not only collections of tales but also theory about them. Aesopic material, unlike fairy
tale magic, was approved for general use in both Catholic and Protestant countries, and
hence it joined Bible stories as a source of knowledge shared in common by children all
over Europe.
By the eighteenth century, then, the only folk-tale genre to have survived for children’s
reading was the fable, and it had done so in large part because its brief texts with
miniaturised plots could be easily edited to produce a moral acceptable within the
reigning social code: a single fable might—and did—have very different morals attached
to it at different times, in different places, and for different readerships.
Folktales as a whole, as opposed to the sub-genre of fables, flowered as a component
of children’s literature in the nineteenth century. The chief source was Grimms’ Tales,
the majority of whose tales derived from folk-tale genres. Clever Gretel, a good example,
is a cook who helps herself so generously to the dinner she is preparing for her master
and his guest, that not enough remains for their meal. By an ingenious ruse, she scares
off the guest and simultaneously blames him for the missing chicken. Generations of little
girls have delighted in her clever cover up, and their brothers have similarly enjoyed the
antics of Brother Jolly who sinfully transgresses one prohibition after another only to be
rewarded with free entry into heaven. The folk-tale component of fairy tale collections
expanded with the publication of Ludwig Bechstein’s Deutsches Märchenbuch (1845 et
seq.), which incorporated many tales from the Panchatantra, like ‘The Man and the
Serpent’ (no. 57).
By the end of the nineteenth century many people believed so unquestioningly in the
appropriateness of folk-tales for children, that new stories were collected or composed
directly for them. Some of the Uncle Remus tales by Joel Chandler Harris (1880 et seq.)
fit this paradigm. As animal tales whose plots encompass the eternal enmity and
repeated encounters between Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, the Uncle Remus stories bear a
close resemblance to the tales of the medieval Reynard cycle that form the basis of so
many of the animal tales in Grimms’ Tales.
A distinctly American folk-tale cycle was composed by the American poet Carl
Sandburg in his three volumes of Rootabaga stories (1922, 1923 and 1930). They begin
with railroads and continue with a nonsense cast of characters and actions that express
mid-Western humour, at once gentle and outlandish. Here, as in other examples of folk-
tales in children’s literature, generic boundaries remain fluid.
ReferencesArabian Nights Entertainments (4 vols, 1705–1708), London: Andrew Bell.
[Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine, Mme d’] (3 vols, 1721–1722) A Collection of Novels and Tales, Written by
that Celebrated Wit of France, the Countess d’Anois in Two Volumes, London: W.Taylor and
W.Chetwood.
Les contes des fées (4 vols, 1710–1715), Paris: Claude Barbin.
[Boreman, T.] (1742) The History of Cajanus, the Swedish Giant, from his Birth to the Present Time.
By the Author of the Gigantick Histories, London: Thomas Boreman.
TYPES AND GENRES 159