When did we stop caring that elves aren't real?

[rachelmanija]

Starting around the 1950s, a number of books in English for children had the message that magic isn't real. Helpfully for the historical cause, many of them won Newbery Medals or Honor, so they are very easy to come across.

The basic plot is that Protagonist Kid meets a kid (Tragic Kid) who claims that magic (elves, etc) is real. The kids do magic spells, make elf homes, etc. Protagonist Kid usually isn't sure that the magic is real, but wants to believe that it is. At the end it is revealed that magic is definitely not real, there are no elves, and Tragic Kid was making it all up to cover up for the fact that their father is abusive/their mother is an addict/they have no parents and are living alone/etc. Protagonist Kid is sadder but wiser.

There are variants on this, such as Bridge to Terabithia, in which no one ever believes that the magic is real - it's explicitly a game - but it ends in tragedy anyway.

I recently came across an example of this, published in 1996, and realized that it is the most recent example I can recall of the genre. Am I missing examples of it, or did they stop getting written or published?

The thing that has always struck me most about this genre is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Kids believing in magic and elves and so forth is not actually a big social problem, but the books treat it as if is. They are written as if the belief must be broken with a devastating shock, when in reality, most kids gradually learn that their parents are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, without the need for a dramatic revelation.

Those are also beliefs which are over way before kids are old enough to read the "there's no such thing as magic" books. The books aren't teaching kids there's no such thing as magic, because by the time they're old enough to read them they already know that. They're actually teaching them that if they read a book hoping that it's fantasy, it may in fact be a book about how fantasy isn't real.

Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death. But that made me wonder about some things. Why was this ever considered worthwhile to begin with? Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?

Comments

[el_staplador]

Not an answer to your question, but one of the books I really loved as a teenager was Too Many Ghosts (Paul Gallico), in which the hero investigated alleged supernatural phenomena in the hope that he would find a real ghost one day but in the meantime he was not going to have anyone scammed/scared/etc by crooks. I was mostly fascinated by the various methods used to produce the phenomena. I didn't like the sequel, The Hand of Mary Constable, in which he takes on fake spiritualists, quite so much, but it was just as interesting.

[rachelmanija]

I also really like Too Many Ghosts.

[legionseagle]

I got really annoyed by the knee-jerk Reds-under-the-bed part of The Hand of Mary Constable though I loved the technical breakdown of how the scam was brought off (and the insight that because the mark -- John Constable? -- thought of himself as super-rational and the brightest man in any given room, he was more vulnerable to being scammed because his reasoning went "If I can't see how this could be a scam, then it can't be a scam" rather than "If I can't see how this could be a scam, there's some information I'm missing." A nice take on "When you've eliminated the impossible...")

It occurs to me that I've just gone through yet another super-annoying discussion of Peter's Room (the AF group on FB, fwiw) and that one of the things I find annoying about those discussions is that the blurb on the back is trying to sell PR as one of the sort of novels in question here, and it just isn't, but the dissonance between people who believe the blurb and people who don't always sets the tone for the discussion.

[swan_tower]

Poorly-written blurbs can cause so much trouble! I kept waiting for the "magical conspiracy" to show up in Freedom and Necessity, before finally realizing the book is actually about an occult conspiracy. It's hidden and esoteric, not supernatural.

[legionseagle]

Yes; the blurb in question includes the line "[author] gives a clear warning of the dangers inherent in make-believe prolonged beyond the proper age" and it grinds my gears. "[Author] gives a clear warning of the dangers inherent in poorly directed role-playing games where there isn't a gamesmaster, several of the teenage participants have concealed PTSD, at least one of them is pretty definitely dancing along the edge of suicidal ideation and everyone except the pov character has a hidden agenda" is more like it.