Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner (review)

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. By Marina Warner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 202 pp.If I may begin by speaking of this book as a material object, and putting aside temporarily the name and reputation of the author emblazoned on the front cover, I would suggest that this volume will probably not visually intimidate its readers. The book is attractive but small, its dimensions coming to only 6.8 x 5.1 inches, and its subtitle, A Short History of Fairy Tale, is fitting because this book is only 202 pages long. In fact, on first glance, one might get the feeling that the volume belongs on the shelf with the children's books rather than the scholarly monographs. However, Marina Warner demonstrates that size is of course no reflection of the author's thoroughness, depth, and ability to do justice to such an interesting topic. Warner fills the pages with not only the history of fairy tales themselves but also the history of their collectors and readers and the manner in which tales, in various media, have been transmitted and used as modes of instruction and entertainment for centuries. At the same time, the accessible nature of her writing communicates such care for the topic that, taken together with the physical dimensions of the book, its wonderful illustrations, and the topic of discussion itself, I feel it would not be at all disrespectful to place it on the shelf somewhere in the general region of my old set of McGuffey readers, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902).Warner devotes some attention (though not at length) to the distinction between the characteristics of traditional oral fairy tales and literary fairy tales and to some analysis of particular tales, such as "Bluebeard," "The Juniper Tree," "The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder," and "The Robber Bridegroom," but her focus seems to be primarily on textual and contextual reasons that fairy tales continue to exist, what forms they assume, and ways that an audience can interpret them. Warner's book is a celebratory description of fairy tales-oral, literary, or otherwise-as an important cross-cultural phenomenon, and even in the skepticism of contemporary times, when, as Warner writes, "Few people believe in fairies" (1), fairy tales have retained their significance even as they have found their way beyond the oral utterance and the written page into other media. However, Warner makes it clear that the history of the fairy tale and its forms is a complicated network of "tangled" influences (1). Whereas oral and literary tales constitute an initial point of departure for Warner, she also portrays the history of fairy tales as a history of storytellers and writers (such as Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, and Angela Carter, who combined extant fairytale variants with their personal aesthetic in new and interesting ways), story collectors (such as Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Andrew Lang, Laura Gonzenbach, and Giuseppe Pitre, who preserved, compiled, and even sometimes revised the tales for new audiences), and scholars (including J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Bruno Bettelheim, and Jack Zipes, who have influenced the way academics and others interpret the symbolic and cultural properties of fairy tales). …