Warner - Once upon a Time

Imagine the history of fairy tale as a map, like the Carte du Tendre, the Map of Tenderness, drawn by Parisian romancers to chart the peaks and sloughs of the hearts affections: unfurl this imaginary terrain in your minds eye, and you will first see two prominent landmarks, Charles Perraults Histoires et Contes du temps pass (Tales of Olden Times, 1697) and a little nearer in the foreground, the Grimm Brothers Kinder- und Hausmrchen (Childrens and Household Tales, 181257). These collections dominate their surroundings so imposingly that they make it hard to pick out other features near or far.

Gradually, however, as your eyes adjust to the dazzle, several more features of the scene begin to grow in definition and give you better bearings: along a whole web of routes from points further east, The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights form deep aquifers of story running through the entire expanse, and emerging here and there in waterfalls and powerful rivers spreading through wide floodplains. Harbours and market-places and pilgrimage sitesVenice, Naples, Genoa, Sicily, in Italy alonebegin to emerge as significant centres of talkative storytelling populations.

To the north, Hans Christian Andersens glowing Danish homeland is emitting powerful signals from regions stretching to the Arctic circle; and when your eyes track his large force field, you begin to discover beacons blazing in the darkness, lit by the work of Walter Scott in Scotland, Alexander Afanasyev in Russia, and other omnivores of their countries stories. The circumpolar regions, as well as the steppes and forests of Russia and Central Asia, are also rich in fairy tale ore: the ogress Baba Yaga lives deep in the forest in a hut that runs around on chicken legs, loves to eat children (but plucky Vasilissa the Beautiful foils the witchs plans, see ). Baba Yaga, like her counterparts farther south, sometimes takes a more innocent fancy to one of the heroes or heroines, and showers them with boons and blessings.

If you could turn this fictive atlas into an advent calendar and open windows in the scenery, you would then see scores of storytellers and inventors gathering, interpreting, re-visioning the materialhidden away hard at work in Ireland are Speranza Wilde and her son Oscar, W. B. Yeats and his patron Lady Gregory; in Wales, Charlotte Guest, who established the first English Mabinogion, a treasury of marvellous stories; in Zurich and Vienna, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud; in Toronto, Japan, and South London, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter. In full view and in close-up, windows that are in fact not windows but movie screens are shimmering with the works of inspired adaptorsJean Cocteau with La Belle et la bte (1946), a poetic, slow-moving romance that crystallizes the seductive mysterious eros at the heart of fairy tale. Film adaptors and producers, stage directors, and designers are busy refashioning fairy tales for audiences of all ages, creating theatrical spectacles that combine circus techniques, masking, song and dance in the raucous and sentimental lineage of pantomime. Therapists, performance artists, couturiers, and photographers a festive cavalcade of those professions now called creative content providers are losing themselves in the forests of fairy tale in order to come back with baskets of strawberries picked in the snow.

There remain many more windows to open; in fact theyre numberless, and besides it becomes clear that the scenery is not stable, for the land masses and landmarks are floating in a vast ocean, the Ocean of Story, which, like the cosmic river of the ancient world, encircles the earth since recorded time. The light keeps changing over the scene, now plunging a once prominent element into shadow, then turning its beam on another hitherto disregarded part of the territory.

Stories slipped across frontiers of culture and language as freely as birds in the air as soon as they first began appearing; fairy tales migrate on soft feet, for borders are invisible to them, no matter how ferociously they are policed by cultural purists.

The Ocean of Story is the title of one of the most ancient collections of fairy talesa phrase Salman Rushdie adapted for his fable, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. We swim, float, or navigate this fluid and marvellous body of water as a matter of course; mass media, television, game shows, video games, and every kind of popular entertainment trawl it daily to bring up plots and characters, animals and motifs.