fairy tale essay 500 words

English Compositions

Short Essay on Fairy Tales [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

We have all loved reading and listening to fairy tales since our childhood. In this lesson today, you will learn how to write essays on fairy tales that you may find relevant for your exam.

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Short Essay on Fairy Tales in 100 WORDS

Fairy tales are the pleasures of childhood. There is almost no one who has not read a fairy tale. A fairy tale is a fantasy story that has humans, animals, birds, magicians, kings and queens, princes, and princesses. It also has fairies. The animals and birds in fairy tales can talk.

Fairy tales are stories of good and bad. These are very old stories and often have morals with them. As children, we all read lots of fairy tales. Our parents and grandparents tell us fairy tales. We love to listen to these stories. They are not real. Still, it makes our childhood happy. Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel are some famous fairy tales.

Short Essay on Fairy Tales in 200 Words

Fairy tales are the source of joy and happiness. There is no one who does not love to read or listen to fairy tales. These stories have magic and fun in them. It has humans, animals, birds, kings, queens, princes, princesses, magicians, and also fairies.

These tales are the best moments of our childhood. We all have heard of it from our parents and grandparents. Even if we grow up, we still love to read the tales of childhood. It takes away our problems as we read them. The fairy tales are indeed magical.

Every country has its own fairy tales. In India, we have Panchatantra and thakurmar jhuli. We have enjoyed reading these stories. Also, these tales are available on television. So that becomes a treat for us. Fairy tales also have morals. We have read moral stories, like Aesop’s fables. There, the animals talk and teach us morals. As children, we learn how to be good.

Fairy tales also teach us about the good and bad. It is always about the fight between the good and bad. In the end the good wins. It shows us the truth of life. Fairy tales are very simple to read. So children can easily understand its meaning. They receive lots of happiness by reading fairy tales.

Short Essay on Fairy Tales in 400 Words

Fairy tales are the happiness of childhood. There is no child who has not read a fairy tale. We not only read those stories but also hear about them from our parents and grandparents. It not only gives us joy but also teaches us many things.

Fairy tales also have morals at the end. It helps to teach the children the good and bad. Fairy tales have humans, animals, birds, kings, queens, princes, princesses, magicians, ghosts and fairies. All of these appear beautiful to us in our childhood. Still the morals we learn to stay with us forever.

All of us want to be in a fairy tale. It is a place different from Earth. The lives of the people in a fairy tale are always pretty. So it enables us to imagine it in that way. Making the child’s life safe and innocent is important. So fairy stories play an important part. All children read fairy tales. It helps them to think better. From a little age, fairy tales help them to imagine. They can create more because of fairy tales.

Every country has its own fairy tales. Aesop’s fables are also a sort of fairy tale. The fables have morals in them. It is very important. Children must have moral lessons from a little age. It teaches them the good and bad. We all have read fairy tales like Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel. These are the most famous stories. Nowadays, many films are made from children’s fairy tales.

All these have made the stories more famous. In India, the stories of Panchatantra and Thakumar Jhuli are famous fairy tales. We feel scared when the devil arrives, and wait for the brave prince to come and rescue the princess. We are amazed by the winged horses, unicorns talking birds, and animals. All these make the reading of the story more beautiful.

A Fairy tale has no fixed time. It all starts with ‘ once upon a time.’ So we never know when it took place. This is a trick. This makes the tale more beautiful and magical. Every fairy tale has many problems. But in the end, it gets resolved. So the children feel positive at the end of fairy tales.

They feel happy. A faith remains that all problems have their solutions. Thus a fairy tale has a solution to everything. Children are encouraged to read books. And fairytales are the important stories that every child reads and enjoys.

In this session above, I have tried to discuss everything about fairy tales that could be relevant to writing essays. Moreover, I have tried a very simple approach to writing these essays for a better understanding of all the students. If you still have any doubts regarding this session, kindly post that in the comment section below. If you want to read more such essays, keep browsing our website.

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The Cinderella Essay

Cinderella story summary, cinderella characters, theme of cinderella, cinderella plot, settings of the story, reference list.

Cinderella is a well-known story about a girl mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters. Despite these challenges, Cinderella finds happiness and love with the help of her godmother. The tale is a classic example of the “rags to riches” trope and has been retold in various forms throughout history. Its plot explores love, oppression, and the power of a kind heart. In the Cinderella essay, you will find the discussion of the tale, its characters, and its settings. The author also analyzes the story’s symbolism, imagery, and literary devices. Read the sample to understand how the Cinderella story is relevant to the modern world, and try to make your own conclusions.

The Cinderella story is a children’s story about a girl whose mother died, and her father remarried a proud and ill-tempered woman. The woman had two daughters of the girl’s age who were as ill-tempered as their mother.

After remarrying her father, her stepmother always gave the girl hard chores, but she never complained. On finishing her chores, she would warm herself in one of the corners of the chimney, and thus her sisters called her Cinderella. Then the two sisters got invited to a ball at the palace in honor of the prince. They left her behind.

As she wept for being left behind, her godmother came and magically showed her how to go to the palace. She also dressed Cinderella magnificently. After reaching the palace, the prince invited her to the next ball in which Cinderella lost her glass slipper. The prince vowed to marry the girl who could wear the slipper, and it emerged that Cinderella was the only one. She was thus married by the prince (“Cinderella,” n.d., p. 1”).

The characters in this story include the main character, Cinderella, whose mother dies, and she is left with her father. Cinderella is depicted as a good girl. The next character is Cinderella’s stepmother, who is depicted as ill-tempered. She has two daughters who are shown as proud and as ill-tempered as their mother.

There is also Cinderella’s godmother, who is shown as a good woman. Others include Lord High Chamberlain, heralds, six mice, a rat, and six lizards. The mice, rat, and lizards were used magically by Cinderella’s godmother to escort Cinderella to the palace (“Cinderella,” n.d., p. 1”).

The theme of the story is the importance of human values. Cinderella is very good to her stepmother even after mistreatment. She is also good to her stepsisters even when they despise her. Her goodness pays off when, in the end, she is the only one who can marry the prince. She is adored by that, and her stepsisters apologize to her. The stepsisters would like to marry the prince, but they miss the chance. This story, therefore, highlights the importance of good temperament and human values (“Cinderella,” n.d., p. 1”).

The story begins with the birth of Cinderella, which is followed by the death of her mother. Then her father remarries an ill-tempered woman with two daughters of Cinderella’s age with the same disposition. Cinderella is given hard chores, but she does not complain.

She is left behind as the two girls answer an invitation to a ball in the palace. As she weeps about being left, her godmother comes and magically shows her how to go to the palace. She goes and gets noticed by the prince, who invites her to another ball and eventually marries her (“Cinderella,” n.d., p. 1”).

The setting of the story is the capital city of a large kingdom and its environs. The introductory part of the story is set in Cinderella’s home. That is, during her birth, during the death of her mother, during the remarrying of her father, and as she is overworked and looked down upon by her sisters.

Her godmother visits her in her home. The other setting is the palace. Here Cinderella goes to a ball uninvited, but she gets invited to another ball by the prince. The prince eventually marries her (“Cinderella,” n.d., p. 1”).

Children Stories. “Cinderella.” Web.

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Modern Fairy Tale Essay: How to Write, Topics and Ideas

Fairies and evil spirits, noble kings and queens, beautiful princesses and brave princes, mysterious castles and abandoned huts somewhere in a thick a wood… This is all about fairy tales.

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Fairy tales are always associated with childhood. Fairy tales always remind us that love rules the world and the Good will always defeat the Evil.

We are almost sure that everybody has his/her favorite fairy tale. Which is your favorite one? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? Beauty and the Beast?

Certainly, the first idea that comes to your mind when thinking about a fairy tale essay is to discuss your favorite fairy tale. If you feel that it is not enough to create a perfect fairy tale essay, you can use our suggestions.

By the way, you may want to check this out when you’re struggling with your assignment and need some help with your writing .

Fairy Tales and Beauty

Have you noticed that beauty is a common theme depicted in many fairy tales? There is always a beautiful main character and someone who either envies him/her or is just amazed by the main character’s beauty.

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Explain in your essay on fairy tale why beauty plays such an important role.

Mothers and Stepmothers in Fairy Tales

Cinderella had an evil stepmother who treated her badly. Belle (Beauty and the Beast) did not have a mother at all. What is the role of a mother and stepmother in fairy tales? What do you think they embody? Give answers in your essay on fairy tales.

Modern Fairy Tales

What is your attitude towards fairy tales created these days? Do you like Harry Potter, Shrek, or any other fairy tales? In what ways are modern fairy tales similar/different to the old ones? Express your standpoint about today’s fairy tales in the fairy tales essay.

How to Write a Fairy Tale in 8 Steps (With Examples)

In this step-by-step guide, we will show you how to write a fairy tale in 8 easy steps with examples. From Cinderella to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, these classic fairy tales have been told and retold by storytellers for hundreds of years. But what makes them so special? In today’s post, we’ll give you the tools to write your own fairy tale.

What is a fairy Tale?

History of fairy tales, 1. decide on your fairy tale moral, 2. create your hero, 3. create your villain, 4. think about the magical element, 5. describe the setting, 6. write the opening paragraph, 7. write the middle section, 8. write a happy ending, fairy tale writing ideas, how do you start a fairy tale, what are the 5 elements of a fairy tale, what is the structure of a fairy tale, how long should a fairy tale be, what are some fairy tale writing techniques, bonus tips on writing fairy tales, write your own fairy tale now.

Fairy tales are stories that usually involve fairies, elves, witches, and other magical beings. These stories often feature heroes who overcome adversity and achieve their dreams. They are also called folktales and were originally told by word of mouth to entertain people.

The main character is often an orphan or someone who is facing great adversity, such as having no place to live or no food to eat. The character faces this adversity and then finds a way to overcome it. In the process, he/she usually overcomes greed, learns something new, and grows as a person. For example, Cinderella was forced to do all of her chores for her evil stepmother and stepsisters. But in the end, she overcomes her adversity and lives happily ever after with her true love.

This is what makes fairy tales so popular and relatable to people all over the world. We have all gone through hardships in our lives. A fairy tale is a story that shows us that we can come out of these situations much better than we were before.

How many fairy tales can you list? 5, 10, maybe 30? Throughout the ages, storytellers from around the world have created hundreds of fairy tales. No one knows the exact number of fairy tales out there. We just know the popular ones, like Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. You might even be surprised to learn that most fairy tales have their origin back in the 16th century. In fact, the first story of Cinderella was even told in 7 BC and was about a slave girl who marries the king of Egypt.

Even today fairy tales are a huge part of our lives. They teach us important morals, such as accepting others who are different or not talking to strangers and provide motivational tales of beating adversity and hardship. One of the most famous fairy tale writers out there is Hans Christian Andersen. Anderson has written no fewer than 3,381 works, including The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and The Emperor News Clothes.

To celebrate Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday on April 2 nd , we have created this tutorial on how to write a fairy tale in 8 steps. Now you can be the next fairy tale extraordinaire by writing your own fairy tales.

How To Write a Fairy Tale in 8 Steps

Now it’s your turn to write your own fairy tale. Don’t worry, it’s really easy when you follow these steps.

A moral is an important lesson your reader learns when they finish reading a story. In this step, you will want to make a list of morals or life lessons that you can base your fairytale around.

For example, the moral of Cinderella is to show kindness to everyone , no matter how they treat you. It is her kindness that wins the Prince over and helps her to live happily ever after.

Another great example is Beauty and the Beast. The moral of this story is that you cannot judge people by their appearances. A beast may be kind at heart, but still appear to be ugly. In other words, what you see is not always what you get. Other great examples of morals can be found in reading Aesop’s fables, just check out this post on the top 12 life lessons from Aesop’s Fables .

In the next step, you should write down a character description for your hero. This character description should include personality traits, likes and dislikes, as well as a physical description.

Some common traits of your hero or heroine could be kind, humble, innocent and kind-hearted. They must be someone that your reader could relate to and feel something for. Therefore it is a good idea to make your main character a normal, everyday person who could change throughout the story. Think about Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk or Snow White.

For example, you could have the character be a gentle giant who enjoys painting or playing music. Your character does not necessarily have to be human! You can create a sea creature or even an object as the hero of your fairy tale.

Now it’s time to write a character description for the main villain in your fairytale. A fairy tale without a villain would be pretty boring. Create an evil character to test your heroes’ abilities and cause them some pain. The villain in fairy tales is normally the source of conflict and is likely to stop your hero from achieving their goals. Some common villains include the Big Bad Wolf, Cinderella’s stepmother or the evil queen.

For example, if you were writing a fairy tale about a brave knight and his quest for love, then your villain might be an evil dragon that is intent on destroying all that is good and pure.

Magic is the best part of any fairy tale. It is the magical element that guides your hero and helps them get a happy ending. Think about the fairy godmother’s role in Cinderella or the Genie in Aladdin.

When creating your magical element, use the “What if” technique. What if the teapot could talk? What if the cat had magical powers? This is a useful technique to help you think outside the box and create some really magical elements for your fairy tale. And remember any everyday object can have magical powers in a fairy tale.

For example, think of a fork that has magical powers. The fork can be used as a magic wand to help you find lost objects.

Different settings can create different moods in your fairy tale. For example, a nice little cottage in a forest is the perfect place to create a cosy, warm feeling. While a gloomy castle might set the scene of a dark, gothic fairy tale.

Other examples of common settings in fairy tales include an enchanted forest or a royal palace. When choosing your setting you can also choose the time period of your fairy tale. Common fairy tales were set in the 18 th or 19 th century, but what if your fairy tale was set in the future?

In fairy tales, the opening sentence normally begins with ‘Once upon a time…’ or ‘There once was a…’ and then goes on to describe the main character and the setting in great detail. You should also ideally mention the adversity the main character is facing at this point.

For example in Cinderella, the opening sentence could be:

‘Cinderella’s father had died when she was very young leaving her an orphan. Her stepmother hated her and treated her like a slave. She had to work day and night making dresses for the family while her stepmother wore beautiful gowns and ate rich food. Cinderella felt so sad that she often wept herself to sleep.’

Here we get a brief description of Cinderella, along with information on the pain she is feeling or her adversity.

The middle of a fairy tale is where the biggest conflict happens. It is also the longest part of most fairy tales. In this section of the story, the main character has to face their greatest challenge and overcome it. They need to either find something or do something that will help them in the battle they are fighting. It is also the part of the story that usually has the most action and emotion in it.

For example in Cinderella, when Cinderella’s stepmother destroys the dress that Cinderella plans on wearing to the ball, she must find another way to achieve her goal. At this point, the fairy godmother appears to Cinderella to offer a helping hand. The fairy godmother transforms Cinderella into a beautiful woman so that she can attend the ball.

This scene contains lots of conflict and drama. There is also a sense of urgency because Cinderella needs to get dressed fast if she wants to be able to attend the ball.

The most important part of your fairy tale is a happy ending. All fairy tales end in happy endings, so what is yours? Think about how the conflict in the fairy tale is resolved or how the villain gets defeated. For example in Cinderella, the glass slippers fit her foot, or in The Ugly Duckling, the duck turns into a beautiful swan. Overall the reader is left with a sense of warmth and optimism that the hero has overcome adversity and that good always wins in the end.

To get you started on writing your very own fairy tale below is a list of some writing prompts:

A young boy discovers a magic lamp in his backyard that brings him to a mysterious world of fairies, witches, and monsters.
A little girl finds a magic ring that transports her to a strange new world. The ring belongs to a friendly wizard who has been captured by an evil magician.
A young man travels into the forest to seek the help of a wise old wizard. He learns that the wizard is actually a powerful sorcerer who has been trapped in a spell for centuries.
An old man’s life is changed forever when he is visited by a fairy godmother who gives him three wishes. The first wish is for him to be rich; the second is to win the heart of a beautiful princess; the third is to be reunited with his long-lost son.
A young girl finds a book of spells that allows her to transform into any animal she chooses.
A young boy becomes the victim of a cruel trick played upon him by two evil brothers. He is turned into a pig and is forced to work on their pig farm.
A young girl with a unique talent is chosen to go on an adventure to find a powerful artefact that will help her family save their farm.
A young man travels to a magical land where he meets a wise old wizard who helps him defeat a wicked king and restore peace to his kingdom.
A young boy discovers a magical stone that allows him to travel through time. He travels back in time to visit his grandparents and see what life was like when they were children.
A young boy befriends a talking cat who teaches him how to use magic to defeat the evil forces trying to take over his kingdom.

For more fairy tale inspiration, see our post on 110+ fairy tale writing prompts with a generator .

Common Questions

The most common way to start a fairy tale is with, “Once upon a time…”. You may also start a fairy tale with the lines, “Long, long ago…” or “There once was a…”. If you want to make your fairy tale sound more modern, you could begin with a question. For example, “Have you ever heard of the legend of the golden sword?” – This is especially great for when you are re-telling a famous fairy tale.

Every fairy tale has 5 elements that make them a fairy tale, these include:

Hero/Heroine & Villain: Good versus evil is a common theme in fairy tales. Traditionally, this involves a kind-hearted hero against an evil character. Heroes in fairy tales don’t always need to be purely kind, they can have a dark side making your story more interesting to read.
Magic: A fairytale with no magic, is no fairy tale at all! Think curses, magical spells and enchanted items. Magic can be the root of evil, and it can be the only saviour in a tough situation for your hero or heroine.
Conflict & Resolution: Every story needs some sort of conflict. A challenge your hero must solve. The bigger the conflict the better. The key to good conflict in a fairy tale is to make the conflict feel impossible to solve. Until the last key moment, where your hero comes out on top.
Moral/Lesson : The reason why fairy tales are so popular is because of the life lessons they can offer to readers. The most common lesson learned from most fairy tales is that being kind can beat any evil in the world, and no matter who you are, dreams do come true!
A Happy Ending: The majority of fairy tales end with a traditional, “Happily ever after” ending. The hero overcomes their challenge and celebrates their win – The end. The princess marries her prince, the poor boy never feels poor again and the Queen never feels alone again. More modern fairytales are moving away from happy endings to ending on a cliffhanger or with a sad ending.

For general stories, you might be interested in this post on the five elements of stories explained with examples .

A basic fairy tale structure starts with an opening paragraph to describe the setting and the hero. This leads to the problem or conflicts the hero is facing. Where the hero will have to either go on a journey or become stronger in order to overcome this challenge. Finally, the challenge is solved and everyone lives happily ever after.

There is no exact amount of words for how long a fairy tale should be. It depends on your target audience and the plot of the fairy tale.

Some classic fairy tales, such as “The Three Little Pigs” or even “Red Riding Hood” are just a few paragraphs long. While modern adaptions of fairy tales like Cinderella or even Beauty and the Beast are much longer spanning around 50 pages. There are also fairy tale chapter books, such as The Enchanted Forest Chronicles series by Patricia C. Wrede which includes four chapter books in the series.

In general, a fairy tale should be of an appropriate length to effectively convey its themes and messages, without becoming tedious or losing the reader’s attention. Moreover, the length may vary depending on the age range of the target audience. Younger children tend to prefer shorter stories, whereas older children and adults can typically handle longer and more intricate tales.

Writing a good fairy-tale means using the right technique. Below are some writing techniques that many authors use to create magical fairy tales:

Vivid Imagery: Fairy tales often use vivid and descriptive language to create rich and detailed imagery. This can help to transport the reader to the fantastical world of the story.
Simple Language: Fairy tales are typically written in simple and straightforward language, making them accessible to a wide range of readers. This also allows the author to focus on the story and its themes, rather than complex language or sentence structure.
Symbolism : Fairy tales often use symbolism to convey deeper meaning and add layers to the story. For example, a character might represent a particular virtue or vice, or an object might symbolize a particular theme or idea.
Repetition: Many fairy tales use repetition, such as repeating phrases or events, to create a sense of rhythm and structure in the story. This can help to make the story more memorable and engaging for readers.
Foreshadowing : Fairy tales often use foreshadowing, such as hinting at events that will occur later in the story, to create tension and build suspense. This can help to keep readers engaged and invested in the story.
Transformation : Many fairy tales involve characters undergoing transformations, either physically or emotionally. These transformations can help to convey important themes and messages, such as the power of love or the importance of inner beauty.

Still, struggling to write a fairy tale? Here are some bonus tips to help you get writing.

When lost for inspiration, try reading fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen and Brother Grimm and then try re-telling these fairy tales in your own way.
Keep it simple, use language that all age groups can understand and read and avoid using complicated and long sentences.
Include words like, “Once upon a time” and “Happily ever after”.
Things happen in threes or sevens – It’s a common fairy tale tradition. This could relate to characters, events or places. For example the seven dwarfs in snow white or the three little pigs.
Send your hero on a quest or journey and show the changes to them relating to their behaviour and personality on the way.
Common fairy tales follow the Good vs. Evil story plot.
Villains or evil characters are punished for their acts and the hero is rewarded in some way.
The challenge or obstacle your heroes faces must be impossible to overcome without the help of a magical character or some special abilities. For example, only true love could break the beast’s curse in Beauty and The Beast.

Need more help with writing a fairy tale? We recommend the book, Lessons from Grimm by Shona Slayton (Amazon Affiliate link), which you can purchase from Amazon. It is a must-have for all fairy tale writers and authors. This book offers a basic formula for writing your own fairy tale, along with practical tips to help you.

Another recommended book for fairy tale writing is, How to Write a Fractured Fairy Tale (Amazon Affiliate link). This illustrated guide is great for kids who want to write their own fairy tales. It provides guidance on outlining your story’s plot , character development , editing your fairy tale and even comes with a range of fun activities.

Now you know the essential steps to write a fairy tale it’s time for you to get writing! Best of all, you can even use our online story creator to write and publish your own stories!

How to Write a Fairy Tale in 6 Steps imagine forest

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

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Article contents

Fairy-tale symbolism: an overview.

Francisco Vaz da Silva Francisco Vaz da Silva Lisbon University Institute
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.79
Published online: 25 January 2017

Because the marvelous elements in fairy tales call for an explanation, a cohort of bright minds have pored over the problem of fairy-tale symbolism. Models sharing the nineteenth-century penchant for genetic inquiries have assumed that symbols are the survivals of archaic metaphors. Thus, Max Müller proposed that myths and fairy tales stem from obscured metaphors about solar phenomena; Sigmund Freud speculated that fairy-tale symbolism is the fossilized residue of primordial sexual metaphors; and Carl Jung submitted that symbols express immanent archetypes of the human psyche. Such early approaches assume that symbols convey fixed meanings, and they disregard the effects of folklore variation on meanings.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did take variation into account. They conceived Märchen in terms of immanent blueprints incessantly recreated in myriad retellings, but they never tried to make sense of the themes by means of the variants. This path was taken by folklorists influenced by Freud. Alan Dundes proposed to harness tale variants to grasp symbolic equivalences, and he pioneered the study of folk metaphors. But Dundes focused on preset Freudian symbols, a trend that Bengt Holbek followed. To this day, the prospect of addressing fairy-tale symbolism beyond Freud’s assumption of fixed translations remains elusive.

Nevertheless, the basic tools are available. Maria Tatar remarked that fairy tales are metaphoric devices, and Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out that metaphors—in switching terms that belong to different codes—lay bare the broader semantic field underlying each transposition. Müller, Freud, Dundes, Tatar, and Lévi-Strauss variously glimpsed metaphoric patterns in tale variations. The time is ripe to synthesize these intuitions in the light of contemporary cognitive research on conceptual metaphor, so as to address the creative dynamics of symbolism in fairy tales.

interpretation
psychoanalysis

Symbolism Matters

Fairy tales refer to events taking place once upon a time, in a faraway realm—not here and now—and the opening and ending formulas of the tales underscore the otherness of the themes. 1 A deceased mother takes the shape of a cow to help her daughter, boys turned into ravens dwell in a crystal mountain, girls prick themselves into a long sleep in the woods … Scores of such unreal stories have kept audiences and readers captive for untold generations, which suggests that—as Friedrich Max Müller put it long ago—the “epidemic” of “incredible and impossible” matter in Märchen and myth must “possess some raison d’être .” 2

One way to understand the otherness of fairy tales is to assume that they are literally true to the reality of other times and places. Such was the prevailing understanding in the 19th century. The assumption that fairy tales are the narrative survival of customs and beliefs from other times and places has inspired two sorts of explanatory models. On the one hand, the evolutionist hypothesis stresses survival in time. As the British folklorist Andrew Lang put it, folklorists find in “proverbs and riddles, and nursery tales and superstitions … the relics of a stage of thought, which is dying out in Europe, but which still exists in many parts of the world.” 3 Specifically, fairy-tale imagery—being rife with magic, cannibalistic episodes, and a general lack of distinction between animals and humans—bespeaks “an age of savage fancy.” 4 On the other hand, the diffusionist persuasion stresses resilience in space. The notion that tales were invented only once and then traveled, while carrying the cultural mark of their place of origin, had a worthy exponent in Emmanuel Cosquin. This French folklorist embraced the view that fairy tales originated in India, and he repeatedly argued that fairy-tale motifs match Hindu representations. 5

Alas, it is hard to envision individuals bothering to learn something and pass it on if it means nothing to them. 6 Cosquin thought nothing of branding a chain of metamorphoses in a French text as an “ultra-bizarre ending” and then, one step ahead, professing that “such an Indian ending” is a true “Made in India” mark of origin. 7 This perilous line of argument raises various issues but focus on the main question: Why, if India’s conceptions were so unique, would Indian tales have been borrowed and nurtured by people who found them “bizarre”? A related problem plagues the evolutionist model. Lang acknowledges that some tale “forms are fitter than others, survive more powerfully, and are more widely spread.” 8 This notion of differential fitness supposes a process of cultural selection that would discard any meaningless contents while preserving those themes that make sense to the taletellers and their audiences. This is a sensible assumption. 9 But, crucially, it contradicts the notion that the “savage fancy” of bygone eras might survive in the modern fairy tale.

In short, the assumption that fairy tales might carry alien cultural traits fails to explain why those traits should have survived at all. Alternatively, the premise of symbolism assumes that the bizarre elements in fairy tales are (somehow) relevant to the taletellers and their audiences. Models that address fairy-tale contents as the symbolic expression of notions that are relevant to individuals and communities have no trouble explaining how fairy tales persist in tradition.

Fixed Symbols: Models with a Key

Although all models of symbolism agree that the contents of fairy tales are not to be taken literally, they disagree on what symbols may be. Typically, models built on 19th-century premises assume that symbols are the survivals of archaic metaphors. This assumption implies that symbols convey fossilized meanings, harking back to a primordial time, that are unintelligible at the present time. As you might predict, competing theories about the origin of the symbols offer alternative propositions about their meanings. Those propositions tend to be contentious. As Richard Dorson noted, “the celestial mythologists wrangled over the primacy of sun, storms, and stars,” whereas “the psychoanalytical mythologists dispute over the symbols from the unconscious.” 10 Still, the theories of Max Müller and Sigmund Freud provide valuable clues on symbolic elucidation from the perspective of survival.

A Disease of Language: Max Müller

In an influential 1856 essay entitled “Comparative Mythology,” Friedrich Max Müller presented a sweeping vision of mythology and fairy tales. Before the split of the Indo-European language family into distinct branches, Müller submitted, language lost its “etymological conscience.” As the original meanings of word roots were gradually forgotten, new meanings were attached to the words, “by a kind of etymological instinct,” in mythical fables. 11 In other words, myths replaced forgotten etymologies. As Müller put it later, mythology comes from an “infantile disease” of language, namely, “self-forgetfulness.” 12 Conversely, discovering the root of the word at the core of each myth should yield, “behind the floating clouds of the dawn of thought and language, that real nature which mythology has so long veiled and disguised.” 13 For this purpose, each relevant word is to be compared to its variants in other branches of the Indo-European family. Usually, the Sanskrit variant yields insight as to the root of the word (for, although “Sanskrit is not the mother of Latin and Greek … it is no doubt the eldest [sister] in so far as it has preserved its words in their most primitive state”), 14 and typically the root in question expresses solar phenomena. Given that the “divine myth becomes an heroic legend, and the heroic legend fades away into a nursery tale,” solar myths are the “seeds” of the modern fairy tales. 15 Thus, Müller finds it “extremely probable” that the motif of “Red Riding Hood being swallowed by the wolf and cut out again” comes from solar mythology. 16

Candidly, Müller acknowledged “the monotonous character” of his own philological readings: “‘Is everything the Dawn? Is everything the Sun?’ This question I have asked myself many times before it was addressed to me by others.” But his unswerving answer was that “my own researches lead me again and again to the dawn and the sun as the chief burden of the myths of the Aryan race.” 17 Eventually, a parody mocking his line of thought to conclude that Max Müller himself was a solar myth was well received, and the French translator added the significant title: “After All, Mr. Max Müller Never Existed.” The sun of solar mythology was setting. 18

With the wane of solar mythology, an aspect of Müller’s contribution lingers in undeserved obscurity. Müller recalled John Locke’s point that “all words expressive of immaterial conceptions are derived by metaphor from words expressive of sensible ideas,” and he added that metaphor is among “the most powerful engines” in the construction of languages. 19 Besides emphasizing the importance of metaphor in the ancient Indo-European tongue, he also made the point that metaphorical processes underlie myth and Märchen as well as every intellectual movement, “even in our own [age], though perhaps the least given to metaphor, poetry, and mythology.” 20 Crucially, his point that myths arise whenever the awareness of metaphor is dimmed implies that myths (and Märchen) hinge on unselfconscious metaphors. This is a fundamental insight.

Because Müller saw myths and fairy tales as the survivals of ancient metaphors, he never thought of exploring the relevance of metaphoric patterns for contemporary storytelling. Since he defined myths (and Märchen) as obscured primal metaphors, he assumed that the philologist must step in and clear up the “mythological misunderstanding” by reestablishing the correct etymological derivations. 21

Yet, tantalizingly, Müller was aware of the recurrence of metaphor on human thought, ancient and modern. 22 His own stated purpose of finding solar phenomena “behind the floating clouds of the dawn of thought and language” uses the solar metaphor to talk about solar metaphors. 23 Willy-nilly, Müller showed that living metaphor pervades storytelling (even the academic sort) up to his own time.

Symbols in Dreams and Folklore: Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud proposed another variation on the notion that symbols are the fossilized survivals of archaic metaphors. His interest in symbols stemmed from the realization that some “‘mute’ dream-elements” resist the technique of dream interpretation by means of free associations. 24 Freud assumed that these elements cannot be illuminated by the dreamer’s free associations because they are endowed “with a permanently fixed meaning.” 25 Put otherwise, the symbolic relation between these dream elements and the “‘genuine’ thing behind them” is constant. 26 On this assumption, Freud compiled a list of symbolic “stable translations,” which he learned “from very different sources—from fairy tales and myths … from folklore … and from poetic and colloquial linguistic usage.” 27

As Freud puzzled over why a symbol would allow people to “make use of it without knowing about it,” 28 he speculated that the “ultimate meaning of the symbolic relation … is of a genetic character. Things that are symbolically connected today were probably united in prehistoric times by conceptual and linguistic identity.” 29 In other words, symbols are fixed because they are the “residues” of a “hypothetical ‘primal language.’” 30 And the likely reason why most of them are “sexual symbols”—which makes Freud’s interpretations admittedly “very monotonous,” but what can he “do about it?” 31 —is that primal words “originally had a sexual significance” but “later acquired another application.” 32 Ultimately, Freud falls back on the idea of primordial metaphors to justify his understanding of symbols. Originally, he muses, “all primal words referred to sexual things but afterwards lost their original meaning through being applied to other things and activities which were compared with the sexual ones.” 33

Ultimately, Freud shares with Müller a fixed reading of symbols based on the hypothesis of primal word roots and metaphorical derivation. Depending on their respective definitions of the primal metaphors, each author offers a confessedly monotonous—sexual, or solar—reading of symbols. But while Müller chose to dispel the metaphors and recover the etymological roots, Freud decided to collect the contemporary survivals of primal metaphors. He set dream symbolism within the wider field of “unconscious ideation” among the folk, as found in folklore and in linguistic idioms, and proceeded to compile a list of the surviving symbolic translations. 34 Although he was a self-professed “amateur” in mythology, anthropology, philology, and folklore, 35 the corpus of fixed symbols Freud gleaned from these fields has set a template for symbolic interpretations. 36 How far this template (and its inherent view of symbolism) can illuminate fairy-tale symbolism remains a contentious issue.

Freud’s Followers

Freud’s hypothesis of a primal language, of which symbols are the survivals, inspired Erich Fromm’s proposition that “symbolic language is a language in its own right, in fact, the only universal language the human race ever developed.” Fromm adds that the understanding of symbolic language “should be taught in our high schools and colleges just as other ‘foreign languages’ are part of their curriculum.” Thus, he expands Freud’s view of fixed symbols into the notion that symbolism is a conventional language. Fromm adds that the problem is “one of understanding [symbolic language] rather than of interpreting as if one dealt with an artificially manufactured secret code.” 37

Yet Fromm acknowledges internecine strife on what the meanings of symbols may be. Each psychoanalytic school, he allows, lays exclusive claims “to the only true understanding of symbolic language,” and “we lose sight of the many-sidedness of symbolic language and try to force it into the Procrustean bed of one, and only one, kind of meaning.” 38 Fromm himself is a case in point. Memorably, he spars with Freud as he chooses to interpret “Little Red Riding Hood” in light of “the male-female conflict” rather than through the oedipal lens. 39

Such disagreements are fairly common. Bruno Bettelheim, in his best-selling book on the meanings of enchantment, brings back an oedipal focus to “Little Red Riding Hood.” This tale, Bettelheim thinks, is about the girl’s budding sexuality and her unconscious desire to get rid of grandmother (i.e., her mother) in order to be seduced by the wolf (i.e., her father). 40 This particular interpretation supposes that Little Red Riding Hood “has outgrown her oral fixation, no longer has any destructive oral desires.” 41 However, fellow psychoanalyst Géza Róheim draws attention to an element of oral aggression perpetrated by the “cannibal child” in oral variants of the tale. 42 So much, then, for the presumption of understanding rather than interpreting the symbolic language of fairy tales. Nor does the plurality of Freudian interpretations foster confidence in Freud’s tenet of the fixity of symbols.

Quite apart from the Freudian tenet, it is noteworthy that the possibility of cherry-picking tale variants facilitates the plurality of interpretations. As historian Robert Darnton noted, both Fromm and Bettelheim focus on the Grimm variant of “Little Red Riding Hood” and thus gloss over important motifs found in the oral variants, such as “the cannibalizing of grandmother and the strip-tease prelude to the devouring of the girl.” 43 Darnton decried Fromm’s “uncanny sensitivity to detail that did not exist in the original folktale,” and he added that “the moral of this story should be: beware of psychoanalysts—and be careful in your use of sources.” 44

This remark on the use of sources is relevant. Notably, it applies to Darnton himself. The fact that he lambasts Fromm’s unfaithfulness to the original folktale suggests that Darnton thinks he knows what the urtext of “Little Red Riding Hood” is. Indeed, he argues that an oral variant collected around 1885 represents “the tale more or less as it was told around firesides in peasant cottages during long winter evenings in eighteenth-century France.” Darnton makes the case that the peasants of 18th-century France had lives “nasty, brutish, and short,” and that their folktales feature a matching worldview. 45 Quite remarkably, Darnton excises the happy end in his chosen source to suit his grim argument. 46

Although Darnton castigates Bettelheim for reading fairy tales “as if they had no history,” 47 he himself addresses tales as though he was no historian. (Darnton reduces the variety of folktales to the fixity of a single text, 48 declares that a 19th-century text represents an 18th-century tradition, and maims his chosen source, all of which is striking behavior for a historian.) In fact, Darnton joins Bettelheim and Fromm in the act of cherry-picking a tale variant that more or less agrees with his predefined template for interpretation. So the contrast between the historian and the psychoanalysts is a moot point. The relevant point is that all three authors feel free to apply a preset interpretive grid to a tale variant that suits it, and to dismiss all the variants that might disprove it.

This methodological choice raises the issue of what to do with all the unheeded tale variants. It is clear that the practice of selecting one variant over the others befits projects bent on reading meanings into tales. Conversely, abstention from cherry-picking variants should be a condition for apprehending meanings from the tales. The lesson here is that understanding a fairy tale involves discovering the commonalities among all tale variants—it requires a comparative endeavor that might capture the inner workings of the tale. This open-ended sort of approach contrasts with the one-sidedness of psychoanalytical models that transpose the unfamiliar imagery of myth and fairy tale into (as Nadia Sels put it) “the safe register of an already familiar truth.” 49

Yet, heeding variation is not enough. The Jungian canon provides a case study in the obfuscation caused by the wholesale metaphorical transposition of fairy tales—variants and all—into preset templates.

Jungian Interpretations

Carl Gustav Jung proposed that the structural elements of the collective unconscious, which he called archetypes, are expressed in myriad images he called symbols. The archetype itself is that which is symbolized, and each symbol captures an aspect of it. 50 These principles yield a comparative approach to fairy tales. Marie-Louise von Franz explains that before you can understand a symbol in a fairy tale, you have to amplify it: “ Amplification means enlarging through collecting a quantity of parallels .” Thus, you get “to know the comparative anatomy of all the symbols” in the tale, and you can proceed to “construct the context.” 51 Then comes “the last essential step, which is the interpretation itself—the task of translating the amplified story into psychological language”—and von Franz is adamant that “we must use strictly psychological language. Only then do we know what the interpretation is.” 52

Note that interpretation does not stem from comparing the parallel images across tale variants; rather, it springs from translating the “amplified” tale into psychological language. This caveat addresses a fundamental point in Jungian interpretation. Jung maintains that “ [c]ontents of an archetypal character are manifestations of processes in the collective unconscious ,” and because they refer to something unconscious, “ it is impossible to say what they refer to .” 53 Jung adds that even “the best attempts of explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language.” The most one can do “is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress.” 54 In precisely this vein, von Franz acknowledges that her own translation of “the fairy tale myth into Jungian psychology” amounts to “replacing one myth by another—by our myth, the Jungian myth.” 55

So the Jungian psychological “myth” becomes the template for all interpretations—again, we find meanings read into tales. Fairy tales read as so many variations on a psychological story line permeated with Self, Shadow, Anima, and Animus. And, given Jung’s notion that archetypical contents are a “twilight … which too much clarity only dispels,” 56 interpreters enjoy untrammeled freedom in that “twilight.” Not surprisingly, as Robert Segal remarks, Jung “is prepared to rule out all non-Jungian interpretations [of myth], but he is not prepared to rule in any one Jungian interpretation.” 57 In the same vein, von Franz states that “many so-called Jungian attempts at interpretation,” by colleagues she does not deign to “assail … by name,” have strayed. 58 Here, we are reminded of the conflicting interpretations by Freudian authors, and the underlying cause is the same. Invasive approaches tend to illuminate the nooks and crannies of the interpretive models, rather than the tales.

One reason why Jungians find it hard to agree on meanings is that Jung himself found symbols inscrutable. Because it is impossible to grasp unconscious contents, “every interpretation necessarily remains an ‘as-if,’” Jung wrote. This is to say that “an archetypal content is first and foremost a figure of speech ,” and likewise all attempts at explanation are but “translations into another metaphorical language.” By implication, the “ultimate meaning” of symbols is inaccessible to rational inquiry. 59

Jung’s tenet that the references of symbols are beyond the pale of rational inquiry is most clear in the work of Joseph Campbell. Since his early inquiry on the heroic pattern of myths and fairy tales, this prodigiously erudite researcher brought together “a host of myths and folk tales from every corner of the world” in order to “let the symbols speak for themselves.” In truth, Campbell liberally used the ideas of Freud and Jung to grapple with “the grammar of the symbols.” 60 Rather than following Freud’s assumption that rational inquiry may transform “what is unconscious into what is conscious,” 61 Campbell shared Jung’s belief in unfathomable archetypes. “Such wonders simply are ,” Campbell writes—archetypes “are antecedent to meaning, though ‘meanings’ may be read into them.” On this assumption, he strives for “the release of the archetypical symbolic images of mythic thought from their various local matrices of culturally conditioned references and ‘meaning.’” This approach amounts to addressing archetypes “as natural phenomena.” 62 Indeed, Campbell reckons that myth is “an expression of the self-regulation of the psyche,” comparable to “the compensatory action … of the body throwing off disease.” Insofar as archetypes have meaning, “such a ‘meaning’ [is] as that of a sneeze, the festering of an infected wound, or a fever.” 63 In other words, the “meaning” of symbols is their biological function 64 —an absent meaning.

Fittingly, Campbell titled his “preliminary sketch” for The Masks of God (his mythological tetralogy) “The Symbol Without Meaning.” This choice aligns his mythological master plan with Jung’s tenet that “the symbol is a figure by which allusion is made to an unknown.” 65 In Campbell’s own formulation, symbols are natural phenomena “opening back to mystery.” 66 “Mystery” is the gravitational core of Campbell’s work on symbols.

Variation and Meanings

All of this suggests that abstaining from translating tales into preset master narratives is a necessary condition for seeking meanings in the tales. Each folk story exists in the universe of its variants, and no single variant ever represents a tale; therefore, heeding tale variations is a necessary condition for apprehending the symbolic universe of each tale. Yet by the same token, taking the plurality of variation in the wrong way can dispel meanings. It is worth revisiting some influential approaches to tale variations and the study of meanings.

Tale Variation as Corruption: Kaarle Krohn and Followers

Start with a negative case. In the late 19th century, the so-called historical-geographic method—also dubbed the folkloristic method by Kaarle Krohn, its main popularizer—proposed that every tale should be tracked cartographically back to its original form. 67 Krohn and his followers assumed that folktales are authorial texts—stories created once upon a time, then memorized and orally transmitted. They assumed that given the limitations of human memory, orally transmitted texts inevitably get garbled. As Krohn himself put it, “If we observe the laws whose effects are recognizable in the manifold modifications of the original form of a tradition, we encounter first the influence of faulty memory.” 68 This is to say that traditional variations stem from memory lapses—they are errors. As the Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow pointed out, Krohn and his philologically trained collaborators transposed literary habits of thought into the study of oral traditions. They assumed that “the original form of a folktale should be the most complete and the best, also the most logical,” and they presumed that the oral variations “are products of degeneration.” 69 By implication, folktales tend toward meaninglessness.

Given the axiom that oral transmission fosters degeneration, the folklorist’s self-assigned task is to trim off the corrupted bits in order to recover the original texts. Archer Taylor, an American expounder of the method, explains that “when the accidental variations are identified and eliminated, then and only then can the tale be studied effectively.” 70 The bitter irony is that folklorists found themselves dismissing folklore. As Valdimar Hafstein puts it, their goal “was to strip folk tradition away from the Ur-form, to ‘recreate the original’ as a ‘complete creation’ of an individual author.” 71

This devolutionary view of tradition is unsustainable. First, it fails to account for the actual stability of tales. Krohn himself mentioned “the incredible stability of folk narrative,” and Stith Thompson—who also subscribed to the notion that forgetfulness “is perhaps the most frequent cause of modifications in stories”—likewise noted the “remarkable” stability of stories “in the midst of continually shifting details.” 72 The adjectives used by the two scholars are interesting. If tradition corrupts texts, then the stability of folktales looks “incredible” indeed: How could a tradition driven by memory lapses achieve a “remarkable” stability? Second, the very assumption of an error-driven tradition shuns the possibility of meaningful variations. Thus, the failure to understand variation and to address meanings constitutes the two sides of one coin.

Alternatively, the assumption that tale variations are meaningful entails that the myriad variants are so many equivalent permutations on enduring themes. This view accounts for the correlated facts that folktales are stable, and yet no two variants are ever alike—an insight that has been available since the inception of modern fairy-tale studies.

Tales and Variants: The Brothers Grimm

At the onset of the systematic collection and study of Märchen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm explicitly held the view that folktale retellings are meaningful variations on stable patterns. Their point, largely disregarded, deserves to be reinstated. The Grimms declined on principle to associate tale variations with corruption and inauthenticity. They reiterated this particular point in their prefaces to the second volume of the first edition ( 1815 ), and the first volume of the second editions ( 1819 ), of Kinder- und Hausmärchen . In two very similar passages, the brothers explain that they insist on preserving the variations of the tales because “these different variations appeared to us more noteworthy than they are to those who see in them nothing more than alterations and distortions of a once extant archetype [ eines einmal dagewesenen Urbildes ].” The Grimms’ own view is that variations “may be simply attempts to approach in manifold ways an inexhaustible prototype immanent in the spirit [ einem im Geist bloß Vorhandenen (Urbild) ].” 73 Thus, the brothers dismiss the idea of original forms and the entailment that variations are corruptions. Alternatively, they propose thinking about tales in terms of stable blueprints incessantly recreated in plural retellings.

The introduction to the 1812 volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen clarifies that the Brothers Grimm felt free to conflate tale variants because they realized that a folktale exists in the set of its variants, and they wanted to convey a rounded view of each tale. In the introduction, they note that folktales, “never fixed, transform themselves in each region, almost in each mouth,” and yet “tales truly preserve the same fundamentals.” Indeed, “the tales as time went by continuously created themselves anew, but for that very reason their core must be very old.” The particulars are valuable; hence, the Grimms often preserve in a single text “several expressions of one and the same tale owing to their pleasing and peculiar variations.” 74 In the second edition, they elaborate on this point: They say that they often conflated complementary tale variants in one text and kept diverging variants in the notes, so as to include everything they collected and to preserve every particularity they noticed. 75 The same idea drives Jacob Grimm, in his 1815 circular on the collection of Volkspoesie , to emphasize that “incomplete fragments are not to be scorned … [A]ll variations, repetitions, and versions of one and the same legend could each become important.” 76

In short, the Brothers Grimm maintained that tradition is all about the creative retellings of capacious blueprints, which is why they chose not to select a single variant of each tale. They knew that Märchen live in myriad retellings, and no single variant ever represents a tale. Philip Pullman, who recently retold a number of Grimm tales, captures the brothers’ point as he declares that “[a] fairy tale is not a text.” 77

Yet the Grimms never set out to make sense of the themes by means of the variants. It took a Freudian folklorist to bring together variation and meanings.

Allomotifs and Symbols: Alan Dundes

Alan Dundes remarked that folktales have two defining characteristics. One is variation—for in folklore “there is no such thing as the text. There are only texts” 78 —and the other is fantasy, “collective or collectivized fantasy.” 79 Much of that fantasy “is unconscious,” in the Freudian sense of materials that are “repressed and disguised.” Moreover, folklore “provides a socially sanctioned outlet for the expression of what cannot be articulated in the more usual, direct way.” 80 It contains, in other words, “projective materials devised by a people themselves.” 81 Dundes submits that it should be possible to “unlock” the “symbolic code in folktales.” He does grant that Freudian readings “typically … give the appearance of being arbitrary, subjective, and unsubstantiated,” 82 but he also points out that folktale variation can be called upon for the “empirical verification of purported symbolic equations.” If a number of motifs can fill the same slot in a tale, then those allomotifs should be symbolically equivalent. By comparing them, “we may gain access to implicit native formulations of symbolic equivalences.” This procedure, Dundes notes, can be of service to psychoanalytic theory. 83

How do allomotifs and Freudian symbols actually fit together? According to Dundes, if you find motif A and motif B on the same tale slot, you may presume they are allomotifs because “A may be used in place of B and B may be used in place of A.” But you still do not know “whether A is a symbol of B or B is a symbol of A.” In order to work out the symbols, you should ask if one or more allomotifs “are taboo or sensitive in nature.” 84 Once you ascertain “that either A or B is a tabooed subject,” it is likely “that the non-tabooed subject might be substituted for the tabooed subject rather than vice-versa.” 85 For example, in different variants of one tale the protagonist may be punished “in a number of ways including throwing the hero into a snake pit, cutting off his head, or cutting off the hero’s male organ.” These three allomotifs suggest to Dundes “among other things … that cutting off the hero’s head is regarded as the equivalent of cutting off the hero’s phallus.” Dundes adds that one Ozark taleteller mentions decapitation before mixed audiences and reserves castration for men-only audiences, which confirms that decapitation is “a symbolic form of cutting off the phallus.” 86

Note that Dundes reasons along Freudian lines. He does not seek the common denominator of the three allomotifs he mentions; rather, he establishes a one-way relation between an acceptable motif and a “tabooed” one, in compliance with Freud’s description of symbols as the manifest elements that screen the “‘genuine’ thing behind them.” 87 Dundes selects castration as the “sensitive” motif and beheading as its symbol, which is in agreement with Freud’s assertion that decapitation symbolically represents castration. 88 In practice, Dundes never asks how the snake-pit punishment fits with the beheading and the castration allomotifs; rather, he falls back on just the data that match Freud’s interpretive key. 89 He reasons in terms of Freudian symbols and (not surprisingly) tends to find such symbols.

There is no doubting the pervasiveness of the “head-phallus equation,” which Dundes examines in some detail alongside other folk metaphors bearing Freudian overtones. 90 He does state that he favors “relying upon folk metaphors,” and he is fully aware that “metaphors are meaningful, not accidental,” for “there are consistent patterns of metaphor in every culture.” 91 Yet looking for metaphoric patterns is not the same thing as seeking Freudian symbols. A Freudian symbol is the unidirectional relation between a manifest image and an unconscious element, and (as Freud noted) people will “make use of it without knowing about it,” 92 whereas a metaphor is the structural mapping between two conceptual domains, which may be bidirectional as well as conscious.

Take, for example, the Ozark taleteller who used decapitation as a conscious euphemism for castration. 93 He actually used the metaphoric mapping between the body (with its head) and the phallus (with its glans), which is quite popular and has many entailments. This metaphor—unlike the unidirectional Freudian symbol—works both ways: A person’s head connotes the phallus and, reciprocally, the phallus has a “head.” All this is quite conscious. One crass Portuguese expression calls the glans of the penis “dick head,” 94 and reciprocally, the risqué English expression “dickhead” likens a person’s head to the phallus glans (and, by implication, the demeaned person to a “dick”). Note some entailments. Since the head maps to the phallus’s glans, beheading—and all sorts of diminishment to the head noted by Freud, such as “baldness, hair-cutting, falling out of teeth” 95 —are apt to represent castration. Reciprocally, because the penis glans maps to the head, the phallus is “a bald-headed guy,” is endowed with an “eye” (hence, the epithet “cockeye”), and has a “mouth” that “spits” (hence, the expression “spitten image” to designate a child who resembles his father). 96

In short, the comparison of allomotifs yields different results according to whether one chooses to fall back on Freud’s fixed translations or to follow the maze of metaphoric entailments. Freud (like Müller before him) posited that symbolism in folklore is the “residue” of metaphor in ancient language. 97 This assumption, itself a residue of 19th-century thinking, has serious consequences. If symbols were indeed the surviving remnants of bygone metaphors, then compiling a list of fossilized symbolic translations would be the way to go. Alternatively, recognizing that metaphorical processes are ongoing—and that metaphorical mappings comprise multiple entailments, which allow perennially creative variations—clears the way for exploring the dynamic patterns of metaphor.

Symbols as Projection: Bengt Holbek

Dundes’s call for comparing allomotifs spurred a few other folklorists to pursue the idea that “careful attention to allomotifs can often validate psychoanalytic arguments.” 98 Most notably, Bengt Holbek developed Dundes’s “plea for psychoanalytical semiotics” in fairy-tale studies. 99 Besides showing that folklore may be of service to psychoanalytic theory (by means of allomotific comparison), Dundes argued that “psychoanalytic theory can greatly illuminate folklore.” 100 For this purpose, he proposed using “the crucial device of projection”—a psychoanalytical tool—to illuminate folk stories. 101 Holbek followed this path. He assumes that the “symbolic” elements in fairy tales “convey feelings rather than thoughts”; and since symbols are “vivid emotional impressions,” interpretation consists in retracing all the “marvelous” fairy-tale elements back to the real-world referents of such impressions. 102 That is, “every element [in a fairy tale] may be read as pertaining to real life.” 103 This leaves “no room at all for the so-called supernatural beings, the witches, fairies, dragons, ogres, etc.,” since—as he stresses—“ they represent aspects of real persons .” 104

This perspective leaves no room for metaphorical patterns, either. When Holbek gets around to mapping allomotifs in one tale, he writes: “ It makes no difference whether the queen is eating roses, onions or apples … [I]t makes no difference whether the queen bears a wivern only or a wivern and a normal child … It makes no difference whether the heroine’s donor is an unidentified old woman or her dead mother.” 105 But saying “it makes no difference” is not so much about comparing allomotifs as it is about skirting the comparison. 106 Holbek’s actual indifference to allomotifs reflects his choice to approach symbols as psychological projections. Holbek surmises that the thematic axes of fairy tales express the “sensitive, even painful” problems of rural communities. 107 He takes up Dundes’s idea that folklore “provides a socially sanctioned outlet for the expression of what cannot be articulated in the more usual, direct way” 108 and leads it to its logical conclusion: Fairy-tale symbolism is a conscious language that screens sensitive matters. Thus, Dundes’s notional project of addressing folk metaphors by means of allomotifs effectively gives way to the psychoanalytically oriented notion of projection. In Holbek’s model, fairy-tale symbols translate to the hypothetical psychological predicaments of abstract people, even while metaphoric patterns recede to the background.

Metaphors and Symbols

Alternatively, exploring the dynamic patterns of metaphor is bound to encourage open-ended quests on fairy-tale symbolism. Maria Tatar once remarked that those who make it their business to study fairy tales “must see to it that they tell us more about the tales than about their particular school of thought.” 109 With this point in mind, it is worth pursuing Dundes’s interest in allomotifs beyond the remit of Freudian fixed translations.

Metaphors in Fairy Tales: Maria Tatar

Freud’s influence lingers in Tatar’s proposition that fairy tales translate childhood fantasies into the “physical projections and representations of psychic processes.” But Tatar highlights the underlying metaphoric processes. She submits that “the shift from the realistic milieu described in the tale’s opening to the marvelous world of the tale proper is accompanied by a corresponding shift from the figurative meaning of words to the things that those words designate.” 110 In the fairy-tale world, “the figurative or metaphorical dimension of language takes on literal meaning. Ideas become matter.” 111

One instance of symbols “generated” by such “literalized metaphors and by visual puns,” according to Tatar, is “[t]he mother or stepmother who is like an ogress at the beginning of a tale [and who] becomes an actual witch.” 112 Thus, “Hansel and Gretel” displays an “evil parent … reflected and distorted in the mirror of the fairy-tale world. The stepmother who fails to nurture the children … reemerges in the woods as … a cannibalistic fiend.” 113 This depiction of fairy-tale symbols as the translation of verbal metaphors into their mirror images is reminiscent of Freud’s argument that symbols translate latent dream thoughts into “visual pictures.” Freud quotes an experiment by Herbert Silberer: “‘I thought,’ says Silberer, ‘of having to revise an uneven passage in an essay.’ The vision: ‘I saw myself planing a piece of wood.’” 114 Overall, Tatar submits that fairy tales tell us “something about the way in which the mind draws on the double movement of language between literal meaning and figurative expression” 115 —a point that is of the essence of this discussion.

Metaphors and Symbols: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss also addressed Silberer’s experiment. He pointed out that the transposition of a figure of speech into a literal meaning is itself a metaphorical process. “To the writer,” he notes, “the work of the carpenter is an image of his own work, just as the writer’s work might remind a carpenter of his own activity. A metaphor always works both ways … it is like a two-way street.” 116 And so are symbols, he adds. Given a metaphor that links different conceptual domains, symbols are the elements in each domain that are homologous to—and, thus, permutable with—elements in the other domain. It follows that signification is the product of such relations between codes—signifying, in other words, “is nothing but establishing a relation between terms.” 117

Lévi-Strauss credits Müller and Freud with finding and deciphering, respectively, the “code of astronomy” and the “psycho-organic code” in myths. But he remarks that myths (and fairy tales) “always put several codes in play,” none of which conveys the “better” meaning. The essence of the myth (and the fairy tale), Lévi-Strauss proposes, “is founded on the property inherent in all codes: that of being mutually convertible.” 118 This property is the telltale sign of metaphoric mappings; indeed, myths reveal that “metaphor rests on the intuition of logical connections between one domain and other domains in which [the metaphor] reintegrates it.” 119 This is why the elucidation of myths (and fairy tales) involves considering the “layering of codes, one on top of the other.” 120 He stresses that metaphor, in switching terms that belong to different codes, “rests on an intuition that these terms connote the same semantic field when seen from a more global perspective. The metaphor restores this semantic field.” 121

Lévi-Strauss highlights the pervasiveness of metaphor as he acknowledges that his elucidation of obscure Amerindian myths matches “the very obvious analogies we make in our native tongue.” Indeed, he points out, “in all languages there are more or less matching expressions that … are the emanation, in popular language, of thoughts that draw their substance from the very roots of the mind.” 122 In the “metaphorical process,” he suggests, the mind regresses to “the primitive apprehension of a global structure of signification.” 123 Here again, Lévi-Strauss meets Müller and Freud. But whereas his predecessors supposed that symbols are the fixed remnants of archaic metaphors, Lévi-Strauss points out that metaphorical processes are ongoing. Hence, no symbol “signifies anything by itself”; 124 rather, the signification of a myth (or a fairy tale) “is always global; it cannot be reduced to the interpretation provided by one particular code.” 125

To begin making sense of the pervasiveness of metaphor, recall Müller’s point “that all words expressive of immaterial conceptions are derived by metaphor from words expressive of sensible ideas.” 126 The experimental finding, in contemporary cognitive science, of “the metaphorical constitution of our abstract concepts” vindicates Müller’s point. 127 Indeed, the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggests that “abstract concepts are largely metaphorical” because, in essence, basic metaphors transpose “imagery from sensorimotor domains” to abstract domains. 128 In fact, metaphor is required for abstract thinking. It follows that conceptual metaphors are mostly not symmetrical. While one can metaphorically map the act of grasping an object to an act of understanding (e.g., do you grasp this idea?), the converse is not true—one could not possibly use “understanding” to convey the concrete act of holding an object.

In this light, recall Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion that “the writer’s work might remind a carpenter of his own activity.” 129 “Might” is the crucial term here and it is misleading. While it may be illuminating to depict the intellectual labor of a writer in terms of the palpable craft of the carpenter, describing the act of planing a piece of wood in terms of the writer’s exertions would merely befuddle the matter. The point, again, is that the thrust of metaphoric thought lies in using concrete imagery for abstract propositions. In fact, Lévi-Strauss’s entire œuvre confirms this point. In the opening words of his tetralogy on mythical thought, he declares his aim of showing “how empirical categories … can … serve as conceptual tools to bring out abstract notions and articulate these in propositions,” so as to bring out “a logic of sensory-based qualities.” 130 Again and again, Lévi-Strauss recalls that in myths, metaphorical thought raises concrete images to abstract propositions. 131

Fairy-Tale Symbolism

The foregoing discussion suggests that (i) fairy tales hinge on live metaphors; (ii) metaphors map relevant aspects of one conceptual domain to other conceptual domains; (iii) such mappings constitute a network of symbols, of which different tale variants choose alternative allomotifs; and (iv) metaphorical mappings often use concrete imagery to construct abstract propositions. These insights entail that (i) the meanings of fairy-tale symbols are not set once and for all; rather (ii) the values of symbols hinge on the metaphorical transpositions at play in tales; therefore (iii) comparing the allomotifs in tale variants is crucial for determining the active metaphors; and (iv) such metaphors likely use sensorial imagery to convey abstract propositions.

When one applies these insights to fairy tales, it bears heeding Vladimir Propp’s warning that this genre has “a quite particular structure which is immediately felt … even though we may not be aware of it.” 132 The comparative outlook of Mircea Eliade correctly identifies in the fairy-tale form the “‘deaths’ and ‘resurrections’” pattern typical of initiatory ordeals. 133 Indeed, Propp remarked that the themes of initiation to puberty and of journeys to the realm of death account for nearly all the contents of fairy tales, which makes sense because initiatory processes are usually conceptualized “as abiding in the realm of death.” 134 Propp also remarked that the “structure of the tale demands that the hero leave home at any cost”; hence, the narrative develops along the “route of the hero.” 135 And he noted that this route often cuts across a dark forest. 136

Fairy Tale as Metaphor

Propp’s insights call for two comments. The first has to do with metaphor as a structural fairy-tale feature. Propp showed that fairy-tale adventures are journeys in space, their overarching theme being maturation into adulthood. Note that these two features correlate: fairy tales depict spatial journeys in order to talk about maturation processes. Differently put, fairy tales use the concreteness of spatial journeys to reason about maturation processes. This is a basic metaphorical process. Lakoff and Johnson note that “[m]ost of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space.” Specifically, the time-orientation metaphor “has an observer at the present who is facing toward the future, with the past behind the observer” (linguistic expressions of this metaphorical mapping include “that’s all behind us now,” and “we’re looking ahead to the future”). Moreover, in time’s landscape metaphor, “each location in the observer’s path is a time,” so that “time is a path on the ground the observer moves over” (linguistic expressions of this mapping include “there’s going to be trouble down the road ,” and “we’re getting close to Christmas”). 137 Fairy tales combine these two mappings of space to time as they depict characters struggling along the path of their own future.

The second comment to Propp’s insights takes note of two shortcomings in his model. First, although Propp defined the optimal span of the fairy-tale genre, he never asked what the minimal condition that a fairy tale must fulfill might be. 138 Second, he argued that the basic form of the fairy tale is about a hero who grabs magical powers in the forest, then slays a monster and liberates a princess. 139 Crucially, this androcentric model both supposes and obfuscates the princess’s prior enchantment. Accordingly, I submit that the minimal fairy tale features a feminine enchantment. 140 The metaphorical expression “coming of age”— coming (as in space) of age (as in time)—arguably sums up the clockwork of fairy tales. In its minimal form, a girl walks into the woods (and comes of age).

In the Forest of Symbols

“Little Red Riding Hood” (ATU 333), a story about a girl who walks into the woods and becomes a young woman, is so deceptively simple that it has been proclaimed a children’s tale—but its marked sexual symbolism suggests otherwise. 141 A measure of intertextual comparison helps elucidate the symbols strewn along the path in this metaphorical depiction of maturation. 142

Consider the path. Virtually all the available variants (mostly from France) mention an innocent girl who strolls into the woods and meets the wolf. Charles Perrault’s pointed revelation (in the moral he adds to the tale) that the wolf is a sexual predator accords with the folk saying that a girl who engaged in trysts “saw the wolf” (É Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française , s.v. “ Loup ”). 143 It follows that the forest path takes the girl from sexual innocence to experience. Now, the oral variants depict the path strewn with pins, needles, thorns, and other items that—as Yvonne Verdier summed up—“scratch, prick, cut.” 144 The plural hints of a thorny, pricking path suggest that the girl oozes blood as she proceeds—that is, she starts bleeding in the forest—a point that Perrault reiterates with flowers. While Perrault elides the pricking references, he describes the girl collecting flowers along the way. Relevantly, a girl decked with flowers literalizes the French metaphoric expression jeune fille en fleurs , which designates a menarcheal girl as someone who carries flowers (see É Littré, s.v. “ Fleurs ”). (Incidentally, this is a metaphor we still use when we call a virgin’s first sexual experience “deflowering.”) Overall, the tale variants hint that the girl walks the path of her maturation. Moreover, Perrault implies that the carrier of flowers heads to her deflowering.

It is noteworthy that the wolf meets the girl at the crossroads to set her on her blood path, and again at the forest cabin to take her to bed. The illustrator Walter Crane, in his Little Red Riding Hood illustrated booklet ( 1875 ), effectively summarizes this two-tiered intervention. As the sheepskin-clad wolf meets the girl at the crossroads, his cudgel points to (is actually lodged in) a spot of flowers that are white and red like the girl’s own apparel.

Figure 1. At the Crossroads. Walter Crane, Little Red Riding Hood (London: Routledge, 1875), 2.

Thus, Crane (like Perrault) both associates the girl with the flowers and hints at her looming deflowering. The point is that, as Verdier pointed out, the wolf “leads the game and conducts the girl toward every step in her feminine destiny, which is realized through him.” 145 Why would this be? Consider again the wolf’s sheepskin. With this image, Crane certainly alludes to Perrault’s insistence that “tame wolves” are “the most dangerous of all.” 146 But wearing two skins is also a defining trait of the werewolf lurking behind the humanized wolf (a werewolf is, of course, a man-wolf). 147 Werewolves, deemed skin shifters, supposedly undergo cyclic shape-shifting according to lunar rhythms. Indeed, shape-shifting is a lunar attribute (every month the moon changes its shape as it wanes, vanishes, and waxes). 148 What is more, the moon’s cycles exactly match feminine cycles. 149 Given that lunar circuits bring werewolves and menstruating girls into the same orbit, werewolves befit lunar scenarios of feminine transformation and coming of age, which is presumably why this werewolf conducts this girl every step of her metaphorical path to womanhood. 150

The variant contributed by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 (“Rotkäppchen”) adds its own metaphorical twist to the theme. 151 The girl is supposed to walk a straight line, connoting a “straight” (obedient, chaste) disposition, which implies that straying from the path bespeaks “perdition” in the moral sense. Essentially, this variant maps the tangible act of walking along the path to the abstract realm of morals. After the wolf lures the girl into leaving the straight path, the straying girl follows her own uncharted path of flowers: “You march along as if you were going straight to school in the village, and yet it’s so delightful out here in the woods! … She plunged into the woods to look for flowers.” 152

Although the Grimms join Perrault in the implication that the path of flowers leads to the girl’s deflowering, they avail themselves of another metaphor, which frames the entire story. At the outset, the mother’s stark warning against straying from the path boils down to a single image: “otherwise you’ll fall and break the glass.” 153 This warning of moral disgrace—metaphorically, a fall from grace—makes use of the pervasive equivalence between bodies and containers, which Freud acknowledges as he notes that female genitals are often symbolized by “ vessels and bottles ” and other receptacles, the breaching of which signifies lost virginity. 154 In this metaphorical strain, breaking the glass connotes the broken hymen and thus the shattering of the girl’s integrity. A shattered wine bottle involves, of course, a red flow. Thus, the brothers convey the basic fairy-tale leitmotif: a girl bleeds in the woods.

But the broken-bottle metaphor is actually transparent enough that the brothers moved to contain its implication. At story’s end, we find a repentant girl bearing an intact bottle. Given the mother’s precise warning, and the girl’s actual straying, this turn of events looks surprising. Yet it agrees with the Grimms’ well-attested zeal for expunging sexual scenes from the tales. 155 What is more, displaying an intact bottle for a prim ending is a special use (a negative instance) of the broken-bottle metaphor. Denying that the glass ever broke whitewashes the girl’s reputation while also reiterating the figure of speech embedded in the mother’s warning. Therefore, the Grimms manage to preserve the sexual symbolism and to present a morally prim tale. (Such procedures should be heeded in debates about whether the Brothers Grimm were faithful to the tales they edited.)

A Metaphoric Kernel: Coming of Age

This discussion of a few allomotifs in “Little Red Riding Hood” is not a proper discussion of this tale. Rather, it is meant as a quick illustration of the point that fairy tales are built on metaphorical mappings among codes, which numerous variants express in various ways. Put in a nutshell, grasping the metaphors in the variants of a tale—that is, mapping the tale imagery to abstract propositions—is what the study of fairy-tale symbolism is about.

My remarks on “Little Red Riding Hood” also illustrate the hypothesis that a particular metaphor— coming (as in space) of age (as in time)—is the bedrock of fairy-tale symbolism. Although the study of fairy-tale symbolism is old, it is only just coming out of the woods, and a long, winding path lies ahead.

Links to Digital Materials

Crane, Walter . Little Red Riding Hood . London: Routledge, 1875.
Internet Archive . University of Florida Digital Collection .
“ Little Red Riding Hood and other tales of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 333 , translated and/or edited by D. L. Ashliman .” This resource includes decent English translations of the texts by Perrault and Grimm, as well as of “Tale of Grandmother.”
Littré, É. Dictionnaire de la langue française . 4 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1863.

Essay on My Favourite Story Book Cinderella

Students are often asked to write an essay on My Favourite Story Book Cinderella in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on My Favourite Story Book Cinderella

Introduction.

Cinderella, my favourite storybook, is a classic tale of resilience and dreams coming true.

The story revolves around a kind and gentle girl, Cinderella, who lives with her wicked stepmother and stepsisters.

Cinderella, the protagonist, is a symbol of humility and kindness. The antagonists are her stepmother and stepsisters.

Life Lessons

The story teaches us that goodness always triumphs over evil, and dreams do come true.

Cinderella, with its magical and inspiring storyline, will always be my favourite storybook.

250 Words Essay on My Favourite Story Book Cinderella

Cinderella, a timeless classic, has been my favourite storybook since childhood. Its enchanting narrative, captivating characters, and underlying themes of resilience and hope have left an indelible impression on me.

The Enthralling Narrative

The story revolves around a young girl, Cinderella, subjected to harsh treatment by her stepmother and stepsisters. Despite her circumstances, she remains kindhearted and patient. The narrative’s magic lies in its transformative arc, where Cinderella’s life changes dramatically through an enchanted pumpkin, mice, and a fairy godmother.

Resilience Personified

Cinderella’s character is a testament to resilience. Her ability to maintain her kindness and optimism amidst adversity has always been inspiring. She teaches us that no matter how bleak the circumstances, one should never lose hope or compromise one’s goodness.

Symbolism and Themes

The story of Cinderella is replete with symbolism and themes that resonate even today. The glass slipper is a symbol of Cinderella’s true identity, which cannot be hidden or altered. The striking of midnight signifies the transient nature of materialistic allure. The story also underscores the themes of justice and karma, where the good is rewarded, and the wicked are punished.

Cinderella is more than just a fairy tale. It is a narrative that encourages its readers to remain hopeful and kind, even in the face of adversity. This storybook has greatly influenced my outlook towards life, making it my favourite. In essence, Cinderella is a beacon of hope, resilience, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

500 Words Essay on My Favourite Story Book Cinderella

“Cinderella,” a timeless classic, has been my favourite story book since childhood. The enchanting tale, brimming with hope, resilience, and magic, has been a source of inspiration, providing valuable life lessons that have shaped my perspective on various aspects of life.

“Cinderella” is not merely a fairy tale about a girl who becomes a princess. It is a profound narrative that explores themes of resilience, kindness, and the transformative power of hope. Cinderella, the protagonist, symbolizes the human spirit’s resilience in the face of adversity. Despite her harsh circumstances, she remains kind and hopeful, demonstrating that adversity should not define one’s character.

The story of Cinderella imparts crucial life lessons. It teaches us that kindness and humility are virtues that can overcome the harshest of adversities. Cinderella’s character embodies these virtues, and her story serves as a reminder that these qualities are often rewarded. The story also emphasizes the importance of hope. Cinderella’s unwavering hope, even in her dire circumstances, is a testament to the power of positive thinking and the belief in better days.

The Element of Magic

The element of magic in “Cinderella” is an essential component that adds charm and allure to the story. The fairy godmother, the magical transformation, and the iconic glass slipper serve as metaphors for the unexpected possibilities that life holds. They symbolize that magical transformations can occur in our lives when we least expect them, provided we remain hopeful and resilient.

Impact on Readers

“Cinderella” has a profound impact on its readers. It serves as a beacon of hope, teaching us to remain hopeful and resilient in the face of adversity. It encourages us to believe in the possibility of a better future, no matter how bleak the present may seem. This timeless fairy tale has the power to inspire and motivate, instilling values of kindness, humility, and resilience.

In conclusion, “Cinderella” is my favourite story book not just for its enchanting tale, but for the profound life lessons it imparts. It is a narrative of hope, resilience, and magic that continues to inspire readers of all ages. The story of Cinderella remains a timeless classic, reminding us of the transformative power of hope, the virtue of kindness, and the magic that lies in believing in oneself.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Fairy Tale Story

Fairy Tale Story - Essay Example

Subject: Other
Type: Essay
Level: High School
Pages: 2 (500 words)
Downloads: 3
Author: yullrich

Extract of sample "Fairy Tale Story"

Fairy Tale Story “The Bronze Ring” is an important fairy tale that makes the opening story of Andrew Lang’s ic selection of popular fairy tales titled The Blue Fairy Book. Significantly, the main story of this fairy narrates how a gardener’s son wins the hands of the princess of the kingdom, with the help of a bronze ring that he got as a gift from the sultan of a city. “The Bronze Ring” opens with the account of how the king is successful in turning the wasteland around his castle into a fruitful garden, with the help of a head gardener who has been a descendant of other gardeners.

When the princess of the country falls in love with the gardener’s son, instead of the King’s choice i.e. the prime minister’s son, the King organizes a contest between the gardener’s son and the prime minister’s son. Thus, both of them are asked to undertake a journey to a far destination and whoever returned first would be given the hands of the princess. On his unpleasant journey to the destination, the gardener’s son helps a woman in rags, with whose support he heals the sultan of another city.

In return, he gains the bronze ring which contains a djinni who can grant all his wishes. With the help of this bronze ring, he gains a magnificent sailing ship with goods of gems, gold, etc, and attractive sailors on board. When the gardener’s son meets his opponent in distress, he helps him on condition that he would make an imprint upon his back with the bronze ring heated in a fire. In the course of the story, the prime minister’s son comes back home first on a ship offered by the gardener’s son and claims the princess as his bride.

However, the gardener’s son soon reaches back to the country in a gold ship who tells him that the prime minister’s son is merely a slave to him. When the prime minister’s son denies this, the gardener’s son shows the trademark of his bronze ring on the back of the prime minister’s son. Thus, the king gives the princes in marriage to the gardener’s son and they start a happy life for a short period of time. However, issues return to their life without delay when a student of the black arts gains the bronze ring from the princess during the absence of her husband.

Now, the student of the black arts turns the gold ship of the gardener’s son into one of rotten wood, his crew into slaves, and his cargo of gems into cats. When he reaches an island of mice, the Mouse Queen asks him not to approach her island with his cats. He agrees to the queen’s plea but demands that her mice must find out and win back his bronze ring to him. Thus, three mice appointed by the Mouse Queen manage to win back the bronze ring from the student of the black arts turns and return it to the gardener’s son.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Once Upon a Time — Once Upon A Time: The Nature Of Fairy Tales

Once Upon a Time: The Nature of Fairy Tales

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Published: Oct 25, 2021

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Article contents

Symbolism Matters

Fixed Symbols: Models with a Key

A Disease of Language: Max Müller

Symbols in Dreams and Folklore: Sigmund Freud

Freud’s Followers

Jungian Interpretations

Variation and Meanings

Tale Variation as Corruption: Kaarle Krohn and Followers

Tales and Variants: The Brothers Grimm

Allomotifs and Symbols: Alan Dundes

Symbols as Projection: Bengt Holbek

Metaphors and Symbols

Metaphors in Fairy Tales: Maria Tatar

Metaphors and Symbols: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Fairy-Tale Symbolism

Fairy Tale as Metaphor

In the Forest of Symbols

A Metaphoric Kernel: Coming of Age

Links to Digital Materials

Further Reading

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