The following essay appears as the afterword of The Sunny Country of Common Sense, my collection of folk- and fairy-tales, available here. This collection was composed on the occasion of the editor's sister's seventh birthday; incidentally, the same as his grandfather's birthday as well; quite appropriate for a book on folklore, which is a living compact between generations past and present.

As a further note to this essay, the author would like to point out that the storytelling division of folklore can itself be broken down into further categories: myths, stories crafted to satisfy the human need for imaginative romance, understood to be fictional, yet evoking a strong feeling of yearing; folktales or fairy-tales, smaller fictions told on a day-to-day level within the context of a household or an intimate gathering, often told by women; legends, thought to be true stories despite any possible fantastic content; and memorates, true stories, though possibly exaggerated, about the speaker's life. This essay, and the book that contains it, is concerned primarily with fairy- and folk-tales specifically.

 

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“The Sunny Country of Common Sense”

	It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticize it.
	- G.K. Chesterton

The past century has been a strange time for folklore. It has become greatly diminished with the near disappearance of its natural habitat, yet in some ways it has risen to greater visibility, albeit in a greatly tarnished and diluted form; it is among the final vestiges of tradition left to us, and such remnants are not easily cast aside. Divorced from its environment of meaning, association and sentiment, cut off from its cheery affirmation of culture and value, uprooted from its specificity of place, folklore has lost a great deal of its former substance; that lived and breathed experience which gave it in a very real sense “the strength of the hills.” And yet in some form it persists still, in almost every aspect of popular culture. Disney cartoons, Barbie dolls, fantasy novels — romance novels, even — , Hollywood movies, video games, rock albums, television shows, comic books…the media have been saturated with what has been called the tyrannical, patriarchic, primitive vestiges of a benighted humanity. These lingering traces, often known as “fantasy,” are regularly mocked as insubstantial (and not always unjustly on that count), irrelevant, and escapist. And yet their ubiquity calls for a closer, more considered look.

At least one close consideration already exists, in the form of an essay written in 1939 by Professor John Ronald Rheul Tolkien, on the occasion of a lecture given at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It is entitled “On Fairy-stories,” and to my mind it is among the best, if it is not the best, material on folklore and the fantastic that exists. The best thing anyone really interested in these subjects could do is to stop reading this essay right now, and begin the good philologist’s instead. It has been printed in many places over the years, the most recent being an appendix to the collection Tales of the Perilous Realm.

Short of that, I will do my best to explore, or at least touch upon, the most important aspects of folktales, fairy-tales, and folklore.

Modern “fantasy” has come to us not so much as the result of a progression, but rather as the result of a thing steadily built up and then suddenly thrown down. Most of what we have, then, is like a ruins overgrown with weeds. Though early scholars believed folktales to be mere worn-out versions of myths, it seems more likely that the myths came later. For example, most pagan gods of polytheistic pantheons were originally a particular place’s one true God, and were only later tacked onto the newer construction of “the gods,” and their myths built up around them. Folktales, on the other hand, are the stuff of everyday human life in traditional societies. In the West, tales and myths were joined by the heroic romance, the ideal of chivalry, and the bracing charity of Christendom. The result of all this is less like the steady growth of a tree or the unfolding of a flower, than like the slow and complex simmering of a soup, whose ingredients have been gathered over a period of centuries. As the Industrial Revolution, along with the seeds of relativism sewn in the Age of Enlightenment, began to uproot established ways of living, thinking and knowing, it became clear that traditional culture, too, was at risk. Folklorists such as the Brothers Grimm, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, Jørgen Moe, and Yanagita Kunio (to name only a few) suddenly became necessary, in the role of preservationists. Most of what now remains we have thanks to the efforts of such men and the memories of their sources.

It is exceedingly obvious and unerringly rational that a thing does not need preservation or conservation unless it is already in danger of dying. The rise (and the necessity) of folklore studies, then, was the death knell of folklore as something lived. There have since been worthwhile contributions to the literature of the fantastic (notice that we have shifted from practiced tradition to the coffin of literature), mostly by those who really understood its roots, its meaning and its value. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and William Morris in the West come to mind, as does Izumi Kyōka, and possibly Mizuki Shigeru in the East. Almost all that has come afterward is like crayons over cave paintings: mere reshufflings of the most superficial aspects of folklore — often borrowed from the guises in which they appear in the works of the men above — , ignorant of their meaning and bright inner light and strength.

But perhaps this is a good place to pause and consider what folklore actually is. Though this book is primarily concerned with folk- and fairy-tales specifically, the field of folklore is a larger, broader tapestry in which these tales are rooted; and to consider them apart from it is to consider the lilies apart from air, water and soil. Folklore is by definition the lore of the folk. What is meant by folk has been attempted in phrases such as “common people,” “ordinary folk,” etc., but has best been captured in Yanagita’s term “abiding folk.” That is, the people living under traditional ways of life, if not in agricultural communities, then at least in agrarian¹ or pastoral ones. Other traditional occupations include fisherman, tailor, hunter, charcoal burner, woodcutter, etc. All of them have at their basic level the characteristic that they are generally unchanging. There are, of course, variations in traditional ways — local variation is the hallmark of true tradition — but in general, within these variations tradition has remained stable in the absence of industry, industrial technology, and excessive wealth and scale. All of which are to some degree enemies of tradition. Tradition is continuity: a bond and compact between the dead, the living, and the unborn. And thus the generation gap is for the most part an innovation.

So much for tradition. Folklore is almost synonymous in its widest sense, but specifically means the knowledge, practices and beliefs of a traditional culture. Yanagita Kunio divided folklore into three categories: tangible culture, linguistic arts, and knowledge and belief. It is primarily into the second category that folk- and fairy-tales fall. And yet the material culture and the beliefs and worldviews are just as important in understanding the experiences of a people, and are often found within these tales. These aspects of folklore are also important because they are in a sense the fullest expression of the idea of a “people’s history.” History as a discipline has been compared to the process of putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The real tragedy of history is that we almost always have only the outer edges of the puzzle, the pieces easiest to fit together. These pieces, chronicling the doings of great men, as well as despots and masses — forces equally tyrannical — are not the true story of humanity. For the story of the Greeks is not the story of epic battles or of philosophy, but of farmers, soldiers, priests. The story of Egypt is not the story of pharaohs, Christendom’s story not the story of popes or the Inquisition. The story of modern America is not the story of Barack Obama but of plumbers, carpenters, mechanics and doctors. Folklore gives us the greatest chance at piecing together this real history of humanity. And it is these aspects that are most often studied by folklorists at their best.

The study of folklore and folktales is necessarily the study of the lives and narratives of a particular people at a particular place. Folklore is often studied under the heading of a culture, though the best folklorists often devote work to single districts or single villages. This seems imminently wise, if not practical: for while little ground may be covered in this way, at least it will be covered thoroughly and, very probably, accurately. The broader, “comparative” way at looking at folklore and culture in general, by contrast, is full of errors and false preconceptions smuggled in with a folklorist’s modern worldview. To look at folklore in the way that comparative scholars do is to miss the trees for the forest. Tolkien tells us, in his lecture on Beowulf, that “the ‘typical folk-tale,’ of course, is merely an abstract concept of research nowhere existing”. Again, variation is the hallmark of true folklore: one tale here, another very similar version a few miles away. Comparative folklorists grab this fact by the wrong end. They see the similarities and conclude that there must be many more wider and more generic similarities. They do not have an ample appreciation for the details which spring up from variation in local character and practice. Writes C.S. Lewis,

A child is always thinking about those details in a story which a grown-up regards as indifferent. If when you first told the tale your hero was warned by three little men appearing on the left of the road, and when you tell it again you introduce one little man on the right of the road, the child protests. And the child is right. You think it makes no difference because you are not living the story at all. If you were, you would know better. Motifs, machines, and the like are abstractions of literary history and therefore interchangeable: but concrete imagination knows nothing of them.2

God is in the details. It is these details that capture the character and quality of a place and its people and not the similarities. Variations, not comparisons, are the real purvey of folklore. For “the dwarf on the spot sometimes sees things missed by the traveling giant ranging many countries.”³

Also problematic with the comparative method is its insistence on interpretation. Truly was it said that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.” Any revenge is violent, on some level, and both psychological and comparative approaches to folklore damage what they claim to admire. “Analytical understanding,” wrote Lewis, “must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing.” To draw patterns and meanings out of folk- and fairy-tales is to draw their entrails from them; certainly the things observed in this manner may be true, but they are truths too dearly bought. If they should be seen at all, they should be seen only by those who live inside their culture of origin — that culture, lived and experienced in its traditional ways. Even then it is doubtful that such conscious understanding is beneficial. Or relevant. A Russian man living centuries ago on the plains of Novgorod may have known intimately the meaning of a soul nested in layers of protection, or the significance of a witch’s connection with mortar and pestle; and for its very obviousness he might have passed over it entirely. But he would certainly have found it wondrous and astonishing that a duck could be hidden inside a hare, a hare inside a hart, and a hart buried alive on an island that is there one moment, and gone the next; or that a house could stand upon the legs of a chicken.

And thus when we see the truths of folklore rightly and rightfully, if we do so at all, we find that the inside is bigger than the outside. The tales must speak on their own terms and in their own words. It is useless to look at a beam of light and think of what it is made of; rather look along it toward that to which it points and illuminates.

What a folk- or fairy-tale is made of is wonder, awe, enchantment, wisdom, morality, reason and humor. “Fairyland,” wrote G.K. Chesterton, “is nothing but the sunny country of common sense….These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”⁴ In this way the tales refresh our earliest memories of discovery, when all the world was fresh and beautiful and our perceptions of it were truest. This youthful way of looking at the world is valuable and important. The tales are full of wisdom, and if human history has taught us anything it should have been that wisdom is more important than knowledge. That is, it is more important for people to learn the correct ways of thinking and living than it is for them to learn the correct facts about Nature. To prove this, imagine you believed that the sun revolved around the earth, that the earth was the center of the universe, that storms are caused by vengeful gods, and that saying “God bless you” will prevent a demon from entering a man’s body when he sneezes. Now imagine that you believe some human lives are worth more than others, or that violence is the key to solving life’s problems, or that you can get whatever you want by taking advantage of the weak. Which set of incorrect beliefs seems more dangerous? So far from being vestiges of a benighted humanity, folklore presents humanity at its richest and wisest. As for superstition, what of it? It was Goethe who said that superstition is the poetry of life.

Though in the wrong hands (such as in Charles Perrault’s) folktales can be too overtly didactic, nonetheless one of the best qualities in this kind of story is its propensity to make moral judgments. This is one of the ways in which the folklore of everyday life helps us to discover who we are, by awakening listeners (for folktales were told by firesides for the majority of their careers; the written tales are a novelty) to the real moral world we live in. “We should not be greedy,” ends one Japanese tale. And everywhere we see kind and selfless heroes rewarded, while selfish individuals who strive to imitate their good luck are punished. And though some heroes, such as Ala’i in the Arab story, are opportunistic and exploitative at times, there is still a strong and taut thread of fairness, justice, and even mercy wound all about them and their world. Folklorists make much of the fact that the tale types can be found in most cultures worldwide; yet they miss the fact that, with a surprisingly small amount of exceptions, the morality in them similarly exists everywhere, and is basically uniform. In folktales, even an antihero is still a hero. It may be argued that this reflects the migration of a tale from one place to another, its moral quality hitching along for the ride, and that the newly exposed peoples simply adopted the new morality as they adopted the new tale. But there are two problems with this. Firstly, it assumes as fact what is merely a hypothesis at best about how and when the tales became so widespread. Secondly, folklore is like water running along the stream bed of a people’s minds, seeking the lowest ground. A story will only be repeated if the listeners like it as much as the tellers. If a tale contained a new morality conflicting with the old, it would be either forgotten, or else adapted to fit the existing morality. Thus folklore accurately reveals the mindset, worldview and assumptions of a people. Morality in folktales is like a Gordian knot. It can be removed and cast aside easily, but only at the expense of irreparably damaging the tales themselves.

It has been remarked that folktales reflect a patriarchic society and are thus filled with sexism. That they are patriarchic may or may not be true; but it has also been said that folktales hide the remnants of an earlier matriarchic society. One or the other — or neither — may be true, but certainly not both. As for sexism, I tend to doubt this very much. Putting girls and women in what are traditional roles for girls and women, in a story set in a traditional society, hardly seems sexist to me. As for the roles themselves, perhaps this needs a closer look. For one, folk- and fairy-tales are most often traditionally told by women; and so they can hardly represent an idea of femininity impressed upon women by men. And many tales portray daughters who act outside of these roles, if only temporarily (for usually their actions are aimed not at upsetting the status quo, but at restoring it). And these bold and daring girls are most often found in tales of societies which are supposed to be most patriarchic. The Arabs come to mind.

Rebecca West wrote that “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” And the folktales express no contrary sentiments. In some cultures there are folk-stories of girls taken from their cities by princes of others. But we are seldom told what the girls themselves think of this. They may despise it; they may be grateful. We do not know. The tale of Badiat-ul-Jamal given in this collection,⁵ however, presents such a girl who is taken from her home at night. But where we expect to find resistance and resentment, we find a worthy heroine who works cunningly and insightfully to ensure that the treachery of her captor’s brothers is revealed. (Interestingly, Ala’i’s secondary troubles may be read as the necessity of his earning the worth and right to marry Badiat.) This is really very amazing, and I do not feel up to the task of interpreting it. But it is worth noting. As for traditional femininity, it has been remarked that what is higher and larger is not always healthier, and that perhaps a woman who wishes to throw aside traditional women’s things is throwing away things of great value. Certainly it seems true that she is judging herself and her role not by her own standards of what is good but by standards written by men. This is a deeper sexism, that men do not exert upon women, but women exert upon themselves. Richard Weaver characterizes the traditional role of women as “superior”, as having “prestige”. He describes “her superior closeness with nature, her intuitive realism, her unfailing ability to detect the sophistry in mere intellectuality….Putting [woman] on a level with the male is more truly a degradation than an elevation.”⁶ The folktales would seem to agree.

Perhaps the worst misconception about folklore is that it is escapist in nature. Even if it were, it seems petty and pedantic, at very least, to undermine an attempt to escape from something perceived as impoverished and undesirable, into something worthwhile and meaningful. Only the sheerest relativism sees a lost ideal as irrevocably lost. But so far from leading away into unreality, the phenomena which folklore invokes — myth, fantasy and imagination — are rather tools of the rational mind. One might say that they are the best means for apprehending truth. For truth at its highest form is something too specific, too concrete, and too perfected for our vague and imbecilic language to express. “Myth” comes from the Greek muthos, and originally meant to tell a story in a straightforward manner. It was used as a synonym for logos, (“word, reason, wisdom”) from which is derived our “logic” and “-ology.” Eventually it became used in a philosophical sense to mean any story which is told for the purpose of imparting, explaining or presenting an idea or truth. And it is no coincidence that all myths do this, so subtly that we often do not notice it. This is its purview, its inner light, that exists not in the words used to present it but in the sequence of events that unfold. Of course, mythology is not only rational. It has played (and still does play) a dual role: it satisfies an imaginative need while expressing a spiritual need. It carries in it something astonishing in its capacity to at once quench and whet our inner thirst: what Chesterton called “the presence of the absence of God.”⁷

Fantasy, properly understood, is primarily a visual phenomenon. One might say it is vision without the eyes. If you have a favorite painting or a favorite tree, or if you know well the geography of a place, then doubtless you use fantasy regularly whether or not you have ever read a Fantasy novel. When we think of these things with which we are familiar, without actually being there to see them with our eyes, the image we hold in our mind is phantasia. Imagination, similarly, is the ability to take as many aspects of the world and of our experiences as possible, and to put them together into an image of interrelation and interconnection. It is through imagination that we understand the world around us.

To give these almost forgotten definitions is not to redefine the terminology, to give senses of the words which are not appropriate, and thus to talk our way out of what looks like the picture of escapism. These are the original senses of the words, and they were applied to what we now call the fantastic because they are suitable in such a discussion; and in discussions of folklore they have taken on more import and depth, not less. The newer, more fanciful and purely fictional senses of these terms are mere accretions over time, left upon once respectable concepts by positivist thinking, the school of thought which holds that if a thing cannot be touched, measured, or physically perceived, then it does not exist or else does not matter. This kind of reductive thinking is largely what Lewis meant when he spoke of analytic thinking as a basilisk. He continues,

You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is not the same as to see.8

Folklore puts the world into terms which we can “see,” in this sense. It does not leave out of the account intangible things like beauty, awe and mystery, because these things — even such things as enchantment — are good and necessary parts of a human life.

The only thing which remains to be discussed about fairy-tales is the fairies themselves, which fall under the heading of mental phenomena: that is, beliefs, knowledge and worldview. It has been remarked that the fairies are very seldom present in the tales that take from them their name; and when they are, they are often misunderstood. A story perhaps worth considering is that of the Sleeping Beauty. She is given all sorts of birthday gifts, but also the horror of the curse of death, which is softened into mere sleep. Chesterton hinted that this may be an allegory of the human condition. For our purposes, it will be useful to point out that there are fairies, and then there are fairies. They are not the teeny-tiny, gossamer-winged cutesy things that popular culture has left us with. They are neutral at best and come in varying shapes and sizes. The word fairy is French, by way of the Italian fata, or “fate.” But they have had many names. They have been elves, alfar, goblins, dwarves, dwarrows, pucks, pucca, bucca, bugges, bogies, boogie men, mannikins, hobs, etc. Folklorists such as Katharine Briggs and Michael Denham have made extensive lists of these names; and these only of England. Often they are called “the good people,” “the other crowd,” or even merely “Them.” It is not wise to speak of them too often, or too presumptively, for they are in all places thought to be prideful and capricious. More a force of nature — as Tolkien observed, they are not supernatural unless one means the “super” as superlative. They are associated with an other world of some sort, called sometimes Faëry. But this is itself a natural world, though a magical one. It is their country that the fairy-tale is primarily concerned with. Faëry, Elfland, the Perilous Realm: a place where there are traps for the overbold and snares for the unwary. But it is also the sunny country of common sense, a place of wisdom and realism. In it there are real consequences to actions, real prices to be paid, “to the last farthing.” In it there is peace and happiness, but as easily broken as glass: a spell about the whole country, of wonder and contentment, that depends on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which it is not obvious why you should not do. It is a place of strong principles. Giants should be killed because they are gigantic. He who is last shall be first, and vice versa. A thing must be loved before it can be lovable. It is a place of golden apples and rivers of wine, and of ten-league boots.

And so we return, full circle, to the wonder and enchantment of fairy tales. C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to his friend Arthur Greve that “the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood — they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside.” If we have become synthetic men, uprooted from tradition and from the strength of the hills, then so much the worse for us. But folklore gives us a hold to grip, like a rope: a tattered, frayed and very fragile rope, but something to grip nonetheless, some last near-hopeless thing to hold onto.

And that is just the sort of hold one would find in a folktale.

 

 

¹ An agrarian community has been defined by the Twelve Southerners as being a community in which agricultural work is seen as the highest, and most basic form of labor, toward whose characteristics all other labor strives.

² C.S. Lewis, “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?”, Selected Literary Essays.

³ J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

⁴ G.K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy.

⁵ The story in question is “The Bird of the Golden Feather,” as found in Inea Bushnaq, Arab Folktales.

⁶ Richard Weaver, “Piety and Justice,” Ideas Have Consequences.

⁷ G.K. Chesterton, “Man and Mythology,” The Everlasting Man. This book is one of my favorites, and this chapter specifically contains some of the best thinking about mythology I have ever read.

⁸ C.S. Lewis, “The Abolition of Man,” The Abolition of Man.