A Companion to the Fairy Tale (review)

Abstract

A Companion to Fairy Tale. Edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri. London: D. S. Brewer, 2003. 294 + viii pp. University presses have recently begun publishing companions at terrific rate. As Judith Ryan suggests in Profession 2004, this may be in part desperate effort to find profitable books to publish at time when monographs are selling in smaller and smaller numbers. But what is these days? And why should we want them? Whose are they supposed to be? OED says that companion is used often as title of books of reference, vade-mecum, but few of recent ones are actually reference books. Often they seem loosely designed as collection point for assorted scholarly essays on one topic or writer. While some bring readers up to date on relevant scholarship, some are already dated when they come out. Many, in fact, remind me of old series like Prentice-Hall's Twentieth-Century Interpretations (of one work) or Views (of one author). In any case, we now have two fairy-tale companions: Oxford Companion to Fairy (2000, ed. Jack Zipes) and newer A Companion to Fairy Tale (2003), reviewed here. They reflect completely different approaches to genre. Oxford version is essentially in encyclopedia format, with short, alphabetized entries for individual authors, illustrators, and tales and few longer articles on topics such as British and Irish Fairy Tales or Psychology and Fairy Tales. (Full disclosure: I wrote about ten of entries in that volume.) new version is collection of fairly long essays, ranging from general ones about interpretation and creativity to essays on Grimms and Andersen to series of pieces on traditional tales from Ireland to Ossetia. (It would have helped this reader to have brief biographies of contributors. Only one scholar, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, contributed to both collections.) Zipes focuses on literary fairy tale (with slight overemphasis on material written for children), while new one constantly shifts its focus from written materials to oral transmission and back again. This uncertainty of focus is evident in introduction by editors, Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri. As they say in first paragraph, a distinction must be made between oral fairy tale, recorded with various degrees of accuracy, as delivered by storyteller to audience, and literary fairy tale, individual creative work of writer. However, there is no clear-cut division between these two types, which constantly overlap. This is certainly true-but then they immediately go on to discuss Andersen and Grimms and their in popular oral tradition, as if this were most important part of their work. Although they return to point that fairy tale is not an exclusively literary or exclusively oral phenomenon, they emphasize now-outdated methods of Finnish school in examining transmission of tales. Throughout introduction (and essays that follow) there is no unifying critical position but rather grab-bag effect: lets include little of everything and see what we come up with. book begins with two ambitious general essays that are grab bags themselves. In The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Derek Brewer draws on somewhat outdated research to claim that the defining qualities of fairy tales . . . are to be discovered in their oral roots and that most fairy tales are about growing up, development of hero or heroine following interdiction or transgression. …