Fairy Tale and Folktale Fans Unite!

The Goose Girl is sad and a little bit terrifying for me. I first encountered (an adaptation of) it in "A Wolf At The Door And Other Retold Fairy Tales," and then I read the actual tale and I'm like ":( Why they kill the poor horse?"

Also, the maid is kind of sociopathic to be flinging death threats around so frequently.

Isn't everyone in the old fairy tales kind of sociopathic, though? I should count the next time I have to stop myself from saying, "That escalated quickly" or "That wasn't reasonable!"

What a coincidence, I looked up this topic again when I wondered today about this fairy tale that I kept thinking was called The Goose Girl but it was actually Tattercoats (the girl was basically Cinderella, except with a guy best friend who herded geese with magic pipe instead of a godmother.) So, I read The Goose Girl for the first time today and yeeech poor horsie!

Have you read Shannon Hale's fairytale novels?

Fairy-tales in general were made to teach kids morals through allegory, hence the overblown punishments/reactions.

Doesn't make them any less fascinating.

Shannon Hale's stuff does sound interesting! Helen Trevillion also has a song out about the Goose Girl that confused me when I first listened to it because my mind was still stuck on Tattercoats and her goose boy.

I am morbidly fascinated by gory fairy tales. The thing is, I don't know if they were even really overblown at the time. Things like drawing-and-quartering were things that could happen legally to adults, so I don't now if people in the olden days just had a higher pain tolerance or lower empathy or what. But it might have been describing to kids things that were likelier to happen than we soft futuristic civilized folk have in our daily life, with our Geneva Conventions and lethal injections with alcohol swabs.

edited 31st Dec '14 11:43:13 PM by Faemonic

I'm into fairy/folktales for the often trippy imagery and the genuine sense of wonder that magic has. A lot of fantasy right now is way too gritty and "realistic," and it's boring now.

Ohhh folktales. I love the Icelandic ones... and do legendary sagas count?

I don't see why they shouldn't! I guess the sagas are not generally as well-known as the Eddas or even the Child Ballads, though.

edited 7th Feb '15 5:35:01 AM by Faemonic

Well, one of my one-shot stories has gone from a seasonal-magic thing (with mild influences from The Snow Queen and Disney's Frozen) to a setting-update of East Of The Sun And West Of The Moon. I was up late last night and suddenly a snippet flew into my head, and now there's this stuff about "True North" and the North Star germinating in my head.

edited 13th Feb '15 11:12:23 PM by Sharysa

Thanks for the link, Sharysa! This is why TV Tropes is my favourite place on the internet. I'm liking The Feather of Finist The Falcon because the leading lady isn't disrespectful of her bird-man's personal preferences nor is she easily manipulated by her wicked sisters or busybody mother. It's other people directly interfering and sabotaging a romantic relationship that they're not even in. More stories should show how bad and annoying that is. And I like Pintosmalto for the genderswapped Pygmalion aspect combined with sirrah/knave in distress. It's refreshing.

The bird-husband is a very interesting variant of the animal-bridegroom formula—it seems to be a Mediterranean/Southern-European thing, because it's very prominent in Portugal and Spain while Western and Northern Europe tends more towards large mammalian predators (bears and wolves).

As for the animal-groom theme in general, context is really important because the bride's immense naivety made a lot more sense in the days/regions when pre-teens would marry grown men. Of course they'd listen to their mothers/family to the point of stupidity if they're still essentially children.

Still, I'm definitely going to work on the "well-meant but clueless family/in-laws" in my Setting Update.

edited 18th Feb '15 10:26:13 AM by Sharysa

Please comment on one of our folktales, Bawang Merah Bawang Putih. I like the version with the tree growing out of fish bones. Personally, I think the fish part is influenced by Ye Xian.

edited 28th Feb '15 4:55:06 AM by Blurring

Most of the actual stories are either in Indonesian/Malay or in Tagalog. I can somewhat read Tagalog, thanks to being American-born. :P The only English translation I've found is pretty crappy, so now I keep reading it in a mix of my family's accents and not-quite-right word choices.

But going from Wikipedia, it sounds a lot like the general Cinderella/evil-stepsister story with the added element of Yeh Shen's fish-spirit/mother.

"Bawang Merah, Bawang Putih" sounds very Aarne-Thompson 480, one of my favourite story types right now because I can see the purpose to demonstrate how to be Good and how to be Evil, but people aren't that simple and life isn't that simple, so I like when that story is given more variety (for example, in Gail Carson Levine's version of Diamonds and Toads.) What if something harmful can be reframed as something virtuous in a different context? Then what can we define as injustice worthy of retribution? Or is it the nature of a person, or the deeds that they do, that define what's good and evil? Okay, that last one was a Batman movie.

Chinese influence is very common here so it is possible it can seep in.

I heard that Yeh Shen is the progenitor of the original Cinderella story, brought in by traders and travellers to Germany, does this make sense?

I don't know, there's a lot of surprisingly common themes in folklore. The Cinderella story format reaches all the way to North America.

I started getting intensely interested in fairy tales and folklore in high school. I have a small collection, but my favorite of the books I own are Tatterhood and Other Stories of Magic and Adventure and The Serpent Slayer.

I love Tatterhood! I'm amassing a small collection of my own. I've got Italo Calvino's Italian Folk tales, Lang's Blue Fairy Book, Lady Gregory's Gods and Fighting Men, a book of Scottish fairy stories, and a kids collection of "stories from around the world."

plus an assortment of full-novel retellings. Shanon Hale's Goose Girl, Edith Pattou's East, Jessica Day George's Princess of the Midnight Ball...

This review of Disney's live action Cinderella blames Hegel for introducing the antithesis, now everyone who retells a fairy tale tries to put a dark and gritty spin in it, like a dog marking a fire hydrant as their territory.

Maaaaan. I mean I'm all for putting more action into adaptions sometimes, but does everything have to be dark gritty?????? man. if you want dark gritty cinderella, don't retell cinderella, retell the italian varient where the three sisters set the palace on fire and rob the coatroom.

Oh, no, the writer of that review was surprised that Disney's live action Cinderella didn't try to put a spin on it. Sorry I didn't make that clearer. I think Cinderella can still be gritty, what some versions having her stepmother dismembering her blood-daughters' body parts just so that they could fit a shoe, and getting their eyes pecked out by birds at the end, but that last bit was probably more an exaggerated moral indignation than a dark and gritty reboot for its own sake.

Apparently people don't tell simple and virtuous fairy tales nowadays because we're too hung up on the antithesis, which I just thought was an interesting idea even if I disagree.

No I got that. I just don't like that it's expected and thought of as needful. I love just the simple...light, happy.

Personally, I think it's time for a Reconstruction of fairy tales. My story Moonflowers is pretty Grimmified right now, but it's still got Hades and Persephone aiding the protagonists because they're outraged at how casually the Wild Hunt treats life and death.

Not to crash the conversation buuuuut... Would any of you know where I might find some collections that point out on a map which region the tale was collected from? I found a Scottish book that came with a map once. So I was wondering if could find some collections like that for Italy, an' Czechoslovakia.

edited 11th Aug '15 2:08:38 AM by Yewleaf

Unfortunately not, but most fairy-tale collections put at least a mention of the specific story's country of origin. That's what my fairy book collection does.