In classical Greek mythology, dragons were so charged with power that even after death their bodies were dangerous. When the Phoenician Prince Cadmus killed the dragon that guarded the well of Ares, he took some of its teeth and sowed them in the ground. From them sprang up the race of warriors called Spartes. Since that time, to sow dragons’ teeth is to stir up strife.
Human teeth have another kind of potency. In many places and moments, tooth loss is seen as a step towards autonomy and is, therefore, a highly charged moment when the child is uniquely vulnerable. In France in the thirteenth century, for example, possession of someone’s baby teeth was equated with possession of their soul, and so rituals that ensured the destruction of those teeth were enormously significant. In many other cultures, only the proper disposal of the lost teeth ensures the healthy growth of adult teeth. Teeth may be thrown towards the sun, buried in secret places, or eaten by parents. In the United States, many children believe in the tooth fairy, who comes in the night to take possession of the lost tooth, which is placed under the child’s pillow, and who replaces it with a small token in return, most often with money.
But what do individual children imagine as they think about all this? I spoke with a variety of children to hear their insights. Here are the ideas that two of them shared with me.
- ME: Did you say there are many tooth fairies, one for each child?
- G: No. Then they'd have to be waiting, waiting, waiting for each person's tooth to fall out, and that wouldn't be any fun at all.
- ME: But I thought that you said she checks under your pillow each night?
- G: Yes, but one only. [In other words, the unique tooth fairy checks under the pillow of every child every night.]
- ME: What do you think she looks like?
- G: I bet she has pale skin and black hair with little blue bows all through it, light blue eyes, bright red lips, and a white dress with many tiny pleats and a little pocket in the front.
- ME: What's the pocket for?
- G: The teeth! And it only holds as many teeth as she finds, so it's very useful--it grows bigger with each one. When it's really full, it weighs her down as she flies.
What was interesting to me about these exchanges was not only the specific content of the children’s conversation, but also my own difficulty in following their trains of thought. You can see from my line of questioning that I have an enormous need to visualize the tooth fairy before attending to what it is that she does, whereas the children are eager to get down to a much richer discussion of how it is that the tooth fairy does what it is that she must. We inhabit such different worlds, me with my need to see the tooth fairy, and these children, ready to grapple with how many tooth fairies it must take to do this job, with such attendant problems as the physics of flight and infinitely expanding spaces
If you would like to explore tooth beliefs further with your children, look for Selby Beeler’s Throw Your Tooth on the Roof: Tooth Traditions from Around the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998).