Elizabeth Oldfield: Hello and welcome to The Sacred, a podcast from the think tank Theos, produced in partnership with Comment. Can you remember the very first story that really grabbed your imagination as a child? I mean the one that you completely wanted to live inside, where you projected yourself onto that protagonist that really took up space in your head? Well, my guest today would argue that that’s a really important thing to pay attention to. Dr Sharon Blackie is a therapist and a writer and an advocate for fairy tales in particular, as a rich resource for those of us seeking to live lives of wisdom, meaning, and purpose.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Where do we develop the imagination and the images that kind of keep us going through hard times? So there is that. I think they tell us how the world actually is, but they also show us all of the beauty in it, because they’re stories. And, you know, after they’ve moved from the times of catastrophe, they’re stories that are filled with love. Whether it’s a mouse or a crow or an old woman or a prince at the end, it’s just — it’s all about love.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I really, really enjoyed this conversation. I learned a lot, and it made me want to go buy a big book of Grimm’s fairy tales for my children. I really hope you enjoy listening too.
Sharon, I want to ask you: what is sacred to you?
Dr Sharon Blackie: I would say that there are two levels to it, if I may.
Elizabeth Oldfield: As many as you like.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Okay. So first of all, everything. Because I am a not-so-closet Neoplatonist, and that means that I do believe that the divine is in everything, and the world soul imbues everything. So, you know, at a very fundamental level, everything is.
But if I were to think of it in terms of values, I would say what’s sacred to me is responsibility, maybe even duty — which sounds very dull, doesn’t it, has a very heavy feel — but I don’t mean it in that way. It’s a sense of doing the work. I think, because I’ve had, ever since I was a small child growing up in a not particularly religious household, I always had a sense that this wasn’t a free ride, that there was something to do or to be, or whatever — that there was some kind of, I don’t know, just something I had to do.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I am going to ask you right at the start to say more about Neoplatonism, because a lot of people will go, “I have no idea what that is.”
Dr Sharon Blackie: No, I suppose not. I’m throwing in all the big words right at the beginning. So it’s the philosophy that really came after Plato, so around about the third century AD. To cut a long story short, they had a very beautiful concept, very simple in many ways — a concept of spirituality which started with the One, what they called the One, literally the ground of being from which everything else comes. Then they conceived that from that, the divine mind emanated — kind of a divine consciousness, intellect, if you like. And from that emanated soul, the world soul, which then created everything in the natural world and us. And as a consequence, everything is part of the divine.
So I love that — I mean, clearly they got more complicated in their philosophy — but that fundamental concept of the divine being part of everything, as opposed to separate, really, really appealed to me, as someone who finds it very hard to do institutionalised religion. It just seems like a really good starting point to work from.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wonderful. We’re definitely going to come back to that, but I want to, um, building on this — you hinted to the sense of responsibility, of duty, there being something to do in the world. I would love to hear a little bit more about the context of your childhood. Any big ideas in the air, implicit or explicit, that were formative on you?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Well, I grew up in a very impoverished environment, kind of on the fringes of a council estate in Hartlepool — somebody has to — in the industrial northeast, basically. It wasn’t an easy childhood. My father was violent towards my mother rather than me. My mother, when I was a teenager, became an alcoholic. So it always felt very, very precarious in many ways.
And yet it was in the days when that really strong working-class set of values was still absolutely full-on, up front, in the community. So I spent a lot of time with my great aunt, who — like so many women of her generation — basically ran the country during the Second World War, when all the men were away, and ran their communities. They’d been, for better or worse, because they weren’t always easy — they could have been the moral pillars of their community — and their values were very much about hard work, responsibility, um, getting a grip, if I can say that. And, yeah, life wasn’t in any way easy for any of them, but they took care of each other, and they required everybody to step up as much as they were capable of, and if they couldn’t step up, then they looked after them.
And I think that whole sense of, um, maybe that fed into the responsibility thing as well, but I think that whole sense of feeling proud of their culture, their very working-class culture, proud of their community-building, was a big thing for me. I mean, not in the sense that I’m a community person — I’m not, like you, I’m a great solitary. But it’s just those values and that sense that we have to shape up sometimes. We have to live up to the story that we’re in, even if it’s not a very easy one. And we have to somehow make something of it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. I was actually speaking to my husband yesterday — we’d been to visit a set of communities in Bristol, and we were talking about how there’s a lot of strong women leaders in that network. I was kind of talking about the effects of that, and he said, “Yeah, I think a lot of them are from working-class roots,” and he said, “and they have that working-class-woman thing of you don’t cross them.” And I was like, yeah, that was my nanny — like, I was actually quite, I spent most of my life quite scared of her, because she’d carried so much. And nanny as in my granny, not my paid child-care person. She had suffered so much and held so much. And by the time I was around, it was just like, you don’t — you don’t mess. Like, this is a woman who’s holding up the world and you don’t get in her way.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah. No, my great aunt Meg is exactly like that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What was her name?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Meg. Great Aunt Meg, yeah, Aunt Meg. And she was, you know, she had the rollers and the hairnet and the pinny and the giant bosom that her arms were crossed on — just like one shelf. Yeah, she would stand on the front doorstep and she would just, like, shout at people if she thought they weren’t shaping up. You know, she’d tell them exactly what she thought of them. She was small, like a trooper, and she was constantly, like, chain-smoking. It was just a halo of smoke that you had to see her through.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Really?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, I mean, they were great role models, because I grew up thinking that women had authority. There’s no question about it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you mind me asking — was your dad around? Did he leave the home, or was he around for your childhood?
Dr Sharon Blackie: He left when I was two, I would say. And then he became a very poor occasional father. So, no, I really sort of mostly grew up without a father. And my mother was — it was very, I mean, we had a complicated relationship, as you can imagine. But she was an interesting woman, in that she was very clever and she thought learning was really, really important. And so that was another value in the home — that learning was good, that books were good, and that I could be anything that I wanted to be, which is nonsense, really. Well, it turned out not to be, I suppose, in lots of ways, but it felt a bit weird at the time.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And you’ve written a little bit about how her alcoholism in particular shaped you. Would you mind saying a bit about that?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, I think, you know, I didn’t really work it out until I was about forty, which is pitiful, because I’m a psychologist — it was a classic case of physician heal thyself. And I think what it did is it gave me an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, because I had to take care of everything. And it also — the negative side of it was that it gave me a very strong need for safety and security, which wasn’t functional when I was a young woman, because I ended up doing a corporate job because it was safe and I would be safe. And it wasn’t at all who I was, and it took me a long time to break out of it and to understand what was going on there.
But also, you know, when you grow up with a mother who drinks — and she was a binge drinker, as opposed to constantly — you have to keep it secret. You weren’t allowed to talk about it. Nobody necessarily could come around to the house, because she might be in one of her bingey times. And so it made it all a bit, not just precarious, but almost inauthentic. It was really hard to figure out what the story was and how to transform it, I suppose. Yeah, it took me a long time.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And a lot of your work has drawn on myths and fairy tales and ancient stories. What is maybe one early story or fairy tale that meant a lot to you when you came across it?
Dr Sharon Blackie: I think, actually — and it’s the story that I start Ripening with — The Girl Without Hands, which comes in various forms across Europe, but the version I knew is from the Brothers Grimm.
Elizabeth Oldfield: That’s because there was a Grimm storybook in your house?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had quite a few books, actually. We didn’t have a television for most of my childhood, but we had a lot of books, and I was encouraged to read fairy tales. I don’t know why — I was also encouraged to read Dickens and all kinds of stuff that I probably shouldn’t have as a very young child. But, yeah, and I loved it because it’s a story. I mean, just very briefly: it’s a story about a miller who falls on hard times and makes a deal with the devil — that the devil will make him rich if the miller will give the devil whatever is standing behind his mill. And he thinks the devil wants his apple tree, which is a bit weird, because that’s what’s behind his mill. And what he doesn’t know is that his daughter is actually standing there.
Well, to cut a long story short, the devil can’t take the daughter because she’s too pure, and the father has to end up cutting off his daughter’s hands so that the devil won’t take him instead. And what’s fascinating about it to me — well, as a child, it’s just like, yeah, okay, that’s the world. Everything begins in catastrophe. Everything begins in hard times. But she refuses to stay with her father, who promises to keep her now that he’s rich, and she just can’t possibly stay, clearly, with a man who just cut off her hands. So she just walks into the forest alone, with her hands bleeding, and kind of creates — it’s a long story, and a very beautiful story — but kind of creates her own story out of what looks like catastrophe. And all of the fairy tales that I read as a child seemed to have that quality: that they always managed to find a way through. And, yeah, I liked that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The reason I said you had a book of Grimm’s fairy tales in your house — I think it wasn’t about books, it was about the fact that, I don’t know, in my generation, that anyone had that book. And I worry that the way fairy tales came to my generation was almost entirely through Disney.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Gosh, that’s frightening.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It is frightening. And, you know, I also grew up in a house with lots of books, and lots of — Mum from a working-class background, but the women on that side of my family, they read and they read and they read, and they passed books around. But I think, if I asked people in my generation, “Did you read the original fairy tales as a child?” it would be really unusual. Oh, it’s interesting, and it means that, as I’ve been getting to know your work and the work of others who work in this area, it’s almost all been brand new. I’ve had the whitewashed Disney version of passive princesses being rescued as the kind of icon of what a fairy tale is. How much are you experiencing that, as you’re going around having to deconstruct what people think a fairy tale is?
Dr Sharon Blackie: I do, I do find it. I mean, my publisher, for example, is exactly that person — she would be, I don’t know, fifty, early fifties, or something like that — and just never read fairy tales. A very literary house, and that’s possibly why, actually. But it’s taken some years to understand why they matter and why they’re interesting.
But I think — I don’t think it matters how late you come to them, but you have to come to the originals, because they have been profoundly degraded, not just by Disney, but by some of their so-called literary fairy-tale tellers, like Charles Perrault, the French writer of fairy tales who took them from the oral tradition but then gentrified them terribly. And that’s where you got the first kind of Sleeping Beauty as a passive person, you know, just waiting for the prince to come along and wake her up with a kiss.
And back in the day, in the oral tradition, for all of those centuries, fairy tales were clearly a subset of folk tales — so they were the stories of the folk. And they were women’s stories. They weren’t necessarily for children. They were stories that women would tell each other when they were at work. And they were told, I believe, to give their daughters hope that there was always a way to create a meaningful, positive life, even in circumstances that looked impossible or very difficult. They were kind of teaching stories, you know — how to escape the big bad wolf, the symbolic big bad wolf, and so on. And that means that they have a lot of power, because they have all of that working-class passion and sense of precarity.
And that’s really why I do believe they’re particularly important today, because they tell us that women have always lived in precarious times. Every fairy-tale heroine walks out of the door with catastrophes snapping at her heels. And although you might think, well, what on earth has a fairy tale got to tell us — because, you know, she’s going to meet a magic frog and he’s going to make everything all right — it’s never that simple, because what they do is they build community. They do it by building community, and, yeah, that includes a frog. It’s not just a human story. It’s a story of engagement with, and embeddedness in, the natural world. And, yeah, we do need that. We need that sense of wonder and possibility.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You said to me you came to a lot of these realisations late, and you kind of had that inheritance of fairy tales that you carried into your corporate job. What provoked you to eventually have the courage to leave that security and that safety which you’d been seeking, and become a psychologist? What helped you?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Um, I think desperation. I felt that I was afraid to live, and I knew that I was not supposed to be in that job — it wasn’t a bad job, it just was so pointless. And I felt that I should be something different. I was living in America when I finally managed to break free — I’d been in America for about four years, on about my third midlife crisis, in my late thirties. And I woke up one morning and I thought, I just really thought, I’ve just got to do something about this, otherwise I’ll be lost. And JFK Jr. had just died in a flying accident, and I thought, I’m going to learn to fly. So there you go. I was petrified of flying.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So that was smart.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Actually, it was smart. It was the smartest thing I did. I was absolutely petrified all the way through — I was convinced I was going to crash at any minute. But the day that I got my pilot’s license, I thought, if I can do that — you know, a girl from a council estate, petrified — if I can do that, I can break free of this nonsense and I can take a few risks. It was really about being afraid to live. And I do think that, certainly for me anyway, if you have that kind of fear of really being fully alive, because being fully alive carries a lot of risks with it, you really need to stare death in the face.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What scares you now?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Oh, that’s a good question. Not very much.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I love that.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Really, not very much. And it’s not just the learning to fly — during the pandemic, I had a very aggressive form of lymphoma. One of those that’s actually very readily curable, happily, when it’s caught in time — it was a marginal blood cancer. And, um, they are, these days, if you catch them early enough — it was the pandemic, it was marginal — but they are curable, happily. But that again was that whole process of looking death in the face and thinking, okay, so what — what shifts? A lot of things shift. So I don’t know that I’m fearful of very much right now. I don’t know whether that is wonderful, actually — it’s kind of just a thing.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, yeah. And when do you feel most fully alive?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Oh, that’s a very good question. I think it’s changed during my life — I think it’s probably changed since the pandemic. But definitely being outside — I mean, it’s always outside. I did live in London for a number of years, but I couldn’t really thrive in a city. So we live in a fairly wild place now, in the North Pennines, having lived in lots of wild places over the past twenty years or so. And I think it’s just that clarity that comes when you’re in a space that isn’t really crowded with people but is crowded with birds and other wildlife, and then the land just hums. And that’s when I know that I’m really a part of it. Or in winter, staring up at the night sky — that will do it. That will plug me right into the mains every time.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The mains — I love that. And what might surprise people about you? There’s, you have thousands of people worldwide who’ve followed your work for a long time — you’ve shared parts of your story — but are there things that people often go, “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought that of you,” or that tend to surprise people about you?
Dr Sharon Blackie: I don’t know, to be honest, I really don’t know how to answer that. I don’t think — well, you see, if people have read my books, and I suppose by definition I’m not going to really surprise them, because every one of my books has some memoir threaded through it. So I find that I meet people and they already know my story. So I think, for people who don’t know me, most people find the flying thing a bit weird.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, it is a cool hobby. Do you do it anymore?
Dr Sharon Blackie: No, not since I left America. The skies are too crowded here and it’s too grey.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So you left your corporate job, you became a psychologist, but there’s lots of ways of being a psychologist. What was it about myths and stories and these Jungian archetypes that you felt drawn to, as you were helping people with what they were struggling with?
Dr Sharon Blackie: So psychology was my first degree. And although I went into it with an all-arts background — there are very few places where you could do it with an all-arts background, because it’s classified as a science — I ended up in probably the most behaviourist psychology department in the country.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Just tell me what that means.
Dr Sharon Blackie: We were not allowed to say “mind,” because she couldn’t see it and cut it open. Brain was all right, because she could see it and cut it open. But we couldn’t — I mean, that would have been proof, you know.
Elizabeth Oldfield: In my head, psychology, it’s all about your inner world and your mind.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Not necessarily, not in that. And then I went to do a PhD and I got very excited by the brain, because I couldn’t say mind. And then I became a neuroscientist — I did a PhD in neuroscience. So, very much scientific psychology. But in the intervening years — it took me a long time, I had to recover from that — but in the intervening years, in corporate life, I did recover, and I kind of indulged all of my wildest artistic and literary yearnings. By the time I came out of corporate life, I wasn’t going to go back to that kind of nonsense. So I retrained using really creative imagination, and even hypnotherapy techniques, predominantly.
And the thing about story is that it captures people’s imagination in a way that cognitive behavioural therapy doesn’t always. I mean, CBT has its place, but people find it very, very dull. I never had a single person who sat in the room where I worked and said, “Story? No, I don’t want a story.” It captures their imagination, and it does, if it’s a good story, help them believe in change. And the thing about fairy tales is they also have these very beautiful images which really resonate with people and stay with people, and give them something to hold on to when they can’t put what they’re feeling or thinking or worried about, or unable to overcome, into words. So it’s perfect, really. And so I developed a specialty in narrative psychology.
Elizabeth Oldfield: My understanding — this is, I always feel like I write amateur, but my understanding is even the neuroscience itself is now saying that story is how we make sense of the world, right? That we can’t get outside of it, that we’re always telling stories, so we might as well make them explicit. Is that right?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Kind of, yeah. I mean, the neuroscientists wouldn’t necessarily, I don’t think these days, encourage people to read fairy tales. But, yeah, the idea that we are narrative creatures — we should, for sure — that everything we do kind of predisposes us to tell episodic narratives about even little things, about the nature of our day, let alone the story of our lives. It’s partly the way that the brain is wired, and it’s partly the fact that we do feel that we live in linear time, which lends itself clearly to “and then, and then, and then.”
Elizabeth Oldfield: Reading your work, I found it so helpful for illuminating something that I have gone around and around in my head. How — I don’t know how to frame this question well. Okay, the headline of the question is: why women? If you see what I mean. Almost all of your books are about women’s stories, reclaiming women’s stories. What is it about that focus that has drawn you? Where do you think that’s come from in you?
Dr Sharon Blackie: I think it came from the fact that during that whole midlife-crisis period, I didn’t really know what it was to be a woman well. I had been married and was divorced. I didn’t have children. And I had grown up in a world where that’s what you did if you were a woman — if you weren’t going to have children, what did it mean? I had no good role models as a child. My mother was very wonderful in many ways, but she wasn’t a good role model. My great aunt Meg was not a good role model, although she’s very admirable in lots of ways. And I just didn’t know what it looked like. I mean, all of my friends were male. I just didn’t know — I didn’t really trust women.
And so I think I spent a lot of time during those years trying to figure out what it actually meant to be a woman. And then, during that process, I realised how much our voices have been suppressed over the centuries, and how much they’re still suppressed. And it just seemed to me that that was my work — it’s the work I’d had to do for myself, and it’s the work I felt that a lot of other women were struggling with. Men’s stories have been told for millennia, you know, and ours are second-class stories. And I think that’s true even today. In spite of the fact that everybody thinks we’re desperately liberated now and what have you, it’s just nonsense, isn’t it? Women’s voices are being suppressed all the time. We’re not taken as seriously.
And the richness of those stories — when I finally found the stories that I needed to work with, the richness of those stories and the complexity of the characters and the beauty of the imagery — it’s just, no, women need to know this. And particularly our native stories. Because when I was in America, I spent a lot of time reading Native American female writers — Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, all kinds of amazing writers who had this sense of groundedness, who hadn’t necessarily had an easy time historically but had this sense of groundedness in their places, who had all of these kind of mythic women who were very powerful in their own way. And I wanted that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: There’s so many threads I want to pick up on. I’m going to start with this trust question, because one of the things from your first book that really sums up a lot, and has really stayed with me, and I wanted to dig into with you, was the sense — in those Indigenous traditions in America, but also in the Celtic tradition here, and in the kind of pre-Christian European traditions — that there is a sense in which, as you put it, women largely possessed the wisdom. They made the land. They held what we needed to know. They kind of bore the moral authority of a culture, created life, kept us connected to life. And the dissonance of that, of the story — the big story, the archetypical Jewish and Christian story that shaped most of the European imagination — which accorded no such significance to women. I’m quoting now:
Women were an afterthought created from a man’s body for the sole purpose of pleasing him. In this story, the first woman was the cause of all humanity’s sufferings. She brought death to the world, not life.
This is the bit that really stayed with me — no matter what women might achieve in the world, the fundamental message of the sacred text of the world’s largest religious grouping is that men should not trust women, and that women should trust neither themselves nor each other. And obviously I’m a Christian, and navigating what is often seen as the patriarchal structures of Christianity — which I sometimes see, but often don’t experience as that. But I’ve never heard that trust piece centred so well and powerfully. I’d love for you to say more about it. What do you see in the Christian story that has had that effect on us?
Dr Sharon Blackie: I don’t see it in the Christian story. I see it in the institutions.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Interesting.
Dr Sharon Blackie: And I have no problem with the story — it’s very beautiful, much Christian teaching is incredibly beautiful. But I personally find it very hard to separate from the institutions that have been built around it. Now, that’s possibly a flaw in me. But it’s the institutions who suppressed all of that.
So the mythology that I know most about is Irish mythology, and it’s the mythology that we have most of in Britain and Ireland and the Celtic traditions — vast numbers of texts, incredible richness and depth of story. And you can see, over time, the degradation of women in those stories. So, for example, just a brief example: there are wonderful stories, both in the Scottish Gaelic and Irish traditions, of an old woman called the Cailleach, which literally means “old woman” in Irish and Scottish Gaelic. We don’t have a creation story in Celtic myth, because it was never written down by the Christian priests, but we have this story of an old woman who creates and shapes the land. She carries stones around in her apron, and she falls over one day and the stones fall out, and lo and behold, you’ve got a range of hills, and she has a little hammer with which she shapes the valleys, and what have you. And she was also the guardian and protector of the natural world, who had been there since the beginning of time.
Who has heard of this old woman? When I was a kid, even in a house that valued myth and fairy tales, I had never heard of her. And you can literally trace, over time, as Christianity takes over and cannot allow a powerful female divinity to be in competition with a kind of father god, you can see the degradation by which she becomes just a wicked old witch. And then there are all of these stories about how she tried to burn the priest’s Bible, but that old priest got the better of her and killed the Cailleach. But who remembers the priest now, whereas the Cailleach is still in place names all over Ireland and all over Scotland — so she nevertheless has kind of stayed in memory.
But you can just see it. So I think, for me — now, where it came from, I do not know. I do not know the origin of that original schism between men and women, way back. I don’t know what happened and how that happened — it’s incredibly hard to be sure of, but it happened. And with the incoming of those profoundly patriarchal religions, with a lot of dogma and doctrine associated with it, you can just see it in every country in Europe.
And so it just seems to me that it is absolutely time to go back to those stories, because they’re beautiful, and they don’t leave men out. In Celtic mythology — it’s very essentialist, but that’s just the way the world was then — the feminine is very much about bringing the wisdom of the other world into this world, carrying the moral authority of the other world into this world, understanding what keeps the land and people in balance. But the masculine is about upholding that — it’s kind of almost a social function, which isn’t seen as a downgraded function, but it is keeping people in tune with the natural world, keeping people in tune with the other world, respecting it, living in balance and harmony.
And it’s incredibly beautiful. I think it’s a great pity that all of that — well, it wasn’t lost, clearly, because we have it still today — but that it just fell into the category of entertainment for kids, and not to be taken seriously. Whereas, once upon a time, it was an actual cosmology. That was the spirituality.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes. How much, as, I guess, over the last decade or so — it was really interesting reading your work, really enjoying and finding myself surprised by — you’re, how do I put this — you just talk about women very straightforwardly, right? Women are this, we are the holders of the — we are the story-keepers, we are the memory-holders. And there’s this beautiful declarative, and I was like, oh gosh, lots of that language now is very contested. What do we even mean? How helpful is it? Tell me how you’ve navigated that and how you’re feeling about that now.
Someone who ties myself in unnecessary knots envies your straightforwardness.
Dr Sharon Blackie: I just don’t care, to be honest, and that’s the way I see it. That’s the way most of the women that I know see it. I have no problem if people don’t like the kind of essentialism. But that is the world that I grew up with, and that is the world of these old stories. And it doesn’t stop anybody taking the wisdom from them — it’s not exclusive. It’s just saying that there are masculine qualities and energies and there are feminine qualities and energies. And once upon a time, they mapped more easily — easily might not be the best word — but they mapped more straightforwardly onto male and female bodies. And now they don’t. That’s fine too — then we need to find ways around that essentialism. But I just don’t have a problem with it, because that’s who I am, that’s who the women I grew up with are, and that’s who a lot of women today are. It’s just that they need to find stories about what it is to be a woman.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, it feels to me like what we’re often missing is the “both/and” — the ability to hold multiple things — rather than the binary of, if you care about telling women’s stories, somehow you don’t care about men having stories.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Or gender-fluid people having stories. And it’s nonsense. But I am not going to be deprived of my stories, or have the women that I know, and the young women particularly that I know, deprived of their stories, in case someone else finds it problematic. It’s not acceptable.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s very zero-sum, isn’t it? It’s this real scarcity — like, if you have something, I can’t have it. And that doesn’t feel like a very morally courageous way of being in the world.
Dr Sharon Blackie: No, I absolutely agree. There are stories for everybody out there.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Dr Sharon Blackie: The old mythology was not in the business of excluding, and I don’t believe that we should be either.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. You mentioned earlier working-class values, and in the end of Ripening — I’ve read several of your books now, so there’s sort of a blending in my head, a beautiful tapestry, I’m sorry —
Dr Sharon Blackie: No, I love it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The amount of magical creatures that now live in my head has very much enriched me.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Excellent. Then I’ve succeeded.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, I’m going to get a cloak made of many types of fur. But I would love you to say a little bit about what values you think fairy tales teach, particularly for women. Because one of the things that really struck me was this sense that it’s all right, actually, for things to have a claim on us — it goes back to your sacred value of responsibility. People need a sense of what to be moving towards; that mass relativism can make people feel very unstable, and a sense of what good values are to live by is helpful for us. Can you say what you think those are, in fairy tales?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Well, I always think of them as the three Rs: relationship, reciprocity, and respect. Those are at the heart of every fairy tale, particularly where there is a heroine. A lot of fairy tales with heroes, with masculine protagonists, tend — there’s a lot of kind of jack-the-lad-ding and swashbuckling, even in the fairy tales — but the fairy-tale heroine doesn’t have that luxury. So it is very much relationship — she never makes it through to the end of her story without having made friends with a bunch of hungry mice, or a wise old woman in the woods, or whatever it might be. It’s always a kind of community effort, and relationship — not just in the sense of building relationship with humans, or funny little dwarves in the wood, or whoever it might be, but also with the natural world around her.
So you have all of these beautiful stories — stories of conception, for example, where women in fairy tales are often struggling to conceive, and you always find the natural world participating in the gift of conception. A frog might tell her that, in return for helping the frog out of a bad place, it will grant her the gift of conception. Or a child might grow out of a flower under a bed, or she might give birth to an apple, which later turns into a child. So there’s just this seamless integration into the natural world.
So it’s relationship at all levels, and reciprocity, because she never just takes. It’s always, “I haven’t got very much porridge, but the mice are hungry, so I’ll give them some of my porridge,” and then they give her something in return, and vice versa. And then just respect for pretty much everyone that she meets, whether it’s a funny old man in the woods, or a wizened old woman, or a set of loaves burning in an oven that want to be taken out. There is just this sense of everybody being equal in the story, and everybody having a voice, and everybody having a part to play. And I love that. And then there are more specific values — courage, kindness, generosity, and doing the housework.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, this really stood out to me — you were like, fairy-tale heroines have to work hard. That’s working-class women had to work hard.
Dr Sharon Blackie: In a world that is precarious, where we can no longer take for granted — or perhaps, in the future, we’ll no longer be able to take for granted — all of the things that we have taken for granted, particularly since the end of the Cold War, we need to relearn some of that stuff, frankly, because there’ll come a day when nobody is going to do it for us.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What I was seeing in your work was something that I don’t see in very many places, which was a kind of middle way between two — and this is true of a lot — I don’t mean “middle” as wishy-washy, I mean holding the tension of various things, that the kind of tropes we get in the culture wars, and I see this more actually in therapeutic circles, are — I think — an often right and good attention to our wounds, right? The girl with no hands has got wounds, and they’re real wounds, right? She’s bleeding. And you had real challenges in your childhood — many of us carry pain that needs honouring, right, that needs telling, often, actually, that needs to bring it out of the secret into the light. But that is the sole focus in some circles and some parts of the culture war. And the kind of hard-work, pull-your-socks-up, responsibility, duty, crack-on bit is talked about solely in other parts of the conversation, right? They both feel like part of the truth, but alone, quite — not that life-giving. Could you say more about, in your work and in fairy tales, how ideally those things work together?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, I think they have to work together, because I do think that, particularly recently — in the past thirty, forty years maybe — we have possibly, as a consequence of modern psychology, become entirely self-obsessed and way too locked up inside our own heads, looking at our own pain, looking at our own wounds, looking for diagnoses which may or may not help us.
And, yes, you’re quite right — I mean, when I was forty and I finally figured out what all of those years with my mother had done to me, that was a real revelation, and all of a sudden a lot of things, my own patterns of behaviour, fell into place. I had to do some really difficult thinking, feeling —
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wondering.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, but also — wow, that was amazing, that was strong, wasn’t it? But if you stay there, it’s like the classic journey to the underworld — you’re going to get stuck in the underworld, and then, where’s the story? There’s no story then.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right. You can’t move it forward. You’re stuck.
Dr Sharon Blackie: And I do think that is a tendency today, for young people particularly, not to be led out of the story again. And what I’m interested in is how we develop the resources — and that’s really genuinely what I think myths and fairy tales can do for us. They can just say, okay, yeah, the girl without hands, in the end, has to go into a house in a forest, just herself and her baby — and someone, I think there’s an angel there, perhaps, in that story — and grow her own hands back. But she does that, you know, but she spends the time. And then the story carries on, because her husband, who’s been away while bad things are happening, because he’s a king and he had to go to war, comes back, and they’re reunited.
So there is that sense of — do the healing. That’s why I love The Girl Without Hands — it’s perfect, it’s a therapeutic story, it’s perfect. But then you have to find a way of bringing that with you — you bring the wounding with you into the new story. You can’t just say, okay, I’ve done that now, leave it behind. It changes you, and it makes you more whole, because that’s what it is to be a person. It’s a very hard world, but I love — hope is a funny word, isn’t it, it has connotations which some people love and some people hate — but I love that ability to accept your wounding, to work through it, and then, yeah, just get on with life.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, and the examples you’re bringing, they’re just that, again and again — there is, yes, there is pain here, yes, there is damage here, and there is a quest and there is a task, and you’re going to need some help, and you can rise to it. And that sense of agency-building, resilience-building, does feel like the story that’s been lost in a purely therapeutic, pain-focused understanding of the self.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, I think so, and some uses of fairy tales don’t really help in that, but there’s another story — you referred to All Kinds of Fur, you’re going to get yourself a cloak of all kinds of fur — that’s another beautiful story about a young woman whose father wants to marry her because she looks like her dead mother, and she escapes with a cloak made of all kinds of fur — a beautiful, wild-animal disguise — but also with a ball gown made of silver, one made of gold, and the other made of stars.
And it’s just, you know, the imagery there — she puts on these ball gowns, she takes off her cloak made of all kinds of fur, and she puts on these ball gowns, one after the other after the other, until she marries the king — which is always symbolic, it’s not about marrying a man, it’s the symbol for becoming whole and the life that you want and dream of. And I’ve used that with clients in psychotherapy — what does it mean to embody a dress made of stars? So it’s just that, okay, she still has those wounds, but there’s a new story that’s very, very beautiful that can only spring from that place — it can only spring from that place of wounding as well.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You can’t get to the dress of stars without going through the wounding.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yes. And the cloak made of scraps of all the furs of all of the animals in the kingdom.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So I want to talk to you about a couple of themes that seem to come up again and again in different stories, but the thing that was really clear as an absence to me — so this is, I’m offering you a hypothesis, feel free to knock it down — you talk about, kind of oversimplifying, but generally you have mythic stories, which slightly more often have a male protagonist and tend to hit that Joseph Campbell hero’s journey — “I alone will go out into the world, rescue the thing,” blah, blah, blah — I think there’s also probably a class distinction. And then fairy tales, which are more often female protagonists and starting with horror being inflicted on them by other people, usually men, and going out into the world and collaboratively figuring out a new story. There’s a lot of absent mothers in fairy tales. I really struggled to find a story, in multiple of your books, of a good father. And then I thought, maybe those stories are in the myths, maybe those stories are in the male-coded body of work. And I did a mental inventory — nope, I can’t find a good father centring in anything I can immediately think of. Am I right in thinking the fathering stories are missing from almost all of the canon?
Dr Sharon Blackie: That’s a very good point, probably. I mean, in fairy tales with heroines, most of the fathers are really feckless.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Awful — they brick them up, they cut their hands off, they try and sell them. Or they’re just a bit — dim?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Or they’re letting things happen, and passive.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Exactly, exactly. But the mothers — I mean, there are a couple of good, there are some good mothers in fairy tales, actually, it’s often thought that there aren’t, but the mothers are better. And, basically, what the stories are saying is that when you leave home, you’re leaving home unmothered and unfathered, and there’s only you. What are you going to do? You walk out that door with nothing and no one. And what I love about the fairy-tale heroine is she goes straight out and makes friends with a crow, or a fish, or seven funny little men in the woods. And so it is, I mean, it sounds awfully clichéd, but it is about mothering and fathering yourself. To me, it’s very much about finding the resources in yourself, and with other people, that allow that to happen.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Okay, so it’s not that you’ve missed the great fathers —
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yes, well, I was thinking, you know, what are the stories that we need in these times, and reading your work and thinking, what are the stories that women need — and you’re offering so many beautiful ones. But I’m also in conversation with lots of men in my life, and in this community house that we live in, and in church, about what the stories that men need now are, and the way in which — you can redo that binary I was talking about, of possibly slightly too wound-centred, possibly slightly too work-centred — most of the stories that women get fed are wound-centred, and most of the stories that men get fed are work-centred, and we both need both.
But — maybe this is speaking, forgive me, I’m an external processor, maybe this is looping back to the Christian story — many of the things I find beautiful in it are about the good father, right, are about the loving parent that doesn’t disappoint us, that there’s healing in being known and seen and held and loved by a father. But the good father of that story is not necessarily what people think about if they’re in that. And it is an archetype that I couldn’t find elsewhere in folk tales or myths.
Dr Sharon Blackie: But then the Christian story doesn’t have a good mother. Not a divine mother — I mean, clearly it has Mary, but not a divine mother. So it is all a bit complicated. One of the things that turns me off about Christianity or Judaism is the preeminence of the father without the mother — I find that intensely problematic. But, really, I think I love these stories because they’re not heroic. And the hero’s journey has done as much harm to men, I think, as it’s done to women, because it just focuses everybody in on that one way of being human. And it’s just one archetype.
Elizabeth Oldfield: For those who aren’t familiar — I think most people would know — but could you just say who Joseph Campbell is, and what that archetype is?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, so he was an American — I think he was a historian originally — and he specialised in what’s called comparative mythology, comparing the mythologies of different countries and cultures around the world. And he decided that, in all of the best myths, there was a hero at the centre of it who basically had a call to adventure to leave his normal everyday life, because something in the world was lacking — might be a gold ring, for example — and that he alone, because he was exceptional, he alone, the chosen one, was the one who was going to find it. He goes through some difficult times, bless his little heart, but comes out at the end brandishing, let’s say, the ring, and then saves the world with it, having cut the heads off a few dragons along the way, and not met very many women who were at all important. And, yeah, I mean, Joseph Campbell had many, many fine qualities. Okay? But the hero’s journey drives me bonkers.
It was of its time — he published the book where he delineated the hero’s journey in 1949. It was a very heroic age in America, it was a very patriarchal age. He was wrong, if I may just bluntly say so, that the mythologies of the world are heroic — Celtic mythology is not actually heroic in the sense that he meant it. But that’s a story for another day.
Campbell, when challenged by one of his female students, quite late in his life, “Where were the women?” — his answer was, well, women don’t need to make the journey, they’re the point that the hero is trying to get to. Thanks, Joe, we’ll just sit here and be the destination. So this student, a woman called Maureen Murdoch, thought, no, I’m not having that — that’s my quest too — and wrote a book called The Heroine’s Journey.
So I don’t think it’s very helpful. Now, Campbell had many subtleties in his hero’s journey, but that’s basically it — it is about exceptionalism, it’s about individualism, not community, it’s about overcoming, conquering, and coming back and saving the world. Campbell writes a lot about Jesus and Gandhi as this kind of archetypal hero — but who’s going to live up to that? Most men that I know don’t want to live up to that, let alone be able to.
And so what you’re doing is you’re focusing on the archetype of the hero, on this one way of being a man — which means that all kinds of other really interesting ways of being a man, there are blacksmiths who have magic, there are magicians, there are all kinds of — you know, there are warriors, actually, who are also needed, a complicated archetype but needed — and it’s just like all the focus has been on the hero. And that’s what Hollywood has done in all of the movies, and that’s what makes all the best blockbusting, best-selling novels. And it’s just, we are so over that — we have had enough of heroes, they’ve got us into this mess. And what we need are — so I talk about post-heroic journeys, whether that’s a female journey or a male journey — which is about going back to these old values and the old stories and the old Celtic myths, as well as the old fairy tales, of relationship and reciprocity and respect, because they’re there. They’re embedded.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And you’ve written a little bit about the relationship between the hero’s journey, that individualistic quest, and our connection with the natural world. Could you use the phrase “eco-heroine’s journey”? What is the helpful thing from these fairy stories, for whatever sex or gender we are, that might help us in these times of real climate collapse?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, and this goes across both myths and fairy tales, in the British and Irish traditions particularly, but also in the wider European traditions — they are so heavily focused on keeping everything in balance. So I start off with a very, very old story, actually an English story, of a time when there were sacred wells around the country, out of which would come otherworldly women, because it used to be thought that wells were kind of conduits to the otherworld. And these otherworldly women would come out of the wells whenever a hungry or thirsty traveller was passing by, and offer them a drink from their golden grail and whatever food they wanted. And this was all very fine, and everything — people respected the otherworld, the otherworld gave its life-giving, nourishing forces, as otherworlds do — until, one day, a king happened along who didn’t understand the bargain between the people and the other world that’s entangled with this one. And he saw a very beautiful otherworldly woman come out of a well, and he raped her, and all of his men looked on and thought that’s great. So they went around the country raping all of the other well-maidens who came out of the wells. And, not surprisingly, the well-maidens went back into the other world — said, in effect, bugger you — and the land became a wasteland.
So it’s a seminal story, it’s one of our oldest stories — again, very few people would have known it until other people had written about it, but certainly it’s central to If Women Rose Rooted, because it’s such a big part of the book and the message in it. But it is about respecting that life-giving force of the other world — and if you don’t, and it’s taken away, then you have dead matter, basically, you’re left with a wasteland. A lot of these old mythologies, the whole Grail mythology, really, is not a heroic journey — it’s about respecting this life-giving force of the other world, or the world soul, or whichever spiritual or philosophical tradition you want to put it in.
There are stories about not taking too much — this classic folk tale in Irish, of a magical cow called the Glas Ghaibhleann, in Ireland — it’s the Dun Cow, I think, in other places. This is the cow-of-plenty motif, you know, where she’ll give a pail of milk to anybody who’s hungry, until one day a woman comes along with a sieve and lots of buckets, and of course the cow can’t tell, because it’s a sieve, that the pail is full. So she milks the cow dry, the cow buggers off, never to be seen again — that’s the end of the cow of plenty. So there are all of these stories about not taking too much.
And then there are all of these stories that teach us to respect the wisdom of other animals — there’s this motif, called the motif of the oldest animal, in lots of old folk tales, where somebody is lost, or something is lost, and so they go to the village, and the village people say, oh, go to the oldest people. And they go to the oldest people, and they don’t know, so they send you to even older people in the next village, until nobody knows. And so they say, go to the animals — and the oldest animal knows where it’s to be found. So there’s this whole sense that animals can know more than we can, and sometimes that wisdom can be more useful than ours.
So all of these things are embedded in these old stories, and it’s a way of living that we’ve lost — but we’ve only lost it very recently, and it’s still there, embedded in the stories that are still told today in some parts of the country and parts of Europe.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The thing that, to my shame, I was astonished by, was how central sexual violence is in fairy stories — and particularly how central sexual violence is to stories that I knew well, and have been well and truly sanitised. Right? Rapunzel — Tangled does not mention that she’s pregnant in the tower. Right? The handsome prince —
Dr Sharon Blackie: The handsome prince, scaled the tower and then —
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yep, yep.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Like, chaste kissing is not chaste kissing in the originals, right? There is rape everywhere you look.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And I think, particularly, could you say a little bit about the sort of Bluebeard archetype? Because I was disturbed — but, yeah, if you could say a bit more about those stories, because I was surprised to discover just how many there are.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Lots of them. So, one of the oldest ones is actually an English story called Mr Fox, where Lady Mary is due to get married to a man who — she just smells something wrong, she knows there’s something fishy about him, and she follows him to the castle that he won’t allow her to visit even though she’s about to marry him, and she hides and discovers the classic bloody chamber, full of the dead bodies of women that he has abducted and murdered. So it’s not always straight sexual violence, but it is violence. And then there’s Bluebeard, and then there’s a beautiful Grimm story called Fitcher’s Bird, which is kind of a Bluebeard tale — but, again, before she finds out, before she marries the Bluebeard character, and stays happily unmarried at the end, which I particularly like.
But there is just this — and, you know, that’s, I mean, it’s still the world today. Not for all of us, but for a lot of people, a lot of women in a lot of countries. And that was the world back in the day — that women were at risk of rape and of murder because they were not valued in the same way that men were. They were there for the taking. And the stories reflect that. These working-class women who told these stories to their daughters were basically saying, just don’t trust every handsome young guy that comes along, because look what might happen.
I mean, the oldest Sleeping Beauty tale — this shows you how much they’ve been sanitised. The Charles Perrault version, where she’s lying there, beautifully virginal, behind the wall of thorns, waiting for a chaste kiss. One of the oldest versions of that is basically that the prince rapes her while she’s asleep for the hundred years, and she wakes up to find two babies, one suckling at each breast.
Elizabeth Oldfield: That’s a shock.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people think that, well, we can’t possibly give those stories to kids because they would be traumatised. Of course they’re not — I wasn’t traumatised, I just thought, yeah, that’s the world, now I’m going to make it better, or I’m going to find a different story. But the fact that all of those stories start with some kind of violence, or with some kind of catastrophe, or with, you know, you emerge from the tower that your father has walled you up in because you wouldn’t do what he wanted you to do, only to find that the entire land has been laid waste by an old enemy, and there’s been a war, and you walk out into the kind of war-torn land — I mean, look, that’s happening all around the world. Maybe not quite so vividly — maybe more vividly, sometimes. And I don’t dress it up prettily.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I want to finish by — okay, so what’s going on in me is, I have a daughter and a son. I have not given them Grimm’s fairy tales, they haven’t seen a lot of old-school Disney, but they’ve probably seen more sanitised fairy tales than these ones. What is it about these stories that are going to equip them to be the kind of resilient, courageous, reciprocal, respectful people that we want in the world?
Dr Sharon Blackie: Because they’re going to start by not living in la-la land. They’re going to know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place. And it is getting more and more difficult, more dangerous.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I don’t want them to know that yet, though, Sharon.
Dr Sharon Blackie: I know. They have to know. And I think kids are very well equipped for it — I genuinely do. I do not believe that most children are traumatised by reading these stories from an early age. I think they just think, yep. And then they’re not disillusioned later — they’re not disillusioned, but also they’re equipped: they can come to you and say, why? Why is the world like that? Has it always been like that? Why is it like that? What can we do about it, then? How do we thrive in spite of it? How do we even change it? You know, where do we develop the imagination and the images that kind of keep us going through hard times? So there is that. I think they tell us how the world actually is, but they also show us all of the beauty in it, because they’re stories. And, you know, after they’ve moved from the times of catastrophe, they’re stories that are filled with love. Whether it’s a mouse or a crow or an old woman or a prince at the end, it’s just — it’s all about love.
I mean, the seven dwarfs, you know, in that Snow White story — yeah, but, I mean, you know, they stay by her coffin when they think she’s dead, they won’t let her go, even though they think she’s dead. So there’s just so much beauty in the stories as well, and I love them because of that, because it’s not just one or the other, it’s not just all pink and pretty, it’s how life is. And the great thing is that the beauty always comes after the bad stuff — so it gives kids a sense that it is possible, even when all of this awful stuff has happened to you, and you might have a mother who’s difficult, you might have a father who’s really bad. But look — you can do this anyway.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Dr Sharon Blackie, thank you so much for speaking with me on The Sacred.
Dr Sharon Blackie: Yeah, thank you — that was interesting.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I loved how quietly formidable Sharon clearly is. To say, “I’m not really afraid of anything anymore” — gosh, what a great life goal. I found it a lovely conversation. I always find it interesting to talk with people who aren’t steeped in fairy tales about why they’re important and why these stories matter, because it does seem a bit bonkers to a lot of people who aren’t. To use this line: whatever story you find yourself in, you have to live up to it, even if it’s not a very easy one. And I think that’s a really — a way to understand our lives.
I think a lot of people, especially at midlife, get to that stage where they just know that they can’t carry on living in the way that they’re living, and that they have to find a way of moving into a new story. And I think it is that sheer desperation, when they know that they are going to die — they feel that they’re going to die if they don’t make a change — and then all they need is a beautiful image. That, I think, is such an important clue to what are the lives we long for, what do we think a meaningful life is, what do we think good is. And maybe we could deliberately be listening to, reading, watching stories that help give us pathways and scripts and images — just like the fairy stories — for us to live our lives by.
I’ve really, really enjoyed speaking to Sharon, and I’ve really enjoyed getting to reflect aloud a bit with you. I hope you’ll write to us, or respond to our social posts, to tell us what it left you thinking about. But in the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Sacred. I will speak to you next time.
