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# We Still Need Fairy Tales
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/we-still-need-fairy-tales/
- Published: 2026-09-03T11:00:24.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-03T11:00:24.000Z
- Description: Zipes correctly diagnoses how fairy tales name the longing for the world to be different than it is, but he misses the cure.
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Ashley Hales, Journal, Summer 2026, Book Reviews, Theology

**Jack Zipes.** [***Once Upon a Time There Was Truth or, Why We Need Fairy Tales***](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300282382/once-upon-a-time-there-was-truth/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Yale University Press, 2026\. $28.00\. 200 pp.** 

We live in a moment in which the mere act of paying attention is a problem, or perhaps a challenge. We know it’s possible. Simply think about the enchantment you felt with stories in your childhood: Do you remember your own wide eyes and mouth agape as you leaned in to listen to a fantastic tale? Perhaps it was King Arthur and his round table or the pixie dust that Tinkerbell bestowed so the Darling children could fly that took you from your modern world to some place outside of time and place. Maybe it was the tales of the *One Thousand and One Nights* or Robinson Crusoe’s daring adventures that opened up the possibility of enchantment, change, and perseverance through bleak trials. Fairy tales give us a framework for imaginative possibility. They might also restore our attention.

Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, has been writing fairy tales—and writing about fairy tales—for sixty years. Now approaching 90, he still believes the genre is borne from our utopian “hopeful desires.” *Once Upon a Time There was Truth or, Why We Need Fairy Tales* is a collection of his essays on the development of the fairy tale from oral tales to the genre’s more contemporary “Disneyfication.” The genre has changed along the way. And yet, he writes, “if there is any genre of storytelling that can raise our spirits and make a contribution to humanity…it is the fairy tale.” 

As a collection of separate essays, most of the book’s chapters focus on various tales: “Puss in Boots,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Nutcracker,” Disney’s versions of classic tales, and *The Wizard of Oz*. Throughout, Zipes draws attention to the pedagogical and socializing functions of fairy tales, especially as they begin to be told to children. For Zipes there is a hardening of the genre throughout the 20th century as Disney’s pervasive influence flattens the genre’s subversive possibilities. Yet, the fairy tale isn’t just about a “happily ever after.” 

Zipes traces the evolution of the form from oral tales to a literary form that flourished from the early 19th century to the early 20th century. Different from myth and oral wonder tales, the fairy tale both substantiated civilizing norms while also subverting them. There is a logic to their telling: a protagonist violates a norm and is then faced with banishment or an impossible task. She or he then has various encounters—with a villain, or magical animals or a creature who bestows gifts, thereby enabling the protagonist to tackle the task while a wonder or a miracle also reverses his or her fortune. The result is often marriage and wealth.

Especially in the genre’s golden age, folklorists (like the Brothers Grimm) very much saw their work of gathering and writing down these oral tales to be an integral part of the nation-building project. These “middle-class collectors \[gave\] voice to the lower classes… and wrote in defense of their native languages and in the interests of national and regional movements.” The nineteenth century literary fairy tale, then, began as a political statement—one that validated the common folk—and while contemporary tales have been more likely to “entertain and soothe a child’s anxieties,” the genre still maintains the power to inspire and subvert. Zipes’ project, then, is not only to recover the history and shifts of the genre but also to name an “impulse for hope for better living conditions.” 

But is the fairy tale simply a social construct, meant to either civilize or comment on social norms? When literary critics evaluate the genre, is it only to class and nation we must look? Must we understand the Disneyfication of fairy tales in terms of perpetuating patriarchal norms? While the fairy tale offers commentary on our present, something much deeper is going on in the genre. This is the nature of truth and reality.

Zipes’ title, *Once Upon a Time There Was Truth*, links “truth” with the fairy tale, but this truth is located within the fairy tale itself. The implication is that truth cannot be found in the readers’ present circumstances and that the tale motivates the reader to align the truth of the tale with the truth of experience. By presenting the world as it should be—where anyone is capable of social climbing and the villain gets his just due—the fairy tale as Zipes writes in his Epilogue, offers “happily ever after” and “once upon a time” as “a persistent refusal to accept life as it is and a demand that utopian longings be fulfilled.” For Zipes the genre presents possibilities for transformation as we compare our society with the counter world of the fairy tale.

But there is little surprise in Zipes’ readings. There *is* talk of wonder and magic but there is little magic in the prose. In the book there is not much that gestures to deeper human longings beyond political, national, or gender-based categories. The responsibility is squarely on the reader to recognize “something \[is\] still missing, deeply missing even, in our lives” and through the world of the fairy tale “to seize on \[glimmers of hope\] as we tell our tales, and futures, today. Zipes argues that we “insert ourselves cunningly into our daily struggles to turn the course of the world’s events in our favor.” While he has no love for Disneyfication, ultimately Zipes advocates for the same project—to turn our tales into self-made dreams.

Zipes correctly diagnoses how fairy tales name the longing for the world to be different than it is, but he misses the cure. This realization that the world is not how it should be and a resulting longing for a magical intervention aligns with the Christian reality. C. S. Lewis famously wrote in *Mere Christianity*: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Fairy tales elicit this longing. Lewis places the truth not in the gap between tale and unfulfilled longing, but in the transcendent reality of God’s creative work. Christian hope tells a story—not of writing one’s destiny and future—but of a good created order, a fall into sin, redemption through the work of Christ, and a future restoration of all things. 

Fairy tales—fairy stories, or true myths as Lewis and Tolkien call them—still have an important role to play. They awaken us to imaginative reversal. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about the moment of recognition, or joyful turn, implicit in the fairy tale. Delivered first as a lecture, he wrote in *On Fairy Stories*: “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.” More than just “an agent of socialization,” the fairy tale can hit at something deeper: a moment of surprise, a *eucatastrophe*. This is the narrative moment where we have, in Tolkien’s words, a “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.” 

The truth that fairy stories give is “not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question…In the ‘Eucatastrophe’ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of *evangelium* in the real world.” This moment of realization, where all is restored in a manner that is both good and true, also ushers readers and hearers into what Tolkien calls a “Secondary Belief,” a real enchantment, an experience of good news.

Martin Shaw in his new book, *Liturgies of the Wild: The Myths that Make Us*, reminds us how our stories point to true myth. Like Zipes, he notes that myths or fairy tales serve a social and pedagogical function. He believes myths make us human, they help us grow up, and they help us locate ourselves. “Far from being untruths, myths have traditionally been forefront in the shaping of human beings. They show us what to defend, what to care about, the need for pluck, sacrifice, and generosity.” Myths are guides. 

But in moments, myths are more than guides. They pierce through the immanent frame, to get at the heart of reality. “*Myth is a Sacred Story*,” Shaw writes, “And some of the most sacred of those stories circle around the tale of a dying and resurrected king. Who carried a great burden for his people and turned that burden into an extraordinary act of love. And some of us believe that the most sacred story crash-bang-walloped into the kind of time we can all register, *ours.*” 

Zipes would argue that we ultimately need fairy tales so that we can assert ourselves between the gap of our reality and the world as it should or could be. Shaw (and Tolkien and Lewis) would instead point to the nature of narrative itself: The best fairy tales do not primarily tell us what to do but what must be done on our behalf. They hold out a world where justice rolls down like streams of mighty water, where the lion lays down with the lamb, where the destitute pauper becomes a king. The best fairy tales succeed to the extent that joy catches in our throats and tear ducts so that finally we *see*: Our King has come, and He will come again to make all things new.