Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning.

in 1068, it would have already been impossible for Hansel and Gretel to walk more than four miles through any English wood without bursting back out into open feilds. The landscape of fairy tales is symbolic: "The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered.

Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.

The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.

Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.

Like ´Bluebeard´, the fairy tale of ´Snow White´does not record a single, appalling crime, but testifies to a structural and endemic conflict in society that was political and social as well as personal, producing many, many instances of similar violence.

The Other Worlds which fairy tales explore open a way for writers and storytellers to speak in Other terms, especially when the native inhabitants of the imaginary places do not belong to an established living faith and therefore do not command belief or repudiation. The tongue can be very free when it is speaking outside the jurisdiction of religion.

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.