Fairy tale

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Fairy tale (disambiguation).

The European fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in a painting by Carl Larsson in 1881.

A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a

talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches, wizards, magic, and enchantments
.

In less technical contexts, the term is also used to describe something blessed with unusual happiness, as in "fairy-tale ending" (a

epics, fairy tales usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion and to actual places, people, and events; they take place "once upon a time" rather than in actual times.[5]

Fairy tales occur both in oral and in literary form; the name "fairy tale" ("conte de fées" in French) was first ascribed to them by Madame d'Aulnoy in the late 17th century. Many of today's fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared, with variations, in multiple cultures around the world.[6]

The history of the fairy tale is particularly difficult to trace because only the literary forms can survive. Still, according to researchers at universities in

Lisbon, such stories may date back thousands of years, some to the Bronze Age.[7][8]
Fairy tales, and works derived from fairy tales, are still written today.

The

Jatakas are probably the oldest collection of such tales in literature, and the greater part of the rest are demonstrably more than a thousand years old. It is certain that much (perhaps one-fifth) of the popular literature of modern Europe is derived from those portions of this large bulk which came west with the Crusades through the medium of Arabs and Jews.[9]

Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways. The Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp are among the most notable. Other folklorists have interpreted the tales' significance, but no school has been definitively established for the meaning of the tales.

Terminology

Some

folklorists prefer to use the German term Märchen or "wonder tale"[10]
to refer to the genre rather than fairy tale, a practice given weight by the definition of Thompson in his 1977 [1946] edition of The Folktale:

"...a tale of some length involving a succession of

motifs or episodes. It moves in an unreal world without definite locality or definite creatures and is filled with the marvellous. In this never-never land, humble heroes kill adversaries, succeed to kingdoms and marry princesses."[11]

The characters and motifs of fairy tales are simple and archetypal: princesses and goose-girls;

wicked stepmothers and false heroes; fairy godmothers and other magical helpers, often talking horses, or foxes, or birds; glass mountains; and prohibitions and breaking of prohibitions.[12]

Definition

A painting from the fairy tale "The Facetious Nights of Straparola", showing people observing as a person jumps inside a building.
Hop-o'-My-Thumb and the ogre in an 1865 illustration

Although the fairy tale is a distinct genre within the larger category of folktale, the definition that marks a work as a fairy tale is a source of considerable dispute.

Russian folktales classified as a folklore, Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index 300–749,—in a cataloguing system that made such a distinction—to gain a clear set of tales.[16] His own analysis identified fairy tales by their plot elements, but that in itself has been criticized, as the analysis does not lend itself easily to tales that do not involve a quest, and furthermore, the same plot elements are found in non-fairy tale works.[17]

Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale ... of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful.

— George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination

As

magic seem to be more common to the fairy tale than fairies themselves.[18] However, the mere presence of animals that talk does not make a tale a fairy tale, especially when the animal is clearly a mask on a human face, as in fables.[19]

In his essay "

The Lilac Fairy Book.[19]

Steven Swann Jones identified the presence of magic as the feature by which fairy tales can be distinguished from other sorts of folktales.[21] Davidson and Chaudri identify "transformation" as the key feature of the genre.[10] From a psychological point of view, Jean Chiriac argued for the necessity of the fantastic in these narratives.[22]

In terms of aesthetic values, Italo Calvino cited the fairy tale as a prime example of "quickness" in literature, because of the economy and concision of the tales.[23]

History of the genre

A picture by Gustave Doré showing Mother Goose, an old woman, reading written (literary) fairy tales to children
A picture by Gustave Doré of Mother Goose reading written (literary) fairy tales

Originally, stories that would contemporarily be considered fairy tales were not marked out as a separate genre. The German term "Märchen" stems from the old German word "Mär", which means news or tale.[24] The word "Märchen" is the diminutive of the word "Mär", therefore it means a "little story". Together with the common beginning "once upon a time", this tells us that a fairy tale or a märchen was originally a little story from a long time ago when the world was still magic. (Indeed, one less regular German opening is "In the old times when wishing was still effective".)[25]

The French writers and adaptors of the conte de fées genre often included fairies in their stories; the genre name became "fairy tale" in English translation and "gradually eclipsed the more general term folk tale that covered a wide variety of oral tales".[26] Jack Zipes also attributes this shift to changing sociopolitical conditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that led to the trivialization of these stories by the upper classes.[26]

Roots of the genre come from different oral stories passed down in European cultures. The genre was first marked out by writers of the Renaissance, such as Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, and stabilized through the works of later collectors such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.[27] In this evolution, the name was coined when the précieuses took up writing literary stories; Madame d'Aulnoy invented the term Conte de fée, or fairy tale, in the late 17th century.[28]

Before the definition of the genre of fantasy, many works that would now be classified as fantasy were termed "fairy tales", including Tolkien's

world-building and is considered a vital part of fantasy criticism. Although fantasy, particularly the subgenre of fairytale fantasy, draws heavily on fairy tale motifs,[30]
the genres are now regarded as distinct.

Folk and literary

The fairy tale, told orally, is a sub-class of the folktale. Many writers have written in the form of the fairy tale. These are the literary fairy tales, or Kunstmärchen.[14] The oldest forms, from Panchatantra to the Pentamerone, show considerable reworking from the oral form.[31] The Grimm brothers were among the first to try to preserve the features of oral tales. Yet the stories printed under the Grimm name have been considerably reworked to fit the written form.[32]

Literary fairy tales and oral fairy tales freely exchanged plots, motifs, and elements with one another and with the tales of foreign lands.[33] The literary fairy tale came into fashion during the 17th century, developed by aristocratic women as a parlour game. This, in turn, helped to maintain the oral tradition. According to Jack Zipes, "The subject matter of the conversations consisted of literature, mores, taste, and etiquette, whereby the speakers all endeavoured to portray ideal situations in the most effective oratorical style that would gradually have a major effect on literary forms."[34] Many 18th-century folklorists attempted to recover the "pure" folktale, uncontaminated by literary versions. Yet while oral fairy tales likely existed for thousands of years before the literary forms, there is no pure folktale, and each literary fairy tale draws on folk traditions, if only in parody.[35] This makes it impossible to trace forms of transmission of a fairy tale. Oral story-tellers have been known to read literary fairy tales to increase their own stock of stories and treatments.[36]

History

Pages from a printed edition of the 14th-century Chinese "wonder tales" collection Jiandeng Xinhua by Qu You; the collection is considered to be one of the most influential East Asian works of fiction.[37]

The

Vikram and the Vampire, and Bel and the Dragon. Besides such collections and individual tales, in China Taoist philosophers such as Liezi and Zhuangzi recounted fairy tales in their philosophical works.[42] In the broader definition of the genre, the first famous Western fairy tales are those of Aesop (6th century BC) in ancient Greece
.

Scholarship points out that Medieval literature contains early versions or predecessors of later known tales and motifs, such as the grateful dead, The Bird Lover or the quest for the lost wife.[43][c] Recognizable folktales have also been reworked as the plot of folk literature and oral epics.[46]

Jack Zipes writes in When Dreams Came True, "There are fairy tale elements in

La Fontaine and the Contes of Charles Perrault (1697), who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.[53] Although Straparola's, Basile's and Perrault's collections contain the oldest known forms of various fairy tales, on the stylistic evidence, all the writers rewrote the tales for literary effect.[54]

The Salon Era

In the mid-17th century, a vogue for magical tales emerged among the intellectuals who frequented the salons of Paris. These salons were regular gatherings hosted by prominent aristocratic women, where women and men could gather together to discuss the issues of the day.

In the 1630s, aristocratic women began to gather in their own living rooms, salons, to discuss the topics of their choice: arts and letters, politics, and social matters of immediate concern to the women of their class: marriage, love, financial and physical independence, and access to education. This was a time when women were barred from receiving a formal education. Some of the most gifted women writers of the period came out of these early salons (such as

salonnières
argued particularly for love and intellectual compatibility between the sexes, opposing the system of arranged marriages.

Sometime in the middle of the 17th century, a passion for the conversational

salonnière was called upon to retell an old tale or rework an old theme, spinning clever new stories that not only showcased verbal agility and imagination but also slyly commented on the conditions of aristocratic life. Great emphasis was placed on a mode of delivery that seemed natural and spontaneous. The decorative language of the fairy tales served an important function: disguising the rebellious subtext of the stories and sliding them past the court censors. Critiques of court life (and even of the king) were embedded in extravagant tales and in dark, sharply dystopian
ones. Not surprisingly, the tales by women often featured young (but clever) aristocratic girls whose lives were controlled by the arbitrary whims of fathers, kings, and elderly wicked fairies, as well as tales in which groups of wise fairies (i.e., intelligent, independent women) stepped in and put all to rights.

The salon tales as they were originally written and published have been preserved in a monumental work called Le Cabinet des Fées, an enormous collection of stories from the 17th and 18th centuries.[14]

Later works

Illustration of the Russian fairy tale about Vasilisa the Beautiful, showing a rider on a horse in a forest
Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942)'s illustration of the Russian fairy tale about Vasilisa the Beautiful
The Violet Fairy Book (1906)

The first collectors to attempt to preserve not only the plot and characters of the tale, but also the style in which they were told, was the Brothers Grimm, collecting German fairy tales; ironically, this meant although their first edition (1812 & 1815)[41] remains a treasure for folklorists, they rewrote the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable, which ensured their sales and the later popularity of their work.[55]

Such literary forms did not merely draw from the folktale, but also influenced folktales in turn. The Brothers Grimm rejected several tales for their collection, though told orally to them by Germans, because the tales derived from Perrault, and they concluded they were thereby

Brynhildr, from much earlier Norse mythology, proved that the sleeping princess was authentically Germanic folklore.[56]

This consideration of whether to keep Sleeping Beauty reflected a belief common among folklorists of the 19th century: that the folk tradition preserved fairy tales in forms from pre-history except when "contaminated" by such literary forms, leading people to tell inauthentic tales.[57] The rural, illiterate, and uneducated peasants, if suitably isolated, were the folk and would tell pure folk tales.[58] Sometimes they regarded fairy tales as a form of fossil, the remnants of a once-perfect tale.[59] However, further research has concluded that fairy tales never had a fixed form, and regardless of literary influence, the tellers constantly altered them for their own purposes.[60]

The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of

"coloured" fairy books series.[61] They also encouraged other collectors of fairy tales, as when Yei Theodora Ozaki created a collection, Japanese Fairy Tales (1908), after encouragement from Lang.[62] Simultaneously, writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald continued the tradition of literary fairy tales. Andersen's work sometimes drew on old folktales, but more often deployed fairytale motifs and plots in new tales.[63] MacDonald incorporated fairytale motifs both in new literary fairy tales, such as The Light Princess, and in works of the genre that would become fantasy, as in The Princess and the Goblin or Lilith.[64]

Cross-cultural transmission

Two theories of origins have attempted to explain the common elements in fairy tales found spread over continents. One is that a single point of origin generated any given tale, which then spread over the centuries; the other is that such fairy tales stem from common human experience and therefore can appear separately in many different origins.[65]

Fairy tales with very similar plots, characters, and motifs are found spread across many different cultures. Many researchers hold this to be caused by the spread of such tales, as people repeat tales they have heard in foreign lands, although the oral nature makes it impossible to trace the route except by inference.[66] Folklorists have attempted to determine the origin by internal evidence, which can not always be clear; Joseph Jacobs, comparing the Scottish tale The Ridere of Riddles with the version collected by the Brothers Grimm, The Riddle, noted that in The Ridere of Riddles one hero ends up polygamously married, which might point to an ancient custom, but in The Riddle, the simpler riddle might argue greater antiquity.[67]

Folklorists of the "Finnish" (or historical-geographical) school attempted to place fairy tales to their origin, with inconclusive results.

The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids).[70]

Fairy tales tend to take on the color of their location, through the choice of motifs, the style in which they are told, and the depiction of character and local color.[71]

The Brothers Grimm believed that European fairy tales derived from the cultural history shared by all Indo-European peoples and were therefore ancient, far older than written records. This view is supported by research by the anthropologist Jamie Tehrani and the folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva using phylogenetic analysis, a technique developed by evolutionary biologists to trace the relatedness of living and fossil species. Among the tales analysed were Jack and the Beanstalk, traced to the time of splitting of Eastern and Western Indo-European, over 5000 years ago. Both Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin appear to have been created some 4000 years ago. The story of The Smith and the Devil (Deal with the Devil) appears to date from the Bronze Age, some 6000 years ago.[7] Various other studies converge to suggest that some fairy tales, for example the swan maiden,[72][73][74] could go back to the Upper Palaeolithic.

Association with children

Spoons for children;engraved on them are fairy tale scenes from "Snow White", "Little Red Riding Hood", and "Hansel and Gretel".
Cutlery for children. Detail showing fairy-tale scenes: Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel.

Originally, adults were the audience of a fairy tale just as often as children.[75] Literary fairy tales appeared in works intended for adults, but in the 19th and 20th centuries the fairy tale became associated with children's literature.

The

Children's and Household Tales and rewrote their tales after complaints that they were not suitable for children.[78]

In the modern era, fairy tales were altered so that they could be read to children. The Brothers Grimm concentrated mostly on sexual references;[79] Rapunzel, in the first edition, revealed the prince's visits by asking why her clothing had grown tight, thus letting the witch deduce that she was pregnant, but in subsequent editions carelessly revealed that it was easier to pull up the prince than the witch.[80] On the other hand, in many respects, violence‍—‌particularly when punishing villains‍—‌was increased.[81] Other, later, revisions cut out violence; J. R. R. Tolkien noted that The Juniper Tree often had its cannibalistic stew cut out in a version intended for children.[82] The moralizing strain in the Victorian era altered the classical tales to teach lessons, as when George Cruikshank rewrote Cinderella in 1854 to contain temperance themes. His acquaintance Charles Dickens protested, "In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected."[83][84]

Marie Louise Von Franz interprets fairy tales[d] based on Jung's view of fairy tales as a spontaneous and naive product of soul, which can only express what soul is.[88] That means, she looks at fairy tales as images of different phases of experiencing the reality of the soul. They are the "purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes" and "they represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form" because they are less overlaid with conscious material than myths and legends. "In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche". "The fairy tale itself is its own best explanation; that is, its meaning is contained in the totality of its motifs connected by the thread of the story. [...] Every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning which is expressed in a series of symbolical pictures and events and is discoverable in these". "I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavour to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician's variation are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted. This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic reality of the collective unconscious. [...] Every archetype is in its essence only one aspect of the collective unconscious as well as always representing also the whole collective unconscious.[89]

Other famous people commented on the importance of fairy tales, especially for children. For example, G. K. Chesterton argued that "Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."[90] Albert Einstein once showed how important he believed fairy tales were for children's intelligence in the quote "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales."[91]

The adaptation of fairy tales for children continues.

traditional stories accessible to modern readers and their children.[94]

Motherhood

Many fairy tales feature an absentee mother, as an example Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood and Donkeyskin, where the mother is deceased or absent and unable to help the heroines. Mothers are depicted as absent or wicked in the most popular contemporary versions of tales like Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, however, some lesser known tales or variants such as those found in volumes edited by Angela Carter and Jane Yolen depict mothers in a more positive light.[95]

Carter's protagonist in

Marquis who was much older than herself to "banish the spectre of poverty". The story is a variant on Bluebeard, a tale about a wealthy man who murders numerous young women. Carter's protagonist, who is unnamed, describes her mother as "eagle-featured" and "indomitable". Her mother is depicted as a woman who is prepared for violence, instead of hiding from it or sacrificing herself to it. The protagonist recalls how her mother kept an "antique service revolver" and once "shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand."[95]

Contemporary tales

Literary

Illustration of three trolls surrounding a princess in a dark area, as adapted from a collection of Swedish fairy tales
John Bauer's illustration of trolls and a princess from a collection of Swedish fairy tales

In

Shrek
.

Other authors may have specific motives, such as multicultural or feminist reevaluations of predominantly Eurocentric masculine-dominated fairy tales, implying critique of older narratives.[101] The figure of the damsel in distress has been particularly attacked by many feminist critics. Examples of narrative reversal rejecting this figure include The Paperbag Princess by Robert Munsch, a picture book aimed at children in which a princess rescues a prince, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, which retells a number of fairy tales from a female point of view and Simon Hood's contemporary interpretation of various popular classics.[citation needed]

There are also many contemporary erotic retellings of fairy tales, which explicitly draw upon the original spirit of the tales, and are specifically for adults. Modern retellings focus on exploring the tale through use of the erotic, explicit sexuality, dark and/or comic themes, female empowerment, fetish and BDSM, multicultural, and heterosexual characters. Cleis Press has released several fairy tale-themed erotic anthologies, including Fairy Tale Lust, Lustfully Ever After, and A Princess Bound.

It may be hard to lay down the rule between fairy tales and fantasies that use fairy tale motifs, or even whole plots, but the distinction is commonly made, even within the works of a single author: George MacDonald's Lilith and Phantastes are regarded as fantasies, while his "The Light Princess", "The Golden Key", and "The Wise Woman" are commonly called fairy tales. The most notable distinction is that fairytale fantasies, like other fantasies, make use of novelistic writing conventions of prose, characterization, or setting.[102]

Film

Fairy tales have been enacted dramatically; records exist of this in

bowdlerizing the gritty naturalism – and sometimes unhappy endings – of many folk fairy tales.[99] However, others note that the softening of fairy tales occurred long before Disney, some of which was even done by the Grimm brothers themselves.[107][108]

Many filmed fairy tales have been made primarily for children, from Disney's later works to Aleksandr Rou's retelling of

Vasilissa the Beautiful, the first Soviet film to use Russian folk tales in a big-budget feature.[109] Others have used the conventions of fairy tales to create new stories with sentiments more relevant to contemporary life, as in Labyrinth,[110] My Neighbor Totoro, Happily N'Ever After, and the films of Michel Ocelot.[111]

Other works have retold familiar fairy tales in a darker, more horrific or psychological variant aimed primarily at adults. Notable examples are Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast[112] and The Company of Wolves, based on Angela Carter's retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.[113] Likewise, Princess Mononoke,[114] Pan's Labyrinth,[115] Suspiria, and Spike[116] create new stories in this genre from fairy tale and folklore motifs.

In comics and animated TV series,

Fables and MÄR all make use of standard fairy tale elements to various extents but are more accurately categorised as fairytale fantasy
due to the definite locations and characters which a longer narrative requires.

A more modern cinematic fairy tale would be

Le Notti Bianche, starring Marcello Mastroianni before he became a superstar. It involves many of the romantic conventions of fairy tales, yet it takes place in post-World War II
Italy, and it ends realistically.

In recent years, Disney has been dominating the fairy tale film industry by remaking their animated fairy tale films into live action. Examples include

Cinderella (2015), Beauty and the Beast
(2017) and so on.

Motifs

A 1909 illustration of kings in a dark forest
Kings' Fairy Tale, 1909, by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
Illustration of the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast". The princess is standing alongside the "beast", who is lying on the ground.
Beauty and the Beast, illustration by Warwick Goble

Any comparison of fairy tales quickly discovers that many fairy tales have features in common with each other. Two of the most influential classifications are those of

Morphology of the Folk Tale
.

Aarne-Thompson

This system groups fairy and folk tales according to their overall plot. Common, identifying features are picked out to decide which tales are grouped together. Much therefore depends on what features are regarded as decisive.

For instance, tales like

Cap O' Rushes; Catskin; Fair, Brown and Trembling; Finette Cendron; Allerleirauh
.

Further analysis of the tales shows that in Cinderella, The Wonderful Birch, The Story of Tam and Cam, Ye Xian, and Aschenputtel, the heroine is persecuted by her stepmother and refused permission to go to the ball or other event, and in Fair, Brown and Trembling and Finette Cendron by her sisters and other female figures, and these are grouped as 510A; while in Cap O' Rushes, Catskin, and Allerleirauh, the heroine is driven from home by her father's persecutions, and must take work in a kitchen elsewhere, and these are grouped as 510B. But in Katie Woodencloak, she is driven from home by her stepmother's persecutions and must take service in a kitchen elsewhere, and in Tattercoats, she is refused permission to go to the ball by her grandfather. Given these features common with both types of 510, Katie Woodencloak is classified as 510A because the villain is the stepmother, and Tattercoats as 510B because the grandfather fills the father's role.

This system has its weaknesses in the difficulty of having no way to classify subportions of a tale as motifs. Rapunzel is type 310 (The Maiden in the Tower), but it opens with a child being demanded in return for stolen food, as does Puddocky; but Puddocky is not a Maiden in the Tower tale, while The Canary Prince, which opens with a jealous stepmother, is.

It also lends itself to emphasis on the common elements, to the extent that the folklorist describes

The Black Bull of Norroway as the same story as Beauty and the Beast. This can be useful as a shorthand but can also erase the coloring and details of a story.[117]

Morphology

Father Frost, a fairy tale character made of ice, acts as a donor in the Russian fairy tale "Father Frost". He tests the heroine, a veiled young girl sitting in the snow, before bestowing riches upon her.
Father Frost acts as a donor in the Russian fairy tale Father Frost, testing the heroine before bestowing riches upon her

Vladimir Propp specifically studied a collection of Russian fairy tales, but his analysis has been found useful for the tales of other countries.[118][page needed] Having criticized Aarne-Thompson type analysis for ignoring what motifs did in stories, and because the motifs used were not clearly distinct,[119] he analyzed the tales for the function each character and action fulfilled and concluded that a tale was composed of thirty-one elements ('functions') and seven characters or 'spheres of action' ('the princess and her father' are a single sphere). While the elements were not all required for all tales, when they appeared they did so in an invariant order – except that each individual element might be negated twice, so that it would appear three times, as when, in Brother and Sister, the brother resists drinking from enchanted streams twice, so that it is the third that enchants him.[120] Propp's 31 functions also fall within six 'stages' (preparation, complication, transference, struggle, return, recognition), and a stage can also be repeated, which can affect the perceived order of elements.

One such element is the

Schippeitaro, the evil cats betray their secret to the hero, giving him the means to defeat them. Other fairy tales, such as The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was
, do not feature the donor.

Analogies have been drawn between this and the analysis of myths into the

hero's journey.[124]

Interpretations

Many fairy tales have been interpreted for their (purported) significance. One mythological interpretation saw many fairy tales, including

The Frog King, as solar myths; this mode of interpretation subsequently became rather less popular.[125] Freudian, Jungian, and other psychological analyses have also explicated many tales, but no mode of interpretation has established itself definitively.[126][page needed
]

Specific analyses have often been criticized[by whom?] for lending great importance to motifs that are not, in fact, integral to the tale; this has often stemmed from treating one instance of a fairy tale as the definitive text, where the tale has been told and retold in many variations.[127] In variants of Bluebeard, the wife's curiosity is betrayed by a blood-stained key, by an egg's breaking, or by the singing of a rose she wore, without affecting the tale, but interpretations of specific variants have claimed that the precise object is integral to the tale.[128]

Other folklorists have interpreted tales as historical documents. Many[quantify] German folklorists, believing the tales to have preserved details from ancient times, have used the Grimms' tales to explain ancient customs.[85]

One approach sees the topography of European Märchen as echoing the period immediately following the

last Ice Age.[129]
Other folklorists have explained the figure of the wicked stepmother in a historical/sociological context: many women did die in childbirth, their husbands remarried, and the new stepmothers competed with the children of the first marriage for resources.[130]

In a 2012 lecture, Jack Zipes reads fairy tales as examples of what he calls "childism". He suggests that there are terrible aspects to the tales, which (among other things) have conditioned children to accept mistreatment and even abuse.[131]

Fairy tales in music

Fairy tales have inspired music, namely opera, such as the French

Hänsel und Gretel, Siegfried Wagner's An allem ist Hütchen schuld!, which is based on many fairy tales, and Carl Orff's Die Kluge
.

Ballet, too, is fertile ground for bringing fairy tales to life. Igor Stravinsky's first ballet, The Firebird uses elements from various classic Russian tales in that work.

Even contemporary fairy tales have been written for the purpose of inspiration in the music world. "Raven Girl" by Audrey Niffenegger was written to inspire a new dance for the Royal Ballet in London. The song "Singring and the Glass Guitar" by the American band Utopia, recorded for their album "Ra", is called "An Electrified Fairytale". Composed by the four members of the band, Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, Willie Wilcox and Todd Rundgren, it tells the story of the theft of the Glass Guitar by Evil Forces, which has to be recovered by the four heroes.

Compilations

See also: Collections of fairy tales

Authors and works:

From many countries

Italy

France

Germany

Belgium

United Kingdom and Ireland

Scandinavia

Estonia, Finland and Baltic Region

Russia

See also: Russian Fairy Tales (disambiguation)

Czechia and Slovakia

Poland

Romania

See also: List of Romanian fairy tales

Balkan Area and Eastern Europe

  • Louis Léger, French translator of Slavic fairy tales (France, 1843–1923)
  • Johann Georg von Hahn, Austrian diplomat and collector of Albanian and Greek folklore (1811–1869)
  • Auguste Dozon, French scholar and diplomat who studied Albanian folklore (1822–1890)
  • Robert Elsie, Canadian-born German Albanologist (Canada, 1950–2017)
  • Donat Kurti, Albanian franciscan friar, educator, scholar and folklorist (1903–1983)
  • Anton Çetta, Albanian folklorist, academic and university professor from Yugoslavia (1920–1995)
  • Lucy Garnett, British traveller and folklorist on Turkey and Balkanic folklore (1849–1934)
  • Romani populations
    (England, 1851–1902)
  • Vuk Karadžić, Serbian philologist (Serbia, 1787–1864)
  • Elodie Lawton, British writer and translator of Serbian folktales (1825–1908)
  • Friedrich Salomon Krauss, collector of South Slavic folklore
  • Gašper Križnik [sl] (1848–1904), collector of Slovenian folktales

Hungary

  • Elek Benedek, Hungarian journalist and collector of Hungarian folktales
  • János Erdélyi, poet, critic, author, philosopher who collected Hungarian folktales
  • Gyula Pap, ethographer who contributed to the collection Folk-tales of the Magyars
  • The Hungarian Fairy Book, by Nándor Pogány (1913).[134]
  • Emma Orczy
    and Montague Barstow.

Spain and Portugal

Armenia

  • Karekin Servantsians (Garegin Sruandzteants'; Bishop Sirwantzdiants), ethnologue and clergyman; publisher of Hamov-Hotov (1884)
  • Hovhannes Tumanyan, Armenian poet and writer who reworked folkloric material into literary fairy tales (1869–1923)

Middle East

  • Arabian Nights
    (France, 1646–1715)
  • Gaston Maspero, French translator of Egyptian and Middle Eastern folktales (France, 1846–1916)
  • Hasan M. El-Shamy, establisher of a catalogue classification of Arab and Middle Eastern folktales
  • Amina Shah, British anthologiser of Sufi stories and folk tales (1918–2014)
  • Raphael Patai, scholar of Jewish folklore (1910–1996)
  • Howard Schwartz, collector and publisher of Jewish folktales (1945–)
  • Heda Jason [de], Israeli folklorist
  • Dov Noy [de], Israeli folklorist (1920–2013)

Turkey

Iran

Indian Subcontinent

America

  • Marius Barbeau, Canadian folklorist (Canada, 1883–1969)
  • Geneviève Massignon, scholar and publisher of French Acadian folklore (1921–1966)
  • Carmen Roy, Canadian folklorist (1919–2006)
  • Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus series of books
  • Tales from the Cloud Walking Country, by Marie Campbell
  • Ruth Ann Musick, scholar of West Virginian folklore (1897–1974)
  • Vance Randolph, folklorist who studied the folklore of the Ozarks (1892–1980)
  • Cuentos populares mexicanos (Mexico, 2014) by Fabio Morábito
  • Rafael Rivero Oramas, collector of Venezuelan tales. Author of El mundo de Tío Conejo, collection of Tío Tigre and Tío Conejo tales.
  • Américo Paredes, author specialized in folklore from Mexico and the Mexican-American border (1915–1999)
  • Elsie Clews Parsons, American anthropologist and collector of folktales from Central American countries (New York City, 1875–1941)
  • John Alden Mason, American linguist and collector of Porto Rican folklore (1885–1967)
  • Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa Sr., scholar of Spanish folklore (1880–1958)

Brazil

South Korea

  • Baek Hee-na, author of "The Cloud Bread" (South Korea, 1971–)
  • Hwang Seon-mi, author of "Hen out of the yard" (South Korea, 1963–)

Africa

  • Hans Stumme, scholar and collector of North African folklore (1864–1936)
  • Sigrid Schmidt, folklorist; known for her voluminous Afrika erzählt ("Africa Narrates") series. The ten volumes are tales (with extensive commentary) collected by the author during 1959-1962 and 1972-1997 (volumes 1 to 7 in German, volumes 8 to 10 in English), mostly in Namibia.[135]

Asia

Miscellaneous

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Scholars John Th. Honti and Gédeon Huet asserted the existence of fairy tales in ancient and medieval literature, as well as in classical mythology.[38][39]
  2. ^ Even further back, according to professor Berlanga Fernández, elements of international "Märchen" show "exact parallels and themes (...) that seem to be common with Greek folklore and later tradition".[40]
  3. Arthurian mythos contain recognizable motifs of tale types described in the international index.[45]
  4. ^ For a comprehensive introduction into fairy tale interpretation, and main terms of Jungian Psychology (Anima, Animus, Shadow) see Franz 1970.

References

Citations

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  2. ^ Bettelheim 1989, p. 25.
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  4. ^ Martin, Gary. "'Fairy-tale ending' – the meaning and origin of this phrase". Phrasefinder. Archived from the original on 19 September 2020. Retrieved 21 August 2020.
  5. ^ Orenstein 2002, p. 9.
  6. ^ Gray, Richard (5 September 2009). "Fairy tales have ancient origin". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 8 September 2009.
  7. ^ a b "Fairy tale origins thousands of years old, researchers say". BBC News. 20 January 2016. Archived from the original on 3 January 2018. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  8. ^ Blakemore, Erin (20 January 2016). "Fairy Tales Could Be Older Than You Ever Imagined". Smithsonion Magazine. Archived from the original on 27 February 2019. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
  9. ^ Jacobs, Joseph (1892). "Notes and References" . Indian Fairy Tales . p. 230 – via Wikisource.
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  11. ^ Thompson 1977, p. 8.
  12. ^ Byatt 2004, p. xviii.
  13. ^ Heiner, Heidi Anne. "What Is a Fairy Tale?". Sur La Lune. Archived from the original on 15 August 2020.
  14. ^ a b c Windling, Terri (2000). "Les Contes de Fées: The Literary Fairy Tales of France". Realms of Fantasy. Archived from the original on 28 March 2014.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  15. ^ Propp 1968, p. 5.
  16. ^ Propp 1968, p. 19.
  17. ^ Swann Jones 1995, p. 15.
  18. ^ Thompson 1977, p. 55.
  19. ^ a b Tolkien 1966, p. 15.
  20. ^ Tolkien 1966, pp. 10–11.
  21. ^ Swann Jones 1995, p. 8.
  22. ^ Jones, J. "Psychoanalysis and Fairy-Tales". Freud File. The Romanian Association for Psychoanalysis Promotion. Archived from the original on 10 November 2012. Retrieved 13 March 2013.
  23. ISBN 0-674-81040-6
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  24. ^ "Märchen". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. Retrieved 22 September 2022. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  25. ^ Healy, Marti (19 January 2019). "Marti Healy: Begin anywhere". Aiken Standard. Archived from the original on 30 January 2023. Retrieved 30 January 2023.
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  28. ^ Zipes 2001, p. 858.
  29. ^ Attebery 1980, p. 83.
  30. ^ Martin 2002, pp. 38–42.
  31. ^ a b Swann Jones 1995, p. 35.
  32. ^ Attebery 1980, p. 5.
  33. ^ Zipes 2001, p. xii.
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  36. ^ Degh 1988, p. 73.
  37. ^ "Kagerou Bunko" (PDF). International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB). ... many writers in those countries were inspired to regard Jiandeng Xinhua as the supreme model for composing fiction.
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  41. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Heiner, Heidi Anne. "Fairy Tale Timeline". Sur La Lune. Archived from the original on 15 August 2020.
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  43. JSTOR 537977
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  45. JSTOR 44939518
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  46. ^ Bošković-Stulli, Maja (1962). "Sižei narodnih bajki u Hrvatskosrpskim epskim pjesmama" [Subjects of folk tales in Croato-Serbian epics]. Narodna umjetnost: Hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku (in Croatian). 1 (1): 15–36. Archived from the original on 20 April 2021. Retrieved 20 April 2021.
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  50. ^ Windling, Terri. "White as Ricotta, Red as Wine: The Magical Lore of Italy". Journal of Mythic Arts. Archived from the original on 3 October 2022. Retrieved 19 August 2022.
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  129. ^
    ISBN 978-1-78356-074-5
    . Retrieved 22 May 2016. As the glaciers of the last ice age retreated (from c. 10,000 BC) forests, of various types, quickly colonised the land and came to cover most of Europe. [...] These forests formed the topography out of which the fairy stories (or as they are better called in German – the marchen), which are one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, evolved.
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  132. ^ Estudio comparativo y antología de cuentos tradicionales del mundo
  133. ^ Sylva, Carmen (1896). "Tales nr. 1-10". Legends from river & mountain. London: George Allen. pp. 1–148.
  134. ^ Pogány, Nándor; Pogány, Willy (1913). The Hungarian Fairy Book. New York: F. A. Stokes Co.
  135. ^ Afrika erzählt

Sources

Further reading

On origin and migration of folktales:

External links

Library resources about
Fairy tale
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