ABSTRACT
Fairy tales were global fictions long before the modern era of globalisation. They are fictions that have been shared across borders and between peoples, both in script and orally, for longer than written records can show, with the result that it is now impossible to say where any given fiction may have originated, or what the various, complex stages of its journey may have been. The international dimension of the fairy tale has long been a theme of folk-narrative scholarship. In the nineteenth century, as the discipline of folkloristics took shape, the transcultural character of the fairy tale was one of the principal areas of enquiry for the major scholars in the field. Andrew Lang and his contemporaries in the ‘anthropological’ school also advanced a bold new hypothesis to explain their empirical observations about the international distribution of the fairy tale. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
