FOLK STORIES

Every culture, no matter how primitive, has its stories which project desirable attitudes and our greatest anxieties. They embody the wisdom of the ages as seen from a pre-scientific view and explain Good and Evil. Good is rewarded and Evil punished. Scholars try to divide them into different categories; the main ones are mythology, legend, folklore and fairy tales. The differences are not clear-cut, and many can fall into more than one slot or none at all.

Myths typically involve gods and other supernatural creatures. They are usually thought to be true history by the society in which they are told. Typically they take place in ancient times before the modern world evolved. Prime examples are the stories of the Greek and Roman gods.

Legends are set in historic times and are often considered to be true. Sometimes they do have some factual basis. Examples are the tales of King Arthur, Lohengrin, Faust, and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. While the current King Arthur stories are set in medieval times, they probably are based on a real sixth century Celtic king. They are exaggerated accounts of things which really could have happened.

Folklore also consists of stories which could have happened. They involve ordinary human beings, even though some of these, including witches and wizards, may have supernatural powers. (At the time they developed, such people were very real to many.) Most stories by the Grimm brothers, such as Hansel and Gretel, fit into this category. They gathered them by traveling about and listening to the stories people told.

What we now call Fairy Tales were not written for children. They evolved from tales told by adults, often peasants, for their own entertainment. When they were collected and written down, they became literature. Fairy tales take place in an unidentified long ago; they often start with "Once upon a time". A characteristic is that they are unbelievable. Characters have to cope with a supernatural occurrence or a supernatural protagonist. The hero(ine) is usually a young person, often an orphan or an abandoned child, a peaceful character who uses native wit to outsmart forces of evil.

The term Fairy Tale is modern and the genre only sometimes deals with fairies. The name entered the language in the eighteenth century and may have come from the French Contes de fées (Tales of Fairies) by Madame d'Aulnay (1698). Most are of ancient origin and have been transformed over the ages. The earliest collections were made in the East. From the fifth century we have a Hindu collection, Panchtantra (Five Books), which includes a version of Puss in Boots. The more famous Arabian Nights had a predecessor, The Book of Sindibâd, of about the ninth century, in which philosophers tell tales to postpone the death sentence of a prince. An Indian anthology of about AD 1000 tells of helpful animals, shoes of swiftness, and other elements common in fairy tales today. It includes an early version of what would become Andersen's The Princess and the Pea. The earliest European collection dates from the sixteenth century — Le Peacevoli Notti (The Delightful Nights) — collected by Gianfrancesco Straparola, which includes Puss in Boots and Beauty and the Beast.

Many of today's fairly tales can be found in Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé. avec de moralitez with the subtitle Contes de ma mère l'oye (Histories or Tales of Past Times with Morals or Tales of Mother Goose), published in Paris in January 1697. In it can be found Cinderella, Blue Beard, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Ridinghood. Soon unauthorized translations appeared all over Europe. Perrault did not indicate the sources for his stories; they were based on old folk legends, but with many changes were made for "civilized consumption".

By the end of the eighteenth century, fairy tales began to be looked upon with disfavor. This feeling is exemplified by the changes the librettist Ferretti made to the story for Rossini's opera Cinderella. This attitude ended with the publication of Kinder- und Häusmärchen (Children's and Household Tales) by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. These were well written, illustrated by the best artists, and each tale was annotated, with a thorough history of its sources. Many were transcribed from tales told by friends and neighbors. Among these was Hänsel und Gretel and Aschenputtel (Cinderella). They were followed by the stories of the Danish Hans Christian Andersen, written, not in literary style but, almost for the first time, to be told to children. Their translation into English was followed by an outpouring of original fairy tales, including Alice in Wonderland by the Oxford professor, Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, and The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, a resident of Coronado. (The Hotel del Coronado is said to have been the inspiration for the Emerald City.) More modern examples include The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), the Harry Potter books and Eragon. These are original stories and not based on existing folklore.

Again, the above categories are open to interpretation and are not hard and fast. Many stories could be placed in more than one of them.

The telling of fairy tales to children, and the telling even of tales of horror, is possible, and mind-stretching, and even in a curious way reassuring, if the tales are told in the right circumstances, if the child and the adult are already united by a bond of confidence or affection, if the child sees the teller of the tale as a co-adventurer with him in listening to the exploits, and if the child appreciates that the story is fantasy, or that the action is distant in time, or distant in place. — Iona and Peter Opie

Charles Perrault (1628-1703). Not mainly a writer, Perrault worked for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Superintendent of Buildings and Minister of Finance to King Louis XIV. He was involved in designing and rebuilding the Louvre palace, and his design was chosen over those of the famous Italian architect Bernini and other well-known French architects. As a boy he had been one of the best students in his class but, at the age of fifteen, he and a friend left school and studied on their own. Eight years later, without ever attending classes, they took the exams for a degree from the University of Orleáns. They passed; the next day they were lawyers. They then bought a law book to learn what to do.

Perrault felt earlier tales did not emphasize morals, and he added these to the stories he pieced together from various sources. He offered his tales as modern rivals to the classical fables by authors such as Aesop and La Fontaine. As a courtier, he wrote for his social and intellectual peers, and his versions of stories such as Cinderella reflect his familiarity with life at the king's court.

Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm. The Brothers Grimm were born into a middle class family in the German principality of Hesse-Cassel just when the middle class was emerging as a force. (This principality also provided the Hessian soldiers of the American Revolution.) Their lives spanned a tumultuous time in European history and literature: the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Ward, the Romantic movement and the struggles for constitutional government in the German states with the rise of Bismark. They studied law but soon turned to scholarly research on language and literature. It was to these studies that they devoted their lives, thinking they would a be key to the history of the German people.

They worked together on adjoining desks in the same room. Although they collaborated on everything, Jacob's passion was language and he has been called the father of German philology (the study of language). He is credited with the identification of the Indo-European group of languages and their common root. (This consists of all of the European languages except Hungarian and Finnish.) Wilhelm worked on the German heroic sagas such as the Nibelungenlied and other folklore, mythology and fairy tales. Their Children's and Household Tales appeared in several editions starting in 1815. One of the editions was illustrated by their younger brother Ludwig. They studied medieval manuscripts and asked all of their acquaintances to supply them with stories they had heard. Although they often had to choose between many different versions of a given story, they seldom attempted to impose their own embellishments; their works remain faithful to the original folklore. The tales are filled with good and evil characters from which it is possible to derive a lesson. However, while Perrault ended each of his tales with a moral, the Grimm brothers never did. They let the stories do it for them. Their work was the beginning of the study of fairy tales as a worthy subject for scholars. They knew they were saving a tradition which was dying out and wrote the stories for "adults and serious people". They censored the stories, removing obscenity and erotic elements but left the cruelty and emphasized that children were to be read TO!

Among their other great works was the German Dictionary one of the greatest works of all time. They only completed a few volumes; the entire work of thirty-two volumes was not completed until 1960. By comparison, the corresponding massive definitive work on the English language, The Oxford English Dictionary or OED runs to twenty volumes. (The entry on the word 'theatre' in the on-line edition of the OED takes sixteen pages to print.)

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) invented most, but not all of his stories. Even when he retold ones already known, he made them his own. Although he started as a poor country boy, the son of a cobbler, he moved to Copenhagen and traveled in sophisticated circles. (He was not, as portrayed in the movie with Danny Kaye a cobbler himself.) His stories are truly fairy tales and were among the first to be written specifically FOR children. One of his best-known originals is The Little Mermaid.

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Revised November 2009
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