ABSTRACT
Human history is written in the fallow fields of silence. It is a tissue of murmuring words and specific gestures that the teller organizes into unique tales. For, although both myths and tales are presented as retrospective narratives, echoes of memorable events that touch people through the stories themselves. This show how tenuous is the distinction so often made between tales, which are presented as games of the imagination, and myths. However, the first part of this proposition seems to have been undermined by certain recent studies. In the same way, according to Fabre's illuminating analysis of the subject, the theme of birds in the springtime, which features in many typical tales, seems closely linked to masculine rites of passage. The concept of the typical tale, defined by Aarne and Thompson as an organization of motifs that is sufficiently stable to be repeated in different stories, is primarily useful as a tool for classifying tales.
