Over at TheGuardian.com Marina Warner has an interesting essay titled “How fairytales grew up.” An excerpt:

Fairytales are enjoying a huge rise in popularity and influence in symbiosis with the internet. The traditional functions of the bard and the griot in predominantly oral cultures included “keeping the memory of the tribe”, as Derek Walcott remarked in his Nobel speech, and the enchantments of technology have placed the power to do this in our hands. The entertainment industry increasingly harvests the common store of fairytale to develop one vastly expensive vehicle after another to reach the global market. Some are disastrous (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters), but at the same time, this new ocean of story provides film-makers and website builders of slender means with magnificent new opportunities.

Like a mother tongue, the stories are acquired, early, to become part of our mental furniture (think of the first books you absorbed as a child). The shared language is pictorial as well as verbal, and international, too. Such language – Jung called it archetypal – has been growing into a common vernacular since the romances of classical antiquity and the middle ages – Circe from the Odyssey and Vivienne from Morte d’Arthur are recognisable forerunners of fairy queens and witches, and the sleeping beauty herself first appears in a long medieval chivalric tale, Perceforest. A fairytale doesn’t exist in a fixed form; it’s something like a tune that can migrate from a symphony to a penny whistle.

Read the entire essay here.