Literary Text Types: Folk and Fairy Tales

This article is drawn from content originally included in PETAA Book A Literature Companion for Teachers 2nd Edition, written by Lorraine McDonald and published in 2017.

Folk and Fairy Tales

Over the past two centuries, folk and fairy tales have become associated with children's literature; yet it is thought that adults were their original audience. The tales are part of a spoken tradition, passed from generation to generation orally rather than written down In the Western English-speaking world, the tales typically come from several collections and often overlap. 

Folk and fairy tales are readily available as picturebooks, illustrated collections and digital versions - and tales of different cultures from all over the world can be found and used in classrooms. When young readers recognise folk and fairy tales as familiar stories, they have gained deep cultural and literary knowledge. Over the past thirty years, many folk and fairy tales have been reconstructed, or 'fractured', offering alternative, contrasting perspectives to the original stories.

There are two basic kinds of fairy tales (Hixon, 2010):

i) restoration tales, in which highborn personages suffer a temporary fall in fortune and, with the aid of magic, endure trials and tests before being finally restored to their original positions

ii) rise tales, in which the protagonist is not highborn at the outset but, again through magical means, achieves both wealth and title, along with a good marriage.

Conventions of Folk and Fairy Tales:

• located in a deliberately vague time and place, 'Once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away, there lived...'
• characters are defined by their appearance - beauty is goodness, ugly is evil
• characters have disguises which hide their 'true nature'
• powerful emotions of jealousy, greed, fear, love and hate motivate the characters

See A Literature Companion for Teachers 2nd Edition, written by Lorraine McDonald for examples of classroom activities you can use with your students to explore folk and fairy tales.

Myth, Legend or Fable?

Fairy and folk tales have always essentially aimed to entertain their listeners, but myths, legends and fables have had different purposes, which may be religious, heroic and/or moral. 

Myths were explanations of all aspects of the natural world. In prehistoric times and before the advent of science, for example, the Ancient Greeks believed Helios drove his chariot across the sky [dragging the sun along with him]. Apollo was later conflated with Helios by Roman writers, but not the Greeks themselves.

Legends are about people - men and women who were elevated through their courageous deeds and inspired stories and ballads. Today 'legend' has moved into common parlance - football players and cricketers, for example, are called legends when they have had a good playing career; we might call a friend a legend if he or achieves something special, or we might use it jokingly or ironically to refer to finishing a simple task.

Fables are simple stories, usually involving animal characters, which concretely express a moral 'truth' that can be easily remembered.