Kristin Bussey

Christina Giarrusso
9/20/16

Fairy Tales as a Genre

O
nce upon a time there was a student who had an essay due on Tuesday. She knew it was due and
yet continued to do nothing until Monday night when a small bird outside her window said
Shame on you! Stop slacking!. The little bird was so annoying she got up and started to work
on the assignment but she realized trying to sit in her apartment and write was not working. At
first she tried to write in her front room but realized the couch was too comfortable. So, she
packed up her things up and left. The second place she tried to write was Oglesby Union, but she
found the seats too uncomfortable and the place too loud and distracting. Yet again a little bird
said Shame on you! Stop slacking!. So, she packed her things up and left. Finally, the student
found a place in Dirac Library, where it was reasonably quiet and the seats were just right. She
looked to the little bird perched outside but it said nothing. Contented, the student got to work on
her essay. And so the moral of the story is, be sure to find a good place to get assignments done.
Fairy tales are so important as a genre because they are so ingrained in every culture. These tales,
often fantastical, are used throughout multiple cultures to not only teach morals to children but
provide an oral tradition that is passed down from generation to generation. However, most
people dont understand how deep fairy tales can be, especially Russian Fairy tales.
A brief history of fairy tales is quite difficult to truly trace due to the fact that they are
more of an oral work than a written one. There are a few collections of books that compiled a
written format of the oral stories. One of the earliest chroniclers of fairy tales was Charles
Perrault, who in 1697 published a small work of 8 fairy tales that jumpstarted a lot of the
recording of fairy tales (Ashliman 2013). Perrault essentially started the movement to begin
compiling fairy tales into a written text form, which allowed more people to enjoy them. Around
1806 the Brothers Grimm began to collect fairy tales and it was in 1812 that they published their

Kristin Bussey
Christina Giarrusso
9/20/16

Fairy Tales as a Genre

first compiled work of these tales. By 1818 they had collected over 585 German fairy tales
(Ashliman 2013). Aleksander Afanasev compiled a list of Russian fairytales into a collection
from the years 1855-1864 (Romanchuk, 2015). During this time period many tales people know
of today were recorded down into a text format in order to preserve the oral tradition in another
way. As it is in the present era fairy tales seem to be gaining in popularity again with all of the
new films and television shows coming out involving fairy tales. There is a television show
called Once Upon a Time and it reworks fairy tales, giving old tales a new spin.
When looking at fairy tales in terms of a genre its not like any other genre around. A
classic convention of fairy tales that everyone knows is how they start and end with key phrases
such as once upon a time and and they lived happily ever after or phrases along those lines. In
many ways these appeal to our ethos because most people can remember hearing those phrases
when they were children. Usually there are talking animals involved, a lack of an object spurring
a quest, triplets, and there is always a moral to the tales. What really makes fairy tales interesting
is the fact that they can change around depending on who the audience is and who is narrating
the story. In Russian fairy tales most tellers would memorize the main points of a fairy tale and
then make up the rest as they went on either lengthening or shortening the tale as they went. One
example of this is Ivan the Fire Bird, and the Gray Wolf which has three different versions by
three different tellers (Romanchuk, 2015). All of them have the main points of Ivan attempting to
catch this fire bird but certain details within the story are changed such as the style in which they
are told. It doesnt disrupt the flow of the tale but shows creative license with fairy tales,
allowing them to modernize to an extent (Romanchuk, 2015). By featuring children as the main
characters with mostly absent parents it is a way to introduce pathos since fairy tales were

Kristin Bussey
Christina Giarrusso
9/20/16

Fairy Tales as a Genre

generally told to children. It gave them a way to connect to the story itself and to pull away the
important lessons. Furthermore, when looking at the element of animals talking, the
anthropomorphized animals guide the story along with actions that they carry out such as
shaming, and misrecognizing the antagonist (Romanchuk, 2015). They are the ones that will help
impart a lesson or moral for the story as well as aid the main character as they carry out their task
or test them.
Works Cited:
Ashliman, D. L. "Charles Perrault's Mother Goose Tales." Charles Perrault's Mother Goose
Tales. University of Pittsburgh, 8 June 2013. Web. 19 Sept. 2016.
Ashliman, D. L. "Grimm Brothers' Home Page." Grimm Brothers' Home Page. University of
Pittsburgh, 1 Oct. 2013. Web. 19 Sept. 2016.
<http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html#chronology>.
Romanchuk, R. (2015). Composition_Transition [Powerpoint slides]. Retrieved from
https://campus.fsu.edu/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?
course_id=_6413207_1&content_id=_7513808_1
Romanchuk, R. (2015). Introduction_Animal Tales [Powerpoint slides]. Retrieved from
https://campus.fsu.edu/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?
course_id=_6413207_1&content_id=_7513808_1