Folk and Fairy Tales. A Handbook (review)

Abstract

Folk and Fairy Tales. A Handbook. By D[ee] L. Ashliman. Greenwood Folklore Handbooks. Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 2004. viii + 268 pp., bibliography, index, illustrations. Ehis handbook of Folk and Fairy Tales by D. L. Ashliman is intended for students, teachers, storytellers, and readers of folktales who want to know more about the stories that are so familiar to them. As Ashliman puts it, his handbook examines the origins of these traditions and their development into the body of literature known today as folk and fairy (vii). Ehe handbook has five chapters, each with its own introduction, and it contains numerous historical illustrations. Ehe first two chapters give a survey of the history of folktale collections in the Indo-European tradition - the question arises as to why he limits his scope to this tradition - and describe genres as well as problems of classification. In chapter 1 several main areas of research are outlined relating to the age of folktales, their migration, their function, their meaning, and their symbolism. Ehe second chapter deals with definitions and classifications. Ashliman gives terse information on terms such as folklore; he describes special varieties like the fairy tales by Charles Perrault (Mother Goose) or those by the Brothers Grimm; he defines genres such as myth, legend, folktale; and he informs us of the classification system of the International Eype Catalog AT (now ATU) and illustrates specific elements of style and structure of the International Type Catalog by practical examples. In chapter 3 Ashliman briefly comments on examples of storytelling in different genres, which are listed in alphabetical order: from the cumulative tale, the etiologic tale, up to the urban legend, a term that has gone out of use (modern legend is more current). The examples are mainly taken from printed sources and stem from well-known collections (Fanchatantra, Gesta Romanorum, Thomas Percy, Johann Peter Hebel, Brothers Grimm). Chapter 4 is quite short and is dedicated to scholarship. It outlines different approaches and fields of folk narrative research. Chapter 5 gives a summary of all activities related to folktales up to our time. The result is a conglomeration of themes, which allows Ashliman to present topics he has already discussed in a different context. In the same chapter he points out phrases derived from famous folk and fairy tales that have become current in everyday language, for example, Kiss a frog or Let the genie out of the bottle. Joke makers and artists of diverse backgrounds use the imagery of folktales in their productions, Ashliman tells us. Finally, he shows in an exemplary manner how motifs, themes, and subject matters appear in the works of famous authors like Giovanni Boccaccio, Shakespeare, and in children's literature and the media of the twentieth century. At the end of the book there is a glossary, a bibliography a list of Internet resources, and an index. D. L. Ashliman has worked repeatedly on the history of the European fairy tale. He has presented a typological list of folktales following the AT classification system under the title A Guide to Folktales in the English Language (1987). His Internet homepage (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/ashliman.html) provides useful links for folk-narrative research. On the whole, his handbook is a convenient tool for narrative research and provides a good orientation to students and other people who are interested in the topic. It is not suited for more advanced studies. Ashliman remains caught up in a romantic perspective on folk and fairy tales and does not take important new fields of research into consideration. Of course, a handbook can offer only a rough and superficial survey of such a vast area like folk-narrative research, as becomes clear by comparison: the Enzyklopadie des Marchens expects to have around thirty-eight hundred articles to cover the field (eleven volumes have been published so far, up to the article Seele [soul]). …