fairy tales
Jun. 25th, 2012 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliHaving pontificated about proverbs, and started a variant of the Golden Bird, I wish to observe that stealing a fairy tale is much easier.
Though it does involve a pile of reading.
Say, Andrew Lang's books -- The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, etc. -- twelve in all. Grimms' collection. Joseph Jacob's -- between English, Celtic, Indian, and European, six in all. Asbjørnsen and Moe.
Lots of them in libraries. Or, since they are public domain, you can check them out here. Note that I do not particularly recommend Perrault, or Anderson, or Madame d'Aulnoy, or Giambattista Basile or Giovanni Francesco Straparola for this purpose. They are the literary variants. The others, on the other hand. . . . Thomas Crane for Italian (or Italo Calvino, but you'll have to buy it or getting from the library, it's not public domain) or A. H. Wratislaw for Slavonic tales. . . .
And other, not public domain ones. Some cultures they weren't published until too late for public domain, and others weren't translated in time. But after you've read two or three dozen such collections, you will have a feel for commonalities. You can construct your own variant, stealing the basic plot, and flourishes from this tale and that one, plus a few of your own devising.
If you already know you want a tale, you can check out more of Sur La Lune: all the fairy tales in the left bar have a selection of variants among their other annotations, so you can pick out "The Six Swans" and read a dozen or so variants and get a feel for how it changes cross cultures.
Though it does involve a pile of reading.
Say, Andrew Lang's books -- The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, etc. -- twelve in all. Grimms' collection. Joseph Jacob's -- between English, Celtic, Indian, and European, six in all. Asbjørnsen and Moe.
Lots of them in libraries. Or, since they are public domain, you can check them out here. Note that I do not particularly recommend Perrault, or Anderson, or Madame d'Aulnoy, or Giambattista Basile or Giovanni Francesco Straparola for this purpose. They are the literary variants. The others, on the other hand. . . . Thomas Crane for Italian (or Italo Calvino, but you'll have to buy it or getting from the library, it's not public domain) or A. H. Wratislaw for Slavonic tales. . . .
And other, not public domain ones. Some cultures they weren't published until too late for public domain, and others weren't translated in time. But after you've read two or three dozen such collections, you will have a feel for commonalities. You can construct your own variant, stealing the basic plot, and flourishes from this tale and that one, plus a few of your own devising.
If you already know you want a tale, you can check out more of Sur La Lune: all the fairy tales in the left bar have a selection of variants among their other annotations, so you can pick out "The Six Swans" and read a dozen or so variants and get a feel for how it changes cross cultures.
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no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 08:17 am (UTC)I always wonder why some fairy stories become detached from their origins and become big stories with lots of different retellings, and some of them never get more than perhaps a few lines in a local history book...
I remember going to a bonfire storytelling event at university - wasn't sure what story to tell, so I had a quick rummage in a local history book and found a nice tale about a woodcutter and a dragon : it was very brief, just a line or so, but had the basics - I reckoned if I expanded it a bit with some nice atmospheric detail, popped in a couple of comedy rustics etc, it would do nicely.
I've never forgotten how dubious the people at the story telling were that this was really a traditional tale. They had never heard of it (well, why would they, I only found it because I looked up the name of a local hill), and since I told it with my own colouring to it and without notes, they were convinced I'd made it up, even though I hadn't changed any of the details. I'd just added some so it was a proper story rather than just a 'they say that once a woodcutter chopped a dragon in two on that there hill'...
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Date: 2012-06-26 01:42 pm (UTC)But your story didn't have a Disney version. . . .
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Date: 2012-06-26 07:54 pm (UTC)Elsewhere, somebody mentioned a story they'd read for some class or other that involved the following:
-a saint and a bear
-a devil on a many-legged horse
-a hill with a Bible verse on it.
At some point in the course of the discussion, they concluded that this was derived from a Norse story in which the many-legged horse was presumably Sleipnir and went on to draw parallels from there.
Unfortunately, none of my efforts so far (including asking the person who brought it up) have identified the story or elicited a more detailed description, and given your extensive reading, I wondered if you recognized it.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 11:09 pm (UTC)Though the Sur La Lune site has a link to its discussion board. I've seen a number of people get stories from description there.
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Date: 2012-06-27 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 02:46 am (UTC)