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

Leprince de Beaumont (author of Beauty and the Beast)
also wrote for the French aristocracy. In England, fairy
stories and heroic legends were popularized through
Malory’s Arthur, Shakespeare’s Puck and Ariel,
Spencer’s Faerie Queen.

With the Age of Enlightenment and the growing
emphasis on rational and scientific modes of thought,
along with the rise in fashion of novels of social realism in
the Nineteenth Century, literary fantasy went out of vogue
and those stories of magic, enchantment, heroic quests
and courtly romance that form a cultural heritage
thousands of years old, dating back to the oldest written
epics and further still to tales spoken around the
hearth-fire, came to be seen as fit only for children,
relegated to the nursery like, Professor Tolkien points out,
“shabby or old-fashioned furniture… primarily because
the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is
misused.”
And misused the stories have been, in some cases
altered so greatly to make them suitable for Victorian
children that the original tales were all but forgotten.
Andrew Lang’s Tam Lin, printed in the colored Fairy
Books series, tells the story of little Janet whose playmate
is stolen away by the fairy folk—ignoring the original,
darker tale of seduction and human sacrifice to the Lord
of Hell, as the heroine, pregnant with Tam Lin’s child,
battles the Fairy Queen for her lover’s life. Walt Disney’s
“Sleeping Beauty” bears only a little resemblance to
Straparola’s Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, published in
Venice in the Sixteenth Century, in which the enchanted
princess is impregnated as she sleeps. The Little Golden
Book version of the Arabian Nights resembles not at all
the violent and sensual tales recounted by Scheherazade
in One Thousand and One Nights so that the King of
Kings won’t take her virginity and her life.

The wealth of material from myth and folklore at the
disposal of the story-teller (or modern fantasy novelist)
has been described as a giant cauldron of soup into which
each generation throws new bits of fancy and history, new
imaginings, new ideas, to simmer along with the old. The
story-teller is the cook who serves up the common
ingredients in his or her own individual way, to suit the
tastes of a new audience. Each generation has its cooks,
its Hans Christian Andersen or Charles Perrault, spinning
magical tales for those who will listen—even amid the
Industrial Revolution of the Nineteenth Century or the
technological revolution of our own. In the last century,
George Mac Donald, William Morris, Christina Rossetti,