Sunday, February 10, 2019

Fairy-Tale Definition

A folk or fairy tale is, of course, a story. It contains simple, one-dimensional characters and a simple, stereotypical plot. It often begins with “Once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after”, and takes place in a “kingdom far, far away”.
It is a story that comes from oral tradition, and grows and changes as it is passed along. Sometimes the story originates as something that happened in real life, and is exaggerated and generalized with each retelling, or is a dream presented as something that really happened. There are many stories that have many different cultural variations on the same tale.
Fairy tales are classified in a system devised and revised by Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson, and Hans-Jörg Uther, and Vladimir Propp created a list of the 31 functions, which describe actions, that exist in folk and fairy tales. There are also many archetypes that show up in fairy tales, like character types (witch, animal companion) and images/symbols (tree, moon). Because of the appearance and reappearance of archetypes, and the fact that so many cultures created similar stories around the same time with no evidence of cultural exchange between them, many people point to a collective subconscious between all humans.

 
 
But! The most important thing in a fairy tale is magic. Or "zauber", as it's known in German.






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