The Long and the Short of It: Folktales and Flights of Fancy
In The Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman noted that fantasy worlds were as important as they were because of their existence: “These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.” These worlds exist because we exist, and it is something we love doing, as people. We love telling stories, and we are, by nature, storytellers. (This article is the first in a series that will explore this side to humans and our relationship to stories.)
Folklore and folktales emerged from this love for telling stories, coupled with our quest to find meaning in what we do. While they might have had some basis in facts, they tend to be broader stories about the human condition. Hidden within these stories is a guideline to how humans reason, behave, and respond to some universal (or cultural) idea of “truth” and sometimes, “morality”. It is no wonder then, that there are commonalities in how these stories are told, what meaning they hold — and sometimes, even what stories they are.
Common types of folktales that can be observed in cultures across the world include wonder tales (or fairy tales), that comprise wonderous displays of magic and introduce one to the supernatural, animal tales or fables, which are stories of talking animals and creatures that hold moral value, pourquoi or “why” tales which try to explain why we see some specific occurrences in nature, and tales of tricksters that try to teach lessons through the use of wit and smarts. In reading these descriptions, I’m sure you thought of stories you heard in your childhood that fit the bill for each of these. These categories can be observed in folktales across different cultures, and this is just the beginning in a world of similarities you can see out there.
For the purpose of this piece, I will use the example of Cinderella to demonstrate how cultures across the world are similar in how they tell their stories. The story of Cinderella is one that transcends time and space. It is a story that serves as a great prototype for stories, as people have not tired of listening to versions of it, just as they have not stopped retelling versions of this (and no, I’m not just referring to live-action remakes of movies). Over 900 versions of this story exist across the world, and almost every culture seems to have its own version.
While not the most popular version, the Chinese tale Ye Xian (dated around 850 AD and written by Duan Chengshi) is touted to be the oldest among the Cinderella-stories that exist around the world. It tells the story of a young girl, Ye Xian, replete with the evil and greedy half-sister and stepmother narrative. Burdened with housework, she finds solace when she makes friends with a magical fish in a lake near her house, who eventually becomes her guardian spirit. Even after the fish is killed and eaten by her stepmother, the spirit returns to help Ye Xian get ready for the local festival, where she loses her golden slipper. The slipper is then found by the king, who eventually finds the true identity of the owner of the slipper and takes her back to his kingdom.
Closer to home, in India, there exists a version of Cinderella that is over 1000 years old, too. Adapted from East Indian oral folklore, Nagami tells the story of a girl and her ill-treatment in a household before she is taken under the fold of a guardian snake, who proceeds to protect her from evil. In this story, she loses an anklet that she had worn to the annual festival, and it is through this that her identity is finally discovered and she gets her happily ever after.
The modern version of Cinderella that a lot of us have heard about is a French version, written by Charles Perrault, published in the year 1697 (Cendrillon ou La petite pantoufle de verre). It was this version that Disney adapted for its movies, cementing its popularity. Perrault’s published collection of stories included folktales that previously existed only in oral tradition, as well as ones that he came up with himself. What set his work apart during the time was the sophistication and moral value he managed to attach to these stories. They began being perceived as “real” literature that resonated with the world around them and broke free of barriers of genre.
Why does it become important to note these similarities, though? For one, folktales can be the window to how we perceive and organise our cultures. This means that renditions of the story can provide context to how a particular culture sees its morality, its identity and speaks some truth to power. Folktales can thus give us new ways of understanding the world, speculating what similarities in stories mean for similarities in cultures, and explore what it means to be truly human. As Juliet Marillier says, “Every ancient tale has truth at its heart. That’s what I’ve always believed, anyway. But after years and years of retelling, the shape of those old stories changes. What may once have been simple and easily recognised becomes strange, wondrous and magical. Those are only the trappings of the story. The truth lies beneath those fantastic garments.”
