Comparative Analysis on Fairy Tales

¶ … Tales Are Not Just Children's Play -- The Importance Of Folklore In College Education

Although fairy tales are often considered to simply exist as palatable and easy to understand tales for children, this has more to do with the modern legacy of Disney cartoons than the actual genealogy of this literary tradition of oral narrative. In fact these stories did not originate as tales to ensure that young people behaved in a proper and decorous manner. Rather they are quite literally, tales of the common folk (hence 'folktales' or 'fairy tales') and populace. These tales provide snapshots of common cultural values particular to a people and to a cultural tradition. The Brothers Grimm quite explicitly attempted to catalogue oral narratives of their native, rural Germany, providing a bloody chronicle of the sociological values and assumptions of this heritage. Even though Hans Christian Anderson attempted to construct his stories more obviously as an individual author, still his Christian and Scandinavian values are in evidence in the ways he constructs his tales, which are based upon the legends of his own childhood.

Thus it is vitally important that the tales collected by the Grimm brothers be studied in college because they are one of the few living texts that still exist that encompass common values and narrative structures of individuals who may or may not have been literate. The tellers of these tales did not have the means to preserve their words in published form, yet still created a vibrant, narrative oral art. In college, there is too much of a privilege given to the history and literature of the higher echelons of society, those who were literate, educated, urban, and quite often male. By including folklore into the education, this tendency of the university syllabus is subverted, or at least minimized.

The value of cultural heritage evident in folklore is evident in one of the Brothers Grimm's most infamous tales, namely "The Juniper Tree." This story highlights the conflict present between the children of an earlier marriage, and the commonality of reconstructed families in a society where women frequently died from childbirth. The story ends with a grotesque banquet, where the stepmother, because of her jealousy, engages in a horrific act of cannibalism -- highlighting the scarcity of food in peasant society as well, where life was very often an eat or be eaten struggle in quite elemental terms.