Folk literature - Folktale (2023)

The oral fictional tale, from whatever ultimate origin, is practically universal both in time and place. Certain peoples tell very simple stories and others tales of great complexity, but the basic pattern of tale-teller and audience is found everywhere and as far back as can be learned. Differing from legend or tradition, which is usually believed, the oral fictional tale gives the storyteller absolute freedom as to credibility so long as he stays within the limits of local taboos and tells tales that please.

A folktale travels with great ease from one storyteller to another. Since a particular story is characterized by its basic pattern and by narrative motifs rather than by its verbal form, it passes language boundaries without difficulty. The spread of a folktale is determined rather by large culture areas, such as North American Indian, Eurasian, Central and Southern African, Oceanic, or South American. And with recent increasing human mobility many tales, especially of Eurasian origin, have disregarded even these culture boundaries and have gone with new settlers to other continents.

In many preliterate cultures folktales are hardly to be distinguished from myths, since, especially in tales of tricksters and heroes, they presuppose a background of belief about tribal origins and the relation of men and gods. Conscious fictions, however, enter even into such stories. Animals abound here whether in their natural form or anthropomorphized so that they seem sometimes men and sometimes beasts. Adventure stories, exaggerations, marvels of all kinds such as other world journeys, and narratives of marriage or sexual adventure, usually between human beings and animals, are common. Much rarer, contrary to the views of earlier students, are explanatory stories. Tales of this description are especially characteristic of Africa, Oceania, and the South American Indians.

In much of the world, especially Europe and Asia, the folktale deals with a greater variety of incidents than just described. In the course of time folktale scholars have given most attention to this area and have classified these stories so that the vast collections of them in manuscripts or books can be referred to with exactness.

All readers of such collections as those of Grimm will easily recall examples of tales of speaking animals. These may be old, Aesop’s fables or parts of the medieval Reynard epic, but most of them are based on some ancient oral tradition. Such animal stories are especially numerous in eastern Europe. But better-known perhaps are the ordinary folktales that deal with humans and their adventures. For these tales, usually laid in a highly imaginative time and place—a never-never land—and filled with unrealistic and often supernatural creatures, there exists no good English word, so that usually scholars use the German term Märchen. Here belong “The Dragon Slayer,” “The Danced-Out Shoes,” the “Swan-Maiden” tales, “Cupid and Psyche,” “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Faithful John,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and the like. Here also belong certain stories with religious or romantic motivation and tales of robbers and thieves—“Peter at the Gate of Heaven,” “The Clever Peasant Daughter,” “Rhampsinitus.” A major division of this classification of tales deals with jests and anecdotes. Examples are the many stories of numskulls, of clever rascals, and tall tales filled with exaggerations or lies. Finally come formula tales like “The House that Jack Built.”

Among jokes and anecdotes a number are risqué or actually obscene. The indexes of the classification have included only those occurring in the published regional surveys. These surveys, and the books and manuscripts on which they have been based, have been subject to severe editing in order to avoid social or even legal offense. Some of the older anthropologists thought to avoid the eyes of the nonscholar by writing such tales in Latin, but generations since have been much less squeamish. Folk stories now appear in print covering the gamut of the erotic—tales of seduction, realistic descriptions of normal or abnormal sexual activity, and scatological stories of great indecency.

This index of tale types fits the region for which it was planned and is constantly being improved and expanded, but it was never designed to cover the world. The Eurasian types are usually recognizable in any part of the globe, and for them this type index is valuable. But for use with stories on a worldwide basis something less formal is needed, a classification of the possible or likely narrative motifs, minute or extended, and wherever found. Such a motif index has in fact proved useful outside of the Eurasian area, wherever comparative studies are undertaken, for parallels or analogues in simple motifs occur even in far distant places, often presenting extremely puzzling problems.

By use of such indexes and from the labours of many scholars, much material for examination of the folktale is available. These studies have been pursued since the 18th century, though until about 1900 most of them were premature attempts to answer the general question of where folktales come from. Eventually it became clear that no satisfactory solution is available but that every tale has its own history and can be studied only with laborious attention to detail.

In contrast to a literary story, with its standard text and author living in a definite time and place, the folktale is anonymous. Its originators have long been forgotten and it exists in many versions, all equally valid. Instead of being fixed like a literary document, it is in continual flux. But, with hundreds of versions of a particular tale available for study, it is possible to establish certain norms of plot structure and to point with some assurance to the varieties of subtypes that give clues to its life history. Such an analytic study of these hundreds of versions usually results in some hypothesis about the original form of the plot and the passage the tale has taken through time and space. In this way some 30 or 40 of the more complicated stories have been studied.

These geographic and historical investigations depend on the fact that the plot of the tale is complex enough to admit of really analytic study. For simpler stories and anecdotes, scholars have had to be content with less exact methods, usually resulting in nothing more than accounts of their distribution and the known facts of their history.

Most of the attention of students of folktales during the 20th century was given to historical questions and to preparing the apparatus for studying them—collecting, with ever improved techniques, arranging and archiving materials from manuscripts or books, and indexing types and motifs, so as to make collections even in remote or difficult idioms available to the serious investigator. But the folktale also has given rise to studies that are not strictly historical.

The attempts during the 19th century to find hidden meanings in tales were generally based upon the theory that they were broken-down myths and had lost their original meanings through linguistic misunderstanding. The result was that this “original meaning” was always found to be some conflict between weather or seasonal phenomena (winter, summer; clouds, sunshine; etc.). This type of interpretation is now out of fashion and has given place sometimes to explanations based upon ancient rituals or to some variety of psychoanalytic treatment. Though both of these possible sources of folk literature merit examination, the resultant interpretations have usually been merely astonishing to those acquainted with the actual history of the tales studied.

A much more fruitful approach to an investigation of folktales has been the studies of the tellers of stories and their audiences. From these has come an appreciation of the way in which folk literature is carried on in a tradition. A great deal more may be expected from such investigations, usually based on an intimate knowledge of the living lore of a single people.

Structural studies, especially of the folktale, have been engaging the attention of more and more scholars. Though particular plots may occur over large parts of the world, the form and literary style of the narrative is likely to be traditional within certain historical or geographic limits. The direction and strategy of these studies of structure are still unclear, but progress is being made.

Generally folktales are considered both by tellers and listeners as purely fictional. The line, however, between belief and unbelief is vague and varies from culture to culture and even from person to person, and even in the most sophisticated societies legends of strange things from the past or present continue being told and are usually believed.

Stories about marvelous creatures are worldwide. Often these are merely mentioned or described and the belief in their existence is taken for granted. Frequently, however, there are circumstantial accounts of meetings with them, which result in adventures pleasant or distressing. With such creatures it is sometimes hard to tell whether we are dealing with a fictional story such as that of the dragon slayer of the typical European fairy tale or with a legend actually believed, such as that of St. George and the dragon. Although people throughout the world believe these stories to varying degrees, there exists everywhere a remarkable resemblance among these supernatural creatures. The dragon, for example, in something of its characteristic serpent or crocodile form, is of great importance in China as well as in Europe and is represented in both places as a guardian of great treasure. Hardly less well known is the unicorn, and various combinations of man and beast such as the centaur and the minotaur have been a part of the legends of the Old World and occasionally of the New. Giant birds carrying men off in the claws, the phoenix reviving from its own ashes, flying horses carrying men through the air, sirens, mermaids and mermen, and unbelievable creatures resembling these appear in traditions all over the world. There are treasure animals of all kinds, not only the goose that lays the golden egg but the cow that furnishes treasure from its ear. The horse may warn the hero of danger or may determine which of two roads he should take. Important building sites are said to have been determined by the actions of a wise animal. Speaking animals, of course, figure prominently in all folk literature and even in such literary forms as the fable. Animals may speak to each other on Christmas Eve, or they may have governments and elect kings or celebrate weddings. These are only a few of the traditions current with a large part of humankind.

The relation between the animal and the human is very close in all folk literature. In the preliterate cultures of the American Indians, the Pacific Islanders, or the Central Africans, the culture heroes who are responsible for the good and the bad in the life of the tribe may upon one occasion appear as animals and upon another as men. Such was true of the ancient gods of Egypt or Greece. The question whether Coyote of the American Indian tribes is animal or human apparently makes no difference to those who tell stories about him.

Aside from these semidivine creatures, now animal or bird or man as they wish, supernatural and ill-defined creatures, much more difficult to visualize, are also common. Fairies or their counterparts appear in the legends of a good part of the world. It is hard to define them, for in one place they will appear in full human size, in another as little creatures inhabiting mounds or caves or living under the roots of trees. In some countries they are benevolent creatures, helpful to men and women. They reward human services but punish misdeeds. They marry or consort with human beings. In some traditions they are malevolent creatures, and meetings with them always bring disaster or bad luck. Almost every country has produced its own variety of helpful and harmful creatures. Stories of the activity of witches and devils, or water spirits and the supernatural guardians of mountains or trees vary in details from land to land, but many of the incidents related about them are easily transferred from one to another. Stories of visits to quite other supernatural realms, fairyland, for example, may be told in all their details in Russia or Greece. Giants are usually considered to be ogres of one kind or another but they may also be considered the most stupid of all beings and may be the subjects of hundreds of numskull anecdotes. Underground creatures like the dwarfs in “Snow White” are usually helpful and kindly, but other underground creatures bring only disaster.

The widespread belief in the return of the dead has resulted in many stories of encounters with ghosts or of actual resurrection. These stories differ greatly in various parts of the world and are much influenced by the current religious ideas. It is likely that in the whole world of traditional literature the belief in ghosts has survived longest.

Traditions of historic characters have a tendency to repeat themselves from land to land and, although they are told as facts, may form as definite patterns as any fictional folktale. Such stories as Joseph and Potiphar’s wife or the exposure and ultimate return of the hero appear in many places. The expected return of King Arthur from Avalon or of Barbarossa from his cavern are only two examples of a widespread motif of this kind.

It is difficult and perhaps impossible to distinguish the explanatory legend from the myth. Tales explaining the origins of customs or of the shape or nature of various animals and plants, of such distant objects as the stars, or even of the world itself often ascribe such origins to the action of some ancient animal or to some magic transformation. These are often connected with stories of the gods or demigods and may even be a part of the religious beliefs of those who tell them.

Generally, legends and traditions of this kind are simple in their form and contain only a single motif or at most two or three. The problem of proper classification for the purpose of studying these has proved very difficult, for while the materials of these legends and traditions show many interesting parallels and resemblances, they vary greatly from place to place. The relation of these stories to actual history, to mythology, and to the fictional folktale is of much interest to students of folk literature.