My daughter’s daughters are 2 and 6. The older girl believes in fairies and unicorns and all the marvelous creatures little girls hold dear. The younger, who calls horses, “neigh-neighs,” also loves unicorns and calls them, “neigh-neigh-corns.”
They have a collection of plastic, wooden and fabric horses and horse like animals, some with horns and some with wings and some with both. They build castles and paddocks for them, with castle blocks and Lincoln logs. The little one feeds them at tea parties, being particularly concerned that the neigh-neighs — with or without embellishment — as well as the “stuffies” and dolls, are never allowed to be thirsty. They read, or listen to, books about these special beings.
Their mother loved unicorns as much as her girls do. When her first-grade teacher assigned a project of writing a self-illustrated book, hers starred a unicorn and her adventures. A neighbor recommended Madeleine L’Engle’s atmospheric novel, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which wasn’t exactly about a unicorn but about marvelous, shape-shifting creatures whose job was to save the universe. The entire family loved it.
Unicorns were shy to the point of absence when I was a girl. Childhood in the 1950s was about mimicking adults and not about flights of fancy. There were no plastic pastel unicorns. I had no spotted, red felt mushrooms for fairies to sit upon, and no tiny houses, like inverted purple flowers to shelter them.
But there were wonderful books. I loved the tales of the Brothers Grimm and of Charles Perrault, which, in the editions available, were scrubbed and tame. From there, it was a short trip to folktales and myths of the strange gods of Greece and Scandinavia. Later, there were the tales of King Arthur, who was not, strictly speaking, an ordinary human.
During the summer between elementary school and high school, I borrowed all of the old books of myths and fairy tales from the library and reread them. The ritual was not a farewell, but, a reunion with an important part of my childhood.
Why do children love those impossible creatures so? Adults do as well. My adult children all played Dungeons and Dragons. Their reading leans toward alternate history and fantasy.
The love of my life and I read the Tolkien trilogy “together,” me at a college in Detroit and he in Ann Arbor, being careful not to read more than two chapters a week. On Fridays, we would talk about what we read. But hybrid creatures and avian humanoids are not post-Enlightenment inventions.
From cave paintings of the Neolithic, to the carved walls of Assyria, to the tomb paintings of Egypt, to the images of Ganesh carried at festivals in India, hybrid creatures abound. Some are human/animal hybrids. Others combine up to five animals in one creature. Some, like Anubis and Ganesh, are clearly gods. Others are thought to represent a shaman in a trance, or, perhaps, hunters who don antlers and animal skins to allow access to the herd being hunted.
Are hybrid creatures symbols of reverence, as in we humans respect your power of flight, your strength, your endurance, or, are they metaphors, as, perhaps the Minotaur was of the unfair demands of the ruling class? Were some imagined in response to finding fossilized bones, with the dragon perhaps inspired by dinosaur remains?
The most interesting hybrid is the avian humanoid, which existed worldwide throughout time. We are familiar with the angel of the Abrahamic religions, whose purpose is to send God’s messages to humans. However, there are at least 80 such creatures, of varying degrees of beauty and ugliness, benevolence and violence throughout the world.
What caused humans to imagine themselves with wings? Was it a desire to travel quickly? To communicate at will? Are they expressions of a desire for a particular kind of superiority, as in, “Look! In the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!”
But fairies are also part of another group, miniscule humans, like the leprechaun, whose name first appears in writing in the year 1000. Tiny humanoids are thought to be largely a Western European invention. Whether they’re fallen angels, pre-Christian deities or elementals (think of Ariel, from The Tempest), or, whether they’re tricksters, like the leprechauns, or helpers, like brownies or elves, doesn’t matter. They have been with us for centuries.
Returning to my own childhood, I remember being home from school with the measles. My godmother sent me two books: “Old Man Rabbit’s Dinner Party” and “Brownies, Hush.” They were among my favorite books. Although the originals are long gone, the texts and their illustrations remain in my mind.
And that might be the power of fairies and hybrid creatures: their indelible nature, the way they linger, in the mind and the imagination. Those representations of fairies and unicorns that my granddaughters play with connect them to their ancestors, teach lessons that help to socialize them and give them hours upon hours of enjoyment.
What better to think of as Christmas and the returning of the sun chase the cold winter away?
A native of Michigan, Susan Wozniak belongs to three alumni associations with at least one other woman named Susan Wozniak in each. She can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.