When I wrote The Parable of Miriam the Camel Driver 20 years ago, I wrote it in the style of a fairy tale. I called it a parable to indicate it was something different–a heroic journey with obstacles and an imperative goal to accomplish.  Fairy tales gave us a well-known world with dangers around the bend.  The treacherous stepmother leads the child heroes into the woods, and they have to find a way to safety.

 “What do we do now?” recurs though the story.  It’s life or death in a familiar setting. Stay out of the witch’s oven!  Stay on the path and recognize the wolf’s big teeth when you see them. There is no time to make it complicated.

I’ve loved the fairy tales since I was a child, reading the blue, red, green fairy tales and as many of their cousins as I could find. I devoured them and looked for more. Homer’s Odyssey felt that way and so did Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I assumed that these tales from oral tradition had this common style.

As I went deeper into the library stacks, I found books that went deeper into how people thought. Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations  and gave us Miss Havisham. She was full of the past that rippled into her future actions and plans. The modernist authors James Joyce (Ullysses is a call-back to the Odyssey) and Woolfe’s To the Lighthouse accordioned out the many many many thoughts a person could have in a day.

And Henry James, whose writing makes an infinity of a conversational pause.

I assumed this was something new– not in only in writing and literary  style—but evidence  of a change in people. Humans were increasing  complexity in consciousness. Humans had expanded their capability for sophisticated thinking.

So when Woolfe take a whole novel to tell the story of a day, readers are invited to pay attention to the shades of interpretation and nuance.

I was gifted Beowulf—Tolkein’s translation—and picked it up again to live in the immediate world of fairy tale again. Tolkien  is a linguist and scholar, and he translated Beowulf in 1926. He was never satisfied with his translation so I wasn’t published until long after his death.

This translation shows how much was happening in the story. Not psychological like Henry James, but the story of a line of people. How the fathers and grandfathers built the hall and fought together. The history of what came before and a foreshadow of the monster that is about to attack. Then the slow build up to how the monster is slain, but the danger remains for everyone.

 Old English comes to me from the foggy past. But this translation shows me how the peoples of that time considered their lives and their actions. This is not a simple fairy tale. I’d only read the story in a flattened translation. I’m changing my mind now. I think the people of the past understood more than I was giving them credit.

The immediate action of fairy tales matches my life. Go go go– make a choice take the action—are still true. But knowing the story of why and how I got here adds a richness and satisfaction to the next steps I choose.

Story pulls me forward.