Fairy Tale

Andrew Teverson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134105779
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume offers a comprehensive critical and theoretical introduction to the genre of the fairy tale. It:

• explores the ways in which folklorists have defined the genre
• assesses the various methodologies used in the analysis and interpretation of fairy tale
• provides a detailed account of the historical development of the fairy tale as a literary form
• engages with the major ideological controversies that have shaped critical and creative approaches to fairy tales in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
• demonstrates that the fairy tale is a highly metamorphic genre that has flourished in diverse media, including oral tradition, literature, film, and the visual arts.

1

Definitions

Pops, music is music. All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.

(Louis Armstrong, quoted in Krebs 1971: np)

Who the Folk are You?

Because the fairy tale is widely believed to have emerged, at some point in its long, complex and often untraceable history, from the mass of fictional forms invented, enjoyed and disseminated by the ‘folk’, it is generally classified as a sub-genre of folk narrative. But this begs a question: who are the folk? And what kinds of narrative did they produce? If we apply Louis Armstrong’s prescription for ‘folk music’ to ‘folk narrative’ the category disappears: all narratives are ‘folk’ narratives, because all narratives are necessarily the product of some human agency. As book publishers and music producers know, however, the prefix ‘folk’ has a very particular, and often highly marketable, set of cultural resonances. It suggests something that is of the people, and therefore close to the roots of culture; it suggests a mode of experssion that is sincere, popular and ‘true to itself’; and it implies a form of art that is unaffected and unselfconscious. This set of associations may be traced back to the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when a group of German writers and intellectuals, seeking to root an embattled German identity in a long and respectable past, invented the concept of a pure and unaffected volk, who might act as guardians of an ancient national tradition. This volk were imagined to be illiterate and lower class, but nevertheless eloquent and expressive; they were, invariably, stationed in the countryside, indelibly bound to the rhythms of the seasons and the bucolic pace of the natural world, and they perpetuated a tradition which had, in its essence, remained unchanged since ancient times. As Wilhelm Grimm writes in the preface to the first volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Tales], in which these ideas are expressed most influentially, ‘the riches of German poetry from olden times’ have been ‘kept alive’ in ‘folk songs and … innocent household tales,’ because these stories represent the untrammelled imagination … not yet warped by the perversities of life (Tatar 2003: 252–53).

So potent has this myth of the folk been that it survives today in the common assumption that the transmitters of ‘folk’ narrative are the common people, that the materials these people transmit are inestimably ancient, and that these materials, because of the illiteracy of their carriers, were orally disseminated in the first instance. In J.A. Cuddon’s Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (third edition, 1992), for instance, ‘folk literature’ is described as being ‘for the most part … the creation of primitive and illiterate people’ and as belonging ‘to oral tradition’ (Cuddon 1992: 346). Even in the nineteenth century, however, scholars were beginning to mistrust this description. In 1893, for instance, the Australian-born Jewish folklorist Joseph Jacobs, in an essay that was ahead of its time in many respects, asked who the ‘folk’ might be, and came up with an answer that was quite different from the one given by many of his contemporaries. The ‘folk’ that mediate ‘folklore’, he argued, if there is such a thing as a ‘folk’ at all, do not represent a single demographic group, and do not come from a specific geographical area. Folklore is produced by all classes, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and it is produced in all regions, urban and rural. It also travels across national borders when the people that carry it travel over them, making it into an international and transitive form of culture, rather than a testament to a sheltered, ethnically pure, national tradition. ‘The folk’, as Jacobs writes, ‘is many-headed … and often many-minded’, and ‘when we come to realise what we mean by saying a custom, a tale, a myth arose from the Folk … we must come to the conclusion that the said Folk is a fraud, a delusion, a myth’ (Jacobs 1893: 233–34). If it is to exist at all, Jacobs goes on, it can only exist under the assumption that everybody is part of the folk, and that when we attribute a cultural product to the folk we are simply giving a name to our ignorance, stating that ‘we do not know to whom a proverb, a tale, a custom, a myth owes its origin’ so we are going to say ‘it originated among the Folk’ (236). This folklore, to which we all contribute, moreover, can also, Jacobs insists, be found in all periods of human history. It is not a thing of the past, characterised by beliefs and rituals that are necessarily obsolete and anachronistic, but is often contemporary with human society. ‘Survivals are folk-lore,’ Jacobs avers, ‘but folk-lore need not be all survivals’:

We ought to learn valuable hints as to the spread of folk-lore by studying the Folk of to-day. The music-hall, from this point of view, will have its charm for the folklorist, who will there find the Volkslieder of to-day. The spread of popular sayings, even the rise of new words, provided they be folk-words, should be regarded as a part of the study of folk-lore.

(Jacobs 1893: 237)

Recent analysis of folk narratives has increasingly endorsed Jacobs’s arguments. Folk narratives, it is generally agreed by folklorists, are stories which have survived for significant periods of time in popular tradition by being passed on, from storyteller to storyteller, both spatially across cultures and communities, and temporally from generation to generation. They do not, however, need to have loomed up from distant antiquity in order to be classified as such, neither do they need to have been exclusively, or even originally, oral narratives in their modes of transmission. The story ‘King of the Cats’ (ML6070b),¹ for example, which is usually classified as a folk tale or a migratory legend, and which has been collected as an oral fiction in several different nations at several different periods, is first found as an episode in William Baldwin’s proto-novel Beware the Cat, written in 1553. Baldwin’s story, narrated in the fiction by a servant, concerns a man who, while riding through Kankwood ‘about certain business’ is confronted by a cat who leaps out of a bush and speaks to him ‘plainly twice or thrice’ the words ‘Commend me unto Titton Tatton and to Puss thy Catton, and tell her that Grimalkin is dead’ (Baldwin 1988: 11). The man, having heard this strange feline communication, continues about his business, and on returning home he tells his wife the full story and repeats the talking cat’s words, upon which his own cat, who has ‘hearkened unto the tale’, looks upon him sadly and says ‘And is Grimalkin dead? Then farewell dame’ (11).

This same narrative has subsequently been recorded in diverse contexts with diverse variations. A version of the story has been collected from County Durham featuring a farmer from Staindrop named Johnny Reed who is told that ‘Mally Dixen’s deed’ (Philip 1992: 346). There is also a Shropshire tale, featuring the death of ‘old Peter’, news of which causes a family cat to disappear up a chimney shrieking ‘By Jove! Old Peter’s dead! And I’m King o’ the cats!’ (Philip 1992: 346). Such variation and repetition is characteristic of migratory traditions, and attests to the fact that the story has survived in popular tradition for four hundred years, altering subtly in its details as it has passed from teller to teller and writer to writer. The fact of the story’s broad dissemination since Baldwin’s first inscription of it, however, does not necessarily guarantee an oral origin. It is certainly possible that Baldwin, in 1553, took it from a flourishing popular, oral tradition, which may in turn explain why he gives the narration to a servant; but equally it is possible, as the recent editors of Beware the Cat argue, that Baldwin invented the story as part of a work of literature (Baldwin 1988: 60 n. 11.9).

A similar genealogy might be given for the well-known tale ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ (ATU328 ‘The Boy Steals the Giant’s Treasure’).² This narrative has been found in oral traditions throughout the world, and is particularly common along the lines of communication established by British exploration and British settlement from the sixteenth century onwards. Oral versions of it have been collected in Mandeville, Jamaica, for example, where it was told to the American folklorist Martha Warren Beckwith by a 19-year-old man named Clarence Tathum in 1919 or 1921 (Beckwith 1924: 150), and in the Appalachian Mountains in the American South, as recorded by Richard Chase in his collection The Jack Tales (1943). Joseph Jacobs has also claimed that the version of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ that he included in his English Fairy Tales of 1890, and that has subsequently become the basis of most modern retellings, was told to him by his nurse in Australia when he was six years old (Jacobs 1890: n. 13). Before any of these oral traditions had been collected, however, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ enjoyed popularity as a chapbook narrative in early-nineteenth-century Britain, having been published as The History of Mother Twaddle, and the Marvellous Atchievements of Her Son Jack by ‘B.A. T.’ in 1807 and as The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk by Benjamin Tabart in 1809. The oldest reliable allusion to the story, moreover, comes in a literary skit, ‘Enchantment Demonstrated in the Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean’, which appeared in the second edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire: Or Christmas Entertainments published in 1734. On the assumption that ‘parody implies popularity’, this skit, no doubt, indicates the existence of earlier mediations of the story (Philip 1992: 9). There is certainly evidence that the rhyme ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum’, associated with the tale, existed in association with another story, the story of Childe Rowland, as early as Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605; see Jacobs 1891), and some scholars trace motifs to be found in the story to depictions of giant plants and acts of giant-slaying in Norse mythology and ancient Indian traditions (see Opie and Opie 1980: 213; and Goldberg 2001). But the story in its current form, as it appears in children’s books, pantomimes, and films, can only be reliably dated to the early eighteenth century and to its appearance as a popular, mass-market literary production.

Both these examples, ‘King of the Cats’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, share the following characteristics: they are (a) popular stories that are or have been widely known and enjoyed by all classes of society, (b) stories that have survived in multiple versions, at different times, and in different regions, and have therefore, in the course of time, even if not originally, become communal property, (c) tales that are (as a result of (b)) not associated exclusively with the authorship of any one individual, (d) stories that have circulated freely between oral, literary and other media, and (e) stories that, according to Georges and Jones, ‘we judge traditional … because they are based on known precedents or models, and … because they serve as evidence of continuities and consistencies through time and space in human knowledge, thought, belief and feeling’ (Georges and Jones 1995: 1). What these stories do not give evidence of, however, is the tenacious Romantic belief that fictions of this sort are necessarily oral in origin, antique in age, or peasant in extraction. When defining the fairy tale as a form of folk narrative, therefore, we should be suspicious of obstinate Romantic conceptions of the fairy tale. This does not mean, however, pace Armstrong, that the category must disappear altogether. Folk narrative remains an institutionally recognisable form; and it also remains a form with some distinctive and enduring generic features.

The Types of the Folk Narrative

The broad category of folk narrative is generally subdivided into three principal forms by scholars: the myth, the legend and the folk tale. This tripartite division has formed the basis of most taxonomies of folk narrative since Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm devoted major works to each category: the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–15), Deutsche Sagen [German Legends] (1816–18) and Deutsche Mythologie [German Myths] (1835). The boundaries between all these categories are fluid, and distinctions cannot be imposed inflexibly on what is, in reality, a rich and metamorphic body of popular materials; nevertheless, as a convenient rule of thumb, it is possible to make some useful basic distinctions between them as follows.

The legend is a story that has become attached, at some point in time, to a specified historical personage, a specified locality, or a specified event. It is also a fiction that requires an agreement between storyteller and audience that they will both, for the purposes of the story, regard the events described as having taken place. Legends include apocryphal stories about well-known historical personages (King Arthur, Sir Walter Raleigh, Vlad the Impaler, Dick Whittington), semi-factual narrative cycles concerning cultural, or more properly, sub-cultural, heroes (Robin Hood, Nanny of the Maroons, Phoolan Devi), and stories that concern particular localities (The Lambton Worm, The Giant of Dalston Mill). Myths, like legends, also make claims to recount true events, though unlike legends they do not take place in recorded historical time, but ‘in a world supposed to have preceded the present order’ (Thompson 1977: 9). They characteristically deal with ‘grand’ subjects such as heroes, gods or the universe, and they tend, as a result, to fulfil culturally important functions for a specific community or nation: establishing a narrative of foundation for the community, idealising its values by embodying them in a specific hero or group of heroes, and codifying aspects of its belief system. This definition of myth was established most influentially by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his collection of essays Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926) that focused on the mythologies of the Trobriand Islanders. Myth, Malinowski argued, ‘expresses, enhances, and codifies belief’ and in so doing it fulfils its main cultural function, which is ‘to strengthen tradition and endow it with a greater value and prestige by tracing it back to a higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial events’ (Malinowski 1926: 23 and 125). It is this sacred function of myths, according to the folklorist William Bascom, that enables us to distinguish myths most effectively from other forms of folk narrative. Legends, Bascom proposed, are narratives that are, at the source of their telling, ‘believed to be true and to contain important factual information’; myths, in their original cultural contexts, are ‘regarded as not merely true, but as venerable and sacred’; and folk tales are narratives that, in contrast to legends and myths, are regarded as purely fictional both by their tellers and their hearers (Bascom 1981: 44 and 97–98). This formulation, as Bascom points out, would allow for the possibility of transit between these genres: a myth or legend that is no longer believed to have truth-value may, in the course of time, become a folk tale; and a narrative that is, in one society, regarded as a folk tale may, in another society, be regarded as a myth (Bascom 1981: 102).

If myths deal with grand subjects (both formally and conceptually), folk tales are more quotidian in their concerns. The protagonists of myth are distant figures, incomparably greater than ordinary men and women, and the objective of the narratives in which their adventures appear is to make readers or hearers realise that they could not be like the personages depicted, or achieve the feats that are within their grasp. The protagonists of folk tales, by contrast, even when they are princes and princesses, seem ‘more like us’, and more concerned with the common human desire to make a living, eat well, marry someone pleasant or successful, and steer clear of danger. Like myths, of course, folk tales are interested in heroism, but where myths celebrate the heroism of those who are first in a society, the ‘likely’ heroes, folk tales tend to favour the unlikely heroes: the plucky peasant, the youngest son, the neglected daughter and the thumb-sized boy. Folk tales are, therefore, in the nautical terminology applied to folk narrative by the Danish folklorist Axel Olrik, achtergewicht (stern weighted) rather than toppgewicht (bow weighted) (Dundes 1999: 93). Moreover, whilst myths tend to engage with grand explanations and theological structures, folk tales tend to ignore the cosmos and divinity and focus instead upon hearth rug and humanity. For all the palaces that appear in folk tales, they are, as the title of the Grimm collection has it, hausmärchen (household tales). They take place in the familiar settings of town and countryside, and they depict their protagonists triumphing over common adversity such as poverty or hunger, through some clever ruse or some extraordinary stroke of luck, or, if the protagonist is not sufficiently quick witted or sufficiently lucky, suffering amusing calamities because of their idiocy. Representative European folk tales would include the story of ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’ (ATU555), written in Pomeranian dialect by Philipp Otto Runge and passed to the Brothers Grimm for inclusion in the first volume of their tales in 1812. In this story a fisherman, having caught a talking fish, is persuaded by his wife to ask the fish for greater and greater rewards until he asks for the unaskable (for his wife to be God), at which point he and his wife are returned to the poverty-stricken state in which they started out. This story may be considered to be a folk tale because it has ordinary protagonists (a fisherman and his wife), dwells on everyday activities (fishing), and, to begin with at least, has a familiar setting (the cottage). It includes magical events, as folk tales often do, but it remains rooted in a familiar world, and its magic makes possible the fulfilment of readily understandable wishes: wealth, a nice house and material satisfaction.

Another representative example of a folk tale is the story of ‘Clever Jack’ related to Henry Mayhew by a 16-year-old vagrant in a London workhouse in the 1860s and recorded in his London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew 1864, vol. III: 388–90). In this story a series of narratives is told about the ruses of Clever Jack including one in which Jack, pretending to be an angel who has come to take a parson to heaven, persuades the parson to put himself in one sack and all his gold plate into another. Jack promptly takes the parson to a gentleman who gives him a horsewhipping, and he keeps the bag full of gold plate and money for himself. Mayhew’s informant, an ‘intelligent-looking boy’ in ‘a series of ragged coats’, described the story as ‘one … that I invented till I learnt it’ (Philip 1992: 19), but in fact the story is an international tale type (AT1525, ‘The Master Thief’) and is at least as old as Giovan Francesco Straparola’s Venetian collection Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights), published in the mid-sixteenth century, where it first appeared in Europe in print.

The dominant mode of such stories, it will be apparent, is comic: we either laugh at the antics of the foolish protagonists and take pleasure in the elaborate forms of their suffering, or we applaud the cunning ruses of the trickster hero and revel good humouredly in his or her high-spirited refus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Definitions
• 2. The emergence of a literary genre: Early Modern Italy to the French salon
• 3. The consolidation of a genre: the Brothers Grimm to Hans Christian Andersen
• 4. The emergence of fairy-tale theory: Plato to Propp
• 5. Psychoanalysis, history and ideology: twentieth- and twenty-first-century approaches to fairy tale
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index