Folk-Lore and Fable

Folk-Lore and Fable Synopsis

Excerpt from Folk-Lore and Fable: Aesop, Grimm, Andersen, With Introductions and Notes

Far earlier written down. But less primitive in hind, are the Esopic Fables. In these allegorical tales, the form of the old animistic story is used without any belief in the identity of the personalities of men and animals, but with a conscious double meaning and for the purpose of teaching a lesson. The fable is a product not of the folk but of the learned; and though at times it has been handed down by word of mouth, it is really a literary form.

Still more recent, both in kind and in date, are the Wonder stories of modern manufacture represented here by the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. This nineteenth-century Dane had a marvelous knack of entertaining children by repeating old folk tales of the type collected by Grimm; and his success in this led him on to attempt inventing new ones. The new ones were suc cessful, too; but though the incidents were often suggested by traditional stories, Hans Christian Andersen's finished products are to be regarded as a form of modern fiction worked out under the in?uence of more or less primitive folk-tales.

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