Writing Right with Dmitri: Folk with Tales
Created | Updated May 3, 2020
Writing Right with Dmitri: Folk with Tales
Somewhere on the akashic, children, is a region of the noosphere where all the fireside tales reside. Hardly anyone goes there anymore, because they have 'devices' now, and those 'devices' tend to show them socially relevant stories made of hype about how 'magical' it is to dumb things down and then copyright them. Old tales aren't much in vogue these days, largely because they lack CGI and lush musical settings of the Broadway persuasion. But for thousands of years, these tales taught us how real magic thinks. By 'real' magic I mean the unseen rules of the unconscious that emerge in our collective imaginations, as opposed to the mass-market advertising industry.
A brief side note: we've just started watching The Storyteller, courtesy of Amazon Prime, and it appeared to be a welcome exception to the rule that the CGI people will ruin a good story. At least, the first episode was quite good, and stuck to the folklore motifs. It concerned a were-hedgehog and the princess who loved him.
What's the story about? Well, if you're a folklorist, you might say:
B641.5. Marriage to person in Hedgehog form. *Type 441; BP II 234, 482.
This classification refers you to the Stith Thompson tome, Motif-Index of Folk Literature. It's a wonderful work: you can get lost in there. Want a plot? Just go hunting.
Creation myths? How the bear lost his tail by ice fishing? Flying horses? They're all there. Find the number. Then go googling for the tale. You'll be surprised at how many there are – and how widespread they are, from Europe to Asia, Africa, South America, from pole to pole and depth to height. We share these things, and pass them on. Or at least, we did, before the 'entertainment industry' arrived to commercialise it. Reclaim your heritage. A magic mouse looks like what it does in my imagination, not in some copyrighted cartoon.
What a good folktale needs, besides a collection of motifs, which after all are just tropes: some relatable characters. An animal in search of a meal. A girl in search of her destiny. A boy trying to sell a cow. The characters need: motivation, desire, an ethical code, curiosity. They also need to make a friend. That friend could be a talking animal, a deceptively simple-looking passerby, or even part of the landscape or architecture. The character will make decisions: those decisions will have consequences. Those consequences are at the heart of why we tell folktales. They are, after all, maps of our ethical psyches.
In no true folktale will the words 'follow your heart' be uttered. If they are, you know you're in Disney territory. Leave quietly. The second story in The Storyteller series was a big disappointment: what in my childhood was a quite delightfully convoluted shaggy-dog story with a deliciously lame punchline had been turned into a 'love conquers all' borefest.
I'm probably going to regret asking this, but here goes…
- What folktale (NOT on television! NOT Disney!) most impressed you as a kid?
- Does this tale still impress you as an adult? Why or why not?
- Can you tell us this tale in an interesting way?
Remember: if you saw it in a movie or on television, it doesn't count. Don't care what it is. Somebody has to have told it to you, or you read it in your big giant book of folktales. No, Beatrix Potter doesn't count, either. As for Winnie the Pooh, remember what Dorothy Parker said.
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