Children’s Literature – Page 5 – Interesting Literature

The Man Who Wrote by Himself: Kipling’s Just So Stories

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Kipling’s classic volume of tales for children

Rudyard Kipling has the dubious honour of being both famous and infamous in modern times. He is infamous for some because of his links with empire and the outdated views he is seen to have promoted regarding the British Empire, particularly in India, where he was born. But he remains one of the most famous writers of his age for The Jungle Book, ‘If-’, ‘Gunga Din’, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and the Just So Stories.

A Summary and Analysis of the ‘Three Heads in the Well’ Fairy Tale

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The King of Colchester’s Daughters’, also known by the title ‘The Three Heads in the Well’, is one of England’s oldest native fairy tales. Sharing some plot similarities with more famous tales such as Cinderella and Charles Perrault’s ‘Diamonds and Toads’, it is a tale in which kindness is rewarded and selfishness is punished, as in all good fairy stories. Below, we offer a summary of ‘The Three Heads in the Well’, along with some notes towards an analysis of this old tale about the King of Colchester and his very different daughters.

A Summary and Analysis of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Match Girl’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Little Match Girl’ is one of Hans Christian Andersen’s most famous fairy tales for children. It is also one of his shortest, running to just a few pages. In any case, below we’ve offered a brief summary of the tale that highlights some of its salient points, before moving on to a brief commentary on, or analysis of, the key themes of ‘The Little Match Girl’. What is the meaning of this intriguing little tale?

A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Princess and the Pea’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Princess and the Pea’ is one of the shortest of the classic fairy tales. It also manages to be simultaneously one of the most straightforward and one of the most baffling. It’s straightforward because its plot is so simple, but it’s almost too simple. What are we to make of this tale of royal oversensitivity to bed-dwelling vegetables? Does the fairy tale (if it even is strictly a fairy tale at all) have any discernible moral?

A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Three Wishes’: A Curious Fairy Tale

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The pattern of three is deeply imbedded in the structure of the fairy tale. Numerous fairy stories, from Goldilocks and the three bears to Rumpelstiltskin to the story of Snow White (to name but three) rely in part on the tripartite narrative structure (three bears, three bowls of porridge, three visits to the house, three nights, and so on). But perhaps the most concentrated example of this patterning is the fairy tale titled ‘The Three Wishes’, where the entire story hinges on the granting of three wishes to a character.