When I was a girl, my great grandmother often read to me. It was common for her to give us books, too, and one of her most frequent gifts to me was fairy tales. One of my favorite collections of fairy tales came from her, and while they were her books at first, I was honored by the gift when she finally let me take it home. Those books are still on my shelves upstairs, but over the year, the other fairy tales she gave me have gotten lost.
You see, when I was small, our local newspaper published a column where they shared unusual fairy tales and folk tales from around the world. Some were stories I could find in the books she gave me, but quite a few were unique–so unique that even the ones I remember a lot about don’t turn up in searches online.
In the interest of sharing these fairy tales with my daughter, I’ve spent weeks combing online newspaper archives from the time period I clearly recall my grandmother cutting these out, but so far, the search has turned up nothing. Newspaper archives online aren’t always easy to navigate, and while it would be easier to scour the archives if I had access to the microfiche copies kept at libraries, my local library informed me they can no longer get microfiche on loan… and I now live a good 400 miles away from libraries that would have that paper in their archives.
As a last attempt to find these stories that have been so heavy on my mind lately, I wrote an email to one of the libraries I frequented in my childhood, as their website confirms they have microform archives of the newspaper I believe might have published these. If they can at least confirm I remember correctly and let me know which day of the week these stories were published, I should be able to find them… but unless I know exactly what I’m looking for, the stories are all but lost to me.
It’s funny, in a way–we say the internet puts all of mankind’s knowledge at our fingertips, but there are still so many pieces that seem to slip through the cracks. If it’s this easy for stories published only 30 years ago to vanish into the ether, can you imagine how many lost stories have slipped through the cracks and fallen out of memory? The most popular fairy tales can be several hundred years old, folk stories passed down through generations until they were finally bound and preserved and kept from fading away. But even those can fall out of common knowledge if they aren’t republished or spoken about, as it doesn’t take long for books to go out of print. How permanent are our stories, anyway?
What’s your favorite all-but-forgotten story? I’ve been delighted to see a few of mine coming back into popular knowledge, but quite a few fairy tales I’ve mentioned to friends are ones people don’t seem to have heard of very often.
More about that soon, though, since my current WIP is based on one of them.