Level 1 Prohibitory Monsters - Do You or Don't You?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett. So much so, in fact, that I'm sort of wondering myself when I'll pick up a different genre again. I suppose it has a lot to do of being immersed so deeply in the rather humorless work of the government grind - I need someplace fun and satirical to escape to when I read. Yet I find that, not only is Terry Pratchett funny, he's also extraordinarily intelligent. So I was rather excited to get my mitts on a copy of The Folklore of Discworld, wherein he and a British folklorist, Jacqueline Simpson, explore the myths of Discworld and Earth (and the remarkable cross between the two worlds). It's both entertaining and educational - and being in the throes now of a time in our daughter's life where there can be no doubt that Magic and Monsters exist, one section gave me a lot of pause to think and wonder.

In several chapters, particularly on races (dwarves and trolls featuring highly here), Elves, and the Nac Mac Feegle, our own ancient myths and legends through the years are dissected - and discussed in terms
 of Then and Now.

So, how did you grow up? Did you know the real Brothers Grimm as I did? Or thought I did until I learned the real, original version of Cinderella (according to Jacqueline Simpson in the book, her "slipper" was actually a fur glove. wink wink). My Opa, a man from The Olde Worlde (born in 1902, thank you) ensured that I was blessed with a beautiful, gilt edged Brothers Grimm book of fairy tales - and in retrospect, they were not nice. I knew Baba Yaga and her hut that spun on chicken legs, along with her flying mortar or, sometimes, cauldron. Therefore, I knew that witches were evil. I knew about murdering stepmothers, lands in the well, and that kissing frogs yielded princes.

But I never knew about Jenny Greenteeth in any local ponds, nor did I know of any picts or elves waiting to carry me away if I strayed from the beaten path in the woods where I played so often. There was no Rawhead and Bloody Bones (outside of Hollywood) to eat me up should I answer the door while my parents were out.

All of these legends, monsters that Terry Pratchett dubs "prohibitory" (for by now obvious reasons, I'm sure), didn't exist. The context of the Brothers Grimm's stories were lost on me and so they didn't inspire much by way of fear.

Instead, I was raised on a steady diet of monsters of a different sort: Strangers. Beware the stranger who offers you candy! Run from the stranger who asks if you want to see his or her puppy. Strangers steal little children and torture and murder them. And somehow, this terrified me more than a thousand Baba Yagas flying through the night in her mortar, in search of children out past to dark to eat alive. Because these Prohibitory Monsters were just...people. There was nothing magical about them. There was no pact with a devil, no supernatural powers. They were you and me, with a deep, dark, horrible twist.

It worked for a while. I remember being nearly paralyzed with fear every time I saw a man with a moustache and mirrored sunglasses (somehow, that got equated in my mind to KIDNAPPERS). But I remember, too, the whispered, secretive warnings on the playground about witches in the woods, and fairies in the flowers. Without any adult ever telling me, without even my beloved Brothers Grimm, I knew about the things that apparently, adults did not. I knew about trolls that turned to stone during the day, about vampires at night. Werewolves, leprechauns, djinn...I knew and believed in them too.

That tells me that somewhere close by, someone's mother or more likely than not, grandmother, was keeping the Lore alive and passing on their own prohibitory warnings about what will eat naughty young children alive if they didn't go straight to bed and, like a corporate safety brief, that knowledge was passed along in the sandbox lest the other potentially (and often actually) naughty little children were innocently unaware.

Now it's our turn. While the Mommy Blogs and parenting forums come alive at Christmas with debates and posts about the veracity of "lying" to children about Santa Claus, and this inevitably leads to discussion about the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and all of the other tales we have no compunction about feeding our little ones - do we maintain our children in, as Pratchett (sarcastically) calls it, "A state of wholesome terror"? And why not? Or has our idea of what a monster really is (the paedophile lurking in the bushes - a good myth if ever there was one as we know that the majority of childhood sexual abuse is doled out by trusted and known adults, monsters to be sure) changed so dramatically that we no longer see a need for prohibitory monsters, frighteners, of not long ago?

It's one of those things I find interesting - and I wonder how we'll handle it in the end. Whatever monsters are to A right now (and we aren't clear on this yet ourselves), I'd prefer she continue to think of them as mostly friends...but I don't want her to live in total fear, as I and a few of my friends did, of not just the witches under the bed but also the neighbor two houses down, or the poor bastard who really does just need directions 'round the block. On the other hand, simple reasoning like, "because you'll drown" ends up not being so simple sometimes, especially in the Age of Magic (e.g. toddlerhood) and I wonder if precautionary messages do require a little bit of the ol' Baba Yaga magic in them to hammer the point home.

And you? What creatures did you grow up with? Trolls or ordinary men and women? How do you reason with your small children now?