentally don’t understand the process that is science. Despite our best efforts, if people are reaching adulthood thinking that Science is something akin to “Nerd’s opinions” about things we have failed. Science is not something that you believe or you don’t. Belief is only required for articles of faith. Science is something that you understand, or you don’t. It exists independent of your thoughts about it. Case in point- whether you believe in Newton’s theory of gravity or not, if you walk of the roof of a building you will find yourself accelerating towards the most massive body nearby: the oblate spheroid we call Earth. Now my colleges and I may be partially at fault in all this. We may have inadvertently undermined children’s’ understanding of science through the careless application of relativism. When we teach children that there is no one way to understand poetry or to a lesser extent, history, we have to distinguish this from the study of Science and Mathematics because children are prone to over-generalizations. You see this with very young children when they are learning the language and they make mistakes with irregular verbs- “Yesterday we swimmed in the pool”. This is over-generalization. Last year after a lesson on Body Safety, Ms. M got the idea that she didn’t have to eat vegetables she didn’t like because, “My body, my choice”. Also, over-generalization. This tendency allows children to learn quickly but it can lead to a lot of confusion if the exceptions to the rules aren’t taught. And teaching these distinctions is difficult. We have to walk a very fine line between cultivating a healthy skepticism that is essential for critical thinking while nurturing a respect for the results of evidence-based inquiry. We have done a good job with the former, but we have been less successful at the latter. Of course it doesn’t help that we have other organizations working against us. Much of the misinformation about the role Science plays in our lives can be laid at the feet of organized religions and corporate industries. They have done their absolute best to muddy the waters of scientific inquiry and to undermine the results produced. Religions should have bowed out of teaching metaphysics 500 years ago when Galileo set the record straight. They could have thrown in the towel after Darwin and just focused instead on the moral teachings of Jesus, which- it should be said, are the absolute standard for what it means to be good. As for corporate industries, they are absolutely diabolical when it comes to misinformation. My favourite (or least favourite) example of corporate corruption comes from General Motors who added tetraethyl lead to gasoline knowing full well that it was poisoning everyone. Beginning in 1922, it was only finally phased out in North America in 1995 (though it is still used in other parts of the world). Phillip Morris Tobacco had their 3rd best year ever in 2017 with 7.8 billion dollars in revenue worldwide in large part because the harmful effects of tobacco use are still “just a theory” in the third world. In much the same way that effects of man-made climate change remains “just a theory” for approximately a third of the people in the United States and Canada thanks in no small part to the good work of the Saudi Royal family, Sinopec and Exxon-Mobil. I don’t want to end on a note of doom and gloom. In fact, I’m not very pessimistic about our future. For all the people who are refusing to get their kids vaccinated, there are many, many more who do. Mr. Loftis and Mr. Burns from South Carolina may want to confuse creationism with science in schools, but there are thousands upon thousands of archaeologists scouring the globe at this moment adding to our collective understanding of the past. (There is also a Supreme Court that settled this matter 40 years ago.) In short, I’m not pessimistic about the future because I know that science is progress and I have faith in the future. |