Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2012 18:46:45 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] Once Upon a Time - fantasy. criticism
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

A very balanced appraisal of literary criticism of Grimm's.

Really. The author, and apparently those cited, miss the one *other*
element: that those on the bottom, knowing they cannot revolt, having
seen or heard of recent peasant revolts put down, value the cleverness
of outwitting the dull and evil lords.

Excerpt:
There are two varieties of fairy tales. One is the literary fairy tale,
the kind written, most famously, by Charles Perrault, E. T. A. Hoffmann,
and Hans Christian Andersen. Such tales, which came into being at the
end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works - short
stories, really - except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy
ducks, princesses who dance all night, and so on. To align the tale with
the hearthside tradition, the author may also employ a certain naivet of
style. The other kind of fairy tale, the ancestor of the literary
variety, is the oral tale, whose origins cannot be dated, since they
precede recoverable history. Oral fairy tales are not so much stories as
traditions. In the words of the English novelist Angela Carter, who
wrote some thrilling Grimm-based stories, asking where a fairy tale came
from is like asking who invented the meatball. Every narrator reinvents
the tale. The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to
the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord
and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were
composed. The premodern tale tellers might also be thought of as
descendants of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon Dark Ages or of the griots
of West Africa, men whose job it was to carry stories. But scholars tend
to associate fairy tales with women, at home, telling stories to one
another to relieve the tedium of repetitive tasks such as spinning
(which often turns up in these narratives). Each woman would add or
subtract a little of this and that, and so the story changed.

In the Grimms' time, industrialization was starting to simplify or
eliminate certain domestic chores. For that reason, among others, the
oral tale was beginning to disappear. Intellectuals considered this a
disaster. Hence the many fairy-tale collections of the period, including
the Grimms'. They were rescue operations. The Grimms, in the
introduction to their first edition, assert that almost all their
material was "collected" from oral traditions of their region and is
"purely German in its origins." This suggests that the tales were
supplied by humble people, and the brothers say that their primary
source, Dorothea Viehmann, was a peasant woman from a village near
Kassel. They claim that they did not change what Viehmann or the others
said: "No details have been added or embellished."
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/23/120723crbo_books_acocella?currentPage=all>

         mark