Reading Ludwig Tieck’s The Fairies: Focusing on the Problem of the ‘other’ and ‘Hospitality’

This article reads the existence of ‘others’ that appear in The Fairies and discusses how ‘hospitality’ can be understood through this process. This article starts with the recognition that Tieck’s text enables us to think about the other and hospitality today, and attempts to extend that recognition by analyzing the work’s semantic structure. In The Fairies, the other can be discussed on three levels: the ‘child-other’ as the other of adults, the ‘fairy-other’ as the other of humans, and the ‘(feminine) other-world’ as the other of the (masculine) world. The child-other and the female-other are depicted as beings who encounter the other world. They are characters who typically possess a romantic sensibility in relation to questions about boundaries. However, they eventually die, and Martin and his son-in-law, the male protagonists, return to the village where they originally came from. In relation to how to read this conclusion, we can raise the issue of hospitality toward the others because hospitality is ‘hospitality of what cannot be welcomed.’ The phenomenon of the other beings coming into contact with the other world and ending in death can be read as a narrative structure that reminds us of the violence of the modern worldview that organizes the world by excluding the other.