Virginia Vigliar Sharon, thank you so much for being here. I’m Virginia, Head of Content at Avaya, and I’m thrilled to welcome you to this webinar titled Fairy Tales of the Feminine with renowned mythologist and author Sharon Blackie. This webinar will run for 60 minutes and consists of a live conversation between Sharon and me, where we’ll explore the rich world of fairy tales as portals to feminine wisdom. The webinar is part of a larger conversation on the advisory platform, which looks at stories and myths as ways to reconnect with ecologies and forgotten landscapes. We’ve just had a webinar called When Women Were the Land, where we discussed some of these themes, such as ways of being, ways of seeing place, ancestry, and how they can open up our worldview, shedding light on unexpected pathways to make sense of the living world and the times we’re living in. Before we start the conversation with Sharon, I’ll hand over to Sophie, who will share a little bit about Avaya and what we do.
We’re so happy to be joined by the amazing Dr. Sharon Blackie. Sharon is an award-winning writer of both fiction and nonfiction, a psychologist specializing in neuroscience and narrative, and a mythologist with a focus on Celtic studies. Her unique approach to working with myth, fairy tales, and folklore highlights the insights these traditions offer us into authentic and meaningful ways of being, rooted in a deep sense of belonging to place and connection to the land. Sharon’s highly acclaimed books, lectures, and teaching programs focus on reimagining women’s stories and exploring the relevance of myths, fairy tales, and folk traditions in the personal, cultural, and environmental realities we face today. Her works include If Women Rose Rooted, The Enchanted Life, Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday, Foxfire, Other Stories of Shifting Women, and Wise Women: Myths and Stories of Midlife and Beyond. Sharon has lived for many years as a crafter in the northwest of Scotland, the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, and the Irish Highlands before settling in Wales. Her experiences on the westernmost edges of the Celtic world give her a unique perspective on the psychology of belonging and our relationship with place. Sharon, thank you so much for being here. I’m honored to speak with you today. To start us off, can you explain what fairy tales are, how they differ from myths, and what makes them special?
Sharon Blackie Hi, Virginia, and everyone. Thank you for inviting me. Just to clarify, I’ve actually moved to the north of England since that bio was written, so that's where I’m speaking from tonight. As for fairy tales—first, we need to differentiate them from myths. Myths are stories with a sacred or explanatory function; they tell us how the world is, why it is, and what our place is in it. Myths tend to be cosmological and are often inhabited by nonhuman characters like gods and goddesses, who possess powers far beyond those of ordinary humans. Myths are incredibly important, but they can be hard for humans to relate to, given the immense challenges faced by the mythic characters.
Fairy tales, on the other hand, are a subset of folk tales. Folk tales, by definition, are the stories of the common people—ordinary folks, not gods or heroes. They address the challenges and issues that everyday people face. Fairy tales specifically include magical elements, where human characters, sometimes disguised as princes or princesses, encounter magical or otherworldly situations and beings during their journey.
What makes fairy tales special is the vivid, archetypal imagery they contain. These images stay with us—they lodge themselves in our hearts.
For example, think of the red shoes or the selkie’s stolen skin. These images don’t need much explanation; we instantly recognize their meaning. Fairy tales also feature archetypal characters like the wise woman or the wicked stepmother, figures we encounter in everyday life. Because of these images and archetypes, fairy tales have a powerful ability to help us transform. At the heart of every fairy tale is a story of transformation: the heroine begins in an impossible situation, and by the end, she has transformed it. Fairy tales help us believe that change is possible and that there is always a way out of situations that seem insurmountable.
Virginia Vigliar That sounds so healing! You touched on it a bit, but could you expand on why you think fairy tales have something special to offer, especially in relation to the feminine, and how your work intersects with that?
Sharon Blackie Fairy tales can feature either female or male protagonists, but I’ve always focused on the fairy tales with female heroes, largely because we don’t hear enough about them—especially those that aren’t populated by stereotypical, insipid princesses. In the original oral tradition, fairy tale heroines are rarely passive. They are strong, feisty, and capable of saving not only themselves but also their loved ones. These stories were traditionally told by women to each other while doing domestic tasks. The stories reflected the lives of ordinary women, with characters and situations they could recognize—like being tasked with spinning an entire room of straw into gold overnight. These fairy tales were about women dealing with real-life challenges, such as harmful husbands or men who would steal your skin.
Fairy tales also often begin with a rupture, where the heroine must leave home—often because home is not a safe place. She embarks on a journey, and succeeds with the help of others she meets along the way. The heroine never does it alone—there’s always a sense of community and support. This distinguishes fairy tales from the heroic myths, where the focus is often on an individual hero who faces challenges alone. Fairy tales, on the other hand, emphasize the importance of community, which is especially meaningful today in a world that can isolate us.
Virginia Vigliar It’s such a revolutionary practice in a world that often pushes us into silos. What I find fascinating about fairy tales is their potential as a form of intimate knowledge transmission—a communal storytelling practice that can evade the dominant narrative. How do you think fairy tales offer clues to encoded matrilineal histories and cultures? How can we reclaim their feminine and ecological nature, especially in the context of a patriarchal system that has co-opted them?
Sharon Blackie That’s a great question. The first part of your question is about how fairy tales challenge the dominant narrative. I’ve written a lot about what I call the "post-heroic journey" as an antidote to the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell, who coined the term The Hero’s Journey, was writing in the 1940s, a time when the dominant narrative in the West was very patriarchal and individualistic. The hero’s journey emphasizes progress, growth, and more—and tends to be about being better than others. But I believe that paradigm is outdated, and we need to move beyond it.
When you look deeply into Celtic and European folklore, you realize that fairy tales—especially those passed down through oral traditions—are not about heroism in the traditional sense. Fairy tale heroines achieve their goals not by slaying monsters or winning battles, but by outwitting them. They succeed with the help of others, like a wise old woman in the woods, or a group of helpful mice. There’s no glorification of individualism or conquest. Instead, these tales show us something else.
Virginia Vigliar Absolutely. And do you mind sharing a bit about your process of finding these stories or reinterpreting them? I'm just curious to know.
Sharon Blackie I think part of the problem that we often get... So, I’m a writer of both popular fiction and nonfiction, but I’m also an academic, and that's really important to me. When I write about something, I want to know about it—not just having read one book sometime. I’ve been studying this stuff for decades, all my life. And when you're an academic, you learn methods of research so that you don’t read just one or two or three books and draw big conclusions. You go away and look at everything you can find. So, when I was looking for stories of elder women, that’s basically what I did. I amassed a great collection of obscure and wonderful fairy tales. There's a wonderful old Scottish book here, which is partly in Scottish Gaelic, for example, and partly in English. This is a really rare book, so I made myself find out that books like that existed and tracked them down, either from the library or if they were cheap enough on secondhand book sites, I’d buy them. I also looked at internet archives and learned where to find fairy tales from Russia—not just the best sellers on Amazon. I just read for months on end. It's not really hard work reading fairy tales, but I made notes on all the elder women characters in this case. I also had the knowledge to be able to classify them. So, as well as an academic background in folklore and mythology, I’m also a psychologist. I practiced psychology and love working from a Jungian and post-Jungian perspective. So, I looked at the archetypes and asked myself: What is the wise woman archetype? And which of these women fit into it? Which fit into the trickster archetype? You know, the old women who literally create and shape the world? Which are the truth-tellers? It’s a funny combination of skills, but I love doing it. It hasn't really been done very much before. I mean, we all know, I’m sure, Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Women Who Run with the Wolves, where she looks at the wild woman archetype in world fairy tales. But beyond that, there’s been very little of this kind of work.
And there’s such a rich treasure house of fairy tales with female characters for us to explore. So yeah, it’s time-consuming, but that’s kind of what I do.
Virginia Vigliar Sounds beautiful. And I’m curious about, you know, stories are usually carried... Well, you were talking about the fact that you read them from books, but how... What’s the difference? Because you started by saying that fairy tales with feminine themes were told by women to each other. So I think the context of morality is so important in stories. I wonder, how do we bring these stories forward? Because we're writing them, you're writing them, and we’re seeing them in books, but what’s the difference between when stories are written and when they’re told? How do they exist in our own context, especially with the feminine and with females? How are we able to tell stories now, and how did we tell them before?
Sharon Blackie Yeah, good question. I mean, to put it simply, there are two kinds of fairy tales. The first are the ones that were part of the oral tradition for longer than we will ever know, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of years. Of course, they’ve changed, because the whole point of a fairy tale, as opposed to a myth, is that myths don’t change much because they’re about how the world is—and that’s not supposed to change. It's like the Bible: it’s there, it’s written, you believe it, or you don’t. But fairy tales in the oral tradition always shifted over time because they were the stories of the folk, and if the folk changed, the stories had to change too. We will never know what the original “pure” version of any of these fairy tales was, but we know they were handed down organically from generation to generation, shifting with the times. That’s one set of stories.
Then there’s another set of stories that arose mostly in the 17th and 18th centuries, in places like France and Italy, where salons were held, and people would write fairy tales as works of fiction, as if they were novels or short stories. These were often morality tales, focusing on cultural mores of the time and how one should behave, especially around things like property and young girls. They’re a little different. Personally, I think there’s rich material there, but I’m more interested in the stories that come down from the oral tradition.
Now, the trick here is that those oral tradition stories, collected in the 1800s, were gathered mostly by men. And there's a whole saga—one that I won’t go into, although it’s fascinating—about collectors like the Brothers Grimm and how they took these often women’s stories and manipulated them, putting their own ideas into them when they wrote them down. Also, once these stories were written down in books, especially here in the West, there’s a sense that they’ve “ended.” That’s the story, it’s done. It’s a bit like the Bible—once it’s written, it’s finished, and you can’t change it. That idea has not helped us maintain the oral tradition. It’s not true everywhere, though. In places like the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland, or the Gaelic-speaking areas of the Outer Hebrides, there’s still a very strong oral tradition, and people still tell these stories around the fire. But mostly, we don’t.
And I think we need to get over this idea that because these stories were written down, that’s the definitive version and we can’t mess with them.
Then there are writers like Angela Carter, for example, who brought feminist versions of these fairy tales up to date for the challenges women face today, which is a bit different. So we have to get over the notion that these stories must be static and can’t shift. We need to understand that the whole point of fairy tales was for them to change, to evolve with the world and always remain relevant.
Virginia Vigliar I love that. And as a writer, I resonate with that so much. I’ve made an exercise out of my own writing lately to just not let it sit, to go back to it, maybe add or take things away, and to see writing as something fluid. I love how fairy tales teach us that. I think that even connects to what we were saying before about shifting the dominant paradigm because we’re constantly trying... we’re living in a society that wants to pigeonhole things, categorize them, or is quite binary in how it describes things. Yes, stories and fairy tales are ultimately ecological, social, and cultural. They’re contextual, and they emerge, mutate, and carry a life of their own through time and space. My question is:
how does a fairy tale bring us into greater intimacy with place and ancestry?
Sharon Blackie Yeah, I mean, just before I move on to that, I want to mention that I wrote a book in 2019 called Foxfire, Wolfskin, and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women. It’s a collection of my own reimagined fairy tales. And one of the things I did to bring them up to date was to look at the story of The Snow Queen, which I’ve always loved. I never thought the Snow Queen herself was a bad character. I actually thought she had a place. She brought winter. And I thought, What does the Snow Queen look like in a world of global warming? From being a villain, does she become a heroine? Just looking at these old ideas and tropes with a modern perspective. Another example is the classic selkie story: a seal woman with her seal skin stolen by a fisherman, made to stay with him for seven years and bear his children, then she finds her skin and escapes back to the sea. But what if that wasn’t how it ended? What if there were consequences for the husband? What would that look like? How would that feel? What would her voice be if she told that story differently, in a world where we badly need a few more consequences?
These are the ways we can shift fairy tales organically and naturally, interrogating what they mean to us today. Many of these stories are good enough as they are—they’re brilliant. Some could use a little massaging for the times, but all of them are in some way related to humanity’s place on this planet and the communities around us.
For example, in reimagining stories of shapeshifting women, it became clear that when women in European fairy tales shape-shift into an animal form, it’s perfectly natural. It’s often seen as a blessing—they get to be two different things, two different kinds of wisdom: as much crow, or seal, or swan, as they are human. It makes them special. It’s never seen as a problem. But when male protagonists take animal form, it’s always because they’ve been cursed. They have to be saved from it and regain their human form. So there’s an interesting dichotomy here in how fairy tales portray the feminine.
For example, these tales tell us that an animal’s wisdom is just as valid as human wisdom—it’s just different. Sometimes we need it. There’s a wonderful story in the Welsh tradition, one of the oldest stories from the Arthurian tradition, where the characters go looking for knowledge.
Virginia Vigliar So beautiful. Yeah. And how they teach us relationality, which is such an important aspect of life.
Sharon Blackie And reciprocity. Yes.
Virginia Vigliar Yeah. Just as a last question before we move on to the audience questions, because people have some interesting ones. We've spoken in the past about reconnecting with the land and place through practice, story, and ceremony. I wanted to ask, how do you advise going about this in a more practical way, and where does the fairy tale fit into that?
Sharon Blackie Yeah, that's a big question. And certainly, Ruby and I have spoken about it in the past. I’ve also run workshops on this many years ago. But I think it’s about having an openness to story. I can only speak from my own experience and wonder if it might resonate with some of you. So, whenever I come to a place, I look for stories. It’s lovely if there are preexisting folk tales about a particular folkloric character in my area, but often that’s not the case. Often, specific stories of place, especially here in the West—certainly in Britain—have been lost, or they may belong to other people. To me, it’s about co-creating stories. What I mean by that is it’s an act of co-creation between me and the land.
For example, I moved back to the north of England about 18 months ago. This is where I grew up and spent the first 10 years of my life, but I hadn’t really embraced it until now. I’m living in a place where there aren’t many specific stories about this beautiful green valley I live in. There are some, but not many. However, I know the kinds of fairy tales and folk tales that populate the north of England. There are a lot of giants and shapeshifters, and there’s a whole Arthurian set of legends around here. So, what I’m looking for is a kind of spontaneous eruption of story from the land.
For example, there’s a big hill right in front of my study window called Malice Dang Edge. It looms over me, dark and imposing. It’s a very narrow valley, and there’s no question that a giant lives up there. That’s my first thought: there’s a giant up there. It’s not because I’m mad, but because I know story. I’ve spent the last 18 months wondering what kind of giant lives up there. Where does he sleep? Is he grumpy today? It might sound a little mad, but it creates a relationship between me and that big old mountain.
At the back of our house, there’s a common with a lot of hares. There’s also a witch there, a shapeshifting hare witch called Granny Burkett, because the place is called Lookat Common. Every time I walk there, I feel like I see a witch, and we have a little conversation. So, what I’m trying to say is that I’m restoring my relationship to the land in a very organic way, by looking at the land and its features, and understanding the kinds of archetypal characters that already live here. Many of them appear in old folk tales.
I talked a lot in the past about living in the northwest of Scotland, where I was surrounded by stories of an old woman in Gaelic mythology called the Cailleach, literally "the old woman" who shapes and creates the land. I really felt connected to her. Then, I moved to a part of Ireland where there were no stories of the Cailleach, and I felt bereft, because the old woman archetype had disappeared from my life. One day, I startled a heron by the river. The heron took off, shrieking, and I thought, “That sounds just like an old hag.” I remembered that in Old Irish mythology, herons were shapeshifting old women who guarded the gates to the otherworld. And from that, I created a character called Old Crane Woman.
So, it’s about being open to story. Where there aren’t pre-existing stories, it’s about finding ways of letting them emerge.
Virginia Vigliar You’re making me want to speak to the beings around this area. I think you can find stories and fairy tales everywhere. I live in Catalonia, and there are so many here—such a strong tradition, especially with giants.
Sharon Blackie And it’s about making the relationship. It’s about building that relationship with the land.
Virginia Vigliar I love that. I’m going to take the last seven minutes, if it’s okay with you, to ask some questions from the audience. So, the first one: Have you found any fairy tales with lesbian themes, or do we need to follow Angela Carter’s example and rewrite them?
Sharon Blackie Yeah, just briefly, European fairy tales are very traditional. They tend to follow the cultural norms of their time, so you mostly see heterosexual relationships and many binaries. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t queer motifs in some stories, if you look deeply enough. That’s not my focus, but there’s a book coming out soon, and I can’t remember the exact title, but it’s something like Queer Folk or Queer as Folk. It’s a study looking at European folklore for queer motifs, binary motifs, and even transgender motifs. You often see these motifs in trickster stories, for example. I think it’s about to be published, so you might want to Google it for more information. I haven’t read it myself, but it sounds promising.
I’ve focused more on women’s stories, so I’m not an expert on queer folktales, but that book might offer more insight.
Virginia Vigliar Thank you. The next question: Is cultural appropriation a concern when it comes to taking traditional stories and changing them to suit personal agendas?
Sharon Blackie Yes, absolutely, it is a concern. That’s one of the reasons I only work with stories from my own tradition, particularly from Britain, Ireland, and Western Europe. It’s not my place to take Native American stories or Japanese stories, for example. The cultural context for those stories is very different from ours. Japanese stories are written with a very different approach, and we might misinterpret them. I think it’s offensive to appropriate stories from cultures that you don’t fully understand.
For me, I only work with motifs and stories from my own culture—stories I feel a connection to, and that I feel I have the right to work with.
Virginia Vigliar Thank you. And lastly, could you please name your top three traditional oral fairy tales?
Sharon Blackie Well, first would be the selkie story—any selkie story from Scotland. The classic selkie tale, where a seal’s skin is stolen by her husband. I think almost every woman can relate to the feeling at some point in her life that her skin has been stolen. It’s all about trying to regain it and return to our true selves. That story, when I first heard it, really resonated with me.
Second would be the story of The Handless Maiden, also known as The Girl Without Hands. I love this story because after her father cuts her hands off, she walks alone into the woods. She meets a fine king who tries to make silver hands for her, but they don’t quite work. The only way she can regain her own hands is by spending time alone in the woods. She grows back her hands, and it’s a story of hope and resilience.
There are so many others jostling for the third spot, but I’ll leave it at those two for now.
Virginia Vigliar Amazing, thank you so much. And thank you for sharing your incredible wisdom with us. We hope to see you at the event again soon. Thank you, everyone, for being here.
