Once Upon a Time
Feb. 14th, 2017 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sadoeuphemistA good children’s story begins with a genocide. The trolls are dead, the lot of them, forced out of their hidey-holes and purged clean by sunlight, their flesh transmuted to stone. Good riddance. They were a nasty lot, crude and flea-bitten and half-dressed, with a penchant for gnawing on the bones of children. A good children’s story needs a good purging to start, the shutters thrown open to let in the sun but all the chains and bones and cobwebs still visible. Children are like wildflowers: neglect them all you want, but they still need the sun to grow.
It’s important that the trolls still carry a sense of menace. Their calcified corpses still line the mountainsides, gnarled fingers raised like twisted spires of rock, mouths open to teeth of jagged stone. They still loom in the darkness, they still terrify passing children, they still cast their shadows across the land. You’ve seen a troll, certainly, worn into the stone by untold millennia of dripping water and sedimentation. They are thousands of years old, primordial, still capable of tearing flesh from bone. Parents whisper stories of the trolls to make their children lie fearfully in bed. Adults tell stories of the great vanquishing, of villagers venturing down into the caves brandishing torches and catchpoles, bringing the horrible things up to light. The stage is set, the props align to make a single message: Aren’t you lucky that the trolls are dead, that you live within a world of stone walls and streets, that you walk upon the corpses of our ancient foes? And, the parents say, as the children draw the covers anxiously up to their chins, wouldn’t it be so very horrible (although it could never, ever happen, and no one would ever believe you if you said otherwise) if somehow the trolls were to return?
There are trolls still alive, of course. No genocide is ever complete. There are the survivors and refugees, the shifty-eyed collaborators, the half-breeds who could pass as something else. You may think it impossible that something as primitive as trolls could possibly survive during an age of man. But even when approaching complete success, a genocide necessarily recalibrates, expands its parameters, swallows more people whole. If the purging had not ended, they would be killing trolls still, dragging them out onto the streets. And so there are the survivors, left to fester, left to rot. Left forgotten and walled up and reduced to myth, reduced to caricature. Reduced to children’s stories.
A good children’s story begins with a genocide, because children are the ones who have yet to discover the truths of the world, who have yet to uncover old crypts and be horrified by the bones within. Children are the heirs to old hatreds, blood feuds, the victims of their parents’ follies. Children are the only ones still capable of being horrified at the fundamental unfairness of the world.
And so the trolls come. They prey on children, cruelly, unfairly, their low-slung postures invisible to adult eyes. They rap on doors and mimic mothers’ voices, they twist their faces into ugly parodies of humanity. They snatch children off streets and poison oatmeal. Shadowed groves and canals bloat with the bodies of missing children. The trolls come at night, they come in moments of abandonment and neglect. They cast shadows through the windowpane and disguise themselves as branches or craggy stone, or as a child’s imaginings. They break into the house and sharpen their teeth on the floorboards while the child huddles upstairs. They steal parents away. They are always, always, defeated by a child.
This is how a children’s story ends: with violence, or with cruelty, or with treachery. The troll is lured into the sunlight, and its skin smolders and petrifies and turns to ash. Or it falls from such a height that its body plunges deep into the earth, never to be found. Or it is tricked into gorging on poison or blunt stone until its belly bursts. Or it is gaslighted and driven mad; or it is stabbed through the heart; or it is shipped off to some remote and miserable island, never again to be seen by a set of human eyes. A good children’s story ends with a genocide: the child watches the troll die and reasserts the order of the world, becomes culpable in their parents’ actions. They have fulfilled an ancient promise. The last troll in the world is dead, killed by a child’s hand. The circle is complete.
They return to their parents and are welcomed in an embrace. The trolls are dead, the lot of them, and good riddance. The stone walls stand sturdy, the stone-paved streets run to all the civilized corners of the world. Everyone else lives happily ever after.
It’s important that the trolls still carry a sense of menace. Their calcified corpses still line the mountainsides, gnarled fingers raised like twisted spires of rock, mouths open to teeth of jagged stone. They still loom in the darkness, they still terrify passing children, they still cast their shadows across the land. You’ve seen a troll, certainly, worn into the stone by untold millennia of dripping water and sedimentation. They are thousands of years old, primordial, still capable of tearing flesh from bone. Parents whisper stories of the trolls to make their children lie fearfully in bed. Adults tell stories of the great vanquishing, of villagers venturing down into the caves brandishing torches and catchpoles, bringing the horrible things up to light. The stage is set, the props align to make a single message: Aren’t you lucky that the trolls are dead, that you live within a world of stone walls and streets, that you walk upon the corpses of our ancient foes? And, the parents say, as the children draw the covers anxiously up to their chins, wouldn’t it be so very horrible (although it could never, ever happen, and no one would ever believe you if you said otherwise) if somehow the trolls were to return?
There are trolls still alive, of course. No genocide is ever complete. There are the survivors and refugees, the shifty-eyed collaborators, the half-breeds who could pass as something else. You may think it impossible that something as primitive as trolls could possibly survive during an age of man. But even when approaching complete success, a genocide necessarily recalibrates, expands its parameters, swallows more people whole. If the purging had not ended, they would be killing trolls still, dragging them out onto the streets. And so there are the survivors, left to fester, left to rot. Left forgotten and walled up and reduced to myth, reduced to caricature. Reduced to children’s stories.
A good children’s story begins with a genocide, because children are the ones who have yet to discover the truths of the world, who have yet to uncover old crypts and be horrified by the bones within. Children are the heirs to old hatreds, blood feuds, the victims of their parents’ follies. Children are the only ones still capable of being horrified at the fundamental unfairness of the world.
And so the trolls come. They prey on children, cruelly, unfairly, their low-slung postures invisible to adult eyes. They rap on doors and mimic mothers’ voices, they twist their faces into ugly parodies of humanity. They snatch children off streets and poison oatmeal. Shadowed groves and canals bloat with the bodies of missing children. The trolls come at night, they come in moments of abandonment and neglect. They cast shadows through the windowpane and disguise themselves as branches or craggy stone, or as a child’s imaginings. They break into the house and sharpen their teeth on the floorboards while the child huddles upstairs. They steal parents away. They are always, always, defeated by a child.
This is how a children’s story ends: with violence, or with cruelty, or with treachery. The troll is lured into the sunlight, and its skin smolders and petrifies and turns to ash. Or it falls from such a height that its body plunges deep into the earth, never to be found. Or it is tricked into gorging on poison or blunt stone until its belly bursts. Or it is gaslighted and driven mad; or it is stabbed through the heart; or it is shipped off to some remote and miserable island, never again to be seen by a set of human eyes. A good children’s story ends with a genocide: the child watches the troll die and reasserts the order of the world, becomes culpable in their parents’ actions. They have fulfilled an ancient promise. The last troll in the world is dead, killed by a child’s hand. The circle is complete.
They return to their parents and are welcomed in an embrace. The trolls are dead, the lot of them, and good riddance. The stone walls stand sturdy, the stone-paved streets run to all the civilized corners of the world. Everyone else lives happily ever after.
