On the Origin of the Wondertale

Abstract

The study of folklore began to distinguish the wondertalea as a quite definite, discrete genre of oral prose narrative toward the end of the nineteenth century. Although there is still no agreement on the most appropriate term to designate this category, the range of folklore texts whose plots are listed in the Aarne-Thompson Index under the numbers 300-7502 is sufficiently well defined that in practical terms it is usually clear whether a particular text belongs to this category. It is much more difficult to determine whether this distinction is conventional, or whether the wondertale does have an objective distinct place among the different varieties of folk oral narratives and constitutes a group of texts linked by common laws, peculiar to them alone, of formation, evolution, and currency. It is quite clear that the wondertale can be characterized not by the motifs it contains (they all exist in other folklore genres as well), but rather by the way these motifs are used to construct the whole. The qual...