Fairy-Tale Files, published once weekly, feature three variations of a fairy tale chosen by one of Fairy Tale Review’s editors.

In the Japanese fairy tale, a young boy finds an abandoned temple—apparently all the priests were driven away by a giant goblin-rat—and draws cats all over the walls. In the middle of the night, he hears a terrible battle ongoing outside the cabinet in which he curled up to sleep. And in the morning, he find his cats slightly altered—they have blood in their mouths, and the goblin-rat is dead.

French archaeologist and anthropologist Henri Breuil believed that cave paintings discovered throughout Europe were meant as a kind of “hunting magic” that would increase the number of animals available to kill, similar to “sympathetic magic,” where acts committed on an image of an object are also committed on the object itself (like voodoo).

In the Harry Potter novels, a portrait of the “Fat Lady” at the door to Gryffindor Tower is capable of a multitude of actions both inside and outside of her painting: she often gets drunk with a friend, and is sometimes simply not present to allow passage into the tower.

This edition of Fairy-Tale Files is brought to you by Fairy Tale Review Prose Editor Joel Hans.