How to Read Folktales: Implications for SFF

It is important when navigating academic definitions of literary and folkloric genres to be as precise as possible while maintaining some measure of acceptance that there will always be exceptions; otherwise an introduction to terms may become infinitely tenuous or just too vague rather than a pragmatic presentation of general tendencies or tools to approach one’s reading.

Folklore, Fantasy and the Literary Fantastic

In passing, it is useful to note that “fantasy” per se is distinct from the instability of the “literary fantastic”–at least so far as one characterizes the genre of fantasy vs. what may merely be a moment of the “literary fantastic” in a story that qualifies as otherwise realistic. In The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre Tzvetan Todorov asserts, “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”^[1] In folk fairy tales princes and princesses don’t question whether dragons exist or like Hamlet wonder if the ghost is real or not. There’s no need for a Horatio in folk wonder tales to proclaim that there’s more in one’s philosophy; it’s all a given: magic exists, and let’s get on with the story to explore the effects of that magic.

In Todorov’s model of the literary fantastic he also sets up a continuum between the marvelous–where events are truly supernatural–and the uncanny–where the events that cause hesitation about consensus reality become ultimately explicable and do not require any new beliefs. In that outcome, the literary fantastic is a stage in determining the reality principle.

Unlike the hesitation that characterizes the literary fantastic as defined by Todorov, literary fantasies are not “uncanny” in the sense of being rationalized. They are irreducible marvels with internal narrative consistency.

Fantasy narrative is largely defined by “continuous and coherent” presentation of what would be in the real world a “development of impossibility”.^[2] Thus, we don’t need a human in The Lord of the Rings to tell us how there’s physical evidence Hobbits might have existed, or that Bilbo–a Hobbit–needs to indulge in skepticism about whether elves or orcs exist. They live in the secondary world that may resemble our consensus reality but it’s an understanding by the reader who explores the fantasy genre that the fantasy exists in that world without question or need to examine it further. It is J. R. R. Tolkien specifically who presented the term “secondary world” in “On Fairy Stories” (1932) to characterize the mechanics of the production of fantasy and the importance of avoiding any disruption in casting the narrative spell: “a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, [. . .]. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”

Tolkien has argued that one of the benefits he sought to emulate with his own fantasy regarding the fairy tale is the eucatastrophic function, which serves to uplift the reader by a positive ending–consider for instance how the eagles literally raise up Frodo and Sam from their likely demise at Mt. Doom at the end of their pilgrimage against the totalizing destructive power of omniscience gone wrong with Sauron’s Ring.^[3] Folklorists, such as Bengt Holbek in Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a European Perspective, have identified how in a social context fairy folk tales serve to offer a real-world optimism in some cases against the sense of oppression that workers often experience from the tyranny of landlords and the upper classes in general. In this fashion, a fairy tale about an ogre that runs a farm and eats the hired help from time to time clearly figures as an imaginative transformation of the hated qualities of that overbearing figure. The optimistic or happy ending thus is not naive, but a rhetorical move towards idealism–in that sense one might argue some fairy folk tales already contain the seeds of utopianism, even if there is no developed communal change beyond the fortunes of the protagonist. Holbek stresses the mechanics of fairy tale invention in terms of “collective daydreaming” of the storytelling community which in the wonder tale’s plot “kept alive a keen sense of justice” and “depicted a true world, i.e., the world as it should be” (406).

The nature of the secondary world in folk tales varies, though literary critics have often wished to advance a totalizing perspective. Jack Zipes for instance has insisted that the role of “might makes right” is in fact the “central theme of all folktales” which undervalues the role of compassion in the Donor Test in folk fairy tales; we often see a supernatural figure reward a less economically fortunate protagonist with a magical gift after he or she proves their ethical worth. Zipes also argues that fairy tales occupy a “realm without morals, where class and power determine social relations” (Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, 29). However, this ignores the importance of the underlying animistic vigilance in folk fairy tales that often punishes antisocial behavior. Furthermore, there are specific tales where those of higher rank are brought low by supernatural forces and more clever actors who are of lower rank.

The role of “disbelief” and “hesitation” is important for folk legends–in the folk legend, as mentioned earlier, there is a continuum of belief that includes skepticism.^[4] This element in narrative has also been integrated into the literary ghost story and horror story genre. Often we encounter characters who mount a temporary defense of skepticism before they are forced to admit there really is some ghostly presence or cosmic horror impinging upon their consensus reality; sometimes this altogether snaps their sanity, which is also a motif, particularly when one contemplates the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. This technique of reluctant or hesitant belief is very much a rhetorical strategy intended to engage an educated readership, and as a trope it has lost a lot of its impact as making one wonder as to the metaphysical mechanics in a story because the token skeptic may have little to do other than stand as it were for later validation of the events as supernatural.

It is important to remember that skepticism is not merely an ability that is part of literary culture. Part of the unfortunate legacy of early anthropology and some literary critics was to mistakenly assume that the refined collectors and critics were more enlightened than their informants. However, as early as the nineteenth century this cultural pretension towards superiority is also fodder for metafictional creative exploration and ridicule, such as we see with Robert Louis Stevenson “The Beach of Falesá”:

We laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see how many traders take them up, splendidly educated white men, that have been book-keepers (some of them) and clerks in the old country. It’s my belief a superstition grows up in a place like the different kinds of weeds; and as I stood there and listened to that wailing I twittered in my shoes.

As it turns out, Wiltshire–the English trader who narrates the story–learns that he has been deceived–along with “the natives and their superstitions”–and the supernatural is largely dismissed by the end of the novella.

Legendary nexus–(anti)memorats and literary impact

Nor is every narration of a supernatural event integrated immediately into a traditional context of repetition that qualifies as a folk legend. A close relative of the folk legend is the memorat, which is a first or second-hand experience narrative involving the supernatural that has not achieved circulation within the community, so not officially yet a legend and it perhaps never will be. If I share the anecdote of my friend’s encounter with his grandfather’s ghost: that’s a memorat. If that anecdote continues to circulate among friends and family then that qualifies as a folk legend. In some cases, the endings of memorats actually dispel the supernatural. In other words, they end up with some rationalization or dismissal of the supernatural that may have been temporarily evoked (think again of Todorov’s hesitation in the literary fantastic) and can be therefore labeled as uncanny in Todorov’s terms.

When a story’s banging shutters turn out to be not a ghost but the wind–of fluorescent paint instead of demons as we learn in Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá– there’s a folkloric precedent for that as well: the so-called “anti-memorat’ or “anti-tale”; first and third-person narrators whose oral tales play with an audience’s expectations of a supernatural outcome but end up merely explained in banal terms (See for example Honko, Lauri. “Memorates and the Study of Folk Belief.” Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies. Eds. Reimund Kvideland & Henning Sehmsdorf. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

The playful reversal of expectations in the anti-memorat or anti-tale is another important dimension of folk narratives; these are not always sober or single-mindedly dramatic stories of conflict and triumph or terror–humor is a key attribute, and the whimsy of the fool or numbskull tales can be a feature of fantasy literature and film as well. Whether the Oz stories of Frank Baum or the absurd fantastic of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds and the spirit of the zany Shrek, the impact of tall tales and nonsense tales resonates. More generally, folk tales have been a source internationally for narrative inspiration and development–from the lush and imaginative epic of Japanese myth and folklore, Princess Mononoke to the Sleeping Beauty films of Disney and later extrapolated innovations of Maleficent. Naturally, folklore has also been an easy target for commodification, and this is a subject Jack Zipes has explored thoroughly.^[5] In addition, Zipes and other scholars have tracked the international scope of fairy tale adaptations for cinema (See Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, Kendra Magnus-Johnson, Fairy Tales Beyond Disney: International Perspectives , Routledge: 2015).

Folk Legends and Folk Horror–fiction and film

In horror stories and films we can appreciate the role of uncertainty and the greater threats of the supernatural impinging upon the real world–dynamics integrated from folk legends. Horror stories and films often involve an intrusion into everyday stability by a supernatural agent or event. In “Laura Silver Bell” and the “Child that Went With the Fairies” Sheridan Le Fanu harnessed the fears of fairy abduction, deceptive glamour, and degradation following fairy interactions in his signature Victorian Gothic mode. Similarly, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood explore the sinister aura of darker fairy lore in stories such as “The White People” and “The Trod” respectively. And the horror film The Hallow directly makes use of malign beliefs about the fairies as baby-stealers and banshees associated with imminent death. Ghosts in films are rampant in many forms deriving from traditional antecedents, from revenants bent on vengeance or kindly sentient phantoms of relatives aiming to exposure lost treasure.

Horror films are not the first attempt to visually depict using technology images of the other world. Victorian and Ewardian seances and spiritual photographs– in some cases intentional dupes offered visions of the otherworld conceptualized in artistic form. Below for example is one of the artful fabrications of William Hope^[6]:

The use of folk legends and folk beliefs for supernatural horror is perhaps the most familiar turn recently for readers and audiences given such focus on appropriation of the Algonquin Wendigo or the mysterious sightings of Mothman, or fakelore like the deceptive marketing and pseudodocumentary accompanying the release of The Blair Witch Project.^[7] However, for readers of the 19th and early 20th Century the revival of folk tales for nationalistic agendas raised to a prominent pitch with the Celtic Renaissance, featuring Wiliam Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and William Sharp (AKA Fiona MacLeod)–these writers adapted Irish and Scottish mythology and folklore to help establish an ethos of national culture and unity.

Folk horror as a horror film subgenre had an active period in the 1970s prior to its current incarnation. And there’s little doubt that folk narratives will continue to drive film plots when looking for materials connected to fear of supernatural predation in the metaphysical contact zone between civilization and the wilderness. Looking at all communities as potential folk communities also has helped to reveal the potential for the communal ties that can both tie and disconcert via the sometimes profoundly disturbing aspects of fearful beliefs.

However, the overall tendency of folklore studies has been to democratize the role of the dynamics of folklore and recognize that one should avoid the condescending assumptions of the past–namely that the “folk” are mere peasants for instance: “Modern folklore theory argues that contemporary and non-oral forms of folklore are worthy of serious academic consideration; Alan Dundes helped expand the definition of ‘folk’ and folklore beyond traditional rural storytelling to include ‘the cultural texts of groups of all socio-economic backgrounds’ (Gürel 2006: 4)^[8]. It should be noted however that even nineteenth century scholars varied in their attitudes; for instance, John Francis Campbell observed in his comments on his Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860-1862) that not only is careful attention to the original language (gaelic) of the informants but also a recognition that so-called superstition is not solely the province of the uneducated: “superstition seems to belong to no one period in the history of civilization, but to all. It is as rife in towns as it is amongst the hills, and it [is] not confined to the ignorant.”^[9] In fact, folklorist Richard Dorson praised J. F. Campbell in contrast to the Grimms’ redactive approach: “In 1860, a counterpart to the brothers Grimm, so often heralded and so often found wanting, did emerge in Britain in the person of John Francis Campbell of Islay [. . .]. That year Campbell published the first two volumes of his classic Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Orally Collected.^[10]

Because of the evolution of inclusiveness with the term “folk” it is important to recognize that the use of the term’s socio-economic grouping varies, and this is true among contemporary literary critics as well as past antiquarians and folklorists. For instance, in Jack Zipes’s Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (2006) he utilizes the term “folk” without the earlier focus on the peasantry which he utilizes in his Casting the Magic Spell when he stresses the folk in “opposition to that of the ruling classes” and the tale itself as a “a precapitalist folk form” (6). The term folklore has been a moving target and readers must observe the contextual definition varies—and sometimes without clear acknowledgment of that evolution.

For Americans, many still tend to think of folk narratives as something of the fanciful literature of childhood and the “superstitious” province of rural life; some would not be necessarily familiar with what defines folklore or examples from American culture–they might not realize that Paul Bunyan is an ersatz representative of corporate fakelore rather than some authentic hero of backwoods tradition. However, in the hollers of West Virginia, for example, beyond Mothman there’s also a rich tradition of folk beliefs and tales. And in Louisiana of course there’s Cajun traditions and throughout the South there’s attempts to archive and perform folkloric content.^[11] The government has taken steps since the 20th century to preserve Native American folklore as well as the ballad tradition.^[12]

It is important to remember though that folklore is not defined by attention to the past despite the focus on the idea of survivals among Eighteenth Century English antiquarians but is a living performance of communal traditions. Often folklorists make a distinction between ​​diachronic studies of folklore that are concerned with evidence and theories of historical development as opposed to synchronic studies dealing with folklore as it exists at the present time. Much debate and even rancor has at times characterized debates about so-called UR-tales or prototypical original tales and their distribution and the claims for sufficiently establishing origins and influences. Most folklore scholarship lately concerns synchronic features but with an ongoing interaction between folklore studies and literary criticism, analysis of narratives continues to be a significant part of scholarship as well.

Diachronic and Synchronic Methods

These are approaches that stress the historical lineage of a folktale. Thus, it is not the tale in of itself that matters from these perspectives, rather what the folktale can tell us about the past—the place the tale originated from, the cultural beliefs of that nation or ethnic group, or the hypothetical myths, previous literature, and prototypical tale (or UR-tale) that the folktale may be a descendant or variant of. The following schools may be classified as diachronic (ironically some of these approaches remain of interest only because of their contribution to the history of folklore research).

Synchronic approaches focus on the folktale not as a stepping-stone towards an ancient archetypal tale or a general theory of the folktale or the mind but rather aim towards identifying and interpreting the form, content, and meaning of the tales as they exist presently.

Table 6.1. Diachronic and Synchronic Methods

The Indo-European Theory/ The Broken-Down Myth Theory

These theories are no longer pursued today, but they are important because they mark the emergence of interest in folktales due to the studies of the Grimms, particularly Wilhelm Grimm. W. Grimm, who did the definitive formulation of his theories in 1856, noted the correlation between the subject matter of folktales of nations which could be identified as Indo-European and he hypothesized that the tales must be the common heritage of an ancient Indo-European protoculture—in other words they are corruptions of original myths: to elicit meaning one must reconstruct those first myths, if possible.

The Mythological School

This approach has also been discarded, but its aim was indeed to piece together the hypothetical myths that folk tales were presumably the broken fragments of.

The adherents to this approach believed that the ancients must have idolized the stars, so they interpreted all folktales as generally being about the solar cycle, the lunar cycle, or a similar stellar process. They based their arguments on comparative philology—making the Indo-European myths literally depend upon the Indo-European language. It’s a narrow and now outmoded approach, but it had its charms for early antiquarians and syncretic armchair scholars.

This school came under fire in the 1870s by Andrew Lang and others.

The Indianist School

The first speculation that India might have been the original location of all folktales was advanced by Loiseleur Deslongchamps in 1838, though it was not until Theodor Benfey in 1859 described the theory in his edition of the Panchatantra (Sanskrit text–collection of fables, supposedly 5th century) that, as Stith Thompson says in The Folktale, the theory became “dogma” (376).

Benfey believed that all folktales, except those which could be traced back to the Greek storyteller, Aesop, derived originally from India. There was some reason to believe this, since many tales found in Western Europe were surprisingly found in ancient Hindu and Buddhist manuscripts. However the discovery of collected Egyptian folktales which were too early to be influenced by dissemination from an Indian source soon cast doubt on Benfey’s conclusion. Today India is recognized as one of several major sources of the creation and transmission of folktales, but certainly not the only one (Thompson 378-379). The testing of Benfey’s theory led to the historical-geographical method, an approach which Benfey had virtually been using himself.

The historical-geographical method (Finnish School)

This method was first utilized in folktale studies by Kaarle Krohn (1863-1933). However, it was his father, Julius Krohn who developed the method in his research of the songs of the Kalevala—the Finnish national epic (Thompson 396). This method demands the systematic categorization of all motifs and tale-types (as Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson have attempted to do) in order to study the distribution of these motifs and tale-types (which categorizes tales according to their particular patterns of motifs). The goals of this approach are to suggest the area of origin and the path of transmission of the tales, and ultimately to reconstruct the archetypal tale by comparing different variants to purify the tale according to which elements are most consistent.

Antti Aarne first developed the Tale-Type Index, which Thompson elaborated upon and then published the Motif-Type Index in addition: indispensable tools for comparative studies of the distribution of folktales. Another folklorist of the Finnish School was Reidar Christiansen: The Migratory Legends–A Proposed List of Types With a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants.

Hans Uther in 2004 made further revisions and contributions to AT index which led to the renaming of these research indices as the ATU Tale-Type Index and Motif-Type Index.^[13]

One reason for the historical-geographical method for falling out of favor by current folklorists is that the method assumes that it is the archetypal tale that matters, not the innovations of the storyteller. Storytellers from this point of view are ideally robotic transmitters of oral tradition–the work of the scholar is to scrape away any ugly accretions from foolish storytellers who may have obscured the shining original tale. On the side however of the folklorist who practices the historical-geographic method, is the Law of Self-Correction, formulated by Walter Anderson, which generally states that the integrity of the tale is maintained by the audience of the storyteller.

The audience can be assumed to have heard the tale before by other narrators, and so any divergence from what has been generally established as the correct tale will be checked by the disapproval of the listeners. This Law of Self-Correction has been criticized and modified in recent years, generally by adherents to synchronic approaches. Other criticism of this method is that too often the researchers assumed that the folk are a collective herd of incapable yokels who could not have come up with the folktales themselves, but are parroting what were originally literary creations. Such condescension is largely a relic of the past (such as Max Luthi below).

Superorganic viewpoints

These include scholars who are more interested in generalizing about the folktale or the collective unconscious which the folktales reveal. Jungian and Freudian scholars who use folktales to speculate about the human mind, but who are not interested about the particular meaning of a folktale in of itself can be included in this category. Also Max Luthi, whose book The European Folktale: Form and Nature suggests stylistic features which distinguish the folktale, falls into this heading. Luthi’s descriptions of style in the folktale are widely observable, though they do not help necessarily for interpretation. Luthi also reveals his diachronic prejudices: “Common people are the carriers and cultivators of folktales, but they hardly ever create them. It seems to me that the folktale is a gift from visionary poets to the people. Who its original creators were escapes our knowledge” (99). Among Luthi’s stylistic categories are one-dimensionality, depthlessness, abstract style, isolation and universal interconnection, sublimation and all-inclusiveness.

Morphological approaches

Morphological approaches emphasize the underlying structural patterns of the folk tale. There have been many contributions to the structural approach, a few of the central ones are mentioned below.

Axel Olrik’s formulation of “epic laws”

Olrik meant to describe the stylistic qualities of all oral narratives–“sagas, legends, ballads and myths” (Holbek 326), served as a model and precedent for later studies of structure which were particular to the folk tale: “The stable and regular formal characteristics he was looking for are more pronounced in folktales than in any other oral genre” (Holbek 326).

 Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928)

Propp was one of the most influential works on the structural components of the folk tale, though his tactics have been both criticized and revised. Propp asserted that there would be no progress in the historical-geographic approach without structural models with which to break up the tales into distinct elements which could be then compared with those elements of other tales: “We shall insist that as long as no correct morphological study exists, there can be no correct historical study. If we are incapable of breaking the tale into its components, we will not be able to make a correct comparison” (Holbek). You can find the entire list of Propp’s functions here.

Propp’s morphology focuses on the characters and events as significant in terms of their functions in the tale, functions which are universally constant. Thus, ethnographic concerns, the particular features observed in folktales which are culturally specific, are not considered as interesting or important. Propp’s rigid structuralism leaves no room for interest in variation, rather all folk tales are reduced to a single pattern, as Propp’s fourth thesis affirms, “All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure” (qtd. in Holbek 34). Thus, it is dubious whether “comparison” was really the ultimate project of Propp.

However, despite the reductive tendency of Propp, his structural observations are acute and largely applicable to many folk tales, particularly the märchen (fairy tales).

Holbek makes productive use of these 31 canonical functions in his revised method of both Propp and Kongas Maranda (see below).

Paradigmatic Model of Kongas Maranda and the Revised Model by Bengt Holbek: Kongas Maranda

A Soviet Structuralist, Maranda devised her paradigmatic model as a tool for teaching children about the general pattern of fairy tales. The model represents the hierarchical opposition of class which is overcome in the course of the tale; the LYM (Low Status Young Male) or LYF (Low Status Young Female) becomes a HYM (High Status Young Male) or HYF (High Status Young Female), so the model stresses the fairy tale’s protagonist’s progress from low status to high status.

Holbek’s morphological approach divides the fairy tale into five sections which correspond to Propp’s functions: “move I (Pf 1-8), move II (Pf 9-14), move III (Pf 15-22) and move V (Pf 23-31)” (Holbek 415). Hero and heroine must absent themselves from dependence on their parents or original community (Move I), endure tests from an authority figure which prove their sexual maturity and social competency (Move II–also known as the Donor sequence, since a gift usually figures here as the externalization of the quality which the hero(ine) has demonstrated by passing the tests), meet their prospective mates (Move III), prove to the parents and communities of their would-be spouses that they are indeed mature, independent and powerful, often shown by completing another task(s) (Move IV) and finally uniting hero and heroine in marriage (Move V). This basic pattern is subject to various qualifications and certainly does not apply to all folktales. Yet many of the basic themes of opposition do prove constant.

Psychoanalytic Approaches

One obvious problem here is that “There is no generally recognized theory of the structure and workings of the mind” (Holbek 259) But Freudian and Jungian applications have both had some success, though these applications often furnish their own conclusions rather than relying on what is manifest in the text.

Freudian approaches have often interpreted fairy tales as though they were dreams, thereby assuming that the same censorship thatFreud believes operates in dreams is similarly at work in the generation of fairy tales. The magical characters, items and beasts therefore begin to figure as substitutions for that which has been repressed. With some ethnographic enlightenment as to the particular taboos of a culture there may be some room for the role of censorship and repression in fairy tales, but to assume that Freudian taboos and obsessions are universal is a dubious starting point and ultimately a cultural imposition and projection of the analyst..

Jung’s model of individuation is an application for any archetypal hero quest, which according to Jung expresses the spiritual progress of the protagonist: the hero(ine) must realize a lack, confront the shadow (the unconscious aspect of the self), confront the opposite gender of the self–male or female (meet the anima or animus), and finally integrate the conscious ego with these aspects (shadow, animus, anima) to form a total self (see Holbek 295-297). By applying Jung’s schema of individuation certain aspects of a tale may indeed be brought to light, but the danger is of course accepting the ready-made explanations which are built in to individuation—the marriage for example would always be a union of animus and anima, the male and female aspects of the self (Mary-Louise Von Franz’s Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales involves a Jungian approach).

Holbek’s Seven Rules

These rules propose how storytellers generate the magical aspects of a tale and are useful for analysis, though very much rely on Freudian and Jungian symbolic assumptions.. Holbek’s general assumption is that storytellers construct marvelous elements as a strategy to give voice to issues which are subject to external censorship, these issues involve social taboos characterized by tensions of class, gender and family.

This is Holbek’s thesis of the production of the marvelous (symbolic) elements in fairy tales: “The symbolic elements of fairy tales convey emotional impressions of beings, phenomena and events in the real world, organized in the form of fictional narrative sequences which allow the narrator to speak of the problems, hopes and ideals of the community” (435).

One should probably look at these Seven Rules more as Seven Tools, since a closed system closes the text.

Table 6.2 Holbek's Seven Rules

Ethnographic Approaches

These perspectives focus on the folk tale in its natural context: the beliefs and practices of the community which produced the tale, and the interplay between storyteller and audience. Emerging from the ethnographic approach came what is now known as the “craftsmanship” viewpoint, which defines “oral verbal art as a traditional art form practiced with individual skill” (Holbek 39). Exploration of the specific beliefs of a culture has generally overlapped with anthropological studies, though whereas anthropological models have generally stressed universal features of different societies, ethnographic studies concentrate on investigating what defines a particular culture in of itself, not in reference to an abstract model of general human nature.

Linda Dégh critically explores the relation between narrator and audience in Folktales & Society. Dégh also suggests that ethnographic approaches contribute to the project of the historical-geographic method, since variations of a tale can be better accounted for when one understands the culture in which the variant appeared. In opposition to the rather static model of Aarne and Thompson, Dégh views each step of transmission of a folktale to be a living act of creation:

Functionally, both the individual telling the story and the listeners take part in the new creation. [. . .] We are thus equally interested in tradition, narrator,and the community attending storytelling sessions: all three combined should yield the key to the origin of the folktale, to the ethnic and individual changes in it, and to therole and the essence of the community (Dégh 52).

Dégh observes closely the storytellers in the Hungarian community of Kakasd and distinguishes between the tale bodies used by the narrators and their stylistic and material contributions to the tales. A vast difference exists among the storytellers, some improvise to a great degree, due to sheer creative enthusiasm, others are more concerned with duplicating as exactly as they can how they heard the tale. Chicherov Uffer, whose categories of the storyteller Dégh cites, also distinguishes the teller of folk tales from the teller of legends: “He is the historian of the people, whereas the teller of tales is an artist” (174).