Mythology, folk, and fairy tales
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| Ancient Egyptian painting depicting the rising sun sailing over the horizon in a boat. |
Modern people were always considering things they could not understand: Where did man and beasts come from? What produced, and vanished, the sun and moon? We found it easy to conclude that other animals, and even the wind, oceans, plants, and mountains, were born with motivations and impulses like their own, with just the crudest ideas of cause and effect. Having these ideas in mind, people set out to put their reactions into sentences, and these responses took the form of the first myths, the legends.
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| A scene from an 11th-century Japanese picture story( attributed to Toba Sojo) shows a chase: frog and rabbit pursue a straw-hatted monkey. Many folk stories ridicule human failings by transferring them to such animal characters. |
For example, the ancient Greeks explained the rise and the lowering of the sun by pretending a charioteer was moving his team of fiery horses through the sky from east to west every day. The god Thor drove a goat-drawn chariot in Scandinavian mythology, and people believed thunder was the cause of the turning of its wheels. However, other myths are drawn from the half-forgotten past events. Some myth recorders also went so far as to provide genealogical trees that link actual historical rulers with their legendary ancestors. Through his Aeneid, the Roman poet Vergil (blog-10) compares to the Trojan prince Aeneas the history of the Roman empire and its people.
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| One of the fabulous beasts that appear in many European folk stories : the griffin, a monster who was half lion and half eagle. |
Many new authors have "rediscovered" the old myths and used them for the novel, the theater, and the film as a basis of narrative ideas. Theseus's plot, for example, was recreated by the English author Mary Renault (born 1905) in The King Must Die. Orpheus is a ballet dancer of the French author Jean Cocteau (1891-1963) in the modern-dress stage and film version of the Orpheus and Euridice story, Orphée.
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| 17th-century woodcut showing Robin Goodfellow-a mischievous house spirit and meddler in human affairs whose tricks are related in many English folk stories. |
When Christianity spread since the first century A.D. across the Greco-Roman region. Most ancient myths come in as a transition. The Greek nymphs of forests, cliffs, streams, and rivers were friendly fairies; ghosts, trolls, goblins, and singing creatures were giving way to the host of local deities. People actually believed in this mystical world; tales were heard of floating witches casting spells, about the fairies who could grant wishes, and about people who had been transformed into wild beasts.
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| Frontispiece by 19th-century French artist Gustave Dore to an 1862 edition of the Charles Perrault's Mother Goose Tales- a collection of popular fairy stories. |
Most of these tales were compiled and written during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries by Perrault in France (blog-2), by Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786-1859) in Germany, and by Jörgen Moc (1813-82) and Peter Asbjörnsen (1812-85) in Norway. Perrault's Sleeping Beauty is representative of the tales they gathered, in which a queen, poisoned by an evil witch, pricks her finger and falls asleep for a hundred years. In the end, she is awoken by a young boy.
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| The Giant, by the Spanish painter Goya . A giant figure in stories as diverse as the Greek myths and English folk tales. |
This is commonly recognized as folk tales that enshrine beliefs, practices, and what is superstitions. These stories are primarily part of an oral storytelling tradition and have their roots in mythical heroes' tales. In 1812 the Grimm brothers published their renowned compilation of German folk tales. Folklore researchers quickly published collections of stories gathered from Norway to Greece, from Zululand to Scotland in other countries. Tales of epic physical deeds, of noble giants-like the American lumberjack Paul Bunyan-of goodness, praised and punished evil, and imaginative animal stories are familiar to almost all nations. Many legends have been imitated or adapted, such as the American writer Joel Chandler Harris' tales of "Uncle Remus" (1848-1908), based on Black folk myths of animals like Brer Rabbit. Throughout Denmark, over 150 original tales in the traditional style were composed by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75), mostly influenced by old folk-story themes.
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| Ghosts, as in George Cruikshank's 19th-century illustration to a good-natured An English ghost story, occur again and again, too. |
Myths, fairy tales, and legends are in one sense an early effort to describe human beliefs whose roots we are only partially conscious of: beliefs of the night and the unseen, and of the powers and monsters that inhabit it. The ghost stories and tales of what is supernatural which are familiar to most countries emerged from these fears. These types of story writers include the German author E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), and English writer M. Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and R. James (1862-1936).
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