Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Bengt Holbek

Genres: Folklore

660 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on interpreting fairy tales, period. I feel as though this book does everything right and should be taken as a paradigmatic example of how to study folklore, or related fields like mythology, medieval lit, etc-- basically texts not included in "literature", meaning a fairly modern canon which is distanced to an extreme degree from oral tradition. First Holbek limits ths corpus of his study and cautions us that this is a case in point of interpretation, not a universal theory (though I think it certainly contains plenty of useful theoretical contributions to the field at large). He focuses on texts collected by one Evald Tang Kristiansson in Denmark in the late 1800s and begins with several hundred pages presenting the informants, their repetoires, a summary of the historical and cultural context, and other bits of the empirical foundation of his study. If I remember correctly, the next portion is an exhaustive overview of, so far as I can tell, ALL theoretical approaches to interpreting fairy tales, from psychoanalysis to structuralism to Jungian symbolism. He concludes this portion with a fifty page explanation of his own approach, which includes portions of many of the theories he has gone through, including a fair-sized but appropriate pinch of Freudian psychoanalysis (with a sensitivity to cultural context, rather than adherence to a blind Freudian universalism), syntagmatic structure (ala Propp and later simplifications of his theory), and paradigmatic structure. The final portion of the book is several hundred pages of both in depth and brief analyses of fairy tales from the corpus he is concerned with, focusing on several variants of King Lindorm. While he uses the 800 or so pages given him very well (every detail could be seen as necessary), his final thesis is fairly straightforward and clear, and is neatly summarized by John Lindow in a review article in a 1990 issue of Scandinavian Studies (I believe that was the year). Basically Holbek argues that fairy tales, which are told primarily by the lowest class of workers, most of whom are unable to marry and may be seen as children their entire lives, are a form of communal day dreaming (wish-fullfillment ala Freud) in which a lower class protagonist and an upper class protagonist are involved in a mediation between three sets of oppositions: lower class to upper class (the lower class protagonist gets to marry an upper class protagonist), male to female (mediated by marriage) and youth to adulthood (in that marriage = entrance to adulthood, and in that the upper class character in some way rebels against the authority of the parents). Mixed into this is all sorts of sexual symbolism, etc, which those who dislike Freud may not go for, but I think such symbolism is very legitimately applied here, and I find this study to be a nice balance between the more extreme Freudianism of, say, Alan Dundes, and studies which completely ignore the tools which Freud has given us, such as projection, etc.
If you don't want to read the whole thing, find John Lindow's article-- it is an excellent summary. If you are in a field which remotely touches on this subject, I strongly recommend that you at least skim his book, reading the intro and the explication of his own theory more thoroughly.