Page 12 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 12/206
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Grimm’s Fairy Tales 1812.
In the context of an increasing population, a growing change of attitude to children, the reappraisal of children’s education, and growing general literacy, the publication of Grimm’s Fairy Tales was a very significant event. Although the first few editions were still rather more addressed to adults and scholars - containing scholarly references and citations, as well as adult treatments of violence and sex - by 1825 the Grimms themselves had published an edited version of their Tales specifically written for children. These stories were collected by the Grimm’s from oral recitation. All the several volumes and editions of the Fairy Tales were incredibly popular - the habit of reading to children at night increased the demand for suitable stories - and Grimm’s Fairy Tales became an established part of the canon of literature in Victorian Britain. Supplemented by the publication of other collections of fairy-tales and ‘folk-tales’ by the likes of Hans Christian Anderson, Alexander Afanasyev, Andrew Lang - all of them foreshadowed by Charles Perrault 1697 Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé.
The idea that our primordial narrative culture – our myths, folk stories, legends, and ancient poems – survived in oral traditions well into the 20th century was appraised by several authors in the last 100 years or so – the keynote ones for me being James George Frazer: The Golden Bough (1890), Vladimir Propp: The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928); Robert Graves: The White Goddess (1948); and Albert Lord in his important The Singer of Tales (1960), on the more general origins and survival of myth and religion, the best collection is by the mythographer Joseph Campbell in his tetralogy The Masks of God (from 1962). It was Albert Lord who followed Milman Parry’s journeys in Yugoslavia in the 1930s, recording poets who still recited (and reformulated) the ancient verses according to what Parry called the Oral Formulaic Hypothesis – essentially that the transliterations (the written forms of ancient oral verse) took only one ‘snapshot’ of the surviving original, and that each time these stories and verses were reiterated, the living poet transformed them by means of not just oral performance, but oral composition too.