Indo European Folktales Wednesday January 15 2014 10 01 AM Lecture 15 January 2014 Influencers of the Grimm Brothers The rise of the middle class offered a rise to the collection of fairytales Tales were not conceived for children but adults Were highly gruesome Perrault origin of the mother goose tales Wrote for the French upper class his collections are what we consider classics Thomas Percy collected tales in England in order to preserve them Macpherson made up his tales in Ossian but they were seen as real Herder was a friend of Goethe Gave us the concept of Volkspoesie the natural culture uncorrupted by the destructive forces of modern civ He believed this showed a genuine expression of national culture We can preserve a national character The Grimm s took this idea Only among the peasantry could Germany recover this true national id The Fable Protagonists tend to be animals that can speak From the outset we recognize that these are not historically true but morally true It has a didactic feature a clearly articulated moral or value that it teaches us Social political commentary Don t deal with the extraordinary but with common everyday situations These are easy to identify and easy to identify with They have a timelessness about them it is not the time that maters but the lesson that is taught Why animals Because they give us distance we learn from them and at the same time we do not feel threatened Fable Collections Aesop We don t know that he actually existed Historically he was a crippled slave who earned his freedom through his wit The first written collection of written fables by Aesop is dated at 30 50 AD Panchatantra The oldest collection of fable written in Sanskrit Very influential in Mediterranean and Eastern Europe Collected at some time in the 4th century but the tales are much older than that Collected by Bidpai Most tales are about animals but we also find human characters Originally had a didactic function To teach the young prince how to rule and conduct himself Always accompanied by a moral that was intended to be memorized Jataka Tales Tales of Buddha Stories attributed to Buddha appears in tales in his former lives reincarnation Educational and didactic Tales are characterized by humor Siddharta Guatam De La Fontaine Used his fables to expose corruption had political themes Criticized political figures without naming them Vampires These tales hover somewhere between fairy tale and legend Vampires are corpses that rely on the living for nourishment According to Christian legend they were considered souls in pain Most of these tales come from the East Alksander Afasanev Slavic counterpart to the Borthers Grimm Molded authentic folktale into a simple style Stories were much more simple but more gruesome than the Grimms Why would people tell tales of Vampires Fear of the dead coming back When corpses were consumed they were not in an acceptable state of putrification Christianization of Eastern Europe Misunderstanding of the consuming of the host Bubonic Plague People would bury their dead without proper knowledge of their actual death Renaissance had little effect on areas of high superstition Historical Vampire Figures Vlad Tepes Dracula was a national hero but also ruthless Ordered thousands to be impaled simply for his pleasure He is associated with cruelty Elizabeth Bathory Slovak countess Had convinced herself that the fountain of youth was the blood of virgin peasant girls Convicted of murdering over 400 peasant girls due to ties with royal family not executed The modern vampire is still around very much a part of our culture Variations in our Stories Repitition of the magical number three crowing of the rooster the sun We have a hero who is clearly good that triumphs over the vampire who is clearly bad The Shroud and The Dog and the Corpse did not quite fit these themes The vampire is more of a tool to illustrate a moral than a living vs dead story The Shroud is about respecting the dead as well as laziness Discussion of Roots tales Different Cultures Similar Stories The similarity of these tales tells us different things Tales were traveling These morals were universal The Wise Judge and Two Mothers Both define true motherhood and assert wisdom of judge These slight differences tell us about the differences in culture The City and Country Mice Both highlight the value of simplicity and country over city They give us different perceptions about how we should perceive the city The danger is external one and internal in the other Recitation 17 1 14 Terms Animisim giving animals human traits Withches either natural or made a pact with a demon Usually women Associated with cats or other accomplices Vampires people who obtain sustenance from another persons blood Between myth and legend Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad the Impaler Do not necessarily rise from the grave Fable collections of stories teach us a moral using animals Alan Dundes had several common themes or features children s interest in the body sibling rivalry Folklore and Literature are verbal arts Literature has an author is written down morphology is different Morphology the components and relationships of a folktae In all fairytales the sequence of the functions must be in a certain order for them to maintain their function Recitation 24 1 14 Aarne theme moral motiv emotion and character type Propp type 31 functions 7 dramatis personae action from the pov of the story as a whole fairytale type some order of functions Lecture 29 1 14 Schools of Folklore Scholarship Psychology and Folklore Carl Gustav Jung Influenced by Freud wrote with Frueds looked beyond pathology maybe they were not only symbols for what had gone wrong Known for his ideas on the collective unconscious Archtypes timeless symbolic forms that make up dreams symbols that point you forward not only symbols that point out what has gone wrong has an awareness of what we need Comparative Example The Frog King For Jung this is a story in which the Frog represents a broader call to adventure redirecting one s life For Freud this is a story in which a woman is trying to overcome her sexual revulsion Reactions Feminists believed that Freud s archetypes were patriarchal believed that they were not universal to all cultures Applied to many movements however New Age Philosophy The Woman s Tale Iron John Fairytales Theraputic Function Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment These tales are existential dramas about life in which children