Differences in Content and Outlook between English Folk Rhymes and Tales

Abstract

EVEN a cursory glance at folk rhymes and folktales tells us that there are major differences between the two: the rhymes tend to speak about everyday people afid occurrences, while the tales tend to speak about special people and extraordinary occurrences; rhymes tend to be realistic, while the tales tend to be fantastic. A closer examination reveals that these two genres contain many more important points of contrast in both their content and their outlook, and that, in fact, the differences are far more profound than the similarities. This study investigates eight hundred and fifty English folk rhymes (nursery rhymes) and ninety-seven English folktales.' Only traditional tales are used, so that the rhymes and the tales have both passed through the oral stage. And, since the folk rhymes are English, only English tales are used, to avoid skewing the data because of possible idiosyncracies of national traditions. The corpus of tales includes Mdrchen, legends, animal tales, etiological tales, drolls, cumulative tales, and nonsense tales. Although more tales are Mdrchen than any other type, no attempt has been made to restrict the study solely to Mdrchen, because there is no indication that this type of tale was kept separate from the other types in the telling. The findings of this study would, of course, appear even more striking were Mdrchen alone considered. A significant number of English rhymes and tales, then, are examined in detail; the differences in content and outlook are discussed below, and an explanation for these differences is posited. Let us consider first the content of the rhymes and the tales. In his study of English ballads and tales, Shuldiner reports 'a tendency toward complementary distribution of subject matter.'2 This same tendency is evident in the content of the English folk rhymes and tales, as we shall see. When we begin with the characters, we note that the majority of people in the rhymes are common folk like lazy Elsie Marley, Old Mother Hubbard, Jack and Jill, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. A few kings and queens appear, but, like the ordinary folk, they are portrayed doing very commonplace things: Old King Cole smokes his pipe and listens to music, the Queen of Hearts is baking tarts, while good King Arthur makes a bag-pudding. These are not special people; whether common or royal, they lead mundane lives. The main characters in the tales, on the other hand, are just the opposite. They may be aristocratic-and there certainly are many more aristocrats in the tales than in the rhymes-or they may be common, but in either case they are extraordinary people who have incredible experiences. They are, as Liithi says, 'heaven's favourites.'3 Both prince and commoner journey to the ends of the earth (the prince in 'The King of England and His Three Sons' and the poor girl in 'The Well of the World's End'); others travel to giantland or fairyland ('Jack and the Beanstalk' and 'Tamlane'); still others experience a transformation (Princess Margaret is turned into a dragon in 'The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh'). No matter what may befall these characters, we know it will be marvellous and extraordinary, for here we are not dealing with run-of-the-mill people. Emphasizing the ordinariness of the characters in the rhymes are the numerous