By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Iona and Peter Opie, in their The Classic Fairy Tales
Fairy Tales
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.
A Summary and Analysis of the ‘Bluebeard’ Fairy Tale
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Is the story of Bluebeard based on a real person? Perhaps more so than any other fairy tale, we want to know whether the chilling tale of the serial killer and wife-murderer (and perhaps the example par excellence of toxic masculinity in children’s literature) is based on historical fact.