Conclusion
We have already pointed out that
fairy tales are very old stories. They are so old that we can’t specify when they
were made up. Antonio Rodriguez Almodóvar is a
philologist and a writer, who says that, lots of the stories that have arrived
to us, it doesn’t matter whether they provide from the
However, these stories, even if they
have or not their origin in the Neolithic, when the primitive men discovered
agriculture, and with it, the property of the ground that divides the society
in priests, nobility, soldiers, peasants and slaves; even if they have been
imagined in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Arab or Hebrew; even if they have been
transmitted by word of mouth, generation after generation, or if they have been
taken to a book, to a film or, even, to television; the fact is that, these
stories contain habits, and beliefs that are the same in every town and in
every civilization, and that is the reason why they have come across frontiers,
why they have survive to the disappearance of Empires, to wars and revolutions,
to the extinction and birth of new languages (even the languages in which they
were first told), and they have seen inventions such as the printing, the
radio, the video, the television or the cinema.
And now, when the progress seems
unstoppable, when newspapers are about to die out, books have its days counted,
and the DVD is a relic from the past, we found ourselves in that traditional
stories can be adapted perfectly to the hypertext format, like in its day they
were adapted to the theatre of puppets, and to the magic of the cinema.
In other words, whatever will be the
format by which culture will be disseminated in the future, the truth is that
fairy tales, with the adjustments they may need, will continue being
transmitted between small, and not so small, people for ever and ever.
Although after all this I have said, I suppose
that it is clear why I have chosen this hypertext of R.Petit
and not another one (I have to admit that I’m fascinated about fairy tales!),
the fact is that the aim of this essay, isn’t another one apart from, analyzing
the space in the hypertext called The
Grimm Tale. Therefore, as a conclusion, I would like to write here these
following lines.
Fairy tales aren’t exactly stories
dedicated to children as we understand now, in part, this is because of the
enormous succeed that has had the Disney factory, and precisely The Grimm Tale is a good sample of it
(let’s think, for example, in the moment where the youth decides to take down
the hanged corpses and sit them next to the fire, to then, angrily because they
had let their clothes burn, put them up again). Actually, fairy tales were
directed, also, to the adult public, and were destined to amuse and, at the
same time, transmit values, beliefs and knowledge consider very important by
the society.
Because of this, it is not casual
that these stories are localized in scenes perfectly identified and blessed
with a high symbolic value: the interminable desert, the lost chapel, the way
to nowhere, the welcoming inn, the familiar home, the garden of the “esperides”, the haunted castle, the cave of the dragon, the
little house in the forest, the hideout of the thieves…
We leave in a world full of
impersonal places which are of no interest: expressways, aeroplanes, train
stations, ministries, shopping centres, sports centres, multiscreen
cinemas… all these places dehumanizes the individual and generate loneliness.
So we are born in a delivery room, we work in an office, die in a hospital, and
celebrate our funeral in a morgue. The reason why lots of people don’t really
know where the progress of the society will take us has a lot to do with the
fact that we have lost our space referents and we don’t really know where we
are now.
By contrast, traditional stories are
full of charming and magical places. These places are full of meaning to us,
and reaffirm our desire to belong to a community that is dear to us. Somehow,
to convey these stories, we are trying to preserve our popular imaginary, in
other words, our roots, and we can affirm without the fear of getting it wrong that
the people who loses their roots also loses its identity.