A Study of Fairy Tales

by Laura Fry Kready

(b) Belief in magic and medicine-men, which resulted in powers of metamorphosis, the effect of incantation, and communion with the dead.—To the savage all nature was animated, all things were persons. The leading ideas of savage peoples have already been referred to in the list of motifs which appear in the different fairy tales, as given by Lang, mentioned under the "Preparation of the Teacher," in The Telling of the Tale.

II. Fairy tales are myths of Sun, Dawn, Thunder, Rain, etc.

This is sometimes called the Sun-Myth Theory or the Aryan Theory, and it is the one advocated by Max Müller and by Grimm.

The fairy tales were primitive man's experience with nature in days when he could not distinguish between nature and his own personality, when there was no supernatural because everything was endowed with a personal life. They were the poetic fancies of light and dark, cloud and rain, day and night; and underneath them were the same fanciful meanings. These became changed by time, circumstances in different countries, and the fancy of the tellers, so that they became sunny and many-colored in the South, sterner and wilder in the North, and more home-like in the Middle and West. To the Bushmen the wind was a bird, and to the Egyptian fire was a living beast. Even The Song of Six-Pence has been explained as a nature-myth, the pie being the earth and sky, the birds the twenty-four hours, the king the sun, the queen the moon, and the opening of the pie, day-break.

Every word or phrase became a new story as soon as the first meaning of the original name was lost. Andrew Lang tells how Kephalos the sun loved Prokris the dew, and slew her by his arrows. Then when the first meaning of the names for sun, dew, and rays was lost, Kephalos, a shepherd, loved Prokris, a nymph, and we have a second tale which, by a folk-etymology, became the Story of Apollo, the Wolf. Tales were told of the sun under his frog name; later people forgot that frog meant "sun," and the result was the popular tale, A Frog, He Would A-Wooing Go.

In regard to this theory, "It is well to remember," says Tylor in his Primitive Culture, "that rash inferences which, on the strength of mere resemblances, derive episodes of myth from episodes of nature, must be regarded with utter distrust; for the student who has no more stringent criterion than this for his myths of sun and sky and dawn will find them wherever it pleases him to seek them." There is a danger of being carried away by false analogies. But all scholars agree that some tales are evidently myths of sun and dawn. If we examine the natural history of savages, we do find summer feasts, winter feasts, rituals of sorrow for the going of summer and of rejoicing for its return, anxious interest in the sun, interest in the motion of the heavenly bodies, the custom of naming men and women from the phenomena of nature, and interest in making love, making war, making fun, and making dinner.

III. Fairy tales all arose in India, they are part of the common Aryan heritage and are to be traced by the remains of their language.

They were first written in the Vedas, the sacred Sanskrit books of Buddhism. This theory is somewhat allied to the Sun-Myth Theory. This theory was followed by Max Müller and by Sir George Cox.

The theory of a common source in India will not answer entirely for the origin of tales because many similar tales have existed in non-Aryan countries. Old tales were current in Egypt, 2000 B.C., and were brought from there by Crusaders, Mongol missionaries, the Hebrews, and Gypsies.

The idea of connecting a number of disconnected stories, as we find in Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, and the Decameron, is traced to the idea of making Buddha the central figure in the folk-literature of India. And Jacobs says that at least one-third of all the stories common to the children of Europe are derived from India, and by far the majority of the drolls. He also says that generally, so far as incidents are marvelous and of true fairy-like character, India is the probable source, because of the vitality of animism and transformation in India in all time. Moreover, as a people, the Hindus had spread among their numbers enough literary training and mental grip to invent plots.