"Charles De Lint - Jack, The Giant-Killer" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

Red is the colour of magic in every country, and has
been so from the very earliest times. The caps of fairies
and musicians are well-nigh always red.
—W.B. Yeats,
from Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
Rowan am I and I am sister to the Red Man my berries
are guarded by dreamless dragons my wood charms the
spells from witches and in the wide plain my floods
quicken
—Wendlessen, from The Calendar of the Trees
Though she be but little, she is fierce.
—William Shakespeare, from A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream


INTRODUCTION
fairy tales
There is no satisfactory equivalent to the German word
märchen, tales of magic and wonder such as those
collected by the Brothers Grimm: Rapunzel, Hansel &
Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, The Six Swans and other such
familiar stories. We call them fairy tales, although none of
the above stories actually contains a creature called a
“fairy.” They do contain those ingredients most familiar to
us in fairy tales: magic and enchantment, spells and
curses, witches and trolls, and protagonists who defeat
overwhelming odds to triumph over evil. J.R.R. Tolkien,
in his classic essay on Fairy Stories, offers the definition
that these are not in particular tales about fairies or elves,
but rather of the land of Faerie: “the Perilous Realm itself,
and the air that blows in the country. I will not attempt to
define that directly,” he goes on, “for it cannot be done.
Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of
its qualities to be indescribable, though not
imperceptible.”
Fairy tales were originally created for an adult audience.
The tales collected in the German countryside and set to
paper by the Brothers Grimm (wherein a Queen orders her
stepdaughter, Snow White, killed and her heart served
“boiled and salted for my dinner” and a peasant girl must
cut off her own feet lest the Red Shoes, of which she has
been so vain, keep her dancing night and day until she
dances herself to death) were published for an adult
readership, popular, in the age of Goethe and Schiller,
among the German Romantic poets. Charles Perrault’s
spare and moralistic tales (such as Little Red Riding Hood
who, in the original Perrault telling, gets eaten by the wolf
in the end for having the ill sense to talk to strangers in the
wood) was written for the court of Louis XIV; Madame
d’Aulnoy (author of The White Cat) and Madam