ABSTRACT
Folk tales and fairy tales create for children an imaginative world which is alluring in its promise of fantasy, adventure and wish fulfilment. It is a world where giants proliferate but theorists disagree over their symbolic function within the tales. Bruno Bettelheim 1 argues that, for children, they may represent adults in general:
‘we … appear to them as selfish giants who wish to keep to ourselves all the wonderful things which give us power’
(p 27)