Research Guides: Oral Tradition (Folktales): Critical Articles

Articles

"Folktales in Newfoundland Oral Tradition: Structure, Style, and Performance" by J. D. A. Widdowson
It is often thought that while England has a rich heritage of legends, it lacks the range and variety of the Märchen found in the great nineteenth-century collections. The survival of such folktales in oral tradition in Newfoundland provides clear evidence that these narratives were once commonplace in England and Ireland and were transferred to the New World. Although the basic plots of the tales are similar to published versions in European collections, their structure is looser, more informal, and less predictable. The tales offer insights into the genre as a living, malleable, and virtuosic performance, which is difficult to capture on paper.
"The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales" by Siegfried Neumann
In the following essay, Neumann evaluates the extent to which the Brothers Grimm "faithfully" preserved folk tales in keeping with the Germanic oral tradition, stating that, "storytellers of an impulsive or imaginative nature ... break away from the original and endow the Grimms' tales with innovations in content and a different linguistic guise.
"The relationship between oral and literary tradition as a challenge in fairy-tale research: the case of Finnish folktales" by Satu Apo
The question of the relationship between oral and literary fairy-tale traditions is linked to a number of theoretical discussions in the study of folklore—for example, the origin of the genre, the history of particular tales, and the authenticity of folklore. These questions have also been addressed from cultural historical perspectives, analyzing the contexts in which fairy tales became literary works in different centuries. What is more, the ethnography of reading and writing has raised some new questions about how folk narrators gained access to written fairy tales and the extent of literacy in different European countries in the nineteenth century, when the great majority of tales were recorded. To judge from existing Finnish folktale collections, there have been several types of narrators: oral and illiterate; narrators who could read but who performed their tales orally; and narrators who were able to re-create their favorite fairy tales in writing. The author examines these questions using Finnish folktale versions of "Beauty and the Beast.

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