The Editor's High Chair

With the publication of Alex Haley's Roots, all ethnic groups are beginning to search out their own roots. As a result, there is a great and growing interest in that universal root literature shared by children and adults: the folktale. Important meetings such as that of Children's Books International IV at the Boston Public Library in 1978 are planned to investigate the folktale.

Actually, however, the role of the folktale as the literature of the future began with the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century. Literary figures, including the critic, G.K. Chesterton, added impetus to the growth of the literature. In the early twentieth century, his seminal essay, "The Ethics of Elfland," was influential enough so that it was later included in an anthology of great essays edited by the philosopher-mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead. Chesterton pointed out how fairy (folk) tales open our eyes: "They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

Other important writers have fostered the continued growth of respect for folktales. In "On Fairy-Stories," J.R.R. Tolkien has compared folktales to the soup at the back of an old stove: "The Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty."

Psychologists of various schools have also furthered the growth of interest in folklore. Bruno Bettelheim's best selling work, The Uses of Enchantment, urges the wholesome quality of the tales. In his essay, "A Note on Story," (Children's Literature, Volume 3), James Hillman of the Jung Institute, Zurich, describes how, as a depth psychologist in Zurich for thirty years, he has used folktales to help adults get the jig-saw puzzles of their minds together. Folktales are therapeutic for all ages.

At the present time, "adult and child have come to be set against each other," according to Hillman. If this is the case, then it would seem to follow that it would be good to set up national story-telling centers, where students could be trained to tell stories to the major ethnic groups. The storytellers could go out into the towns and cities, into neighborhoods, gather children and adults, and tell them some of the most loved folk stories of that particular group—Greek, Jewish, white or black.

In the Centers, besides the trainers of storytellers, there could be scientists and scholars in various disciplines—clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, cultural anthropologists—who would prepare questionnaires which could be taken into the neighborhoods, and when completed, would give a more comprehensive picture of neighborhood needs and problems.

It may be argued that the ancient art of storytelling is not practicable in a television-oriented world. But such eminent child psychologists as Dr. Jerome Singer at Yale have indicated they believe that families can be retrained to listen if they are convinced of the wholesomeness of Story for all concerned. Not only the listeners but the tellers would benefit, for the practice would give work to many hundreds of young and old people who (hopefully) would be paid partly by the town, partly by the government. Instead of remaining passive, old people could tell stories. (That they can write poetry has already been demonstrated by that imaginative and people-loving writer, Kenneth Koch, in I Never Told Anybody Teaching Poetry in a Nursing Home. New York: Random House, 1977.)

Some persons concerned with sex role stereotypes and violence in folktales have failed to see that folklore contains all of life, the good and the bad, and helps us to achieve a psychic balance. But important scholars of children's literature, including Virginia Haviland and Anne Pellowski, have long appreciated the wisdom of the tales, which they have collected and disseminated. Universities have recognized the significance of the study of folklore and have established Institutes, such as that at Indiana University, and have produced such valuable works as the Stith Thompson Motif-Index, which is used internationally.

This issue of Children's Literature begins with an interview with one of the great friends...