![]() ![]() You can read the details of the story here, but essentially Simpleton succeeds in this task with the aid of a magical helper. The king has issued a proclamation that any man who can make his daughter laugh shall have her hand in marriage. ![]() Many people will have read the story of The Golden Goose (Brothers Grimm), in which a poor woodcutter called Simpleton, who is the youngest and least promising of three sons, lives in a kingdom where the princess is permanently sad. What has this got to do with being bipolar? Well, In recent years, I’ve found myself contemplating fairytale characters that I haven’t thought about for decades, as a result of developing certain, ahem, “magical” powers of my own. ![]() What I believe is interesting to children about this kind of story is the way that something completely out of the ordinary can be explained away and accepted by the characters on the grounds that it is “magic”. I had volumes of the classic stories collected by the Brothers’ Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, but I was also given stories of Tzar’s palaces and crafty peasants from pre-revolutionary Russia tales of giants, warriors and shape-changers from Irish folktales fables of djinns, flying carpets and talking animals from the Arabian Nights and modern fairytales written by Enid Blyton. I was lucky that my parents supplied me with a lot of books when I was growing up. ![]()
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