Fairy Tales

Today has been a real day for regressions...in my Wellness Requirement, we all laid on mats and learned how to take a short nap, and then I worked on some homework that was eerily similar to the circuit-building challenge of an old computer game I used to play (Gizmos and Gadgets? Anyone?)

Anyway, either I've never grown up, or I was never actually a kid.

And also, apparently it is Disney-themed month on Facebook? Who knows...everyone has been putting up photos of themselves as princesses. Spooky. I've never really been into Disney films, I don't think, but I have been into - am still into - folklore and fairy tales, and so that is what I shall discuss today.

You're probably familiar with Carl Jung and the idea of Archetypes, and of course Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces; but perhaps Aarne-Thompson Classification is new?  I think it's interesting that so many old stories from all around the globe often have common threads running through them, and apparently so did Aarne and Thompson, because these commonalities are what the classification system is based on.

The four-hundreds, for instance, are stories with supernatural relatives, like Beauty and the Beast, the Frog Prince, or Snow White and Rose Red.  The stories in the five-hundreds all contain magical helpers, from Rumpelstiltskin to various tellings of Cinderella, not to mention the Fisherman and his Wife.  There are tales involving magical items, from Aladdin's lamp to magical rings to golden geese; and there are stories with talking animals - both wise and foolish.  Once stories are organized like this into categories based on similar themes, characters, or messages, one can then pull apart the differences.  I'm not quite sure what exactly is gained from that...an understanding of humanity? an appreciation for oral histories? a novel anthropological perspective? a load of picked-apart children's stories?...

Anyway, it's not a perfect system, but it's intriguing, and I like order (not to mention these types of stories), so it appeals.  Perhaps it does to you, too.