Fairy Tales as Guides to Reality
By Jonathan Pageau
Symbolic World Press, 2025; 53 pp., $39.99
A review of Tales for Once & Ever
Jonathan Pageau has established himself in recent years as one of the Internet’s most insightful commentators on matters of culture and religion. His YouTube channel boasts hundreds of thousands of subscribers who follow his videos on everything from Genesis and The Consolation of Philosophy to Superman and K-Pop Demon Hunters. Pageau easily brings together disparate subjects thanks to his knack for uncovering layers of meaning in stories and other cultural items, something he may get from his background as an icon carver. While such commentary may seem rather niche, Pageau’s project is profoundly ambitious. His work as a cultural critic, writer, and artist is a challenge to the materialist, disenchanted worldview that has long dominated Western civilization. In it, he makes the case that materialism is a dead end, and that it has tricked us into adopting a distorted way of engaging with reality. Turning the tables on the dominant currents of post-Enlightenment thought, Pageau makes a compelling case that it is often through myths and fairytales that we come to a true encounter with the real.
Unlike many critics, Pageau is not content with merely commenting on culture—he is also engaged in making it. One of Pageau’s most striking recent projects is a series of retellings of traditional fairy tales titled the Tales for Once & Ever. So far, the series includes Snow White and the Widow Queen, Jack and the Fallen Giants, and Rapunzel and the Evil Witch.
Judging by the way contemporary retellings of traditional stories usually go, you might be forgiven for immediately rolling your eyes. Whether it is picture books like The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, hit musicals like Wicked, or big budget movies like Disney’s Maleficent, recent retellings follow a predictable playbook. They either subvert the traditional story—usually along trendy ideological lines—or exploit its status in the culture to market a commercially driven product that is only tangentially connected to the original.
Not so with the Tales for Once & Ever. Pageau has absolute respect for his sources and understands them at a profound level. He has no interest in deconstructing or “problematizing” them. Rather, he is a man who has found a treasure that he longs to share with others. His goal in these retellings is to go deeper into the traditional stories in order to draw out riches hiding beneath the surface—which are the ultimate reasons the stories have endured in the first place. Thankfully, if Pageau avoids the pitfall of running traditional fairy tales through the meat grinder of modern ideologies, he also avoids the temptation of reading into the stories shades of meaning that seem forced, farfetched, or idiosyncratic. Rather, I found that each story remained very much itself. As Pageau elucidates a story’s themes or symbols, he holds up for contemplation notions that feel familiar and fitting, but which readers may have never explicitly noticed.
The tale of Snow White and the Widow Queen, for example, preserves all its traditional elements: the magic mirror, the evil queen, the hunter, the seven dwarves, the prince, true love’s kiss, and, of course, Snow White herself. Yet Pageau’s retelling—in deceptively simple prose that is appropriate for reading to small children while remaining engaging for adults—makes evident why this story has stood the test of time. In it, we see a young woman encountering the two-edged gift of her own beauty, with both the positive and negative attention it affords her. What is this new power and how should it be used? Will it lead to communion and fruitfulness or self-absorption and cruelty?
Snow White, the character, wrestles with the consequences of becoming “the fairest in the land” even as the aging widow queen, desirous of the prince’s attentions, ravages her own appearance in attempts to destroy her young rival, using spells and potions to which she must sacrifice her hair, nails, and blood. Notably, each of the witch’s three attempts against Snow White while she is in hiding at the dwarves’ cottage comes in the form of a temptation that amounts to adopting the witch’s own understanding of beauty—tests that Snow White does not exactly pass. Nevertheless, Snow White has cared for the dwarves in body and spirit, inspiring them to leave behind a life of thievery, and has cultivated a virtuous love with the prince during her previous encounters with him—even rebuffing his over-eager advances by telling him not to “awaken love until its time.” Because of these past choices, when her own flaws end up bringing her to harm, there are those around her willing to come to her aid, restoring her to health. Indeed, her previous words to the prince play an important role in securing the final, happy ending. Love does cover a multitude of sins.
Pageau’s Snow White, therefore, is far from the one-dimensional Empowered Female Character that became de rigueur some years ago in books and movies—but which more recently has been the subject of derision in many corners—yet nor is she a passive character who only exists to be saved by a male hero. She is a girl coming of age, learning to navigate the treacherous waters of becoming a woman, making choices for good and ill that shape her character, her relationships, and ultimately her future. In taking this approach, Pageau’s retelling manages to feel fresh while remaining faithful to traditional versions of the story. He helps readers enter the tale anew—and do so with eyes open to the riches that have been there all along. Moreover, because he is touching on timeless themes, this version manages to feel vastly more “relevant” than other recent retellings, such as Disney’s live-action remake, that tried to appeal to modern audiences but only managed to flop at the box office.
One way in which the Tales for Once & Ever do feel surprisingly modern surfaces in the third installment of the series, Rapunzel and the Evil Witch. In it, we suddenly realize what was only hinted at in the first two books, which is that these tales all exist within the same universe. At the end of Snow White, I thought it was interesting that the queen remains alive, though exiled and much diminished. In Rapunzel, we meet her again, having learned from her past mistakes, in a way, but falling into new errors that continue to turn her from the good. We also meet other important fairy tale characters that end up playing an important role in the fates of Rapunzel and her prince. While this trend of creating a common universe of stories might remind many of Marvel movies, it does not come off as gimmicky. Beyond the sense of novelty, the connections and transformations that Pageau creates through this device end up adding a sense of depth and poignancy to the tale of Rapunzel, building the story towards an ending that, while “happy,” also shows that character and the choices that arise from it can have serious, sometimes negative consequences, which even “good” characters cannot wholly erase.
No review of the Tales for Once & Ever would be complete without mentioning the stunning artwork that Symbolic World Press has commissioned for this series, and the love and resources they have poured into each book’s production. Indeed, more than hearing Pageau speak about the series, it was the magnificent illustrations that drew me to these books. After coming across them online, I immediately reached out to Heather Pollington, who did the illustrations for Snow White and Rapunzel, to inquire about the possibility of sharing some of this artwork in Dappled Things. I need not comment on it long, since you can enjoy it for yourself in this issue’s pages. While all the art in the series is excellent—including the work done by Eloïse Scherrer for Jack and the Fallen Giants, which is fittingly fantastic and action-driven—I am delighted with the way Heather Pollington brings elements of Gothic and Byzantine iconography to the service of these fairy tales, imbuing them with a sense of the numinous and the sublime.
At a time when the experts tell us the future belongs to the Machine, whether we like it or not, how invigorating it is to come across a project that showcases the lasting power of human culture. If Paul Kingsnorth is right that the first step in fighting the Machine—understood as those forces driving us toward the techno-dystopia that materialists sell as salvation—is to break its hold over our imaginations, then the Tales for Once & Ever belong in the home libraries of all those who would resist such a future.
