The Meaning of Folktales

Abstract

A FOLKTALE may be described as a story handed down by oral tradition from mouth to ear among people generally in fact illiterate, though not necessarily so, for even in the academic world the stories told from man to man of such great characters as Jowett or Robinson Ellis or J. E. B. Mayor are in fact a local folklore, and none the less so as many of these anecdotes have from time to time strayed from the conversation of Commonrooms into the publicities of print. For indeed the folktale need not have been all through its history oral. People tell stories that they may well have read in books; all they ask is that it be a good story. Many genuine folkstories have been at first literary and passed later into oral tradition: in this stage they are as much folktales as any others. Here is an example. The legend of St. Alexios, the Man of God, originated it seems in Syria as a piece of hagiography ; with the name of the saint altered to Johnnie it has recently been recorded among other folktales in the neighbourhood of Kerasund 1 : to the storyteller it makes no difference whence his story comes. Another story that has been in and out of the two currents of transmission, oral and by books, seems to be that of the Patient Griselda. Elsewhere I have tried to show that behind the story as written down by Petrarch and after him by Chaucer, there is a widely spread folktale. From this stage the story reached Petrarch who has taken as his cruel hero what seems to have been a real Marquis Walter, whose name as the husband of Griselda has now become a part of the folkmemory of his native town Saluzzo. Later by way of popular chapbooks the Griselda story has become folklore again and we now have it in Europe in both forms.