Fairies have appeared in literary works since the twelfth century. This chapter presents some medieval examples of fairy godmothers. The story cluster of the Kind and Unkind Girls offers the opportunity to investigate the fairy in the fairy story. Although the Grimms heard the German version of the Kind and Unkind Girls at least six times, it appeared only once in the main Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM) volumes: as the story of Frau Holle, in English known as 'Mother' Holle. For the Grimms Frau Holle represented one of the defining examples of mythological survivals. The German story of the good and the bad maiden of which the Grimms collected so many variants had a number of literary predecessors, in German, French and Italian.

Closing remarks and observations with their contexts – moving towards a 'conclusion' to a trilogy of books.'

The story of the quest for the devil's hairs is an early nineteenth century invention; it is only speculation that it ever existed in this form at some point during the Middle Ages, where fairy tales are generally situated. The story about the quest for the bird's feathers, or the devil's hairs, was included in the index under number ATU 461, more so because of its occurrence in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM) than because of its French ancestry. In the context of a discussion about the Three Hairs of the Devil's Head, a brief excursion into the genre characteristics of those tales of magic with the devil as prime opponent may be elucidating. In eastern and northern Europe the printed presence of the Quest for the Three Feathers can be attested for the whole of the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines the different stories that have contributed to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century shapes. It focuses on the Princess on the Glass Mountain, the Shepherd in the Service of a Witch, the Ogre's Heart in the Egg and finally the Sky High Tree. During the course of the twentieth century, the shamanistic characteristics of the Sky High Tree were put forward by a number of Hungarian scholars, among them Sándor Solymossy. In the 1980s notions of the enormous age and orality of fairy tales not only resurfaced in certain feminst circles, they were also given a new life by connecting them to shamanism, primarily a male preserve. From the folklore perspective, fairy tales and 'folk belief' were usually separated: 'the properties and functions of the characters in fairy tales and their authenticity do not tally exactly with the characters figuring in folk beliefs'.

On an Innovative Poet’s Book, Never Published – Asked to write an introduction to a new book of poetry by Scott-Patrick Mitchell that never appeared, I wondered about the life of such texts (the book itself, the intro apropos of a ‘hidden text’). Within this book, this short chapter is an example of the evasiveness of critical text-making, where its referent is ‘lost’ or changes into something else (Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s poems would find different lives in different contexts). So the book itself becomes ambiguous, as all physical manifestations of texts are vulnerable to deletion, erasure, to loss in some form. In the first volume of this trilogy, I discussed the erasure of digital files of record I called ‘Net Death’, and in some ways this echoes that. But it’s different – the loss is only partial in the immediate, and the text written remains a moment of engagement that says something, I think, about textual practice. The direct relevance to the argument of this book resides in the following quote: ‘Love and desire, lust and consummation, are not about imposition. Again and again, these are poems of rights, poems of language’s possibility to extend outside the status quo, to particularise and universalise at once, over and over, but to know respect and intactness of self and community.’ Scott-Patrick Mitchell identifies as ‘non-binary’, and it should be said clearly here that this does not necessarily accord with ‘ambiguity’. The defining of ‘non-binary’ as ‘ambiguous’ is completely at odds with the affirming decision-making behind identity. Such ‘definitions’ are beyond ambiguity, and only those who see a binary in gender will construct a discourse. In their poetry, Mitchell deals with ambiguity of language and even situations and interfaces with world, but this is not via an ambiguity of identity. Sexuality and desire are central to the poet’s poetics, but they are not fixed by even the language they use.

A magical contest is present in the prose version of the Carolingian epic Malegijs, dating from 1556, without, however, any metamorphosis. During the nineteenth century the retelling of Maestro Lattantio evolved around a limited set of elements, mostly taken from other tales concerned with the acquisition of magical learning. This chapter discusses the tale's appearance in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM) and some nineteenth-century folklore notations. The popularity of the Finnish School has dwindled and folklore classification has acquired a life of its own. In other words, a re-examination of the Magician and His Pupil becomes opportune. A tour through its tradition necessarily starts in Gian Francesco Straparola's Venice and proceeds to the Middle East and India. The chapter examines the story's wanderings through the Islamic world before a final return to the theory of Indian origin.

The eighteenth-century published French stories, including the Oriental and pseudo-Oriental stories translated into French or written directly in French, constitute the genre of fairy tales. Their reception elsewhere in Europe, first in the French language and in the course of the eighteenth-century also in translations, made the genre international, the more so when other authors started to write their own 'fairy tales'. A prime example of how folklore theory argues away the practice of storytelling in favour of the continuity of oral tradition can be found in the concept of 'craftsmanship'. The concept of 'craftmanship' attempts to allow for individual skill while adhering to a presumed collectivity. The 'craftsmanship' theory tries to reconcile the political notion of a collective 'folk' with the historicity of an individual skill, while denying extraneous influences such as printed texts and translations.

This book aims to develop textual and literary mechanisms – a poetics – for dialogue and exchange between different ‘communities’, in order to enhance positive communication and empathy, and lead to ‘conflict’ resolution, seeking ‘common ground’ for social and cultural interaction. This might be subtextual in most instances, but the suggestions are as relevant as the overt statements, and if this generates ambiguities, it also generates multiples points of departure from a status quo (of text, of reading, of context), from the nexus or tangled webbing of communications – it offers nodal points, zones of agglomeration and coalescence, moments beyond the ambiguities. The core principle here is the notion of exchange between communal and individual voices privileged in how they are received and heard outside their own communities, and those who are only (and often barely) heard within their own communities, struggling to be heard in a way that can implement positive change for themselves, their communities, and humanity as a whole.

This section is about encounters with non-human life and an articulation of vegan animal-rights activism and mode of living. The ‘nature’ model of literary making that often comes (to my mind) at the expense of animals is considered, refuted and criticised. Starting with a ‘letter to an editor’ that is as much critique of a mode of talking about ‘nature’ texts as it is about a book being reviewed, I write: ‘Written with that oozing, sickly fluidity of so much neo-colonial cross-referential “nature writing”, which seeks to historicise experience as knowledge from which definite conclusions about the right and wrong of human interaction with nature might be drawn, the article leaves us with the “experience” of encountering the author’s encounters and epiphanies.’ I then seek to justify other approaches through a vegan animal-rights environmentalism, and consider how important conversation and exchange of information are around this (and, yes, accommodating different approaches!). The topic of loving animals and yet not wanting to ‘keep animals’ is explored in detail; the section finishes by reconsidering my long-term ‘anti-pastoral’ poetics with a look at the fraughtness between pastoral constructs of a rural ‘nation’ and the brute reality of such impositions – a consideration of the ongoing colonial exploitation that is supported by literary tropes. We are brought back to the point of ambiguity and its ‘consequences’ and movements: ‘The pastoral is inherently connected with an agriculturalism of progress. The mechanisation of the means of producing food. As such, in text, it becomes as if a “magic roundabout” that sends spokes and tracks out into ambiguities of literary expression’

This chapter takes up the innovative ways of reading and knowing the past introduced in Chapter 1, and shows that aesthetic innovators at the fin de siècle found archaeology-inspired ways of reading portraits, crafting portraits out of prose, and creating a Decadent prose style shaped by the sensual experience of archaeological discovery. Examining Walter Pater’s collection Imaginary Portraits (1885–1887) alongside Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1890) and Louis Norbert (1914), as well as Lee’s essay ‘Faustus and Helena’ (1880, 1881) and some of her travel writing (e.g., Genius Loci, 1899), this chapter argues that Pater and Lee create an archaeological epistemology of portraiture—one that is both inspired by archaeological excavation and also embedded in their prose styles. Additionally, readings of Lee reveal how she draws from Decadent aesthetics in her transhistorical tales of ghosts and archival mysteries to craft an experimental Decadent prose which also gestures to the iconoclasm and severed perspectives of modernism. Exploring additional works by Pater, including Appreciations (1889), as well as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), this chapter simultaneously unearths the influence of seventeenth-century polymath Thomas Browne’s archaeological tract Urn Burial (1658) on these Decadent stylists. In its examination of the formal styles of prose portraits and archaeological meditations, this chapter teases out the archaeological methods and encounters woven into the fabric of experimental Decadent prose at the fin de siècle.

In this last chapter, the limitations of the research are presented and discussed in the context of the findings. I also describe the process of reflexivity, through which I examine how my personal background and experiences in war may have influenced the interpretation of the research results. The need for multiple rehabilitation components is also debated. We start by reflecting on the relationship between healthcare providers and patients in the two predominant theoretical models of disability, namely medical and social. Continuing with a brief overview of the change in attitudes towards disability over time, we note how attitudes in the humanitarian field have also transformed. We focus on the victims of war and their need for social recovery. This was an essential part of the rehabilitation process in past centuries but has been mostly forgotten in recent decades especially with regard to the care of civilian victims of armed conflict. The last component of rehabilitation that I discuss is symbolic healing, a component essential for the victims of war. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the potential for implementing the findings in the broader context of disability care and the proposed avenues for further research.