Snow White History of Fairy Tales Legends
Snow White (Fairy Tale History) The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul. The dark path of the fairy tale forest lies in the shadows of our imagination, the depths of our unconscious. ... We do children--and ourselves--a grave disservice by censoring the old tales, glossing over the darker passages and ambiguities. ... (Windling) Throughout history, stories have occasionally come along that captured the imagination and passed down from person to person through many generations until finally they became the product of an entire culture rather than their creators alone. While they may have originated as literary tales, they later became part of a great oral tradition as they spread by word of mouth (The Tales and Their Tellers). ... Apart from their entertainment value, folk tales can offer us insightful glimpses into the cultures from which they spring. The term “folk tale” refers not to a specific kind of literature but instead serves as an umbrella that covers many types of tales that have certain features in common. Fables, myths, legends and fairy tales all fall within this broader class. The characters in each of these types of folk tales typically appear as one-dimensional stereotypes such as an evil old man or a wise woman who encounters some astonishing circumstance. ... A fairy tale represents a particular category of folktale both lengthier and more complex than legends, myths, and fables (The Origin and Evolution of Fairy Tales). Oddly, most fairy tales that remain popular today do not even have fairies. The term originally derived from the French “contes des fee” which literally translates as “to tell” (Fairy Tales: Evolution of the Tales). France’s contes des fee, which first appeared in print in the seventeenth century, had far more fairies than the best-known tales of today. The fairy tales of other cultures took a different path. The Germans, for example, call fairy tales Märchen, a term with no exact equivalent in the English language. The Brothers Grimm first popularized Märchen as a form of literature in Germany when they published a collection of tales in the seventeenth century. Since their collection includes only tales of German origin gathered from peasants, fairies make only a rare appearance. The versions of fairy tales that eventually made it into print often underwent significant editing to remove some of the darker and more gruesome aspects of earlier versions, as their intended audience also changed (The Tales and Their Tellers). When we hear the term “fairy tale,” most of us probably form an immediate association with such names as the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Anderson. Yet in the early years when fairy tales first began to appear in print, the number of female authors exceeded that of male authors. Even when the fairy tales still belonged to the oral tradition, women often created them and certainly played a greater role than men in passing them down from one generation to the next. Perrault, the Brothers Grimms and others actually only collected these older fairly tales and edited them to suit their audiences. Perrault, the famous French writer, originally gathered his tales to present at the court of Versailles. Fitting the occasion, he had each tale end with a moral (Fairy Tales: Evolution of the Tales).