The Poetry and Meaning of Fairy Tales

The conditions he is looking for are there, but they are distorted by the outer physical world, where indeed most things do appear altered. We certainly do not have—in the physical world—the forces in their true reality. However, the transformed glass king finally appears in his true form and is the very personality who can point out where the other should look for a wife. Through the opposing forces of the outer world the glass king has been transformed; these forces assert themselves when the human being is completely entangled in the concerns of the external world. At first the glass king is completely enmeshed in outer circumstances and this has made him different inwardly from what he actually could be. We often have things like wrong-doing in our karma that are like an evil bluebottle fly. The truth lying at the bottom of all this is revealed in such pictures. We must be able to imagine the situation: what lies behind physical phenomena can be found in the forces awakened in the king. As his soul forces awaken and when he directs them well, he finds what the outer physical forces had hidden from him, his “bride.”