ABSTRACT
The literary fairy tale is derived from oral folktales, specifically tales of magic, in which two young people, social unequals, overcome older and more powerful opponents through magic aid, finally to gain, or restore, a happy and fertile marriage. As Bengt Holbek argued in Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1987), these tales sufficiently disguise real-life confrontations between rich and poor, old and young, and within families, to enable such contentious situations to be ventilated without inevitably giving offense: a necessary consideration in small communities in the past, although not without resonance in any context. Contrary to the view of Ruth Bottigheimer in Fairy Tales: A New History (2009), there is abundant evidence that such tales were not invented in the sixteenth century by elite writers such as Straparola but that they were already present in oral tradition in antiquity. It is literacentric to assume that magic tales could only have been transmitted over great spans of space and time through writing and print. This chapter brings evidence from folkloristic research to show that storytelling is a complex social phenomenon that involves much more than the reproduction of a static text.
