Fairy Tales: W is for Wonderful and What is Folklore?

 A few of my favorite fairy tales come in the Ws:

 I am particularly fond of the works of Aubrey and Don Woods who wrote and illustrated Heckedy Peg, a creepy yet delightful story about a tough mom who has to outwit a witch, who turned her kids into food. 

The images are stunning, absolutely gorgeous. The text flows effortlessly. 

Aubrey Woods also wrote the delightful The Bunyans filled with humorous and memorable illustrations by David Shannon. 

Both books raise points about folklore.  

Heckedy Peg, claims the dust jacket, is "[i]nspired by a sixteenth-century game still played by children today." 

I couldn't, at first, find any online mention of a "sixteenth-century game" involving food and riddles. I began to ponder if the Woods, tongue in cheek, had made up the "history." 

But then I came across an older online forum that confirmed that yes, at least in Michigan in the 1930s, children were playing a game in which every participating child took the part of the Witch, the Mother, and the Child. Part of the game was to pair things, such as "bread" to "butter." A participant on the forum mentioned that the game was also played in Canada. 

Ultimately, I found a review of the Woods' picture book with a link to an article about the original game: The Game of the Child-Stealing Witch.

What interested me, though, was how many reviews, including a review in The New York Times, simply took the jacket blurb at face value: the Woods could have gotten away with simply declaring that the book was based on an old game, and they would have been mostly believed (except for all us folklore fetishists who went looking.)

The Bunyans raise a similar point about folklore. When I took a folklore course for my master's program, the professor made the point that folklore is not noble peasants "authentically" strumming guitars in a shack. As notable folklorists such as Brunvand have demonstrated, the urban legend is as much folklore as anything that happens in the countryside. 

The professor then completely contradicted himself by pouring scorn on the Bunyan stories. They were started as part of an advertising campaign and therefore, weren't "real" folklore.

"But," I objected, "if I didn't know that--if the stories entered the popular discourse and got detached from their commercial origins, then wouldn't they constitute folklore?"

I got a chiding, superior smile and tut-tut scold, which type of response I found (and find) irritating and rather a waste of my time. I pointed out that if we decided to determine folklore by its type of origins, we were right back where we started. A number of students supported me, and the professor turned back into a friendly, thoughtful guy.

Granted, it is a difficult call in some cases. Hollywood announcing that it has produced a "cultural phenomenon" doesn't make that declaration a reality. On the other hand, an actual cultural phenomenon--where a saying or trope or image enters everyday discourse without anyone knowing or caring where it came from--that does occur, and the origins might be as varied as a movie, commercial, campaign, script dialog, or review.  

As numerous writers, such as Marina Warner, have pointed out, the line between spoken and literary fairy tales can sometimes be immensely slight, so "translators" of The Arabian Nights get accused of falsification until it turns out that they were relying on word-of-mouth and then it turns out that they were also relying on text and then it turns out that they added in their own bits. 

I've said it before--I'll say it again: Nothing is pure, and the hunt for purity, especially with folklore, will not only disappoint but nearly always end in carping disillusionment rather than in wonder.