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- Hello, my name's Michael Rosen.
And I'm talking to you today
about a campaign called Cook Up your Own Fairytales.
I write stories and poems,
I even sometimes write things
that are a bit like fairytales,
which are also sometimes called folktales.
So one way you can think about folktales and fairytales
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 gonna concentrate on today.
Thinking about the ingredients of fairytales.
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So what is a fairy tale or a folk tale?
Well, 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 the 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.
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But in the West,
amongst the first people who wrote down the stories,
was somebody called Charles,
or Charles in French, Perrault.
We sometimes say Perrault in English
and the Brothers Grimm,
or the Brüders 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 Cendrillon,
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 her professor,
and her slipper is gold
and the fairy godmother, I think, is a golden fish.
And it had a nasty family prevent her
from attending the local feast.
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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?"
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Really at then 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 fairytales, 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 crazy,
the edible house in Hansel and Gretel
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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 could you have?
Or princes, yes, princesses, wise women.
You can have all of those.
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Quite often the objects in them, they can be enchanted.
That's a very important thing.
So you could have a pumpkin, enchanted mice.
Cooking pot, a magic cooking pot.
That's one of my favorites.
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?
In - 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,
a cooking pot heats up without any fire,
beans, what happens to the beans
in Jack and the Giant Stalk?
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?
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And also girls and boys can be very powerful in stories.
A girl can overcome the cruelty of a wolf.
Siblings, a 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.
And so it can include tyrants and oppressors.
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And so quite often, these folk stories are about,
well, they're kind of warning really.
They warn us about the consequences of bad behavior.
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.
And 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.
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So this campaign is really,
what we're doing,
is inviting you to cook up your own fairytales
out of these ingredients that I've been talking about.
Do you think you could do that?
We very much hope so.
Thank you.
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