Yesterday the Blue-eyed Boy, who's about to turn nine (!), came to be with us. Both he and I were suffering from what you might call 'too much weekend'. I hosted a pot luck lunch celebration and he had his birthday party with a sleepover. Being a sensitive child, the excitement had to be dealt with in some way, and so he was a bit 'piano' and his forehead and chin felt hot to the touch, although from the way his eyes looked, I don't think he was running a fever.
He arrived with a basket-load of books and settled down to read. After a while he asked me if I'd read to him, which I did. Now, the story we read about some hero in fantasy land (I've forgotten the name but there are many in the series) was fairly innocuous and quite fun, but later I thought it would be good to put something else in his head, some mind-pictures that might serve as food for the soul and maybe even possess some underlying moral content. So I read him a long story from 'Celtic Tales', a collection of folk tales I can really recommend.
He listened, spell-bound, a sure sign that he's not too old for such tales. When he was younger we went more with the classic Grimm's stories such as Sleeping Beauty, Mother Holle, the Musicians of Bremen, the Shoemaker and his Wife and so on. These I read in a matter-of-fact tone. No drama. But I did allow myself more expression with 'King Conal's Horses'.
'French Fairy Tales' is another book I can recommend, and you can always look for the Andrew Lang collections. I also used 'Stories for Six Year Olds' for my children and the grandsons. Some of these are retellings of the old tales, but usually done with sensitivity. On the other hand, especially in the world of young adult books, recently there's been a fashion to re-work some of the stories in order to make the princesses more feisty and pro-active, in line with our feminist views today. This always feels to me like a misreading, a kind of betrayal of the originals. If you think of archetypal images, very often the feminine, the princess, represents the soul. I'd say that in our modern world it's exactly this, the soul, that very often needs rescuing and freeing from imprisonment in illusion.
I don't know how the Blue-eyed Boy felt at the end of the day, but me, I felt re-energized and ready to engage with life again.
p.s. A week later, and he's with us again. And what does he ask for? For me to read the same story once again. I was happy to do so.
