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Why Read Fairy Tales?

by Lisa Ripperton
April 23, 2016



The excerpt begins below:

First, fairy tales cultivate the imagination.


Second, fairy tales broaden the mental horizon.


"Songs the sirens never sung
  Shores Ulysses never ﻿﻿knew﻿﻿."

Third, fairy tales deepen and enlarge a child's emotional experience.

He thrills with pride as the little tailor gets the better of the giant; he holds his breath in suspense as the last mantle is thrown over the eleventh swan brother, he shudders before the locked door in Bluebeard's Castle; and as a result, he is all his life more sensitive to the appeal of "brave romance," wherever he may find it.

Fourth, fairy tales develop a sense of humour.


More examples

It is often said that a child cannot fully appreciate the clever fooling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but while he is eagerly following Alice's adventures he is laying, unconsciously, the foundation for an appreciation of humour in literature. Kipling's Just So Stories, have a similar value. Howard Pyle's fairy stories in The Wonder Clock, and Pepper and Salt, are full of humour and are told with a delightful drollness, irresistibly appealing. Stockton's stories, The Bee-man of OrnThe Clocks of Rondaine, and others, are full of a humorous fancy.

Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring belongs to the older children, who are leaving the fairy tale age behind them. They can appreciate its delightful absurdity without being puzzled by its burlesque quality. Of this book Andrew Lang said that he thought it "quite indispensable in every child's library, and that parents should be urged to purchase it at the first opportunity, as without it no education is complete."



If the adult has forgotten how he felt as a child when he came to the end of the fairy story, let him reread the conclusion of Martin Chuzzlewit. Mr. Pecksniff, with "a disconcerted meekness on his face . . . enormously ridiculous," Mr. Pecksniff completely unmasked by the old man he would have tricked and wronged and, moreover, laid flat on the floor by a blow from this same irate old gentleman's stick, while Martin, Tom Pinch, Mary, Ruth and Mark Tapley stand by as witnesses of the discomfiture of hypocrisy, gives us the same pleasurable sensation, as did the summary disposal of the wicked step-mother.

Sixth, fairy tales counteract certain unfortunate tendencies of modern life.


Seventh, there is no better introduction to poetry.

In the letter to Coleridge quoted above, Lamb says: "Think what you would have been now if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!" The atmosphere of the fairy tale, its "high hill among the trees of the forest, where the fox and the hare bid each other good night"; its talking beasts and flowers; its lakes and mountain caverns prepare a child for the magic of the great poets. "We cannot all hope to be classical scholars, but all may be steeped in folk-lore and heroic romance in childhood, when the imagination is fresh and keen and so acquire a share of the old-world culture."

An excerpt from Introduction to the Use of Books and Libraries
by Fay and Eaton

Share your experience

Why do you read fairy tales with your children or students? Why did you read them as a child? Can you think of benefits to reading fairy tales that we didn't include on this list? Please share your experience with us know in a comment below. We love hearing from our readers!
