Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.
An original fable, told the way the old literary fairy tales are told: a puppet king in a toyshop window wants to stand up without strings, and learns, after a flood and a fisherman's daughter and a one-eyed gull, that there was a fifth string all along, too fine to see, which does not pull.
In the Grimms' "The Juniper Tree" (KHM 47), a murdered boy returns as a bird and sings the story of his own death, first to strangers and then under his family's windows. This feature follows that seven-line song through the tale, and through the painter Philipp Otto Runge's part in writing it down, to show how a song can carry a story of murder toward judgement, restitution and return.
In Charles Perrault's collection of 1697, the book that gave the world its Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and Sleeping Beauty, every tale ends with a rhymed "Moral," and the morals are stranger than the tales. This introduction explains where the book came from, why its morals are addressed to a different audience from its stories, and how to read two of them, the one that follows a Red Riding Hood who is never rescued and the pair that follow Bluebeard, so that the gap between the story and its lesson becomes the most interesting thing on the page.
