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Author
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Comment
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shadowmann
Unregistered User
(3/26/03 8:26 am)
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first fairy tale
What is considered to be the very first fairy tale written?
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Jess
Unregistered User
(3/26/03 8:32 am)
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"Written" fairy tales
Note that fairy tales derive from oral tellings and so it is difficulty, if impossible, to determine the exact history, that is origins and dates, of most fairy tales. If you are interested in recorded or literary tales, you should visit the Surlalune fairy tale pages. Our webmistress, Heidi, has a time line there which may answer your question.
Jess
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Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(3/26/03 8:44 am)
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giving the question too much thought (must be bored)
Charles Perrault's 1697 collection, histoire ou contes du temps passé is, i believe, the first written collection that we would recognise as "fairy tale" in our conception of the genre.
i.e. It's ostensibly aimed at children (previous fairy tale collections, from Boccaccio, Straparole, to Basile were aimed squarely at adults as were the outputs of Mm. D'aulnoy, L'héritier et al). The narrative style is simplistic and faux naif, Perrault even attributed authorship to his son. The tales are (c)overtly didactic, with morals in rhyme at the end of each tale.
However, even if you were to take Perrault as the father of the contemporary fairy tale genre, you would run into a problem because the definition of fairy tale is notoriously tricky. If you believe a fairy tale is "collected" rather than "written", then Perrault is not going to be recognised as he altered his sources quite liberally. Then again, so did the Grimms, Calvino, Yeats . .
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Jane Yolen
Unregistered User
(3/27/03 2:49 am)
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Even earlier?
As I always understood it, Perrault was writing for adults in the French court. Not children.
And what about collections like Ocean Stream of Story which predates Basile etc.
And what about Apelaius? Aesop?
Jane
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Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(3/27/03 12:39 pm)
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The fairy tale as a late european invention
Well, according to Warner Zipes and Tatar, Perrault was writing for children. They both refer to the faux naif style he adopts, and the fact that he attributed the collection to his son as indicators of this fact.
There's certainly some case for argument: his style is really aimed at a dual audience, while he's pretending to be a naive folkloristic narrator he's also winking at the adults reading, a bit like Rowling does in Harry Potter.
I didn't deny that there were things that could possibly be called fairy tales before Perrault, but I attribute the term only to the genre as a modern invention: a written genre originating in north europe with folkloristic roots but that became a literary genre in the nineteenth century. For that reason I'd not count the ocean of story, but as i said, it all depends on your definition of fairy tale.
Apuleius I'd count as Greek Romance, Aesop as a writer of the animal fable (again I draw a big distinction between the genres).
Ultimately, there's no way to say what the original fairy tale was/ is. But, I don't think I'm alone in identifying Perrault as the first recognisable writer of what now passes for the fairy tale genre, in the same way as you could call Aristotle the inventor of tragedy (even though, obviously, tragedy preceded aristotle).
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Don
Registered User
(3/27/03 3:15 pm)
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Re: The fairy tale as a late european invention
I'm not sure that Warner, Zipes, and Tatar can be used as authority for the claim that Perrault was writing for children. In the case of Zipes, for example, that is indeed part of his argument in the Perrault chapter in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, where he's making the case for the fairy tale's role in the socialization process, especially as it affects what Zipes calls both "children" and "young people." But that was twenty years ago (1983), and since then he has argued differently (see the introduction to Perrault in Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantments (1987) or his article on Perrault in The Oxford Companion (2000), where he takes this question up explicitly). I also see in Warner's book and across Tatar's works a more nuanced understanding of Perrault's tales, in which they note the tension between the apparent juvenile audience and the implicit adult readership.
Edited by: Don at: 3/27/03 3:22:35 pm
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Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(3/28/03 12:42 am)
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i can, y'know.
Seeing as they wrote it, I think I can safely refer to them as authorities*, but I do so in the same spirit as the aforementioned critics, a tentative assertion of a possible fountainhead of what would later become crystallised into the literary genre of the fairy tale.
As Zipes later states in the Oxford Companion, there was no children's literature genre at the time (how can you be safely categorised as a children's writer when no children's writing genre exists?), and if you take his tales as part of the debate about ancients and moderns then you have to assume a sophisticated adult audience.
Nevertheless, even if his tone was a conceit, you can still see that Perrault is a key figure in the formation of children's literature, and he's also the main influence on what we now consider the prime examples of the fairy tale: Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots are the "classic" fairy tales, and we normally encounter them in forms closer to Perrault's own tellings rather than later re-tellings by the Grimms, for example.
You very rarely get tales from previous authors, like Basile, Straparola, Boccaccio, printed for children these days. For this reason, I reassert that Perrault--one of the salonnierres who wrote when the term contes de fées was invented, one of the first authors to be associated with the term's translation "fairy tale" when it was first used in Britain-- can be seen as the first writer of fairy tales.#
* That's the great thing about books. I don't care what he thinks now, I can still argue using what he thought then.
# That is, if you define fairy tales, as I do (and I quite understand if you don't). I don't believe the term can be used about tales from entirely different cultures and times and therefore don't use it when referring to native american tales and tale types that can be seen in the Greek Romance. As far as I'm concerned, the fairy tale is a literary genre that far from being timeless, arose from a concatenation of circumstances including the rise of nationalism, and the need for a didactic literature to "sivilize" children.
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Don
Registered User
(3/28/03 8:55 am)
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Yes, you can
You're right: You can refer to them as authorities. My point was that without further discrimination and specification, their work can't convincingly be "used" as authority/evidence for the initial claim the earlier posting makes about Perrault's intended audience.
In any case, you may be interested in Bottigheimer's new book on the origins of the fairy tale in Straparola: Fairy Godfather.
Edited by: Don at: 3/28/03 9:10:54 am
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Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(3/28/03 11:56 am)
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<insert subject here>
Have you read it? It got a good review in the TLS, I've ordered it for the uni library.
p.s. note in the original post where i said perrault's audience was "ostensibly" children. The modal is there for a reason, that reason being this is a forum and not a 200 page tome, and some vast overgeneralisations are necessary to facilitate brevity.
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(4/22/03 7:47 pm)
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dual audience
[[There's certainly some case for argument: his style is really aimed at a dual audience, while he's pretending to be a naive folkloristic narrator he's also winking at the adults reading, a bit like Rowling does in Harry Potter. ]]
Like Barrie, Nesbit, Lewis, Kipling, Baum.... The art is in the contrast between the dual messages....
Rosemary Lake
www.rosemarylake.com
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