marycatelli (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marycatelli) wrote2014-02-16 10:06 pm
marycatelli) wrote2014-02-16 10:06 pm
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The Enduring Power of Fairytales
The perennial fairy tales found all over the world in slightly varied form.
Do they answer to some deep need?
And what's a fairy tale anyway? J. R. R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" came up, and there was discussion about needing magic. A bit later, I put in "Catskin." Fairy tale: father doesn't want a girl, only a son, so he goes to marry his daughter off to anyone who'll have her, she demands three fancy dresses in an attempt to escape, and then a catskin coat, sneaks off, gets a job in a scullery, goes to the ball three times in her fancy dresses, marries the young lord, has a child, tells her husband about her family, and her husband goes to retrieve her father, now forlorn, and willing to do anything to see his daughter again. Notice the total lack of magic. Mind you, many of "Catskin"'s variants have magic, as a panelist pointed out. The coat she demands can be magic, or the chest she uses to flee over land and sea; she might even turn into a bear; but it's not required.
This panelist also noted it's not popular nowadays, which she thinks stems from its recommending running away.
Many female-centric one. (Me I'm dubious about this one, because I'm not sure anyone's gone and counted. It's the true of the most popular ones nowadays.)
Can't remember whether this was the panel where they talked about the way European ones got out. If so, this was where I observed that the publication of Grimms' Fairy Tales produced a noticeable shift how oral fairy tales were told -- in Japan.
Do they answer to some deep need?
And what's a fairy tale anyway? J. R. R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" came up, and there was discussion about needing magic. A bit later, I put in "Catskin." Fairy tale: father doesn't want a girl, only a son, so he goes to marry his daughter off to anyone who'll have her, she demands three fancy dresses in an attempt to escape, and then a catskin coat, sneaks off, gets a job in a scullery, goes to the ball three times in her fancy dresses, marries the young lord, has a child, tells her husband about her family, and her husband goes to retrieve her father, now forlorn, and willing to do anything to see his daughter again. Notice the total lack of magic. Mind you, many of "Catskin"'s variants have magic, as a panelist pointed out. The coat she demands can be magic, or the chest she uses to flee over land and sea; she might even turn into a bear; but it's not required.
This panelist also noted it's not popular nowadays, which she thinks stems from its recommending running away.
Many female-centric one. (Me I'm dubious about this one, because I'm not sure anyone's gone and counted. It's the true of the most popular ones nowadays.)
Can't remember whether this was the panel where they talked about the way European ones got out. If so, this was where I observed that the publication of Grimms' Fairy Tales produced a noticeable shift how oral fairy tales were told -- in Japan.
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We also talked, come to think of it, about children and fairy tales. I brought up that while adults told them about the court about Louis XIV, well, one novel recounts how a man declared he would tell one at a salon, and the hostess said she loved them as much as if she were a child. While fairy tales were told here and there in literature throughout history, the first collection that had only what we would call fairy tales was Rennaissance - Giambattista Basile's. A panelist went on about this, because Basile and Giovanni Francesco Straparola wrote their fairy tales for adults, Perrault in fact pretended his son had written his tales.