ABSTRACT
This personal account reflects about how marvelous tales, or Märchen, typical of the Aarne Thompson-Uther (ATU) classification, collected from the Quebec and Acadie oral tradition, helped rethink and stir present-day issues from the margins of society. I present four examples of folktales which migrated from my folklore research background into the quest side of my own involvement in civic action for social justice in Quebec society. Without losing their polysemic potential to bear meaning on other levels, these tales provided fresh frames of reference that allowed collective thinking outside the box and long-lasting appropriations of specific issues: one about the economy, another about politics, a third about the workplace, and the last about utopia. A discussion is opened about what might be learned from this unusual path of research-plus-quest for further adventures between reality, fiction, and the world to be.
