The different theories and schools of thought that have attempted to explain the historical development of folk narrative date back to the early collections and analyses of folk literature in the late 18th century and extend up to present‐day considerations about the nature of storytelling in modern, technological societies. In the history of folk narrative scholarship, the main prose genres have been folk tale, legend, and myth. The folk tale continues to be the most extensively studied of the prose genres. Although many theoretical perspectives have evolved directly from the study of the folk tale, they have often been applicable to other genres as well. An overview of research on folk narrative can be grouped according to four general directions of inquiry, which do not always constitute separate schools, concerning the question of origin, form, meaning, and style.
1. Precursors
The formal study of folk narrative began with Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who were the first systematic collectors and scholars. Others predated them, but it was the Grimms who provided the earliest theoretical and methodological statements on folk narrative, from Jacob's initial observations on genre to Wilhelm's description of their sources and research methods. For the Grimms, their research on folk narrative was part of a conceptually holistic project of Germanistik (German studies) encompassing the areas of philology, law, mythology, and literature. Although their fairy tales were appropriated by the German middle class, who saw in them an instrument for the socialization of children, their primary purpose in publishing the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales) was first and foremost as a contribution to the history of German folk poetry.
Collections of literary fairy tales, such as Giambattista Basile's Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen and Charles Perrault's Contes de ma Mère l'Oye had already enjoyed considerable popularity by the time the first collections of folk literature, focusing initially on poetry, ballads, and folk songs, were published. Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a three‐volume collection of traditional English and Scottish ballads, appeared in 1765, the same year as James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian, which would later be denounced as the fraudulent fabrication of the editor. The collections of Percy and Macpherson had a profound impact on the German philosopher and writer Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in turn inspired the Grimms.
Herder was convinced that Volkspoesie (folk poetry), which included prose and lyric genres, was the only true poetry, because its natural vitality and simplicity were uncorrupted by the destructive forces of modern civilization. For Herder, folk poetry constituted the genuine expression of national character. He believed that German literature had lost touch with its native traditions, and that only through studying folk poetry, which still survived among the German peasants, could Germany recover its true national and cultural identity. He articulated his goal of reviving the nation's past in Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur (Fragments on Recent German Literature) and published his own collection of international folk songs, Lieder (Songs), later retitled Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (The Voice of People in Songs) in 1778–9.
2. Origin
In the mid‐19th century the prevailing intellectual climate was concerned with the question of origins. Rapidly developing technology brought about increased travel to and greater knowledge of other places in the world, and with it investigations into the origins of the human race as well as that of language and culture. Related to the question of origins for folk‐narrative scholars were the issues of distribution and dissemination, as these processes constituted the traceable links between past and present forms of folk narrative.
Both the Grimms and Friedrich Max Müller, a Sanskrit scholar who translated the Rig‐Veda, were proponents of the Indo‐European theory of mythic origins, which held that European folk tales were the fragmented remains of the myths of Indo‐European peoples. The aim of research was to reconstruct the Indo‐European parent language, and by extension Indo‐European folk tales and their original meanings. On the basis of comparative linguistics and comparative mythology, they attempted to reconstruct the myths and the mythic‐religious beliefs that gave rise to these narratives.
Statements expressing the belief that folk tales were part of the cultural inheritance from a common Indo‐European past can be found in Jacob Grimm's 1834 Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology) and in the preface to the 1856 edition of the Grimms' Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen. In the latter, Wilhelm Grimm observed that folk tales contain ‘fragments of belief dating back to the most ancient times’. Demonstrating his penchant for naturalistic metaphors, he compared the mythic in folk tales to ‘small pieces of a shattered jewel which are lying strewn on the ground all overgrown with grass and flowers, and can only be discovered by the most far‐seeing eye’.
Müller and George Cox were also proponents of ‘solar mythology’, the idea that folk tales derive from myths about natural phenomena. They posited that early humans were fascinated by the dramas of nature, specifically the movement of the sun, and that early language described natural processes in concrete and personified terms. Myth evolved as language became increasingly abstract and rational, in the attempt to explain obsolete concepts and linguistic forms no longer comprehensible to modern man.
Another school of thought on the origins of the folk tale was proposed by Theodor Benfy, a German orientalist whose reading of the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen led him to believe that India was the probable source of the European folk tale. Rather than rely on the philological speculation practised by Müller, Benfy examined Indic texts as well as the relationship between oral and literary traditions. He concluded that the dissemination of tales from India to Europe occurred through three avenues: first through oral tradition before the 10th century, later through the vehicle of Persian and Arabic translations of Indian literary texts, and finally through contact between Muslim and European populations. Present‐day scholars consider India as one of several important sources for the European folk narrative tradition and subscribe to the theory of polygenesis (many origins) when accounting for the similarity of narrative traditions throughout the world.
The search for origins acquired greater rigour in the hands of Finnish folk‐tale scholars, who developed what is known as the historical‐geographic method of folk‐tale analysis. Eschewing preconceptions about the origin and meaning of folk tales that characterized much of 19th‐century thought, this approach consisted of assembling all known variants of a single folk tale from archival and literary sources as well as oral tradition, isolating the tale by its component parts, and plotting the distribution of the tale over time and space. The central premiss of this method was that each tale had a single origin (monogenesis). Multiple variants of a particular tale were attributed to diffusion, with the best tales travelling the furthest in wave‐like circles from their point of origin.
The goal of the researcher working within the Finnish school was to reconstruct the history of a particular tale and determine its hypothetical Urform (original form). The central units of historical‐geographic analysis consisted of the ‘motif’, defined as the smallest narrative element capable of persisting in tradition, and ‘type’, a traditional tale comprising many motifs and having an independent existence. In addition to developing key analytic concepts in folklore scholarship, this direction of folk narrative research produced important research tools and reference works for comparative analysis, most notably Antti Aarne's Types of the Folktale, expanded and translated by Stith Thompson and therefore known as the Aarne–Thompson index, and Stith Thompson's six‐volume Motif‐Index of Folk Literature. Although their usefulness is greatest when analysing European and European‐derived traditions, they offer the most widely recognized classification system for the identification of international folk narratives. In addition to the compilation of indices, several important handbooks and methodologies developed out of the Finnish school, among them Kaarle Krohn's Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode (Folklore Methodology) and Stith Thompson's The Folktale.
3. Form
Folk‐narrative scholars have also asked themselves why certain ideas and experiences take a particular form. Andre Jolles approached the problem of form as a category of poetic expression in Einfache Formen (Simple Forms). Narrative, he suggested, originates in and takes its form from the expression of fundamental human experiences, which exist in the mind of the individual as a Geistesbeschäftigung (mental occupation) until they are expressed linguistically in a particular narrative form. Social change brings about different experiences, and this has prompted scholars to re‐examine the analytic categories and typologies developed in earlier times from the study of traditional narrative. The German folklorist Hermann Bausinger demonstrated in ‘Strukturen des alltäglichen Erzählens’ (‘Structures of Everyday Narration’) and Folk Culture in the Technical World that contemporary storytelling, while often non‐traditional in form and content, none the less is created out of many of the narrative impulses outlined by Jolles.
Considerations of form have contributed to the analysis of narrative structure. Structuralist approaches to folk narrative had their heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s and were applied primarily to the study of the folk tale and myth. Folk‐narrative scholars generally distinguish between two types of structuralism, one developed by the Russian formalist and literary scholar Vladimir Propp, the other by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss.
Propp's The Morphology of the Folktale applied Russian formalist criticism to the relatively small corpus of tales in Aleksandr Afanasyev's collection of Russian fairy tales. Rejecting Aarne's classification system based on categories of the motif and type, which he considered inconsistent and unscientific, Propp devised a method of identifying the structure of narrative elements in relation to one another and to the tale as a whole. His basic unit of analysis was the ‘function’, defined as the actions of a character from the point of view of its significance for the development of the course of action. Propp determined that functions occur in a fixed sequential order, often in pairs constituting an action and its consequence, and that there is a maximum of 31 possible functions, although not all 31 will necessarily occur in a given tale. He demonstrated that folk tales with very different content have a similar structure, consisting of a series of ‘moves’ from conflict to the resolution of that conflict. Although Propp's Morphology of the Folktale appeared in 1928, its importance for international folk‐tale scholarship was only fully realized with the first English translation in 1968. The American folklorist Alan Dundes applied Propp's system to North American Indian folk tales as well as in investigations into the structure of proverbs.
For Lévi‐Strauss, who analysed myths within the study of comparative religion, myths reflected the logical structure of the human mind. In ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, he compared the structure of the Oedipus myth with Zuni origin myths, concluding that the logic of mythological thought and the structure of narrative were based on the mediation of binary opposites, such as nature and culture or man and woman. Unlike Propp, for whom structure remained a question of syntax, Lévi‐Strauss sought to relate structure to cultural context and symbolic meaning.
4. Meaning
Most studies of folk narrative have ultimately been driven by the search for meaning, although only a few theories about the meaning of folk narrative led to fully developed schools of thought. Herder and the Grimms, convinced that folk narrative was the purest expression of national character, attributed great cultural importance to the collection and interpretation of folk narrative for all nations, in particular for Germany. Their belief that folk narrative reflected cultural values did not translate into a detailed analysis of specific tales, but rather contributed to the general applied nature of their work. Meaning was as much a question of political and cultural application in their contemporary context as it was a problem of historical development.
Theories of meaning in the 19th century were also linked to questions of origins and often conceived within paradigms of progress: the Grimms believed that the meaning of tales was linked to the Indo‐European past; solar mythologists held that myths and folk tales developed out of early man's explanations of natural phenomena; and British anthropologists, adopting the evolutionary theories of the day that all societies pass through the same stages of culture at different historical moments, concluded that folk tales were survivals of primitive myths. All held that while the forms of narrative persisted, their original meanings had been lost.
In the 20th century psychoanalytic interpretations, following in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, have claimed to uncover the meanings of folk narrative in the unconscious desires of individuals, often in the correlation between dreams, fairy tales, and myths. This direction of analysis began with Freud's 1913 essay ‘The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales’, analysing a patient's dreams containing motifs from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Wolf and the Seven Kids’. It was supported by Karl Abraham's assertion that ‘the dream is the myth of the individual’ and extended in Géza Róheim's conclusion that dreams provide the raw substance for myths and tales. Where solar mythologists saw nature symbolism in myths and folk tales, Freudian psychoanalytic readings see symbolism of a sexual nature. Carl Jung, however, rejected the narrow emphasis on sexual symbolism in favour of what he called the ‘collective unconscious’. One of his more important essays for folk narrative research analyses the psychology of the trickster figure in the mythology of North American Indians.
In The Uses of Enchantment the Freudian‐trained child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim concluded that fairy tales speak to the unconscious of a child, thereby aiding the child in overcoming inner struggles, such as sibling rivalry and Oedipal conflicts, through the presentation of simple situations, polarities that are easy to comprehend, and solutions to conflicts in the form of happy endings. In the United States, the most prolific proponent of psychoanalytic interpretations of folk narrative has been the folklorist Alan Dundes.
5. Style
Stylistic considerations have been textual and contextual in nature, with text‐centred approaches predominating from the beginning of folk narrative research up through the first half of the 20th century. The earliest conceptions of folk narrative, defined alternately by Herder as Naturpoesie (natural poetry) and Volkspoesie (folk poetry), derived from his philosophy of aesthetics and contributed to the romantic idea that folk literature, with its strong rhythms and vibrant imagery, was closer to nature because the peasants, who retained the folk‐narrative traditions, remained tied to the land and were less affected by the force of civilization. Similar statements can also be found with the Grimms, whose understanding of the style of folk narrative was both romantic and rigorous. The romantic underpinnings of their ideas derived from the period of romanticism in which they lived, while their rigour was the result of their comprehensive knowledge of and extensive study into German language, literature, and culture. Influenced as they were by Herder, they held that the style of Volkspoesie, in contrast to the deliberate and conscious creation of Kunstpoesie (art poetry), was organic, resembling the ‘half‐unconscious growth of plants watered by the source of life itself’. Prefaces to editions of the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen, for example, praised the simplicity, innocence, and purity of the oral traditions they sought to preserve. For them the inherent style of folk literature derived from its social and cultural context and resided in the text. Their work on German grammar, the history of the German language, and particularly on their Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) provided them with an impressive knowledge of the evolution of German language and the place of folk literature within that framework. Jacob's Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar) included a comparison of German regional dialects and Wilhelm's appreciation for folk speech and idiom was reflected in later editions of the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen. Jacob also addressed the question of generic styles, when he observed that the fairy tale is more poetic, the legend more historical.
In the 20th century, important contributions to the study of folk narrative style have come from literary scholars as well as ethnographers. In The European Folktale, the Swiss folklorist and professor of literature Max Lüthi identified the central stylistic features of the folk tale as: one‐dimensionality (the unproblematic coexistence of real and enchanted worlds); depthlessness (an absence of psychological depth and motivation); abstraction (the lack of realistic detail and a proclivity towards extremes, contrasts, and fixed formulas); and isolation and universal connection (the lack of sustained relationship between characters).
As style was thought to be inherent in the narrative itself, the text‐centred approaches of the Grimms and later scholars viewed story‐telling from the vantage point of an abstract ideal, favouring stability and adherence to tradition over individual artistry and innovation. Storytellers were seen as ‘bearers of tradition’, whose role it was faithfully to reproduce stories they had learned. Although the Grimms appreciated Frau Dorothea Viehmann, one of their main sources, for her ability to narrate ‘carefully and confidently and in an unusually lively manner’, their praise was based more on her accuracy while adapting to their recording needs than her actual performance style. Later theories explaining the stability of oral tradition, such as Walter Anderson's ‘law of self‐correction’, regarded stylistic variation as an error corrected by a communal aesthetic.
In the 20th century ethnographers introduced a shift in focus from text‐centred studies of folk narrative to the social context and creative process of storytelling. Ethnographies from the Russian and Hungarian schools of folklore examining the personality of storytellers and the social function of storytelling in a community, such as Mark Aadowskij's Eine Siberische Märchenerzählerin (A Siberian Teller of Fairy Tales) and Linda Dégh's Folktales and Society: Storytelling in a Hungarian Peasant Community, contributed towards a richer understanding of the meaning of storytelling for narrator and audience. In the United States, context‐sensitive ethnographers from various disciplines began to conceive of performance as an aesthetically marked event, in which narrators assume responsibility for artistic communication. Viewing performance as an emergent event in which aesthetic aspects of communication predominate, researchers in this tradition are as much interested in the process of storytelling as the text produced through performance. Precursors to this ‘performance‐centred’ approach include the work of Prague School linguists emphasizing actual performance over rule‐based competence, and the ‘oral‐formulaic’ theory of Milman Parry and A. B. Lord delineating the complex technique of oral composition by which lengthy epics are created and recreated in performance through the use of ‘formulas’, groups of words regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given idea.
Bibliography
- Aarne, Antti, The Types of the Folktale (1910; enl., with Stith Thompson, 1928; 2nd rev. edn., 1961).
- Bauman, Richard, Verbal Art as Performance (1978).
- –– and Scherzer, Joel, Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (1974).
- Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment (1976).
- Jolles, Andre, Einfache Formen (1930).
- Lord, A. B., The Singer of Tales (1960).
- Lüthi, Max, The European Folktale: Form and Nature (1982).
- Propp, Vladimir, The Morphology of the Folktale (1968; orig. 1928).
- Thompson, Stith, The Folktale (1946).
- ––Motif‐Index of Folk Literature (1955–8).
— Mary Beth Stein
