Houses, Castles, and other Buildings in Fairy Tales
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Burg Eitz Castle, Wierschem, Germany. By Cederic Vandenberghe from www.unsplash.com
Houses, castles, and other buildings in fairy tales
Setting is important for all stories, but buildings in fairy tale stories are the things that make the story whole. The setting for fantasy takes place in medieval times, but the architecture that blends in with the scenery plays a big part in the tale. So, I’m going to tell you how important houses, castles, open areas, and other buildings are within fairy tales.
Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast live in towns filled with medieval structures like grand fountains, animal stables, small shops, and vintage housing made of wood and stone. Within a house they will build the chamber, drawing, and dining rooms; storage rooms are modern day garages. They also build houses separate from the kitchen. You could say it’s an old method for ventilation.
In Cinderella, she is known to be covered in ashes. That’s because she sleeps by the kitchen fire where all the cooking and smoke comes from. Moreover, if the kitchen and the main house weren’t separated, her step-family would be covered in ashes and breathing in smoke too. Then they’ll all be called “Cinderellas,” and we won’t have the classic fairy tale name we have now. I think we should all thank those old medieval ventilators for giving us this classic fairy tale.
In Beauty and the Beast, the Beast’s castle is huge with a grand ballroom and reading room, an outdoor garden filled with roses, winter skating rink, and wide winter forest. Having such a huge domain was enough for the Beast to develop feelings for Belle and for Belle to kill time both inside and outside the castle while she was held captive.
Castles have underground dungeons, Beauty and the Beast and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are great examples. Dungeons underneath castles are often used to keep prisoners captive when they had somehow offended the royal family and are imprisoned there until further notice, like Belle’s father from Beauty and the Beast, which then triggers storyline for Belle to trade places with her father to be held captive instead and for the storyline to develop.
Although not all castles have dungeons to imprison criminals. Instead, they are often used as storage rooms for keeping their wares like expensive books, jewelry, gold, and other valuable stuff; treating it like a big safe. In Snow White’s case, the Evil Queen needed to go down to her dungeon, where she stored many of her spell books, manuals, and recipe books. She needed them to perform her witchcraft to get rid of Snow White, which becomes the base for her inventions to kill Snow White and gets the story moving.
Castles can have secret rooms too, which can be the hidden crime scenes for murderers, which makes it horrifying and dark, leaning into the dark sides of fairy tales. For example, Bluebeard is a murderer who murdered his brides and kept their corpses locked inside a room.
Castles also have built-in attics and towers, which have spectators in watch towers guarding over the castles or are used to keep captives. It can be a separate room for captives to concentrate on their work, unaffected by the outside world by locking them in a room. Like in Rumpelstiltskin where a girl is locked up in a castle to spin golden threads or like Rapunzel locked up in a tower away from outsiders, waiting to be found. They are often made from stone to prevent destruction caused by the captive.
I used to think that buildings in fairy tales were just there as part of the setting and weren’t really significant to the story, but after putting some thought into writing this, I was mind blown to how important they were to the tale. They weren’t even physical characters that had any personality and yet here I am talking about inanimate objects.
Art piece and photo by Emily Chow (EC)
Hi, I’m Emily Chow and I have a deep passion for fantasy. My passion for fantasy started when I stumbled upon the dark side of Fairy tales and since then I have never been able to crawl out of it, but this opened me up to the vast world of fantasy and imagination. I daydream a lot thinking about fairytales, how each fantasy genre and sub-genre has their own unique charms. I even go as far as to reflect upon the philosophy and morality subjected around the characters within the genre. This is how I got into the world of fantasy.
