I'm going to go straight to the point, and by that I mean imparting meaning on the rather lamely poetic title and hopefully entertainingly. I want to compare what was old and what is new, but not in a way that first seems apparently, but really does make sense. For the tales of old, I meant those which we once knew before, in youth, as versus ancient or classical (More of Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales than The Canterbury Tales or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). The "tails" (poetics on Tales for humor: reference to regenerable, hence new, tails, like those of certain species) of new are the contemprary material, which can comprise anything from the Inheritance Cycle to The Dragon Heir. Glancing these two are quite similar (and yes I will be using dragon tales to demonstrate a slightly broader topic of fairy tales as I have more experience in dragon ones), but I am trying to discern the two to appear different by their times, timing of our own age more than the year of publication (some overlap).
When we first start out, as toddlers (basically infants), we are often told of the world in a mystical tone via stories, which are often retold tales from ages past (at least partly). Many if not all know something of Red Riding Hood, Repunzel, Cinderella, several "lesser" known tales (Princess and the Frog, Jack and the Bean Stalk, etc.), and very especially Dragons, probably from the mythological fasination of something great yet inhuman. These clearly offered us exposure to imagination and wonderment, in a world that is great, if not as magically as percieved elsewhere. It is also quite apparent that without this, culture and innovation would be far less important if they were even to somehow exist in such absence. In example, most tribal cultures still thrive by the passing on over the next generations life, even as the world changes deeply around them, and most religions, major ones, have stood the test of time by the tales of what once passed and what will be, all seen by viewing things as they are via stories.
Then what is the point of separating the tales we now know and have avilable to us? For me at least, there is a stark contrast in the feel and takeaway each possesses, especailly with age. When we "grow-up," for some reason we appear to shrink and/or dissipate the very lively things of imagination that caused us to get to that point. This is reflected in materials today as some steer away from what could, to what really is, an irksome notion that reality is some plane representative of a box and a withering one at that. Inheritance and The Dragon Heir were books I enjoyed very much with their use of fantasy to a great moral length, one I could learn from in the end (in the books together this was self sacrifice). However, they had a slightly lesser effect (in this case only slight), than did things like Dragon Rider and The Daughters of Petabyee: Maelstrom, despite having a more "mature" and "modern" take on something very similar. These books for the youth somehow held more value, especially in my own youth, than even things I enjoyed just as immensely and intensively (after all they were mmore my "level"). I wish I could state it more clearly, but this correlation is all that I can really muster, that in youth there are the fairies, and later they recurr, but strangely enough are so different. What really happened to these symbols and characters of olde escapes even me, perhaps our reality and its change to the almost exclsuively material is blame. However somehow I feel this is just a visible change of something much deeper, and more innate than something gained by the way of generations. Hopefully it is a path to find a brighter light, rather than inevitable irreversible corruption, and most certainly not a loss by natural, or perhaps artificial, destruction.
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