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Author
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Comment
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JRTbluebabe
Unregistered User
(4/15/03 8:12 pm)
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The Hero's Journey in relation to the Grimm's tales
Hi! I just found this board today. You all have a lot of knowledge
when it comes to fairy tales. I am in need of some help. I am writing
a paper about the Hero's Journey in relation to a Grimm's Tale.
Does anyone have a suggestion of a Grimm's Tale that would encompass
this motif? Thank you so much for your help!!
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Midori
Unregistered User
(4/18/03 4:49 am)
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hero
JRT,
Welcome to the board! Before I offer a few suggestions I would like to suggest that you do a quick search of former posts--we often discuss the role of hero--both male and female (as their journey's are often different) and you may find a much fuller and more interesting answer to this question.
The "hero" journey shows up quite a bit--in both large (epic) and smaller ways (the rites of passage of a boy or girl into the role of an adult). Joseph Campbell has the most well known theoretical model of hero--otherwise known as the "cosmogonic cycle"--the hero (Campbell was really interested in male heroes here) undergoes a process of "separation" from home and childhood--"initiation" which occurs out there in the woods or other fantastic realms and where his heroic qualities (those most suitable attributes for his life as an adult) are tested--followed by a "return" --usually to his home where he brings with him a new bride (symbolic of his new status as an adult and married man) and often takes over his father's role as a leader. Take a quick look at Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces." This should help give at least one theoretical model of the "hero's journey."
On a separate note--the journey will be different for girls because in exogamous socities girls leave home to get married--and do not return. Consequently the tales often reflect this outward journey--and the defining "heroic" task of the girl is claiming a new identity and status in a new place (usually a house of marriage).
But you really need to decide which narratives you want to discuss from the Grimms collection. I would suggest reading through the tales--and then come back here after you have found one or two you would like to write about. The home page of Surlalune offers additional commentary and variants of many of Grimms tales that you might useful.
good luck
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(4/22/03 7:33 pm)
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Propp's _Morphology of the Fairy Tale_
I was fascinated by Campbell's theory of a 'monomyth', one large story of which all the tales he studied were perhaps fragments.
I"m not sure about Campbell's, but a Russian named Propp did find a pattern that many Russian and some other European stories fit into. I think a good paper might be done comparing Propp's pattern with Campbelll's. There are some resemblences and enough differences to be interesting.
Some Russian stories might fit Campbell's pattern better than those in Grimm, too.
Rosemary Lake
www.rosemarylake.com
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Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(4/23/03 1:36 am)
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Not sure
I'm not sure whether attempting to find similarities between Campbell's monomyth and Propp's functions would be worthwhile as they both come from a completely different tradition of scholarship.
Propp's uses a hard headed pseudo-scientific formalist approach, whereas Campbell is far more influenced by Jung. Furthermore, in reducing the hints that Campbell gives to his idea of the monomyth you'd be perpetrating the same kind of reductivism that Propp does (Jameson, for example, complained quite correctly that Propp simply synopsises tales, and that his project is not separate from the narrative at all).
Maybe its possible to mix the two (chalk and cheese spring to mind), but the parentage of such different approaches might lead to seriously monstrous progeny.
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Angel
Feather
Registered User
(4/23/03 10:02 am)
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Hero Journey
I'm a little more familiar with Joseph Campbell's definition of the hero's journey than I am with all of Grimm's tales. Anyway, skim through them until you find what you are looking for. "The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers" is a good start. I just opened to it. The boy goes away, he's given a task to complete, encounters magical happenings, and "frees" the castle from its spell. That matches with Campbell's idea that the hero's journey results in a transformation and recovers something that was lost. The fairy tale ends with a kind of joke which is the beauty of the fairy tale.
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Jess
Unregistered User
(4/23/03 9:00 pm)
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I can't remember the tale's name
There is a Grimms tale where each of the sons of a dying king set out for a fountain (?). Each encounters a fox, but only the youngest son follows the fox's suggestions. He gets the fountain, rescues a princess who is to be his bride, but is waylaid on the road by his evil brothers. Eventually the truth comes out and he, the youngest son, marries the princess, gets the kingdom and gets revenge on the brothers. The fox turns out to be the brother of the princess and he, the youngest son, chops of the fox's head to restore the prince.
That sounds a lot like your "hero's journey" style story. Wish I could remember the name of it.
Jess
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(4/24/03 7:07 am)
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Propp and the Prague School?
>Propp's uses a hard headed pseudo-scientific formalist approach, whereas Campbell is far more influenced by Jung.
I agree about the different traditions of scholarship these approaches come out of, though that in itself might well be a worthy topic to explore in the paper.
It's been many years, but I have this recollection that the Russian formalists were influenced by and even connected to the so-called Prague school, which was hardly pseudo-scientific, though certainly linguistic structuralism has been applied outside of linguistics in some dubious ways. And there is no question that some aspects of linguistic form that you see in phonology, etc., pervade higher-level communicative acts like narrative, whether or not Propp got it right.
I always read Propp's function sequence as a very particular ethnogeneric form, which almost certainly has direct analogues in other traditions, but can't simply be applied as is beyond the Russian wonder tale. The issue of how Propp's functions are manifest actual narrative text -- the tale performance, in Russian oral tradition -- is a legitimate one. In my dissertation I looked at how a number of competing theories of narrative form played out on the ground in relation to a single ethnogenre and a single narrative text. How Proppian-style functions (and they were definitely there) appeared in the text was pretty interesting.
Judith
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Jess
Unregistered User
(4/26/03 1:37 pm)
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Pilgrimages
You might be interested in an article about pilgrimages appearing in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, April 25, 2003, entitled "Walk this Way: Painfully, Repeatedly," by Tunku Varadarajan. In the article, the author cites work by anthropolgist Arnold Van Gennep regarding pilgrimages in some instances being "rites of passage" and describing a similar sequence to that of the "hero's journey" as you describe above (he even refers to pilgrimages as a peregrination). Obviously, it is not a Grimm's tale, but seems relevant to your topic.
Jess
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Jess
Unregistered User
(4/26/03 1:42 pm)
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by the way
The tale I was thinking of is "the Water of Life."
Jess
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(4/26/03 8:54 pm)
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Propp's and other theories, and the fox story
<i>In my dissertation I looked at how a number of competing theories of narrative form played out on the ground in relation to a single ethnogenre and a single narrative text. How Proppian-style functions (and they were definitely there) appeared in the text was pretty interesting.
</i>
That sounds fascinating. I'd like to know what the other theories were, what story you used, etc.
Re the story of the fox, that follows the Propp pattern more closely than most Grimm tales. The part about false claimnants taking the credit and the princess finally revealing the truth is not very common in Grimm.
I did a gender-reversal story following the Propp pattern at www.rosemarylake.com/andrea.html
R.L.
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