Traditional literature, including and especially folk and fairy tales, is an essential component in both the historical evolution of children’s literature and the modern canon. For previous generations, the folktale has often been a child’s first experience of story, the fairy tale often a young reader’s first foray into literature.
For generations of 21st century children, folk and fairy tales saturate the storytelling media that surrounds them, from early picture books to Disney movies to popular novels. Much of children’s entertainment across media engages with traditional tales, both in the forms of straightforward retellings or reiterations and in subversive or transformative shapes, like the “fractured” fairy tales exemplified by Shrek, the book by William Steig (1990) and the film developed by DreamWorks Animation (2001). Each successive iteration of a traditional tale, including those that twist and play with the reader or viewer’s expectations for typical content, adds to the cultural consciousness of the tale itself and to the overall presence and importance of traditional literature as a whole.
What makes traditional literature so significant? The answers to that question could fill this entire volume, but a few key ideas stand out:
Traditional literature embodies quintessential human experiences and often follows the pattern of human development, with protagonists who must learn lessons and achieve milestones or rites of passage in their lives. Many stories in the folklore category encode coming of age issues, such as learning to act independently, learning to overcome fear, and learning to solve problems or resolve conflict. Folk and fairy tales provide central characters who experience such lessons in exaggerated or entertaining ways, but under the surface they represent every reader who has encountered or will soon encounter similar challenges.
Perhaps the most common shared human experiences encoded into folktales are relationships, whether romantic or familial. The most famous fairy tales in the western world, particularly, focus on marriage as a central theme and a significant milestone for characters such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. While the modern reader might question the prioritization of romance in such tales, these stories encouraged social norms of relationships suited to their cultural contexts. Friendships and protective relationships, such as those central to the beast tales “Puss in Boots” and “Rikki-tikki-tavi”, also feature strongly in the folktale traditions of many cultures.
The cultural value of stories from different traditions cannot be overstated; human beings are above all storytellers and these elder tales are the substance from which all other literature evolves and so not just children’s literature but all genres, forms, and audiences owe a debt to stories like these. The level of engagement, which may result from structure or content or both, makes traditional stories both appealing to all ages and relatively easy to grasp for even the earliest readers. Repetitive patterns, archetypal characters, and straightforward plots typify traditional stories but should not be mistaken for oversimplification; often, these elements are holdovers from an ancient oral tradition intended for an audience of listeners.
Traditional or folk literature falls into different types, each of which follows a loosely defined set of characteristics, and most of which originated within oral traditions across the world. This volume contains a few examples, from specific traditions, for each of the types defined here, but should also encourage students and readers to seek additional tales further afield, perhaps beginning with—but certainly not limited to—the list of Recommended Reading at the end of the section. The following types of traditional literature are featured in this section:
The earliest form of traditional literature, at least for the purposes of this volume, is the Myth. In the context of ancient societies, myths are stories that provide social, religious, or otherwise cultural lessons, carrying forward a particular culture’s ideas of how the world works, how one should act or believe, or how a society should be managed. Myths typically feature gods and other powerful beings interacting with larger-than-life heroic characters who achieve feats beyond the ordinary. Famous heroes of myth—like Perseus, from the Roman tradition, or Chi-Li, from China—fight monsters and rescue people in need, and are generally rewarded for their efforts with social or spiritual approval. Other types of myths include trickster tales, of which “Coyote” and “Anansi” are popular examples from Western North American indigenous cultures such as the Zuni and West African countries like Ghana, respectively, where the main character often is a being of substantial power, but with flexible loyalties, and those loyalties may be tested in humorous ways. Concepts of virtue rewarded, guidance through challenging tasks, and navigating an uncertain world have especial value for young readers beginning their own journeys in the world.
The mythic characteristic of explanation also manifests in the Pourquoi Tale, in which the purpose of the narrative is to provide an origin or explanation for animals, practices, or other cultural elements. In myth, pourquoi tales—like the story of Arachne—often present a supernatural origin for common beings, like spiders. In children’s literature, the pourquoi tale often emphasizes humor, making the seemingly fantastical both entertaining and accessible for a young reader, as Rudyard Kipling attempts to do in his Just-So Stories.
Another descendent of myth, Legend typically contains a small—sometimes very small—kernel of historical truth, encapsulating an individual for whom there is actual historical evidence or an event that factually happened. One variety of legend—the Tall Tale, so named for its tendency to exaggerate the ordinary into the extraordinary—has a strong American tradition that centers on stories of frontier days and eras of social or political change in the United States. Figures like Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and George Washington feature prominently in the American tall tale tradition, but other cultures have similar tales, going all the way back to King Arthur of Britain and beyond.
The most famous, but perhaps least “traditional” type of traditional literature is, of course, the Fairy Tale. Defined by an emphasis on unusual or magical events happening to well-intentioned main characters, the fairy tale typifies the stories that dominate children’s literature, especially in the Western canon. Many of the stories identified as famous fairy tales were, in fact, quite literary in origin. The story of “Beauty and the Beast”, for example, started in published form, as a 17th century meditation on arranged marriage. While the collectively identified “princess tales” like “Sleeping Beauty” or “Cinderella”—with their emphasis on class, romance, and reward for heroic behavior or even just good intentions—are perhaps the most popular and well known, the fairy tale category also includes darker tales of mayhem and rescue or even redemption. Fairy tales like “Bluebeard” speak as much to societal and individual fears as they do to our ambitions or desires, but the darker details of these types of stories are often softened in modern children’s collections and retellings, in order to make them more palatable for contemporary parents and their children.
Beast Tales, a category that overlaps with both folk and fairy tales in form and characteristic, focus their attention on animals as stand-ins for human characters. In these stories, animals frequently speak and sometimes dress and behave like humans, often demonstrating specific human personality traits in order to emphasize the point or lesson of the story. Some anthropomorphized animal characters, like Puss In Boots or Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, commonly save the humans with whom they are associated, while other beast tales, like “The Three Little Pigs,” feature no humans and no intersection between the animal and human worlds. In such stories, the child reader often identifies readily with the personified animal characters, especially those whose hard work or other virtues are rewarded, as happens in many of the kinds of traditional tales that inform children’s literature.
A more direct emphasis on virtue rewarded is found in the Fable, a specific type of beast tale that typically ends with a condensed lesson, often in rhyming form. Fables are an older category of traditional literature, ranging back to the 6th century BCE with the Greek tales of Aesop and forward to 17th century France, with tales like “The Grasshopper and the Ant” from La Fontaine. Their simple structure and evident message long made fable a popular choice for early children’s readers as well as modern picture books.
The Cumulative Tale, a type of traditional story in which repetition builds the ongoing narrative by adding a single element to each round, features rhythms that invite oral recitation or reading aloud, an essential component in the development of children as readers. Cumulative tales, such as “This Is the House that Jack Built”, have often formed the basis of songs and, in the modern era, feature strongly in picture book form as well.
The stories contained in this section each stand on their own, representing these key components of traditional literature, but also are commonly adapted or sourced in other works of the children’s literature canon. Familiarity with them is valuable, therefore, for beginning students and scholars in the field as well as teachers and others interested in children’s literature as a whole.
