Suggested Reading
In researching Fariyland, I naturally read a great many books. Anyone wanting to learn more about Fairyland, or just to check my scholarship, might want to read what I found most helpful. This list is meant to highlight sources that particularly influenced me, and why. It is not currently presented in any particular order, but it will grow with time, and I may need to arrange things somehow later.
Readers may notice that classics like the brothers Grimm, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and the epic of Gilgamesh are (currently) absent. This is not because the classics are overrated, but simply because they are well known. Anyone deeply enough into folklore to be reading this page already has at least a dim awareness of King Arthur, and can easily find him on the shelves of any sizeable book store. For this list to be really helpful, it needs to point your attention towards less obvious treasures.
Despite the title of this page, not everything will be reading material. I drew from as broad a selection of stories as possible, and a few appeared originally outside of print. (Alas, only a few. Too many movies and radio or television shows of Fairyland are simply adaptations of books, or of even earlier oral traditions captured in books.)
Enjoy!
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Spells of Enchantment. Jack Zipes, ed. © Jack Zipes, 1991. Published by the Penguin Group. ISBN 0-670-83053-4
This volume takes fairy tales from many periods and presents them in chronological order, starting with Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche,” and progressing right through Philip K. Dick and Tanith Lee. This presentation gives the reader a great view of the evolution of the fairy tale. I was fortunate to find this book early in my readings; an outline of trends in fairy tales let me concentrate on periods that produced stories with a strong sense of (super)natural law, and avoid wasting too much time on meandering romances or fantasies with magical beasts lacking any cunning whatsoever. (I read some of these, too, of course, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.)
The tone of the stories ranges from wistful fantasies to pity morality plays, from high art to low humor. It is outstanding as a sampler of fairy tales.
Ingeborg Bachmann’s “The Smile of the Sphinx” was a gift for A Survivor’s Guide to Fairyland, a beautiful demonstration of Rule 25: there are larger games than yours. In this parable on the dangers of science divorced from humanistic perspective, the Sphinx comes to a kingdom and asks three riddles of its king: what is in the earth, what is over the earth, and what is in the people you rule? Desperate to avert the monster’s wrath and save his subjects, the king commands his scholars to Herculean efforts to find the answers. They ultimately succeed, but only at the price of dissecting the people for exhaustive analysis. The king answers all three riddles, at which point, he and his kingdom, destroyed at his own command, are spared whatever ruination the Sphinx may have visited upon it herself. The Sphinx then merely smiles and leaves.
Until I came upon this story, the only arguments I had for larger games than yours were literally dozens of stories that all read the same: the devil spares a mortal soul in his thrall, knowing it works far more evil on the earth than it could suffering in hell. A good point, but somewhat obvious, and thoroughly hackneyed. The malicious subtlety of the Sphinx is far more menacing, and far more instructive. It also cheered me to find a concrete example proving Bill Willingham’s Thessaliad comic book series wrong: the Sphinx is not a paper tiger condemned to ask the same damn riddle forever. Don’t underestimate a monster just because you’ve heard of it being defeated once.
Also, don’t miss James Thurber’s “The Girl and the Wolf,” originally from Tales for Our Time. No, I’m not going to tell you. Go read it.
Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi. Hayao Miyazaki, director. Studio Ghibli; distributed in the US by Walt Disney Studios as "Spirited Away".
As mentioned above, good movie sources are hard to come by. Movie monsters that do more than butcher teenagers or demolish Tokyo almost always first appear elsewhere. In this wonderful exception, Chihiro, unhappy about moving to a new town, loses her parents when they get lost and stop to look around. Ignoring Chihiro’s misgivings, they enter fairyland and offend the witch Yubaba by helping themselves to a banquet, and are transformed into pigs. Chihiro must sell herself into service to Yubaba to have any hope of winning them back.
The movie is noteworthy in its absence of direct antagonism. The magical creatures aren’t out to get Chihiro; they just have their own agenda to pursue. Witness the confiscation of Chihiro’s name to represent power over her, the importance of food as a bond, and the warning not to look back as she eventually exits fairyland.
"Not Long Before the End," and related stories by Larry Niven.
In the short story “Not Long Before the End” and several sequels – short stories and novels – Niven postulates that magic is fueled by a non-renewable natural resource, and examines what impact this natural (supernatural?) law would have. Although these stories do little to examine the social laws of fairyland, they are excellent explorations of the idea that magic should be governed by any laws at all. “The Three Wishes” was particularly inspiring in its treatment of a genie’s generosity as a ritualized game. Other titles to watch for are “What Good is a Glass Dagger,” The Burning City (with Jerry Pournelle),The Magic Goes Away, The Magic May Return (collection), and More Magic (collection).