The European sources of American folklife encompass a survey of the folk traditions of the various European cultures from which the European American folktale traditions emerged as distinct from the Native American, African American, and Asian American traditions. From the sixteenth century to the present, the authors of these tales, such as Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, or Hans Christian Andersen, have used the genre to articulate personal desires, political views, and aesthetic preferences within particular social contexts. The earliest European folktales evolved from Aesop’s Fables (Aesopica), a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. These stories, of diverse origins, have been passed down through generations, appearing in a number of sources and different interpretations as they spread throughout ancient and medieval Europe in the literatures of France, Italy, Spain, Russia, England, and Germany.
The eighteenth to nineteenth centuries saw the blossoming of this literary form as authors from numerous European cultures composed new folktales for print publication. In England George Gordon, Lord Byron, published the first two cantos of his narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. In 1835 Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen published his first collection of fairy tales. Twenty years later, in the United States, American teacher Thomas Bulfinch published The Age of Fable, an introduction to Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Scandinavian mythology.
Regional dialects made use of versions adapted from Jean de La Fontaine, or the equally popular Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, and Charles Perrault, a French author, who laid the foundations for a new literary genre with his works derived from preexisting folktales. Perrault published his most famous collection, Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals (Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé), subtitled Tales of Mother Goose, in 1697 (Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye). He is often credited as the founder of the modern fairy-tale genre. Even though Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, is credited with coining the term “fairy tale,” many of the best-known tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, were originally told by Perrault, often in more elegant prose.
Even more influential sources of American folklore were the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. These German academics were linguists, cultural researchers, lexicographers, and authors who together collected and published folklore. When Jacob and Wilhelm set out to collect stories in the early 1800s, their goal was to preserve Germanic folklore and the folkways of European peasants rather than to entertain children. However, once the brothers saw how young readers embraced the stories, they began softening some of the harsher aspects to make them more suitable for children.
An image of George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), better known as Lord Byron, published in 1836. Byron’s composition of his narrative poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), illustrates the development during the Romantic period of European literary forms developed along folkloric lines. (Library of Congress)
The Grimms played a pivotal role in the evolution of European folklore and in the history of the fairy tale. By encouraging friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales, the Grimms preserved much of the cultural heritage of central Europe. Their Kinder und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Stories, volume 1, 1812; second volume, 1815), was a collection of transcribed folktales that previously had been handed down for centuries. The Grimms began a process that continues to this day of disseminating oral traditions through print. The Grimms’ work also brought prominence to the academic study of folklore, prompting others to continue the pursuit, such as Hans Christian Andersen, who produced his own original fairy tales. In Europe the folklore studies movement actually began when scholars started using the Swedish folkliv and the German Volksleben to designate vernacular (or folk) culture in its entirety, including customs and material culture, as well as oral traditions. The terms folklore and folklife are used interchangeably.
Immigrant European Traditions
An important source of American folklife came from the traditions and stories that immigrants from Europe brought with them. The celebration of ethnic cultures goes back to the earliest days of the United States. Although the best known are the celebrations of Columbus Day and St. Patrick’s Day, which are now annual events, these public celebrations and festivities have established a national identity that has helped shape American nationalism. The examples are abundant. From 1850 to 1909, San Francisco celebrated the incorporation of French culture into the American mainstream. In the 1860s, Chicago’s Jews held parades to identify their sense of community. Then there were the German American festivals held in Milwaukee from 1870 to 1910. None of these celebrations really embraced the entire heritage of an ethnic group, however. This only came about in the twentieth century with the beginning of heritage month observances. These were the result of presidential proclamations and executive orders to exhort the public to honor a particular group of citizens.
Folklife Festivals
Along with the American Folklife Center, the other national institution that preserves European folklore traditions is the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Culture Heritage, located in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian Center holds its annual folklife festival, which is held outdoors on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the last week of June and first week of July. It is a national celebration of living cultural heritage that is usually divided into programs featuring a nation, region, state, or theme. It has featured exemplary tradition bearers from more than ninety nations, every region of the United States, scores of ethnic communities, more than a hundred Native American groups, and some seventy different occupations.
The first festival was held in 1967 but it was the 1976 Bicentennial celebration that brought together several displays of European folklife, with demonstrations on “Old Ways in the New World,” which included Germany, Ireland, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Greece, Austria, France, Poland, Britain, Portugal, Romania, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Switzerland, and Italy. Previously, the “Old Ways in the New World” exhibit had highlighted only one or two countries such as Britain and Yugoslavia. Today, the festival continues to honor individual European traditions but not on an annual basis.
Modern Versions
Finally, there are the modern retellings of these tales, often with adults as the intended audience rather than children. Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White (1967) endows the title character and her seven companions with libidos as well as postmodern despair and dread. The book features numerous references to “the Frog Prince” and other Grimm stories, and even a pop quiz to ensure that readers understand the references. Feminist Angela Carter’s short stories, collected in The Bloody Chamber (1979), are all retellings of classic fairy stories, and her screenplay for Neil Jordan’s film The Company of Wolves (1984) is a rather nasty Freudian interpretation of “Little Red Cap” (Little Red Riding Hood).
Jean Cocteau’s classic film La Belle et la Bête (1946), based on the story of Beauty and the Beast, inspired an opera of the same name by Philip Glass (1994). Even more familiar is Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award–winning musical Into the Woods (1987) and its film version (2014), which weaves together stories such as “Cinderella,” “Little Red Cap,” and “Rapunzel” and focuses on the consequences ignored in the original tales.
Then there is Walt Disney. Many of Disney’s animated features were based on the fairy tales and folktales he heard as a child. Disney used them as the basis for feature films and even shorter cartoons, which, in many cases, are sometimes better known than the originals, especially in the United States. Not without truth, many Disney critics have noted how stories that Disney wanted to bring to the screen underwent a metamorphosis (“Disneyfied”) during the production process. “Disneyfication” usually involved cleaning up the original story with the addition of a happy ending, often not present in the original tale. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney deleted much of the complicated ritual of the folk story, such as the magical birth of Snow White and the anonymity of the dwarfs, and fleshed it out by adding a love affair, providing each dwarf with a separate personality, and giving the whole a pleasing glow of charm and romanticism fairly distant from the grim detail and horrifying ending of the original tale. He diluted a psychologically charged tale to serve his own needs: a film that generated goodwill and optimism. Other fairy tales that received the Disney treatment all but obliterated their rather grim and often tragic originals, such as The Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty.
Martin J. Manning
See also Animal Tales; Legends; Lullaby; Nursery Rhymes; Saints’ Legends; Storytelling; Superstitions; Tall Tales; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Brode, Douglas. 2004. From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Cocchiara, Giuseppe. 1980. The History of Folklore in Europe. Translated by John N. McDaniel. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage. 1982. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center.
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. 2006. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, edited by George Stade. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics.
Hufford, Mary. 1991. American Folklife: A Commonwealth of Cultures. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center.
Simpson, Jacqueline. 1987. European Mythology. New York: P. Bedrick Books.
Zipes, Jack. 2014. Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.