Hello, my name's Michael Rosen and I'm talking to you today about a campaign called Cook Up Your Own Fairy Tales. I write stories and poems. I even sometimes write things that are a bit like fairy tales, which are also sometimes called folk tales.
So one way you can think about folk tales and fairy tales is that they have ingredients, just as we talk about a recipe having ingredients. If you're making a cake and you've got eggs and flour. So that's what we're going to concentrate on today, thinking about the ingredients of fairy tales.
So what is a fairy tale or a folk tale? What actually is it? Well, they're usually short. And for hundreds of years, possibly thousands of years, they've travelled through time and space.
So that's across dinner tables, through villages, cities, deserts, seas, trading routes, told by everyone. Grandparents, children, teachers, merchants, tradespeople. They were very important storytellers and people who travelled with stories. They travelled in a mixture of ways, quite often orally, just somebody telling a story.
But other times in books and in pictures and also of course in theatre and films, opera, ballet, these have all been ways in which we've shared these stories. But in the West, amongst the first people who wrote down the stories was somebody called Charles or Charles in French, Perrault. sometimes say Perrault in English, and the Brothers Grimm or the Brüder's Grimm in German. Thinking of something like Cinderella, we can chase all over the world.
I mean, just the name of Cinderella. In French, it's Cinderella. In German, it's Aschenputtel. And so these stories are different and they change each time somebody tells them or writes them down. So, for example, in the Chinese story, I think she marries a professor and her slipper, it's gold, And the fairy godmother, I think, is a golden fish, and her nasty family prevent her from attending the local feast.
So, how do we remember these stories? As I'm talking, you're probably thinking up where you first met a story. Well, probably when we were very young.
I mean, my mum and dad used to tell me... Stories and quite often when we hear a folk story we think, oh have I heard something like that before? Really at heart of fairy stories also it is an imaginary world, they're not really meant to describe a real world and anything can happen in an imaginary world can't it? And let's have a think about some of those ingredients.
I've already mentioned forests They're quite often places where people can get lost, a little bit scary, mysterious paths. They can be very ordinary places in folktales and fairy tales, places like kitchens. Think of Cinderella, there she is, what's she doing?
Sweeping up. That's what she is doing mostly, so they can be very ordinary. And of course you could have something crazier, the edible house in Hansel and Gretel.
Characters, who can you have as characters? Well, they could be anybody, can't they? Think of Puss in Boots.
Puss in Boots, what are you talking about? A cat in boots who talks, often with a little hat. Well, you can have that in a folk story, can't you? You could even have a talking spider.
You can have talking frogs, giants, witches, stepmothers. What else can you have? Or princes, yes, princesses, wise women.
You can have all of those. Quite often the objects in them, they can be enchanted. That's a very important thing. So you could have pumpkin, enchanted mice, cooking pot, a magic cooking pot.
That's one of my favourites. That's an Italian story as I remember it. And you can have apples that are somehow or other enchanted. Could be poisonous, can't they? Well, I'll leave you to think of which story.
Keys, mirrors, rings. These can all be enchanted. And also you can have transformations, can't you? So a pumpkin becomes a carriage. Cooking pot heats up without any Fire, beans, what happens to the beans in Jack and the Giant's Talk?
They grow into this great giant beanstalk and up there giants live. Yeah, so, and of course a glass slipper. So you also have items in stories that can be, if you like, the means where you get from one person to another. They're kind of special tokens, aren't they?
And also girls and boys can be very powerful in stories. A girl can overcome the cruelty of a wolf. Siblings, brother and sister, can escape from the witch's gingerbread house.
And a girl can break free from... her oppressive sisters and stepmother. And of course, folk stories and fairy stories can be nasty. They can have very, very nasty people or animals or giants, creatures and so on.
So it can include tyrants and oppressors. And so quite often these folk stories are about, well they're kind of warning really. They warn us about the consequences of bad behaviour, they warn us maybe how to cope with scary situations, they're quite often about fear, and they're quite often about...
the little person against the big person, and the little person overcomes the big person. Or it might be very dangerous and somebody who's quite innocent. So you often have a kind of looking up, being scared and dealing with it.
You think of a great storyteller like Julia Donaldson. She created that idea in The Gruffalo, which, of course, is like a fairy story. So these stories can be very powerful and they help us to resist. cruelty or to overcome hard times. So this campaign is really what we're doing is inviting you to cook up your own fairy tales out of these ingredients that I've been talking about.
Do you think you could do that? We very much hope so. Thank you.