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As for the beginnings of fairy-stories: one can scarcely improve on the formula Once upon a
time. It has an immediate effect. This effect can be appreciated by reading, for instance, the
fairy-story The Terrible Head in the Blue Fairy Book. It is Andrew Lang's own adaptation of
the story of Perseus and the Gorgon. It begins once upon a time, and it does not name any
year or land or person. Now this treatment does something which could be called turning
mythology into fairy-story. I should prefer to say that it turns high fairy-story (for such is
the Greek tale) into a particular form that is at present familiar in our land: a nursery or old
wives form. Namelessness is not a virtue but an accident, and should not have been imitated;
for vagueness in this regard is a debasement, a corruption due to forgetfulness and lack of
skill. But not so, I think, the timelessness. That beginning is not poverty-stricken but
significant. It produces at a stroke the sense of a great uncharted world of time.
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