Saturday, May 26, 2007

Fairy Tale Statues

I am interested in collecting a list of statues around the world depicting fairy tales. Besides the famous examples (Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens), here are some our editors have stumbled upon nearly or certainly by accident - to the left, the Troll under the bridge in Seattle. This one is an especial wonder to me, as I grew up on a small farm near Seattle - and my family did raise a number of billy goats gruff.

More wonders of wood and stone from Washington state: small families of Scandinavian trolls can be seen standing, brilliantly painted and four feet tall, by the streets in Poulsbo; someone on Hood Canal long since collected enough driftwood of the right shape to create a dragon or dragon-like sea serpent on a narrow spit of land, so that from a distance its coils appear to be rising from the water.


Are there other fairy tales in stone or wood or metal around America? Someone on our continent needs to make a project of creating something like the Sacro Bosco in Italy, which Vicino Orsini established in the sixteenth century.

The Sacred Wood is a garden-forest populated with fabulous creatures, some of them peering out from behind branches or small shrubs, many of them now clothed in moss or lichens -- a labyrinth garden where the lost might wander and wonder. You might sit in what appears a safe spot for a long hour before looking up to realize there is a stone dragon watching you through the branches.

Help us collect such sites.... Where have we made to carve fairy tales into the actual landscape on which we breathe and walk?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Rock City (Lookout Mountain, Georgia, USA) has two sections featuring statues of fairytale/mythic characters: the Fairyland Caverns and Mother Goose Village.
I feel comfortable including Mother Goose Village because the rhymes of Mother Goose were the first exposure to fairy tales that many of us had. Let's face it; who besides a fairy could live in a shoe or a pumpkin and habitually hang out with talking animals?