Explores how children of war and adults reflecting on their violent wartime childhoods have had recourse to the space of fairy tales to interpret their traumatic physical environments and their emotional lives within them. To that end, the article (1) considers the nature of time and space in the classic fairy tale; (2) establishes how the ambiguity of fairy-tale spaces creates an imaginative geography that lends itself to the representation and mapping of wartime experience; and (3) uses examples from autobiographical accounts that show how fairy tales have been used to comprehend and to take emotional control over the war-torn landscape of childhood
