Lessons of the folk tales

Yesterday was a terribly rainy day in Pennsylvania, and I got to the point where I was positively sick of watching TV, and I just couldn’t summon up much interest in reading a comic book or surfing the Internet.

So instead, I sat down and cracked open a few books on folk tales, including Neil Grant’s “American Folk Tales and Legends,” shown above, and “The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm,” shown below.

I love folk tales.  I’ve got several books that collect dozens of them. From fairy tales to scary ghost stories to the tall tales of America, I find them all strangely alluring.

It must be that in this day of PlayStations and YouTube, I find myself longing for simpler things.

I could launch into a speech about how these great old stories will be lost if we don’t tell them to our children, but I won’t. You’ve heard it or some variation of it a hundred times.

But I will say that there’s got to be a way to get these stories back into our cluttered minds. Maybe a big animation project or a comic book aimed at youngsters.

Folk tales are certainly just as relevant as they were back then — stories of working hard, doing the right thing, respecting one another and the ‘devils’ getting their  due — and that’s their real worth.

Now it’s just a matter of pushing them back into the limelight. Any ideas?

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