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Lecture III: The Characteristics and History of the Oral Tale

Nature of Historical Change and

The place of Folktales in Literature

Tales enchant us for several reasons. They beguile us because they are always changing, because they are often told in an atmosphere of intimacy, because they are sometimes more daring and exciting than what appears in print, and because they necessarily speak to our deepest hopes and fears in a sensory, imaginative way.  Most of all, they persist - a quality that carries infinite implications, in itself.

In addition to the kinds of changes that occur through individual tellings, the shifting of a tale to please the audience, the character of the teller, etc., there are large-scale changes that occur in legendstock for impersonal, historical reasons.  We can explain permanent changes this way.   Sometimes the whole culture colludes in the alteration or the extinction of a tale.

Obsolescence

Consider the interpretations that we find in Marvin Harris' incredible accounts in Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches.  According to Harris, cultures discover practices that are useful and contribute to the survival of the group.   They then, quite unconsciously, construct various rituals and dogma that encourage the perpetuation of these practices.  But what happens when environmental, economic, social, or historical conditions change?  What happens to the folklore that supported the once-useful practice?  Some ideas that become archaic simply disappear.  In other cases, the material is "modernized."  And, in other cases, cultures have a stubborn memory, keep the dogma long after the practice is defunct.

Caption:  Representation of a medieval city at a bend in a river. . . tidy and nice

Think, for example, of how much folk material takes place in a "city" like this - one that is on a river, well organized, small enough to draw a picture of! We rarely live in places like this any more - and so our stories about where we live must change, too!   Folklore changes for other, big reasons, as well:

Attrition

Outright loss

Cultural Destruction

Omissions

Caption:  Red Riding Hood (adolescent) in the woods

Eleanor Vere De Boyle--illustrator

and, with the age of print, the inevitable

Print Censorship

The following quotations speak for themselves:

In this new edition we have carefully removed every expression inappropriate for children. -- Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, preface to the 1819 edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales).

And now, before the translator takes leave of his readers for the second time, he will follow the lead of the good godmother in one of these tales, and forbid all good children to read the two which stand last in the book [Tom Totterhouse" and "Little Annie the Goose-Girl"]. -- George Webbe Dasent, preface to the second edition (1859) of his translation of Popular Tales from the Norse by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (Edinburgh: David Douglass, 1888), p. vi.

Many parts [of the old Cornish folk plays] are omitted, as they would in our refined days, be considered coarse; but as preserving a true picture of a peculiar people, as they were a century and a half or two centuries since, I almost regret the omissions. -- Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (London: John Camden Hotten, 1871), p. 395.

"The Swineherd" has certain traits in common with an old Danish folktale, but the version I heard, as a child, would be quite unprintable. -- Hans Christian Andersen, "Notes for Fairy Tales and Stories" (1874), The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), p. 1073).

I have had to omit a certain number of stories as unsuited for publication. -- Cecil Henry Bompas, preface to Folklore of the Santal Parganas (London: David Nutt, 1909), p. 7.

Whenever an original incident, so far as I could penetrate to it, seemed to me too crudely primitive for the children of the present day, I have had no scruples in modifying or mollifying it, drawing attention to such bowdlerization in the somewhat elaborate notes at the end of the volume. -- Joseph Jacobs, preface to European Folk and Fairy Tales (New York: G. Putnam's Sons, 1916), p. viii.

A few (four or five) of the stories are frankly indecent, and are always expurgated from popular editions of the work in Italy, a course which I have followed here. Two or three of the present collection are also a trifle free, but I have decided to leave them in their place, with a few unimportant excisions and alterations. -- Edward Storer's introduction to his translation of Il Novellino: The Hundred Old Tales (London and New York: George Routledge and Sons and E. P. Dutton and Co., ca. 1925), pp. 31-32.

Being productions of a more outspoken age, many of the following tales are, as was to be expected, of a character that is contrary to the taste of the present time. I have, however omitted nothing in this book; but in the case of a few isolated passages and of three entire stories, the nature of which is such as to preclude the possibility of their publication in these days, I have been content to print the original transliterated into the Roman alphabet, but untranslated. -- E. J. W. Gibb, preface to his translation from the Turkish of The History of the Forty Vezirs; or, The Story of the Forty Morns and Eves by Sheykh-Zada (London: George Redway, 1886), pp. xx-xxi.

Folklore, then is always changing.  It changes as a result of the passage of history and time in its oral form and it is materially changed by the historical process of publication.

The place of Folktales in Literature

The transmission of folk tale to printed book - fixing the audience.

As it stands today, we maintain an uneasy balance between the oral material we still reference and the print incarnations of these tales.   In the same way that "pagan" practices went underground during the height of the Christian centuries, oral material keeps getting invented and passed around in a modality quite separate from the commercial channels or the officially-sanctioned literature.

end Lecture Notes 

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