Maria Tatar – 1945 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Remember the fairy tales of your childhood - Rumpelstiltskin, The Golden Goose, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, The Fisherman and His Wife, et. al.? Well, welcome to adulthood and the truth behind the “Once upon a time…they lived happily ever after” stories. In The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar provides insights to the tales, in all their variety, published by the Brothers Grimm, as well as folklore in general. Fairy tales as you never knew them. Fairy tales as they never were.

Dedication in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
“For Daniel & Lauren”

Excerpt from the chapter FACT And FANTASY: The Art of Reading Fairy Tales in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

“One of the chief sources of irritation for the interpreter of fairly tales is the nature of folklore sources. For nearly every tale, there are at least a dozen versions, in some cases hundreds of extant variants. In other words, rather than a single, stable literary text in which even the finest points of detail may function as bearers if significance, we have an infinite number of corrupt “texts,” spoken and written, each representing one version of a single tale type, and an imperfect version at that. No matter how gifted the transcriber of a tale is, he cannot fully succeed in capturing and recreating the spirit of an oral performance. Much s fairy tales invite interpretation, the facts of their origin and diffusion imply the impossibility of textually grounded interpretation. Even the anthropologist who can go straight to the source, observe the teller, study the community in which a tale flourishes, and record that tale still has nothing more than a single version, one no more and no less authoritative than other oral variants….

When we read and interpret a fairy tale, it is important to bring to it some knowledge of national and international variants of the tale. Once we realize that German female Cinderellas did not outnumber male Cinderellas until the eighteenth century, we look at the Grimms’ version of the story with different eyes. The discovery of male Cinderellas and Snow Whites in modern Turkish folklore invites further meditations and investigations. That Russian folklore has a male Sleeping Beauty reminds us that we must show caution in drawing generalizations about female developmental patterns on the basis of that plot. And we are obliged to think twice about male hero patterns when we come across a collection of tales depicting heroines who carry out tasks normally put to male heroes alone or who denounce fathers too weak to protect them from evil-minded stepmothers.”


Yesterday’s writer – Gloria Steinem
Tomorrow’s writer – Fay Weldon

Source: Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-691-01487-6. Excerpts: pages 42 and 47

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Center: Maria Tatar from the website people.fas.harvard.edu