Post 4 of N

[wellstar]

Hey, I'm back! Might as well get this one posted as well, since letting the question sit has not yielded any better answers than when I started writing it.

ayelle asks, "Do you feel that fairy tales and folk tales are the same genre, or different

Comments

[ayelle]

Good heavens, why did I ask you that? In retrospect, it seems kind of jerky, especially compared to everyone else's questions about your life and stuff. But I like your answer!

(Looking at the date, early September, I think the mostly likely explanation is that I had been discussing the topic with my class at the start of the semester, and so it was on my mind. If it was inspired by the class discussion, I was definitely not looking for a scholar's answer, FWIW.)

(Also: groan)

[wellstar]

As I was preparing it to post today, the thought crossed my mind that you had been looking for discussion fodder for something on your syllabus and that posting it now however many months later was too little too late.

Fact of the matter is, I spend far too much time being introspective about my life, so it's just as well you got me out of...well, not my head, exactly, but into a different headspace, perhaps. I got stuck on an ending, however, so those puns were, I'm afraid, conceived out of desperation.

[scholargipsy]

Speaking as a folklorist, I'd say that, as folklorists use the terms, "folktale" and "fairy tale" (or "Märchen," to give it its scholarly designation, do not refer to exactly the same things. A folktale is any oral narrative (whether later written down or not) that exists within both one or more bounded folk groups and across multiple generations, chronologically speaking. It's a broad genre-legends are folktales, as are jokes, believe it or not.

Fairy tales, or Märchen, or magic tales, or whatever you want to call them, are a subset of folktales; they are folktales that deal with supernatural characters and/or events. So not all folktales are fairy tales, but all fairy tales are folktales...and not all fairy tales have fairies in them, but you knew that already. :)

Of course, in popular usage, the two terms quickly come to seem interchangeable. Genre studies is a messy business.

[wellstar]

Yes, I thought you might have something to say on this topic. I would not consider the terms interchangeable, even colloquially, but certainly see them as related. The nested approach makes sense to me, especially applying an academic perspective. As for genre studies, I would consider the distinctions useful in establishing expectations and making connections, and limiting insofar as they can alienate or secularize particular interests from a more inclusive worldview about the value of different approaches to navigating and making sense of the world. This taps into larger questions about labels and identity and things like snobbishness and typecasting, for lack of better terminology. I keep wanting to say something about people's eagerness to utter statements like "I am/an not an X person" where X is a noun rather than an adjective (e.g. math vs. analytical, to use a frame of reference I'm more accustomed to) but I don't know if that applies. I guess it comes down to using texts (broadly interpreted) as teaching tools and which

[scholargipsy]

If folklore depends on oral transfer, what is the internet doing to the field?

Chiefly, complicating it. The old guard argues that this newfangled Internet isn't a locus of authentic folk tradition, and the newer guard (who have the ascendancy) argue that online communications replicate many of the features of traditional oral transmission, right down to anonymous replication.

Really, it comes down to the fact that folkloristics, theoretically understood, can shed light on the Internet just as it can any area where human beings create and sustain traditions (i.e., any place where there are humans). But the term "folklore" sounds old-timey, and some people have trouble letting go of the notion that its proper area of study is not just pre-modern in a sense, but anti-modern. I am sympathetic to both perspectives.