First grade: Fairy tales

Certain questions are very difficult to answer. And those which arise unbidden when you have followed your thirty-odd children through their first two years of school seem to belong to this group. You'd really prefer just to lock the questions up in a big chest, carefully secured by bolts and iron fittings.

To what end were these two years organized just as they were?
And what has happened overall with this particular clutch of children during their first-and second-grade years?

Answers would be hard enough were I to settle just for taking these two slips of paper out of the chest.

A relationship between people consists in their having something in common—inside themselves. Not in their owning something in common—that, as we know, not infrequently leads to the reverse—but in their having common objects of feeling. In having the same things to think back on. In thinking in the same images.

Hardly anything binds people closer than their having experienced something together. Common memories, common experiences are what is needed so that souls can feel each other.

Indeed it often appears in later, adult relationships, that at a certain stage in a friendship people get an amazingly strong urge to exchange childhood memories. They know, that is, that until they've entrusted each other with a few small insights, everything they say and do is rather tentative. And they never fail to be amazed at how close they come to each other through such glimpses. Only rarely do adult experiences acquire the same decisive power as those of childhood. What you have experienced, and how the experiences are mirrored in your memory—that is who you are.

Thus an uncanny power is placed in the teacher's hands—the power to determine, for quite a span of years, a large share of the impressions and experiences which will meet the child and thereby bind him to, or separate him from, others. This is not very pleasant to think about.

And the clearer you become over what a role the smallest things play—yes, especially and above all the smallest things—the less pleasant the thought becomes. And in the long run few could bear to live under the weight of a full awareness of this point. But nature is merciful....

Socially the teacher is a modest figure, but behind the (more or less modernized) scenes he has a position of power which Caligula could have envied him. And the strange thing is that only the children really know that.

If you are to enter into a relationship of human dignity with your children, you can do so only by appealing to one single part of them: To the very innermost and freest.

For true social amenities between people the rule applies: What you hold on to, you lose. What you give away, you keep. So the way to this innermost point goes not through spiritual aggressiveness, but through reserve. The shortest way lies not in a straight line, but in a large arc outside.

The children come into relationship with their teacher by the teacher's engrossing them in something else. So paradoxical is the human nature we're dealing with.

“Hey, Bjørneboe! I don't like nice kids!” That came from the very bottom of his soul when he whispered it in my ear.

It was hard to do anything but confess that I too basically liked the naughty ones best. But still the nice ones aren't as pathetic as you might think. For the “naughty ones” have all the problematic natures. And on closer observation that means the whole class. It's just a matter of seeing it, for we all have some thicket in our souls where we are naughty, and it's only when we've discovered each other's thickets that we begin to see each other. For in the shadows among the vines is where the secrets are. And if in the name of morality you attack this piece of jungle with a sickle and insecticide, you can at least be sure that those secrets are something you will never get to know.

Now of course souls don't exist so that teachers can go snooping into them. But if you tell children fairy tales and legends for several years, and if you then let them paint and draw and write about what they've heard, you have to be blind and deaf to avoid finding out a great deal. After just a few months you already know quite a lot. You may not be able to make use of it, but you know it. And a look, a gesture, a touch often says so much that you can be uplifted or disheartened by it for several days.

What makes the work at a Steiner School so strenuous that before every vacation the teachers feel their nerves curl up like fur all over their body is not the pressure of their duties. It is the great spiritual intimacy with the children, the day-to-day atmosphere of spiritual housework and caring. It's easy to ascertain that children and teachers continually dream about each other. Every single day you see things in the class, things which you know will one day become life problems for the children involved. Every single one of these sprouting seedlings has its points of weakness and danger. And even the jolliest and loudest hour in class is overlain with a seriousness you can grasp with your hands. You can hardly begin to describe the pathos which in fact is already there in a room accommodating thirty children. Thirty life fates.

And in the long story hours the children indirectly become aware of this.

Let us look a little more closely at a few of the things a fairy tale is.

The most common interpretation is that the fairy tales show us how things go well for the good and badly for the evil. And this, of course, is a bald-faced lie. If you act the way the “lad” does in the fairy tale, then things will generally go uncommonly ill with you.

Actually the fairy tales don't conceal this fact, either. Things always go very badly for the hero or the heroine&—up to a certain point. And it is at precisely this point that the textbook wisdom ends. For at this point occurs the miracle. Help arrives.

And this help we don't otherwise know about.

Most people will have noticed that in the “practical” life the miracle tends to be absent. Just because we share our lunch with someone doesn't mean we will therefore be excused from paying taxes. From a bourgeois point of view the fairy tales are just plain amoral. For help always arrives on the other side of the curtain.

This curtain is a very important thing.

On this side of the curtain the following happens: The “lad” is rendered destitute, but he still has a little—a loaf of bread, three dollars, or whatever it may be. Then he goes out into the world, and there he gives away the rest of what he has. He gives it to someone who needs it even more than he does.

When the lad goes on, the road leads him into misfortune. He falls into privation. And his need sends him through the curtain. From a bourgeois standpoint he exits from the saga.

On the other side a helping hand reaches out to him, and this help comes from the person he himself had helped.

For the adult this means meeting your childhood again; life regains its greatness, its dewy earnest. In this renewed childhood is found the sole source of new power. And this new life is not achieved by a one-time effort; you must gain admission to it daily.

Of course you can think what you like about this. You can call it metaphysical nonsense and hand-me-down mythology, but unless you find a way into the childhood within yourself, you will always be barren—not least in practical life. This experience runs throughout history like an inmost red thread: from the Vedas to Plato, Aristotle, the gospels, Dante, Goethe, and Ibsen. The way to Paradise is through dying before you die. And only with the life force from this garden can you do something for others.

When children are healthy and unspoiled, they meet the fairy tales in this world quite naturally. They don't draw “moral” conclusions, but meet them as immediate reality, because they themselves are in Paradise. “Paradise,” of course, means not that you “have it good”, but that everything around you has reality and abundance.

What a child experiences with one of the great fairy tales, an adult can no longer imagine. But by trying to understand the fairy tales he can approach the children. He can get close to them. And he can learn to tell fairy tales in such a manner, with such seriousness and such devotion that the children can enter fully into them without being disturbed by the adult's personality.

What makes such a story hour so fateful? First and foremost: the “lad” in the fairy tale is—yourself! But not only the lad! Everything in the story is within you. Therefore it has reality.

But the lad has enough money for this. And he uses it to get the man into the earth.

Then he goes on. The Companion turns up. He helps the lad into the mountain, and procures him the sword, the cap of invisibility and the ball golden yarn. He carries him across the fjord. And now they are approaching the princess of his dreams.

But this is not a very comforting world.

Around the castle the heads of former suitors stand impaled—“as thick as crows at the harvest.” And the princess herself? The troll has her under a spell; she has small black hairs all over her body, flies through the air on billygoats at night—and is the troll's sweetheart. Three times she puts the lad to the test—and three times he fails. He would have adorned one of the palings long since, had not the Companion time after time saved him with the sword and the golden yarn. The last test is the worst: to bring the princess the head of the troll, of her sweetheart.

During a tryst inside the mountain the princess tells the troll what task she has given the boy, and the troll is a bit confused by the joke, but decides to laugh.

Still, the Companion gets the troll's head. And the princess becomes the boy's. She prepares to celebrate the wedding night with a well-honed kitchen knife under her pillow. But she is disarmed and the spell is beaten out of her. Then she becomes the princess the boy dreamed about—before he came to the city and the story began.

The “lad” now parts from the Companion, but bids him return in a few years to take half of what the lad has produced in the meantime. When the Companion comes back, the lad has had a son. And a promise is a promise. He raises the sword over the child, but the Companion lays his hand over the sword's point and stops the stroke.

“Are you happy now?” he asks.

“I've never been so happy before,” replies the lad.

“That's how happy I was when you broke me out of the block of ice,” says the Companion. “But now I must go, for I am a spirit, and they are ringing for me with the bells of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

And here the story ends.

The “frozen one” helps him to the “princess” in us, but she has waited a long time for a worthy suitor, and in the meantime she has grown dissolute. She is seduced by the “troll.” The history of humanity.

The Companion, the Lad, the Princess, the troll, the sword, the ball of golden yarn?

They can all be placed in the circle of mythical archetypes—just as we know them from mythology, poetry and the Bible. All myths, legends and fables tell of the same thing: of what a human being is. And the images are taken from humanity's common, subconscious memory. The developmental history of the whole world is present in every single human child you see before you in the classroom. Our whole past lives unawares in every look, every touch and every tear.

And in wonder the children listen to myths, fairy tales and legends—and without knowing it, it is themselves they meet. Themselves, but clearly drawn—“just as you sprang forth in the Mind of God”. So joyous, so pure, so strong—as you are only when you meet the siblings who are more than siblings and who haunt the fairy tales' towers, halls and stairways3in the castle behind your own great, dense forest....

“That's just a little poem!” he said.

But within us there also blows a wind in the evening: in our woods, briar hedges, in the long stone staircases and halls inside us, in the tower rooms, the moats—there go Joringel and Jorinda, the Ash Lad, Cinderella, Little Freddie, Tom Thumb, and the princess who was white as snow and red as blood. As wine and water.

And they will always live there: Faithful John, the king's son Lini, the steed Fallada, Loyal and Disloyal Ferdinand—all, all of them. And the dew from the fairytales will have the same effect on us as the dew from the leaves had on Loyal Ferdinand's destroyed eyes: We shall regain our sight.

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