Fairy tales, for both scholars and general readers alike, most often mean printed texts in books. Folklorists are aware that behind each printed text are hundreds of unrecorded tales by hundreds of traditional artists, with no single telling capturing the full potential of any story. Nonfolklorists, however, place far too much weight on a single text or at best a handful of variants, without giving much attention to the dynamics of oral context. Traditional tales were meant to be heard, not read, and exist in specific geographical, historical, and cultural settings. No traditional tale can be fully comprehended without some...

The stories of theThousand and One Nightsappear on first encounter to appeal principally through their exotic, fantastic, and sensational features. And, indeed, they are filled with kings and caliphs and all the panoply of court life, with enormous and terrifying jinns, with magicians both good and evil, and of both sexes, and with adventures that are by turns horrible, wonderful, bloody, and sublime. Yet the collection opens with the instruction that we are to read these tales, not to be amused or distracted, but to be admonished and restrained.

The lives of former generations are a lesson to...

I begin not, as one might expect, with aconte de féesor aMärchenbut instead with a story, which provides us with a more ancient paradigm for understanding the female voice in folklore and fairy tale. But to speak about voice in a tale so singularly about the voiceless is immediately to recognize that to tell a tale for women may be a way of breaking enforced silences. I refer to Ovid’s account in theMetamorphosesof Philomela and Procne, which in Western tradition can serve as a type for the narrative power of the female, capable of...

The historian of European folk literature faces several complex and complicated questions in connection with the subject of change in and the dissemination ofMärchen.I would like to raise a few of these questions and then try to find solutions. Is theMärchen* actually a genre clearly defined by ancient traditions, or has it taken shape only recently under quite specific historical conditions? May one actually accept the elevated position of the fairy tale which it occupies today within the confines of what is known about folk narrative? What relationships does the fairy tale bear to orality? Is it...

Identifying fairy tale heroes by name is no mean feat. In the Grimms’ collection, only one in every ten actually has a name. But it is also no secret that the most celebrated characters in fairy tales are female. Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty: these are the names that have left so vivid an imprint on childhood memories. With the exception of Hansel, who shares top billing with his sister, male protagonists are exceptionally unmemorable in name, if not in deed. Lacking the colorful descriptive sobriquets that accord their female counterparts a distinctive identity, these...

Mid-nineteenth-century Germany shared to a very large extent in European culture as a whole but differed from it in significant ways. A vigorously championed German ethic at that time was that of the silent woman.¹ Yet the years 1770–1830 in non-German Europe provide a very different pattern. Furnishing a pattern admired and imitated in the numerous courts and large cities of the Germanies, France of the ancien régime was a place where the privileged and educated could expect to be surrounded by articulate and eloquent women of letters. In Germany, a few women—Germaine Necker de Stäel, Bettina Brentano...

Once upon a time, in those halcyon days before the greening of America and its subsequent graying, before the vultures of the Vietnam War came home to roost and peck at our vitals, before the invention of the doomsday machine and the forecast of a nuclear winter, when America was still innocent or could believe itself to be so, for it still dwelt in the afterglow of our heroic battles of the Second World War against a truly “evil empire,” two young cultural anthropologists set out with their two very young children to find in the scarcely explored mountains of...

Folktales,a term usually embracing fairy tales such as the Grimm tales as well as traditional prose narrative handed down over the years, are largely known through popular editions with a narrow view of women aimed to fit ideals promoted by nineteenth-century patriarchal sensibilities. A reader of unabridged collections of folktales, and fairy tales, soon realizes, however, that the model for female conduct reflected in such tales over a wide geographical area is far from confined to the submissive beauty of popular selections and Walt Disney’s dramatizations. Furthermore, a folktale scholar soon finds that a similar tendency to present an...

Two of the most important approaches to folk narrative study include the historic-geographic and structural methods of analysis.¹ Both, in their turn, have made significant contributions to our understanding of folktales. However, their coexistence as methods of folk narrative study has not always been peaceful; they have been regarded to date somewhat more as competing methodologies and not as mutually supportive systems of analysis.² It is my contention that these two approaches to folktale study may be usefully combined into one synthesized methodology for the study of the formal features of folk narratives. Specifically, this essay represents an attempt to...

Since 1975 a reference work in German has been appearing fascicle by fascicle which aims at presenting the results of over 150 years of international research in the field of past and present folk narratives.¹ The title,Enzyklopädie des Märchens(Encyclopedia of the folktale) is not intended to suggest a genre restriction of the type found in modern definitions. The work is concerned with all those categories which the Grimm brothers included in theirHousehold Tales,animal stories, fables, religious legends, etiologies, legends, novellas, jocular tales, fairy tales, and so on.

“One of the goals of the Encyclopedia,” according to...

With the publication of Vladimir Propp’s classical workMorphology of the Folktale,¹ the genre of the folktale became a popular object for structuralist research. Formalist studies of folklore material concentrated primarily on similarities and archetypal features shared by folktales of various cultures and different historical periods. The search for repetitive patterns and their generalized meanings overshadowed concern with the creativity and uniqueness of individual tales. As a result, the relevance of the creative element in folklore became questionable.

Students of folklore recognize, however, that such conclusions come as a result of analytical speculations, yet scholars should go beyond pure theory...

Fairy tales and psychotherapy have been related to each other throughout this past century of psychological, or, as some would have it, Freudian, man. I would like to provide a brief historical perspective and then discuss how some of the recent shifts in the theories of psychotherapy (more specifically, Freudian psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis), have affected the way the psychoanalyst sees and uses fairy tales, and how these shifts point to potential areas of research into the psychology of the fairy tale. The current sense of research in applied psychoanalysis is actually a re-searching of the theories of psychoanalysis, with...

In September 1983, leading newspapers¹ reported the surfacing of another fairy tale from the Grimm brothers’ collection—either fairy tale number 201, or, more likely, legend number 11. It was front-page news for theNew York Times.² People young and old, and scholars in particular, were delighted. Apparently of relatively recent origin, the tale refers to a war that lasted thirty years, probably the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648. That war raged particularly in the central German area in which the Grimm brothers collected most of their tales. In this latest story mother takes her “dear child” into...

TheMärchenhas lent itself to a variety of literary, psychological, and sociological interpretations based primarily on the examination of printed texts. Feminist writers have been attracted to theMärchenby its popularity as a genre of children’s literature. Initially it was viewed, in its form as the well-known fairy tale (primarily from selected tales from the Grimms, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and Andrew Lang¹), as an unfortunate source of negative female stereotypes. The passive and pretty heroines who dominate popular fairy tales offer narrow and damaging role-models for young readers, feminists argue. Thus much writing has been a...

Before I discuss the relationship of Marxists to folk and fairy tales, I want to quote three German Marxists whose ideas were heavily influenced by the social and political changes of the Weimar period, and who became interested in and concerned with the meaning and power of fairy tales.

The proletariat will create the new fairy tales in which workers’ struggles, their lives, and their ideas are reflected and correspond to the degree which they demonstrate how they can continually become human, and how they can build up new educational societies in place of the old decrepit ones. [Edwin Hoernle,...

Like Aristides, Philostratus, and others, Plato speaks pejoratively of the tales current in the nursery astitthōn mythoi(“old wetnurses’ tales”).¹ The Romans used the expressionaniles fabulae(“crones’ tales”). These expressions have a twofold implication: first, that folk narrative material is regarded as unimportant, childish, and beneath notice; and second, that this disdain also carries over to the tale-tellers. Neither tales nor tale-tellers seemed worth studying at that time, at least not by scholars or philosophers. A great distance separates present scholarly interest in the genre, Märchen and folktales, and in their narrators. A perceptual shift is prerequisite to...

The first thing to say about fairy tales is that they are an oral form. Fairy tales, however one may choose ultimately to define them, are a subgenre of the more inclusive category of “folktale,” which exists primarily as a spoken traditional narrative. Once a fairy tale or any other type of folktale, for that matter, is reduced to written language, one does not have a true fairy tale but instead only a pale and inadequate reflection of what was originally an oral performance complete with raconteur and audience. From this folkloristic perspective, one cannot possibly read fairy tales; one...

It is not by chance that the cover of the 11 August 1984 issue of The Economist portrayed a large, green-shaded picture of Hansel and Gretel with a beckoning witch under the caption “West Germany’s Greens meet the wicked world.”¹ Inside the magazine a special correspondent began his report as follows:

Once upon a time (in the late 1960s), a hostile stepmother (West Germany’s Christian Democrats) and a kindly but weak father (the Social Democrats) decided that they had no room for children who thought for themselves. So they abandoned Hansel and Gretel (rebellious young West Germans) in a dense...

Socio-literarily and folkloristically important questions about the informants for theKinder- und Hausmärchen gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm(KHM) which appeared for the first time in 1812 (vol. 1) and 1815 (vol. 2), have been posed only piecemeal, with reference to one tale or to one informant at a time.¹ Everything not considered relevant to the particular tale or informant has been generally referred to in passing as something that was generally understood and unproblematic, so that decade by decade the impression has grown that there were at most only trifling details still to be added, Grimm research and fairy...