Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
- 2 Creativity and Tradition in the Fairy Tale
- 3 The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literate World
- 4 A Workshop of Editorial Practice: The Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmarchen
- 5 Old Tales for New: Finding the First Fairy Tales
- 6 Helpers and Adversaries in Fairy Tales
- 7 ‘Catch if you can’: The Cumulative Tale
- 8 Unknown Cinderella: The Contribution of Marian Roalfe Cox to the Study of Fairy Tale
- 9 Hans Christian Andersen's Use of Folktales
- 10 The Collecting and Study of Tales in Scandinavia
- 11 The Wonder Tale in Ireland
- 12 Welsh Folk Narrative and the Fairy Tale
- 13 The Ossetic Oral Narrative Tradition: Fairy Tales in the Context of Other Forms of Traditional Literature
- 14 Russian Fairy Tales and Their Collectors
- 15 Fairy-Tale Motifs from the Caucasus
- 16 The Fairy Tale in South Asia: The Same Only Different
- 17 Rewriting the Core: Transformations of the Fairy Tale in Contemporary Writing
- General Index
- Index of main tales and tale-types
2 - Creativity and Tradition in the Fairy Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
- 2 Creativity and Tradition in the Fairy Tale
- 3 The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literate World
- 4 A Workshop of Editorial Practice: The Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmarchen
- 5 Old Tales for New: Finding the First Fairy Tales
- 6 Helpers and Adversaries in Fairy Tales
- 7 ‘Catch if you can’: The Cumulative Tale
- 8 Unknown Cinderella: The Contribution of Marian Roalfe Cox to the Study of Fairy Tale
- 9 Hans Christian Andersen's Use of Folktales
- 10 The Collecting and Study of Tales in Scandinavia
- 11 The Wonder Tale in Ireland
- 12 Welsh Folk Narrative and the Fairy Tale
- 13 The Ossetic Oral Narrative Tradition: Fairy Tales in the Context of Other Forms of Traditional Literature
- 14 Russian Fairy Tales and Their Collectors
- 15 Fairy-Tale Motifs from the Caucasus
- 16 The Fairy Tale in South Asia: The Same Only Different
- 17 Rewriting the Core: Transformations of the Fairy Tale in Contemporary Writing
- General Index
- Index of main tales and tale-types
Summary
Oh these folklorists! And what have they done - murder a few innocent fairy tales. (W. B. Yeats, Collected Letters, 1886)
Human culture exists to provide us with a context in which to live. In every culture there is a tension between the needs of the community and the needs of the individual. The fairy tale, in my view, exists as a kind of ultra-sensitive balance between these two needs. It mediates between the life we have and the life we want; between the world we inherit and the world we imagine.
Anthropologist Harold Scheub walked more than six thousand miles through southern Africa recording oral narratives. One of his key sources was the Xhosa storyteller Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, who told him: ‘These are the storyteller's materials: the world and the word’ (Scheub 1992: 3). It would be hard to phrase this truth more simply or more fully. From those materials has been fashioned every story ever told. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (John 1: 1).
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ‘Every word was once a poem’ (1964: 189). It would be equally true to say that every word was once a story, and that storytelling is as intrinsic to human culture as language itself. To tell a story is to interpret the world (what we experience and what we observe) through the word (what we imagine and what we perceive). All stories do this.
Fairy tales in particular seek to hold a balance between reality and dream. The realm of Faërie, wrote J. R. R. Tolkien (1964: 16),
contains many things beside elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.
The definition of the fairy tale, as opposed to any other kind of narrative, is fraught with problems. The standard term among folklorists is the German Märchen which is perhaps best translated as ‘wonder tale’. They are stories with an element of fantasy or magic, located in the world of ‘once upon a time’.
Märchen are only one kind of oral narrative.
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- Information
- A Companion to the Fairy Tale , pp. 39 - 56Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2002