A Study of Fairy Tales

by Laura Fry Kready

The Three Bears illustrates the third class of repetitive story, where there is repetition and variation. Here the iteration and parallelism have interest like the refrain of a song, and the technique of the story is like that of The Merchant of Venice. This is the ideal fairy story for the little child. It is unique in that it is the only instance in which a tale written by an author has become a folk-tale. It was written by Southey, and appeared in The Doctor, in London, in 1837. Southey may have used as his source, Scrapefoot, which Joseph Jacobs has discovered for us, or he may have used Snow White, which contains the episode of the chairs. Southey has given to the world a nursery classic which should be retained in its purity of form. The manner of the Folk, in substituting for the little old woman of Southey's tale, Goldilocks, and the difference that it effects in the tale, proves the greater interest children naturally feel in the tale with a child. Similarly, in telling The Story of Midas to an audience of eager little people, one naturally takes the fine old myth from Ovid as Bulfinch gives it, and puts into it the Marigold of Hawthorne's creation. And after knowing Marigold, no child likes the story without her. Silver hair is another substitute for the little Old Woman in The Three Bears. The very little child's reception to Three Bears will depend largely on the previous experience with bears and on the attitude of the person telling the story. A little girl who was listening to The Three Bears for the first time, as she heard how the Three Bears stood looking out of their upstairs window after Goldilocks running across the wood, said, "Why didn't Goldilocks lie down beside the Baby Bear?" To her the Bear was associated with the friendly Teddy Bear she took with her to bed at night, and the story had absolutely no thrill of fear because it had been told with an emphasis on the comical rather than on the fearful. Similar in structure to The Three Bears is the Norse Three Billy-Goats, which belongs to the same class of delightful repetitive tales and in which the sequence of the tale is in the same three distinct steps.

II. The Animal Tale

The animal tale includes many of the most pleasing children's tales. Indeed some authorities would go so far as to trace all fairy tales back to some ancestor of an animal tale; and in many cases this certainly can be done just as we trace Three Bears back to Scrapefoot. The animal tale is either an old beast tale, such as Scrapefoot or Old Sultan; or a fairy tale which is an elaborated development of a fable, such as The Country Mouse and the City Mouse or the tales of Reynard the Fox or Grimm's The King of the Birds, and The Sparrow and His Four Children; or it is a purely imaginary creation, such as Kipling's The Elephant's Child or Andersen's The Bronze Pig.

The beast tale is a very old form which was a story of some successful primitive hunt or of some primitive man's experience with animals in which he looked up to the beast as a brother superior to himself in strength, courage, endurance, swiftness, keen scent, vision, or cunning. Later, in more civilized society, when men became interested in problems of conduct, animals were introduced to point the moral of the tale, and we have the fable. The fable resulted when a truth was stated in concrete story form. When this truth was in gnomic form, stated in general terms, it became compressed into the proverb. The fable was brief, intense, and concerned with the distinguishing characteristics of the animal characters, who were endowed with human traits. Such were the Fables of Æsop. Then followed the beast epic, such as Reynard the Fox, in which the personality of the animals became less prominent and the animal characters became types of humanity. Later, the beast tale took the form of narratives of hunters, where the interest centered in the excitement of the hunt and in the victory of the hunter. With the thirst for universal knowledge in the days following Bacon there gradually grew a desire to learn also about animals. Then followed animal anecdotes, the result of observation and imagination, often regarding the mental processes of animals. With the growth of the scientific spirit the interest in natural history developed. The modern animal story since 1850 has a basis of natural science, but it also seeks to search the motive back of the action, it is a psychological romance. The early modern animal tales such as Black Beauty show sympathy with animals, but their psychology is human. In Seton Thompson's Krag, which is a masterpiece, the interest centers about the personality and the mentality of the animal and his purely physical characteristics. Perhaps it is true that these physical characteristics are somewhat imaginary and over-drawn and that overmuch freedom has been used in interpreting these physical signs. In Kipling's tales we have a later evolution of the animal tale. His animals possess personality in emotion and thought. In the forest-friends of Mowgli we have humanized animals possessing human power of thinking and of expressing. In real life animal motives seem simple, one dominant motive crowds out all others. But Kipling's animals show very complex motives, they reason and judge more than our knowledge of animal life justifies. In the Just-So Stories Kipling has given us the animal pourquois tale with a basis of scientific truth. Of these delightful fairy tales, The Elephant's Child and How the Camel Got His Hump may be used in the kindergarten. Perhaps the latest evolution of the animal tale is by Charles G.D. Roberts. The animal characters in his Kindred of the Wild are given animal characteristics. They have become interesting as exhibiting these traits and not as typifying human motives; they show an animal psychology. The tales have a scientific basis, and the interest is centered in this and not in an exaggeration of it.

Having viewed the animal tale as a growth let us look now at a few individual tales:—

One of the most pleasing animal tales is Henny Penny, or Chicken Lichen, as it is sometimes called, told by Jacobs in English Fairy Tales. Here the enterprising little hen, new to the ways of the world, ventures to take a walk. Because a grain of corn falls on her top-knot, she believes the sky is falling, her walk takes direction, and thereafter she proceeds to tell the king. She takes with her all she meets, who, like her, are credulous,—Cocky Locky, Ducky Daddies, Goosey Poosey, and Turky Lurky,—until they meet Foxy Woxy, who leads them into his cave, never to come out again. This is similar to the delightful Jataka tale of The Foolish Timid Rabbit, which before has been outlined for telling, which has been re-told by Ellen C. Babbit. In this tale a Rabbit, asleep under a palm tree, heard a noise, and thought "the earth was all breaking up." So he ran until he met another Rabbit, and then a hundred other Rabbits, a Deer, a Fox, an Elephant, and at last a Lion. All the animals except the Lion accepted the Rabbit's news and followed. But the Lion made a stand and asked for facts. He ran to the hill in front of the animals and roared three times. He traced the tale back to the first Rabbit, and taking him on his back, ran with him to the foot of the hill where the palm tree grew. There, under the tree, lay a cocoanut. The Lion explained the sound the Rabbit had heard, then ran back and told the other animals, and they all stopped running. Brother Rabbit Takes Some Exercise, a tale from Nights with Uncle Remus is very similar to Henny Penny and could be used at the same time. It is also similar to Grimm's Wolf and Seven Kids, the English Story of Three Pigs, the Irish The End of the World, and an Italian popular tale.

The Sheep and the Pig, adapted from the Scandinavian by Miss Bailey in For the Children's Hour, given also in Dasent's Tales from the Field, is a delightfully vivacious and humorous tale which reminds one of Henny Penny. A Sheep and Pig started out to find a home, to live together. They traveled until they met a Rabbit and then followed this dialogue:

R. "Where are you going?"

S. and P. "We are going to build us a house."

R. "May I live with you?"