Apparently, the origins of Mother Goose are shrouded in mystery. This is but one fact of the many that can be found in Greenwood’s Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales. Like many other encyclopedias, this one threatens to crack under its own weight. The three volumes (Vol. 1 is A-G, Vol. 2 is H-P, Vol. 3 is Q-Z) amount to an examination of a genre--sometimes called folktale, sometimes called fairy tale--that spans millennia, media, and more countries than can be summed up here. Of greatest concern here are the facts it contains about academic issues, such as theories, theorists, and the like. Edited by Donald Haase of Wayne State University, who also provides an introduction that traces the history of folktale studies, the Encyclopedia is comprised of 670 entries by dozens of writers from various fields, which reflects the multi-disciplinary approaches possible to these stories as well as the state of the current scholarship.
Works of this bulk are daunting and not meant to be read from cover to cover. So we follow one theme: transformation seems appropriate. It is hinted at early on, in Volume 1, in such entries as the one on Angela Carter, a twentieth-century British writer whose fiction frequently employed the motifs of folk narratives; particularly notable are Carter’s renderings of “Little Red Riding Hood” and werewolf stories. Jessica Tiffin’s entry on Carter concludes with the observation that Carter’s work “returns again and again to dreams, transformations, questions, monsters--the toolbox of symbolic fable” (163). Transformation comes up again in Volume 2 in, for example, the entry on “Initiation.” Here, Francisco Vas da Silva notes that a great many of the stories under consideration in this encyclopedia feature an initiation into adult life--a rite of passage that incorporates transformation as its liminal stage. Transformation culminates in Volume 3 with its own extensive entry, which refers back to the previous two here considered and also links to many others. This entry sums up what many scholars believe to be key in understanding folktales and fairy tales: that they are “in essence, transformative narratives on transformations” (982). Each entry enriches and reflects upon the others. This is foregrounded by the cross-references accorded to a “See Also” component of each entry. Entries also contain a section entitled “Further Reading,” and the work as a whole has a bibliography in the third volume.
There are more than facts here, as well. Theory pervades the entirety of the Encyclopedia. Those who want to know what scholars think of fairy tales, and what scholars think fairy tales reveal about people and their world, will not put these volumes down disappointed. As with most works of this kind, the scholarship is meant to be summary, not original (though a thorough student will no doubt detect some original ideas slipped in here and there), but it is exemplary save for a curious factual error in the introduction: the editor of the Folktales of the World series was Richard M. Dorson, not Robert as the text indicates (xxiv).
The Encyclopedia is about tales, but it is also about the people behind them, and herein readers will find perhaps the most notable bias. While writers of tales are well represented, those whose means of transmission is purely oral are not. The entry on storytelling refers to many traditional, oral storytellers, but none of them receives their own entry. This is sad in light of the work of so many fieldworkers to catalogue, study, and chronicle the repertoires of individuals. The information is there--in books, in archives--but it is not represented in this encyclopedia. That is not to say that oral tradition is neglected, only that attention to it pales by comparison to writing. The first volume includes a “Guide to Related Topics” in which it becomes clear that “Authors” is the most robustly represented group. Many of these, their entries note, are also celebrated oral narrators, but even in these cases the attention to written work overshadows the live performance.
Still, the Encyclopedia is a monument to collective scholarship and to the development of a genre. Readers will perhaps be forgiven for a bit of confusion regarding exactly what that genre is, since its title gives it two names, or even if folktales and fairy tales can be considered a single genre. The difference between folktales and fairy tales is never quite clearly delineated, despite the separate entries. Both of these entries note that many consider folktales to be oral and fairy tales to be written, but that this formal distinction breaks down, as do all other criteria, in light of the magnitude of texts that appear in every medium imaginable. How does this apply to a film, for example, neither written nor oral?
Perhaps a better distinction is an ideological one. The fairy tale is something today to be reacted to: authors fracture them, critics bemoan them. Any number of critiques from socio-political to feminist rail against the bounds of life marked off by the characters of the tale. The fairy tale is a dream, one which many people aspire to achieve in one form or another, so that the phrase “I want the fairy tale wedding” is perfectly comprehensible. To say, “I want the folktale wedding,” however, is meaningless in the same context.
It seems that no one is quite sure where one begins and the other ends. Haase, in his introduction, suggests that the distinction is best understood as suggestive rather than divisive, indicating that a wise approach is “inclusive rather than exclusive, flexible rather than fixed” (xxxviii). A discussion of emic terms might be one way to handle the problem, but it seems that, at best, we can conclude, as JoAnn Conrad does in the entry on Folktales, that the two terms will “continue to exist in an uneasy balance” (362). As long as people continue to use them interchangeably, to mean what they need to mean in any given context, the distinction will remain academic in nature. A fairy tale or folktale is perhaps like poetry, then. You know it when you see it.
--------
[Review length: 1013 words • Review posted on December 10, 2008]