beasts, that beasts could speak, that magic rings could make
their owners invisible, and all the other wonders in the stories.
Then, as the world became grown-up, the fairy tales which were
not written down would have been quite forgotten but that the old
grannies remembered them, and told them to the little
grandchildren: and when they, in their turn, became grannies,
they remembered them, and told them also. In this way these tales
are older than reading and writing, far older than printing. The
oldest fairy tales ever written down were written down in Egypt,
about Joseph's time, nearly three thousand five hundred years
ago. Other fairy stories Homer knew, in Greece, nearly three
thousand years ago, and he made them all up into a poem, the
Odyssey, which I hope you will read some day. Here you will find
the witch who turns men into swine, and the man who bores out the
big foolish giant's eye, and the cap of darkness, and the shoes
of swiftness, that were worn later by Jack the Giant-Killer.
These fairy tales are the oldest stories in the world, and as
they were first made by men who were childlike for their own
amusement, so they amuse children still, and also grown-up people
who have not forgotten how they once were children.

Some of the stories were made, no doubt, not only to amuse, but
to teach goodness. You see, in the tales, how the boy who is kind
to beasts, and polite, and generous, and brave, always comes best
through his trials, and no doubt these tales were meant to make
their hearers kind, unselfish, courteous, and courageous. This is
the moral of them. But, after all, we think more as we read them
of the diversion than of the lesson. There are grown-up people
now who say that the stories are not good for children, because
they are not true, because there are no witches, nor talking