Folklore is one of those subjects that is so broad, and it’s a little bit like the blind man and the elephant. In trying to describe what folklore is, if I yank on the tail, I say, “Folklore is cultural history.” And if I feel the trunk, I might say, “Folktales are the stories that we’ve told all through the generations, and we shouldn’t lose them.” You could go on and name various parts of that elephant.
For me, folktales begin as great stories. And they’ve been so recognized as great stories, that people have continued to tell them and retell them and reshape them to fit their lives long past the times of their earliest tellings.
In America today, the greatest fairytale teller has been Disney. I hate Disney, but by “great” I mean it has influenced and has shaped those stories in ways that make people think they’re the only way that those stories can be told which, of course, is errant nonsense. But if a child reads or watches Sleeping Beauty and then goes to Disneyland or Disney World and meets Sleeping Beauty, or Snow White, or Beauty and the Beast, sees them on ice, and sees the little Disney books that becomes the only Beauty and the Beast, or Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty that they’ll accept. And so all those hundreds of years of those stories being told by different tellers is really in danger of being lost to us, because Disney has been such an influential and great storyteller. And I really bemoan that fact.
And one of the things that I’ve done for years is try to re-couch or retell those stories in other ways, so that children can see that there’s more to these stories than Walt Disney.
