We’ve all heard this line from the Disney classic, Beauty and the Beast.
There are countless stories, myths and legends that we regard in our modern times as 'fairy tales'.
Our fairy tales and folklore are important parts of our history. They tell of a time before we had the understanding of the world we currently do.
But many of our childhood classic fairy tales have their origins long before we could even imagine.
Great writers like Hans Christian Andersen, The Grimm Brothers and Charles Perot curated these stories and wrote them down, but they changed them for our modern ears and sensibilities.
For example, the story that we know as Beauty and the Beast is actually over 6000 years old and was told at a time before the English, Italian or French languages even existed! The original is far far darker though...
The story of Rumplestiltskin too is about as old as Beauty and the Beast, and the tale we know as Jack and the Beanstalk is over 5000 years old and was based on a story called 'The tale of the boy who stole from an ogre'.
Many of these original stories were cautionary tales and didn’t have a happy ending.
The original story of what we know as Red Riding Hood features a description-less young girl, who didn’t have a red hood, which ended with her actually being devoured by the wolf - the end!
No hunter came to save her, no happily skipping off through the woods. Just death and darkness.
It was a story of the dangers that lie ahead of you wander too far into the dark...
The tale we know today was written down in the 1690s by Charles Perot, who added in the red hood as a symbol of blood and danger, and the hunter who saved her wasn’t added in until a century after Perot’s version, by the Brothers Grimm.
But the actual story was already thousands of years old at that point.
The story of The Little Mermaid is also ancient in origin.
In the original, the little mermaid is cursed. As soon as she steps on dry land, her tail turns to legs, but each step she takes on her new legs is excruciatingly painful, and should her husband go on to marry another, she will turn to sea foam and die an agonising death.
In the story she dances frantically for her husband, to gain his affections (which on painful legs must have been agony).
The story ends with him marrying another woman, as the little mermaid bursts into a cloud of sea foam with a haunting scream, as what remains of her is carried out across the waves.
The story is about the sacrifices women had to make for their husbands, particularly in arranged marriages common to secure wealth, status and power, and the life of servitude and pain that often entailed, back in a time when women were seen as the property of men to be traded at will.
Another classic - the tale of Bluebeard - also has very old roots, possibly as far back as the 6th century.
It is based on a very real person, called ‘Conomore the Cursed’, a cruel king who ruled over what is now Brittany in the 6th century.
The story of Bluebeard is fairly accurate to Conomore’s real life. It’s a story about domestic abuse, serial murder, power and control, and well worth further inspection if you want to go down that rabbit hole...
The story of what we know as Cinderella is also ancient - at least 2000 years old - and is based on a very old tale from China about a girl known as Ye Xian.
The details of the story we know are mostly very similar - Ye works in servitude to her wicked stepmother and step sisters, she lives in squalor, etc., except instead of a fairy godmother, Ye has a magick fish, who is actually her spirit guide, sent to her by her deceased mother to protect her.
The point to all of this is we are often quick to be flippant about stories and legends, folklore and myth.
We view them as the imaginations of a people who 'didn’t know better' - unenlightened folk who had nothing better to do than make up stories.
But as the old adage goes, 'there’s no smoke without fire'.
Many of the tales we know today were told as a form of verbal news at a time before most people could write, or before even recognisable, structured languages were invented.
They were often forms of verbal rational communications, Chinese whispers and mashed together real events, at a time when information could take weeks, months, even years to travel from mouth to mouth, ear to ear, continent to continent.
Our stories, folklore, myths and legends tell us about our history and where we come from.
They all play their role in how we got here, who came before us and what their lives were like.
We owe it to our ancestors and our history to dig deeper into the shadows of the past and see what lessons we can learn.
Understanding the folklore and stories is understanding our humanity, our history and our spiritual self.
Not everyone has a 'happy ever after', and perhaps we should take heed of those lessons.
For more musings, why not join the Facebook group 'Beneath The Canopy'?
Or you can listen to our in-depth discussion on 'The Crow's Nest' about this topic - 'The Magick & Murk of our Childhood Tales' - here.