9 Real People Who May Have Inspired Fairy Tales

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This cartoon comes from Sandman, #50 (Ramadan).

This cartoon comes from Sandman, #50 (Ramadan).

Who doesn’t love fairy tales? We all have our childhood favorites — mine were Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel. Oh, and Snow White! I would collect images (picture books, View Master slides — remember them?? — the Disney movies) of the characters, especially the witches in each of those tales. The saga of Baba Yaga stories were also great sources of witch-lore as well. But what if you could meet the real Hansel and Gretel? Or Rapunzel? Or the real Sleeping Beauty? Did you ever imagine there was an historical kernel underneath the stories that enchanted and bewitched us as children? Fairy tales are often the sanitized or watered-down version of ancient mythology but they are just as often the slightly embroidered accounts of real events.

Lauren Davis has a great post about real people or incidents that may have given birth to commonly told favorite fairy tales. Read her blog here. The Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy is also a great source of information like this.

See yourself here?

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In September 2014, the most visitors to this site were from the USA, the UK, Canada, Spain, and Australia.

In September 2014, the most visitors to this site were from the USA, the UK, Canada, Spain, and Australia.

The monthly data for September is now available! There were 845 unique visitors to this site, with the most coming from the countries highlighted in the map above. The posts that most people visited were about emerald, sage, daffodil, diamonds, and marigold. It’s always interesting to see which searches bring people to visit and what other pages/posts they look at once they are here.

Were these 5 subjects what brought YOU here for the first time? Please share below what you were looking for when you discovered www.stephenmorrisauthor.com!

The Mabinogion

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"The Island of the Mighty" is the first volume in Evangeline Walter's 4-book series retelling the Welsh stories found in the Mabinogion.

“The Island of the Mighty” is the first volume in Evangeline Walter’s 4-book series retelling the Welsh stories found in the Mabinogion.

There have been many translations and retellings of the Welsh mythology known as the “Mabinogion.” Evangeline Walter has done the best job of retelling the stories for a modern adult reader. Lloyd Alexander brought several characters from the Mabinogion to life in his Prydain Chronicles for younger readers. Disney took two of Alexander’s books to use as the basis of their animated film, “The Black Cauldron.”

Apart from the difficulty in pronouncing the Welsh names (just remember the double LLs are pronounced like “chl”, an Eastern European rolling hocking sound in the back of your throat followed by the “L” sound and that double DDs are “th”), the stories in the Mabinogion are some of the most wonderful and fantastic in world folklore. But again, there is a lot of code: what does it mean to “hold the feet” of Math? Are his “feet” a euphemism for his sexual organs like in the Old Testament? And the sudden birth accounts that imply sex must have happened previously but is never directly referred to.

If you are looking for autumnal reading, I highly recommend the Mabinogion in one of its many forms!

Hear the BBC report about the Mabinogion here.