History of Folk Genres: Derivation, Influence, and Didacticism

The influence of folk fairy tales and folk legends on literary narrative and popular culture is not a one-way street because folk tales and legends are themselves part of popular culture, and sometimes elite narratives from royalty and well-known authors have in fact influenced oral tales. However, in terms of self-conscious imitation, redaction, subversion, and adaptation, there is a general body of literature readily available and discernible.

One of the first well-known literary adaptations of fairy tales is Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (1697) which in the later English translation of 1729 became known as “Tales of Mother Goose”—the subtitle of the original (in French: “”Contes de ma mère l’Oye.”^[1] Even earlier was the Pentameron by Giambattista Basile in two posthumous volumes 1634 and 1636.^[2] These literary anthologists did not seek to offer the literal folklore of the storytelling tradition but to offer smooth and refined stories that engaged the earlier materials. They are book tales with significant redactions and transformations of plots and characters rather than folk tales proper. Their work often includes a moral which is more common in book tales than folk fairy tales. Literary writers seized upon folk tales to adapt for profit and proselytizing, whether to inculcate middle class respectability or to promote other ideological agendas (see below for Dickens’s objections to Victorian appropriations of the fairy tale in his “Frauds on the Fairies”). This didactic evolution into the realm of middle class media was a continuation of already having appropriated existing folk traditions and the fairy tale as a literary form with upper class cultural influence and behavioral modification: “the ‘conte des fées,’ or ‘contes merveilleux,’ as a feminine literary genre was already established since the time of Perrault. A line of women authors popularized the Märchen in France in the course of the eighteenth century, to the tastes of the feudal aristocracy, as well as the educated urban classes.”^[3] Focus on the didactic and developmental potential of fairy tales for children continued into the 20th and 21st centuries. For example, in his The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettleheim contributed important analysis regarding the personal growth children experienced reading fairy tales.

Although Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm started out their project of tale collection with the goal of assembling authentic examples of oral narratives extant among people to help the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, their project evolved into a nationalist collection by the seventh edition of 1857 that changed the original tales into children’s stories. It is quite the irony that the idealistic initial reflections by the Grimms noted the very lack of agenda–as they saw it at least–in terms of their attitude towards the tradition-bearers: “Wherever the tales still exist, they continue to live in such a way that nobody ponders whether they are good or bad, poetic or crude. People know them and love them because they have simply absorbed them in a habitual way. And they take pleasure in them without having any reason. This is exactly why the custom of storytelling is so marvelous”.^[4] It took a long time to gain access in English to the first and second editions of 1812 and 1815 of the Grimms, but thanks to Professor Jack Zipes, we now have the less expurgated collection and some notes too about the storytellers and contexts–not a lot of context by contemporary standards of folklore research which digs in deeply to performance, yet nevertheless we do have some.^[5]

A quick comparison between the first and final edition reveals the tendency to remove the sexual content of the originally transcribed tales. Consider the 1812 Rapunzel, which clearly refers to the effects of pregnancy on clothing fit: “The fairy did not discover what was happening until one day Rapunzel said to her, “Frau Gothel, tell me why it is that my clothes are all too tight. They no longer fit me.” Then contemplate the 1857 version: “The sorceress did not notice what was happening until one day Rapunzel said to her, “Frau Gothel, tell me why it is that you are more difficult to pull up than is the young prince, who will be arriving any moment now?” Most conveniently D. L. Ashliman has provided a grid comparing these two versions.^[6]

Jack Zipes observes in his 2014 translation of the 1812 First Edition Grimm tales that the pregnancy details had already been expurgated by the 1819 version in fact: “In the first edition “Rapunzel” is a very short provocative tale in which the young girl gets pregnant. The 1819 version is longer, much more sentimental, and without a hint of pregnancy.”^[7] Zipes remarks of the changes for the 1857 edition that they are consistent with the overall ethos of that final edition to be geared towards childhood education rather than folkloric scholarship: “The florid descriptions, smooth transitions, and explanations are characteristic of most of the tales in the 1857 edition. Wilhelm embellished and elaborated the tales with good intentions—to enhance their value as part of an educational primer.”

Aside from the Romantics’ agenda to harness their belief in the appeal of the volksgeist for literature, writers also turned to folk content for ideological and aesthetic reasons. In Charles’s Dickens’s “Frauds Against the Fairies” he inveighs against George Cruikshank’s literary fairy tale stressing temperance. Dickens bristled against using the fairy tale as a vehicle for proselytizing: “In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected. [ . . .] our dear moralist has in a rash moment taken, as a means of propagating the doctrines of Total Abstinence, Prohibition of the sale of spirituous liquors, Free Trade, and Popular Education. For the introduction of these topics he has altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to do any such thing we protest with all our might and main.”^[8]

Cross-cultural adaptations with ideological agendas became a literary trend of the 18th and 19th centuries. Aristocrats in French Salons experimented with fairy tale narratives and the fairy tale form to impart philosophical ideas as well as promote moralistic aims. Thomas Carlyle, for example, translated Goethe’s literary fairy tale “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” the same year as the first Reform Act in England in 1832.^[9] Ideas of social reform became increasingly mixed with literary aims. We find the growth of fantasy literature starts to occupy this space of social reform and visionary idealism increasingly as well.

George MacDonald’s fairy tale fantasies emerged with an emphasis on personal spiritual development as well as articulations of general social fellowship, decrying selfish capitalism while urging Christian utopianism. The sustained fantasy worlds that emerged from the 19th and 20th centuries owe much to the nature of secondary world motifs from folk fairy tales. The often medieval milieu, the various supernatural helpers and antagonists, and typically a lack of skepticism about the role of magic: seven-league boots are found in both literary fairy tales and folk tales and fairy realms, and underworlds that heroes may venture into and out of are common features, and no one spends time doubting that such things exist.

Students of Arthurian literature will find many fairy tale motifs in those narratives–most notably perhaps The Mabinogion (composition date estimated around 11th to 12th centuries) but most famously with Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1469). Athurian literature with the range of heroic models of flawed and saintly individuals seeking redemption through martial prowess and encountering otherworldly helpers and adversaries serves as a model for some early works of fantasy literature too, such as T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958). Linda Dégh in her influential book Folklore and Society (1969) helps identify how the evolution of literature as a written form is closely connected to the machinations of the ruling class; oral storytelling became marginalized or at least contracted in scope: storytelling was general until the scope of the written word forced it into a more restricted circle, until the upper classes gave preference to written literature. We have ample evidence. . .storytelling in the Middle Ages existed at the courts of the dukes as well as in the highway inns, the manor houses, and the village taverns” (65).

Beyond the Arthurian literature and legends, there are also other medieval examples of interaction between unofficial folklore and written records such as with manuscripts of Deirdre or Catholic and Hebrew materials. The form of the exempla covers saints’ legends, chapbooks, pamphlets and jestbooks, which were written down, yet they were often drawn from oral tales, and recirculated in the oral tradition once they were recorded and repeated. Stith Thompson, who along with Antti Aarne pioneered the historico-geographic method^[10] of attempting to connect tale-types and motifs among international folk narratives, underscores this very point in his monumental book The Folktale (1946) (see more below for methodologies): “Geoffrey of Monmouth, in telling the story of King Lear, includes the incident of Love Like Salt (Type 923), widely known, not only through Shakespeare’s treatment, but also as a part of the Cinderella cycle (Type 510) The chivalric romances. . .contain much that must have been taken directly from the people. Marie de France thus tells the tale of the Prince as Bird (Type 432). This interplay between written and oral narratives helps reinforce the fact that folk narratives are not fixed in any particular form in terms of their trajectory of development and influence.

Fabliau and Schwank

Medievalists seeking a close examination of the role of folklore and The Canterbury Tales will enjoy Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales by Carl Lindahl. Among his other astute examinations Lindahl tracks the role of class rhetoric and the traditional tales and forms likely in circulation; he insists that the Fabliau—a tale in verse, which originated in France in the twelfth century and lasted about one hundred years, dealing with humorous and often sexual matters—had already fallen “into relative obscurity”before Chaucer was born (125). The Schwank, on the other hand was omnipresent among folk culture, and it was well suited to expressing in a jocose manner the class, gender, and occupational tensions which the pilgrims experienced:

the content of the Schwank involves the most basic human drives—”eating, drinking, sex”—and the most fundamental social conflicts—peasants versus landlord, trade versus trade, husband versus wife, clergy versus laity [. . .]. All five of the churls’ tales are classified as Schwank by folklorists, all five have been collected orally within the last century, and there is no reason to believe that they were not also told orally in Chaucer’s time, in much the same ways and for the same reasons that Chaucer’s churls tell them [. . .]. the Schwank was omnipresent in the Middle Ages [. . .]. the fabliau was a relatively isolated development that exerted little influence on subsequent literature. . .

Schwank surfaced in exempla long before the fabliau came into being (125). An analog of The Miller’s Tale in fact occurs in an exemplum which ends with the didactic proverb: “He who believe readily is readily deceived” (Lindahl 130).

Hero Tales

Lastly, of interest to students of medieval literature who seek connections with SFF, there are the heroic tales–concerning legendary deeds that are popular within a traditional community–of Finn Mac Cool, Grainne, Deirdre, and Cuchulainn: the ancient Irish epic heroes and heroines. For these heroic tales, one can read both the Gaelic texts from medieval manuscripts, or updated in more modern language, as well as find these characters in transcribed oral recordings.

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More familiarity with these Irish and Scots heroic tales of Gaelic culture helps deepen a literary scholar’s understanding of not only the medieval texts but an appreciation about what writers like W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, Flann O’Brien, James Stephens, and James Joyce were doing with mythic motifs of Gaelic storytelling in the Celtic Twilight and thereafter. It is easy to see in Star Wars that Yoda’s command to Luke that he need not bring with him his weapons is a bit like the geas of Celtic hero myths, and likewise his refusal to do so is another transgression setting Luke up for more trouble.

These patterns of development with the so-called hero’s journey rely much on the history of folk narrative scholarship–long before Joseph Campbell, Lord Raglan made his claim of mythic stages that each hero progresses through (The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, 1936). And Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale in 1928 offered a detailed sequence of functions that fairy tale protagonists encounter. From the “absentation” of the protagonist that leaves the hero exposed to a wicked (step)parent or monster or the elements or on the road of the quest, to the final “wedding” that signals the communal validation of the protagonist, Propp offers thirty-one “canonical functions” describing what Propp considered each fundamental structural element that defined the fairy tale as a genre. Propp did not presume to answer for all types of fairy tale narratives and myths but did assert his “monomyth” lurked beneath many a traditional sacred form.

Joseph Campbell, though often despised by folklorists as having a tendency to over generalize without participating in actual fieldwork, also made use of the structural patterns of Propp and Raglan, and his work has been further adopted by creative writing guidebooks that promise breakthroughs via using the hero’s journey template. Variations have also been published for particular genre craftbooks, such as Tim Waggoner’s Writing in the Dark that includes a chapter dealing with alternative perspectives for the often reactive progress of protagonists in horror fiction and films. Waggoner points out on the first page of chapter nine “The Horror Hero’s Journey” that in horror narratives the protagonists are not heroes per se and don’t hear a call so much as were “going along just fine with their lives until a Bad Thing intruded into their world, forcing them to react.” Waggoner’s observation reminds us also of how much horror stories owe a debt to the folk legend which is typically based on supernatural disruptions of otherwise everyday life.

One of the important distinctions usually between folk fairy tales, legends, and myths is that there is an absence of the sacred, at least in terms of defining the tale’s form. Sacred narratives usually carry a traditional pressure to maintain the form because of its inherent status as literal or figurative truth regarding a relationship between the community and divinity. Even without the codifying nature of print culture, there can be that pressure based on likely consensus of traditional oral versions of a particular tale; sometimes this extends to a hero or highly regarded legendary narratives as well as regional or spiritual origin narratives. William Butler Yeats made this observation about the importance of certain highly regarded tales–namely Deirdre of the Sorrows– in his introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888): “the long tale of Deirdre was, in the earlier decades of this century, told almost word for word, as in the very ancient MSS. in the Royal Dublin Society. In one case only it varied, and then the MS. was obviously wrong – a passage had been forgotten by the copyist. But this accuracy is rather in the folk and bardic tales than in the fairy legends, for these vary widely, being usually adapted to some neighbouring village or local fairy-seeing celebrity”^[12] (xix).

Myth

Regarding sacredness, it is useful to observe that in general myths are folkloric narratives that have a sacred value to the community, but often it is not a matter of solely content but attitude towards the material from the community of insiders that helps to define the genre of the mythic–the tradition bearers decide what is sacred or numinous and what is merely historicized legend or fictional entertainment. To glance back at the world of Arthur, Raglan’s twenty-second item in his monomyth works for both the sacred and the secular, which the Arthurian myth arguably combines with an air of mystery that continues to excite both archaeologists, treasure-seekers, and adventurers: “He has one or more holy sepulchres.”^[13]

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Also, a figure like Baba Yaga combines elements of the sacred–or the once sacred–given her status in some tales as a goddess who commands the “bright day” “red sun” and “dark night” such as “Vasilia the Beautiful.”^[15] At times, she is a gruesome ogress, but at other times she metes out gifts and rough justice. The tale-type in stories where Baba Yaga appears in fact varies because sometimes, as in the role of fairy godmother or reincarnated mother found in other Cinderella tales (ATU 510), Baba Yaga offers the protagonist the means to dispatch unpleasant family rivals, such as the skull as a gift that burns the stepmother and sisters to death in the aforementioned “Vasilia the Beautiful.” Or in other tales, the very visit to Baba Yaga and the escape from her clutches leads to the revelation of the evil stepmother: “As soon as her father had heard all about it, he became wroth with his wife, and shot her. But he and his daughter lived on and flourished, and everything went well with them.“^[16] Baba Yaga has been utilized in a number of cultural mediums, including cartoons^[17] and Vasilia from “Vasilia the Beautiful” (or “the Wise”) had her own postage stamp in Russia in 1975:

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