Folklore and Fairy Tales
According to Jack Zipes in "Breaking the Disney Spell," "Fairy tales were first told by gifted tellers and were based on rituals intended to endow with meaning the daily lives of members of a tribe. As oral folk tales, they were intended to explain natural occurrences such as the change of the seasons and shifts in the weather or to celebrate the rites of harvesting, hunting, marriage, and conquest. The emphasis on most folk tales was on communal harmony. A narrator or narrators told tales to bring members of a group or tribe closer together and to provide them with a sense of mission. The tales themselves assumed a generic quality based on the function that they were to fulfill for the community or the incidents that they were to report, describe, and explain. Consequently, there were tales of initiation, worship, warning, and indoctrination. The tales came directly from common experiences and beliefs. Told in person, directly, face-to-face, they were altered as the beliefs and behaviors of the members of a particular group changed.
With the rise of literacy and the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the oral tradition of storytelling underwent an immense revolution. The oral tales were taken over by a different social class, and the form, themes, production, and reception of the tales were transformed.
What we today consider fairy tales were actually just one type of the folk-tale tradition, namely the Zaubermärchen (magic tale), which has many sub-genres. The French writers of the late seventeenth century called these tales conte de fées (fairy tales) to distinguish them from other kinds of contes populaire (popular tales), and what really distinguished a conte de fée was its transformation into a literary tale that addressed the concerns, tastes, and functions of court society. The fairy tale had to fit into the French salons, parlors, and courts of the aristocracy if it was to establish itself as a genre.
With the rise of literacy and the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the oral tradition of storytelling underwent an immense revolution. The oral tales were taken over by a different social class, and the form, themes, production, and reception of the tales were transformed.
What we today consider fairy tales were actually just one type of the folk-tale tradition, namely the Zaubermärchen (magic tale), which has many sub-genres. The French writers of the late seventeenth century called these tales conte de fées (fairy tales) to distinguish them from other kinds of contes populaire (popular tales), and what really distinguished a conte de fée was its transformation into a literary tale that addressed the concerns, tastes, and functions of court society. The fairy tale had to fit into the French salons, parlors, and courts of the aristocracy if it was to establish itself as a genre.
While the literary fairy tale was being institutionalized at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century in France, the oral tradition did not disappear, not was it subsumed by the new literary genre. Rather, the oral tradition continued to feed the writers with material and was now also influenced by the literary tradition itself. The early chapbooks (cheap books) that were carried by peddlers to the villages throughout France contained numerous abbreviated and truncated versions of the literary tales, and these were in turn told once again in these communities. In some cases, the literary tales presented new material that was transformed through the oral tradition and returned later to literature by a writer who remembered hearing a particular story.
Such violation of oral storytelling was crucial and necessary for the establishment of the bourgeoisie because it concerned the control of desire and imagination within the symbolic order of western culture.
Unlike the oral tradition, the literary tale was written down to be read in private, although, in some cases, the fairy tales were read aloud in parlors. However, the book form enabled the reader to withdraw from his or her society and to be alone with a tale. This privatization violated the communal aspects of the folk tale, but the very printing of a fairy tale was already a violation since it was based on separation of social classes. Extremely few people could read, and the fairy tale in form and content furthered notions of elitism and separation. In fact, the French fairy tales heightened the aspect of the chosen aristocratic elite who were always placed at the center of the seventeenth and eighteenth century narratives.
The literary fairy tale tended to exclude the majority of people who could not read, while the folk tales were open to everyone. Indeed, literary fairy taless were individualistic and unique in form and exalted the power of those chosen to rule. In contrast, oral tales had themes and characters that were readily recognizable and reflected common wish fulfillment (Zipes).
The stories that peasants told one another reflected the harsh, unjust, and often cruel circumstances of their existences as virtual slaves to the nobles. A common theme in their folktales is overcoming social inequality to attain a better way of life. In many tales, a poor lad outwits a nobleman, wins his daughter in marriage, and gains lifelong wealth. This theme is found in "The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship," a Russian tale; "The Golden Goose," a German tale; and "The Princess on the Glass Hill," a Norwegian tale (Zipes).