Snow Princess and Polar Bear
by Ruth Sanderson
31 mei 2012
30 mei 2012
29 mei 2012
28 mei 2012
People who’ve never read fairy tales,
the professor said, have a harder time coping
in life than the people who have.
They don’t have access to all the lessons that can be
learned from the journeys through the dark woods
and the kindness of strangers treated decently,
the knowledge that can be gained from the company
and example of Donkeyskins and cats wearing boots
and steadfast tin soldiers.
I’m not talking about in-your-face lessons,
but more subtle ones.
The kind that seep up from your subconscious and
give you moral and humane structures for your life.
That teach you how to prevail, and trust.
And maybe even love.
by Charles de Lint (The Onion Girl)
27 mei 2012
25 mei 2012
24 mei 2012
23 mei 2012
~Books
.
“The Swiss Family Robinson” by Johann D. Wyss.
.
One of the world’s best-loved stories of shipwreck
and survival, The Swiss Family Robinson portrays
a family’s struggle to create a new life for themselves
on a strange and fantastic tropical island.
Blown off course by a raging storm,
the family—a Swiss pastor, his wife,
their four young sons, plus two dogs and
a shipload of livestock—
must rely on one another in order to adapt to
their needs the natural wonders of their exotic
new home. Inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,
this classic story of invention and adventure has fired
the imaginations of readers since it first appeared in 1812.
22 mei 2012
18 mei 2012
16 mei 2012
14 mei 2012
13 mei 2012
~Sunday Quote
It is the mark of a good fairy-story,
of the higher
or more complete kind,
that however wild its events,
however fantastic or terrible the adventures,
it can give to child or man that hears it,
when the “turn” comes,
a catch of the breath,
a beat and lifting of the heart,
near to
(or indeed accompanied by) tears,
as keen as that given
by any form of literary art,
and having a peculiar quality.
by JRR Tolkien
12 mei 2012
“The Hereford Cathedral Chained Library
is an interesting one!
The practice of chaining books was the normal
practice for reference libraries starting in the
Middle Ages until the 18th century.
The Chained Library has been
around since the 1100′s.
MORE INFO HERE!
10 mei 2012
9 mei 2012
8 mei 2012
Instantly they lay still, all turned into stone.
An Arthur Rackham illustration for
The Two Brothers in Little Brother, Little Sister
Source
6 mei 2012
In fairy tales,
Everything beautiful is golden and strewn
with pearls; there are even golden people living there;
misfortune, by contrast, is a dark power,
a horrid cannibalistic giant who is, however,
vanquished,
since a good woman who knows just how to avert
misfortune stands ready to help.
These narratives always end by opening the prospect
of boundless happiness.
Evil is also neither inconsequential
nor something close to home, and not something
very bad,
to which one could become accustomed,
but something terrible, black, and wholly alien that you
cannot even approach; the punishment
of evil is equally
terrifying: snakes and poisonous reptiles devour their
victims, or the evil person dances to death
in red-hot iron shoes.
by Wilhelm Grimm,
Preface to the first edition of Kinder und Hausmärchen
Art by Caspar David Friedrich