Once Upon an Autumn Eve

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If you have read the forewords of the first two tales of my Faery series- Once Upon a Winter’s Night and Once Upon a Summer Day — you will know my thesis is that once upon a time many (if not most) fairy tales were epics of love and seduction and copious sex and bloody fights and knights and witches and dragons and ogres and giants and other fantastic beings all scattered throughout the scope of the tale as the hero or heroine struggled on.

Bardic sagas were these, but as the minstrels and troubadours and sonneteers and tale-spinners and bards and other such dwindled, and common folks took up the task of entertaining one another with these well-loved sagas, I believe bits were omitted-fell by the wayside-and the stories grew shorter, or fragmented into several stories, or changed to fit the current culture or religion or whatever other agendas the tale-tellers might have had.

And so, if I’m right, the grand and sweeping tales bards used to keep their royal audiences enthralled for hours on end became less and less as the tales were spread from mouth to mouth.

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