TATAR: Oh gosh, I did, I was going to say, I had a secular childhood. TIPPETT: You know, whoever I’m talking with, whatever subject -I actually always start with this question about whether there was a religious or spiritual background to your childhood.ĭR. But she inched towards them with a doctoral thesis on a 19th-century German philosopher who delved into the “dark side” of nature.Ī daughter of Hungarian immigrants who fled Holocaust-era Central Europe, these themes were the stuff of reality, not fantasy, for Maria Tatar.
When she was doing her graduate studies, such stories were not deemed serious enough for scholarly attention. Maria Tatar is a professor of Germanic languages and literature at Harvard University, where she also chairs the program in Folklore and Mythology. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Not a resolution, I should say, because you have to keep working through things. You know, and in just mysterious ways you come to an understanding or a resolution. You can say things that you’re afraid to talk about. You can go in places that you’d be scared to go otherwise. MARIA TATAR: There’s the great “once upon a time,” which is a marker. They are carriers of the plots we endlessly rework as we weave the narratives of our lives.ĭR. These stories, she says, have survived by adapting across cultures and history. She’s an expert on classic fairy tales and legends and on how they help us work with things like fear and hope. To uncover what all of this might be saying about our time, we turn to Maria Tatar. TIPPETT: The last few years have seen multiple renditions of “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel,” as well as as well as “Frozen”, Disney’s updated take on “The Snow Queen.” There are overt fairy tale themes in hit TV series like True Blood, Grimm, and Once Upon a Time. And I know that light burns in all of you. But I have never seen a brighter light than when my eyes just opened. SNOW WHITE (PLAYED BY KRISTEN STEWART): All these years, all I’ve known is darkness.
TIPPETT: But now, we have a darker, adult, self-realized Snow White and the Huntsman. SNOW WHITE (VOICE-OVER BY ADRIANA CASELOTTI): What do you do when things go wrong? Once upon a time in my childhood, for example, there was Disney’s frothy Snow White. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: There’s something in the present that is finding new sustenance in the old, old storylines of fairy tales.
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