The Uses and Abuses of Traditional Oral Tales

My double professions of folklorist and storyteller balance with admirable precision. As a folklorist I gain insight into the dynamics of narration, and as a storyteller I value the qualities of authentic oral folktales. I also know that folktales do not live in books, they only hide there awaiting dedicated tellers.

It has been said more times than I care to recall that true storytelling is a dying art. Even the Grimm brothers believed that almost 170 years ago, and their compilation of 210 stories was an attempt to capture the fraying remnants of a once-rich oral literature. Their influence was so durable that few non-folklorists know or care that non-Grimm tales can still be heard in various parts of this continent, though, of course, skilled tellers (rural and urban) are few now and have heavy competition. So long as an old story is told, however, it is not dead, and we have not fully lost that talent. One of the delights of oral tales is that they have remained alive because they appeal to audiences diverse in age, experience, and interests.

There are four good books discussing the value of oral tales from several points of view. The oldest and most serious of these is Stith Thompson's The Folktale (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1946), a very broad scholarly survey of European folktales. Also scholarly but more dynamic (despite its forbidding title) is Linda Degh's Folktales and Society (Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1969), which concentrates on the tellers as much as the tales. An excellent popular scholarly discussion is offered by German folktale specialist Max Luthi in Once Upon A Time (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1970). And of course there is Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), which often transcends its psychological biases and offers a moving defense of old stories.

All of the above writers observe, in one way or another, that the best story is a told story rather than a read story. They also insist that stories in print should be as unadulterated as possible. Since most of our once-oral tales will be in print rather than directly from the lips of the teller, it is particularly important to be aware of the authenticity of a story or a collection of stories. The first thing obviously is to look for material that is clearly identified as authentically oral and traditional. "Literary" folktales are often too sentimental, melodramatic, bland, or overly rationalized to convince discerning listeners of any age. Completeness is also desirable. There are collections of the entire 210 Grimm tales instead of the usual 30 or so selections. One good example is The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1944 & 1972). Another is R. Mannheim's new translation, Grimm's Tales for Young and Old (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977). For a broader scope two more collections by professional folklorists are available: Stith Thompson's One Hundred Favorite Folktales (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), and Richard M. Dorson's Folktales Told Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), a sampling of stories from the multi-volume Folktales of the World series (University of Chicago Press). Both offer authentic oral tales as well as a useful index of type and motif categories for serious students of folktales. Anyone working with oral tales should certainly be familiar with Stith Thompson's Motif Index of Folk Literature, rev. ed., 6 vols. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1955), and Aarne and Thompson's The Types of the Folktale (Helsinki: Folklore Fellows Communications, 1961), both indispensable comparative references. A less scholarly but richly authentic collection of Slavic tales is Russian Fairy Tales collected by A. Afanasiev —the Grimm of Russia—and translated by N. Gutterman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945).

Because of the justifiable success of the Grimm tales we have sometimes forgotten that folktales exist even on our own continent. Perhaps it is because we have been too self-conscious to acknowledge our old European, African, or other roots and have thus preferred the well-known...