Jack and Molly's Role for the New Millennium We have another past besides the past that history tells us about, a past which is in us, in individuals, more livingly than the recorded past. It is a past in which men slowly arrived at self-consciousness while building up the community, the arts and the laws. Today we have advanced poets and novelists who are trying to find means to suggest the unrecorded past in our memories and in our attitudes and so give their work another dimension. Well, it is this long past, the past that merges with the time when men were comradely with the animals and personalize dthe powers of nature that comes over to us in these and in other traitional stories. With it certain things are restored to our imagination. Wilhelm Grimm, who knew much more about the inwardness of these stories than the philologists and the historians of culture who were to comment on them, was aware of "fragments of belief dating back to most ancient times, in which spiritual things are expressed in a figurative manner." "The mythic element," he told us, "resembles small pieces of a shattered jewel which are lying strewn on the ground all overgrown with grass and flowers, and can only be discovered by the most far-seeing eye." "Their signification has long been lost, but it is still felt," he says, "and imparts value to the story." It is this felt but hidden value that makes a connection between certain subtle modern works and these old-world fairy tales. --- Padraic Colum in an introduction to Grimm's Fairy Tales Pantheon Books, Random House, Reissued 1975 Afterword by Joseph Campbell Links Books