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Conclusion

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Well, this is it. My final blog post. Over the past several weeks, I have learned a lot of interesting things about fairy tales and was exposed to a variety that I had no idea existed. At the beginning of the semester, I mentioned that I was excited to read tales from other cultures and was very happy that this is exactly what we ended up doing. Of the atlas of tales that we read, I think that my favorite were probably the Native American and Arabic ones for their beauty and humor.  I also really enjoyed the modern short stories, films, and cartoons that we analyzed for their relationships to the classic fairy tales. It was fascinating to see how these tales continue to permeate our culture and I even found my favorite tale of the ones we have read this semester in Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose.” The critical theories articulated by von Franz and Bettelheim were very interesting too. I especially liked Bettelheim’s notion of fairy tales as something that children ca...
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The Poetry of Arabic Folktales

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This week, McDaniel Arabic Professor Carol Zaru came in to tale to our class about Arabic folktales. Much like in the other cultures that we have looked so far, the Arabic tales were told both for entertainment and to pass on certain moral lessons. Arabic tales for entertainment include the stories of the Thousand and One Nights and the stories of Joha, a simpleton or trickster character who has spread and been adapted by cultures throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. Stories about him are often short and humorous, reminding me a little of some of the Jewish stories we have read, such as "A Dispute in Sign Language" or "Chelm Justice." Another kind of Arabic story features two jackals named Kalila and Dimna. These tales originated in the court of an Indian king, but spread across the Middle East as tales which provide the hearer with wisdom and moral knowledge. One feature of Arabic tales I found to be particularly interesting is the rol...
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The Nightingale and the Rose

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Recently, philosopher and activist Dr. Cornel West came to McDaniel and delivered an amazing talk which covered a variety of topics. One part of his talk that particularly touched me and, I think, a lot of other students here at McDaniel who participate in the music program, was a comparison that he made between music and acts of giving. In a good musical performance, he said, a person pours their entire self into their performance so that those listening can be filled with whatever emotion they hear in the music. Likewise, the greatest acts of charity are those that involve giving our whole selves to help others or further a cause. Oscar Wilde, I think, understood this idea quite well, as he expresses it beautifully in his story "The Nightingale and the Rose." In an especially powerful scene, the Nightingale pierces her heart on a thorn, singing all the while the most beautiful song that has ever been heard, so that a young student can have a red rose to give to the wom...
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Native American Folktales

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This week, we read a number of folktales from various Native American cultures. As with many of the less familiar tales that we have read in this class, I did find it interesting that many of the basic motifs of these tales were quite similar to many of the other ones that we've read. That being said, however, there were also some features of the Native America tales that made them unique when compared to, for example, some of the more familiar European ones that we've read. For one thing, Native American cultures seem to include many more examples of stories intended to explain certain natural phenomena than European ones do. Among the stories we read, for example, were the stories of how mosquitos came to be, how two particular stars were created, and how men and women first "got together." The Native Americans stories also seemed to put a much greater emphasis on the importance of community. In the story of "Deer Hunter and White Corn Maiden," for examp...
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Kendal's Blog

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For this week's post, I read the last three entries on the blog of one of my classmates, Kendal. In her entries, Kendal had a lot of interesting stuff to say on the fairy tales we have read, including the "Cinderella" and the Trickster stories, as well the Kenyan stories told to us by Dr. K'Olewe. In her most recent entry on Trickster stories, Kendal talks about Charles Perrault's "Little Thumbling" and a story from Louisiana called "The Singing Bones." She points out that in both of these stories, the main characters are able escape from danger because of their quick wits. In "Little Thumbling" in particular, the ability of Thumbling to not talk, but listen plays an important part in helping him to eventually save the day. Far from indicating stupidity, as his family suggests, Thumbling's ability to listen seems to help to make him smarter, something which I also think is a really cool aspect of this story. In her entry on K...
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The Child as Hero

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In the Norton collection of fairy tales which she edits, Maria Tartar chooses to put into one chapter, a collection of tales which she calls "Trickster" tales. This sort of tale typically involves one or more children (often siblings if more than one) who are in some way forced by their parents or circumstance or a combination of the two, to leave the safety of the home and enter the outside world. In this outside world, they run into some kind danger - a witch, ogre, or other supernatural beast - which they are able to overcome, despite their diminutive size, with their wits. They then return home, often with riches, and live happily ever after. Two examples of this sort of tale would be "Hansel and Gretel" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" Freudian critic Bruno Bettelheim interprets these trickster stories as symbolizing a child's growth into a higher level of independence and away from the oral fixations of early childhood. He argues in The Uses of En...
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The Art of Story Telling

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So far in this class, the main way we've experienced the fairy tales we have been studying has been through reading them from an anthology of tales. In the anthology, the tales have been collected, of course, in written form, a form that has been in many ways necessary to the way in which have been studying them. None of us know every fairy tale by heart, so in order to have any hope of comparing and contrasting different versions from around the world, it is necessary to have them packaged in one place. Having the tales written down also makes it easier for the reader to analyze the tale and, in some cases, it is only because it was written down that we still have access to a particular tale at all. To be sure, having these stories written down is useful, but it is also not the only way to experience a fairy tale. As we learned in the first few weeks of class, most fairy and folk tales originated in oral traditions, in which they were told, not read. Luckily, this week, we were ...
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