Professor of Literary History and Hermeneutics at the University of Chichester
Public Engagement, Public Writing and Media Appearances
“An introduction to fairy tales”, video clip from the National Theatre featuring interviews with Bill Gray along with authors Philip Pullman and Sally Gardner.
Advised on interpretation of source material. As well as contributing to a “darker” rendering, this included details such as naming the dwarves, drawing on original research on Ogham, the ancient Celtic ‘Tree Alphabet’ in which letters are associated with certain trees and have a symbolic value.
“They reassure us that in hard times, in families we’d nowadays call ‘dysfunctional’, you can, with a bit of ‘nous’ or common sense and initiative, and a slice of luck, and maybe some supernatural help (such as a talking fox, a fairy godmother or a magic food-producing table), get by, survive and maybe even get a happy ending. That’s a message that most people need to hear most of the time, just to keep going.”
Quote from interview: “The programme is about our fascination the Sackman, the Sandman and other bogey figures. This kind of figure appears in various cultures, which suggests that this kind of scary figure is to do with basic anxieties and issues about how an individual comes to terms with the demands of joining a culture, what the child has to give up, or sacrifice, in order to join a culture, and the fearful consequences if they don’t.”
Quote from interview: “These so-called fairy tales are often about surviving a (murderously) dysfunctional family in a harsh situation. Don’t forget, the Grimms created their book when Germany was an occupied country under French rule. Life was harsh; people did starve to death. Fairy tales take you out of the harsh demands of real life but are also about finding solutions, finding hope, in hard times.”
Quote from interview: “Most of us can relate to the story of the downtrodden girl sleeping in the cinders, or the downtrodden boy sleeping under the stairs, who gets her or his own back. She or he is the hero of a thousand faces, making good in a dysfunctional family, which is how all families must feel, at least some of the time.”
Quote from interview: “A lot of Grimm tales came out of a really difficult time, when Germany was under occupation during the Napoleonic wars. Fairy tales can open up possibilities for survival; they are utopian.”
Quote from interview: “Some scholars worry that precisely because fairy tales are so deeply embedded in our psyches and our culture, they have an untold impact on how we experience the world. This is of particular concern to feminist scholars who are critical of the gender stereotypes passed on in fairy tales.”
Quote from interview: “The interesting thing about Peake, and this series in particular, is that he created characters through both his text and his pictures. It was the two coming together, the symbiosis. He might begin to describe a character with words but it would relate to the illustration he had in his head, and vice versa.”
Quote from interview: “It is what CS Lewis would call joy, a particularly strange feeling of disturbance and excitement and anticipation – a mystery which is terrifying but also attractive. It’s partly about trying to communicate certain religious experiences in a non-conventional way. They are trying to recreate some kind of religious or mystical experience, some kind of spirituality outside conventional religion. One of the ways they can do that is to create myths. They are a way of expressing something that can’t be expressed any other way.”
