Other stories, such as Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s The Jolly Postman (1986), Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s The Stinky Cheese Man (1992), and David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs (2001), are populated with characters, plots, and settings from several Western European fables and tales, each of which evokes the stories from which they are taken while giving voice to multiple texts. Gianni Rodari (1996, p. 38) described such jumbles of fairy-tale characters as a “Fairy Tale Salad Mix.” He suggested that in subjecting stories and characters “to this treatment, even the images that are most constantly used appear to take on a new life, to blossom again, and to bear fruit and flowers in unexpected ways” (p. 38). Yet, as Anthony Browne’s Piggybook (1986) and Into the Forest (2004) demonstrate, the mixing of folktale characters can create not only humorous results but also ominous moods.
Retellings, parodies, and “fairy tale salad mixes” are also found in books and series for older children, from beginning readers such as Lisa Wheeler and Frank Ansley’s Fitch & Chip (2003) to stand-alone novels such as Liesl Shurtliff’s Red: The True Story of Red Riding Hood (2016) or Sara Lewis Holmes’s The Wolf Hour (2017) and series such as those by Michael Buckley, beginning with The Sisters Grimm (2005), or Adam Gidwitz, beginning with A Tale Dark and Grimm (2010). These works are more than new versions of old tales. Many of them fill in the “back stories” of traditional characters while imagining their lives and new adventures during the “happily ever after.”
Controversial Tales
Folktales are not neutral territory in children’s books. Controversy surrounding folktales as fare for children is almost as old as the first tales published explicitly with young people in mind. Sarah Fielding, the author of one of the first novels written for children in English, saw value in the imaginative aspects of the tales and included them in her novel The Governess (1749), helping to make them more respectable. Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, an educator, found the imaginary beings in the Countess d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales Mother Bunch’s Tales (1773) potentially harmful to the religious beliefs of young children (Avery and Kinnell 1995, pp. 69–70).
Theories emerged on how fairy tales could be adapted and used with young children. Some educators began to see the tales as a way to pass on cultural and social mores while helping to shape national identity. Romanticists William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw childhood as a unique time marked by freedom. They stressed the importance of allowing children to develop their imagination and advocated for books that encouraged children to do so. They perceived imaginative elements of folktales as more important than books filled with facts (Briggs and Butts 1995, p. 137).
As the popularity and publication of folktales increased, so did the criticism and disapproval of folktales in books for children. The debate about the appropriateness of folktales for children continued throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, many educators and parents favored children’s books that stressed hard work, honesty, cleanliness, virtuous behavior, and male superiority. In 1850, George Cruikshank, the illustrator of the Grimms’ Popular German Stories, adapted and rewrote a collection of fairy tales to warn against the dangers of alcohol. Charles Dickens, a friend of Cruikshank, denounced Cruikshank’s work, calling it “Frauds on the Fairies” (Briggs and Butts 1995, p. 137). Cruikshank was not the only one to adapt tales to align with particular values or moral lessons. As Briggs and Butts point out, by the Victorian era, fairy tales had already been modified: “preselected and often strategically cut and bowdlerized … warned against the failings typical of childhood – greed and selfishness, curiosity and disobedience” (p. 138).
Today, folktale genres are still criticized for their violence, magical and supernatural elements, and gendered role modeling. The images and texts of particular adaptations become the focal point of controversy. Trina Schart Hyman’s inclusion of a bottle of wine (in text and image) in her 1983 Grimm-like picturebook retelling of Little Red Riding Hood drew criticism from several religious groups. Sometimes it is not the tale or the images that are problematic. Instead, it is the teller or adaptor. Since the mid-twentieth century, the increase in the publication of tales from non-Western European cultures has raised issues of ownership and appropriation. Betsy Hearne’s (1999) essay “Swapping Tales and Stealing Stories: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Folklore in Children’s Literature” explored the cultural, political, and economic issues that arise when an author or storyteller adapts a tale from outside their own culture. Although source citation has become more common, questions of ownership and the right to tell tales outside one’s culture remain. Aesthetic choices such as style and tone, translation, and the use of metaphors, symbols, and humor make adapting and interpreting tales from different cultures challenging. Crossing cultural boundaries also requires navigating political (i.e. artistic freedom vs cultural ownership), economic (i.e. who gains financially through copyright and royalties), and social (prestige) interests. And yet, as Hearne points out, when tales, especially oral tales, are no longer told or recorded, “much great culture would be lost” (p. 513).
Interpreting Tales
Folktales are the focus of research by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, folklore, history, literature, library science, and education. Scholars have used a range of methods (for example, comparative analysis, historical research, close readings, etc.) and theoretical approaches (structuralist, mythological, Marxist, feminist, intertextual, ecocriticism, etc.) to interpret tales, to illuminate their history, and to better understand their role, influence, and appeal within a culture or cultures.
The underlying presumptions and focus of research in folktales have changed over time. Early folklorists, following in the footsteps and methods of the Brothers Grimm, believed that folktales were universal in their structures and meanings across time and place. These folklorists, known as the Finnish School, collected and categorized European tales according to their plot or motifs, assigning tales with similar plots or motifs a classification number and title. In 1910, Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne published Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (The Types of the Folktale), an index to European tales. American folklorist Stith Thompson translated and expanded Aarne’s work, creating The Types of the Folktale: Classification and Bibliography (1928, 1961), known as the Aarne-Thompson (AT) Tale Type Index. In 2004, Hans-Jörg Uther published The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, updating and expanding the AT Index to include tales from around the world. Sample entries for the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index include “Little Red Riding Hood,” both Perrault’s and the Grimms’ versions, which are listed as tale type ATU333 The Glutton (Red Riding Hood; The Six Little Goats) while “The Three Little Pigs” is sometimes listed as tale type ATU123 The Three Rams/Wolf and the Kids (Thompson 1977, pp. 39–40; see also University of Missouri Libraries 2021) and sometimes as ATU124 Blowing the House In (3 Pigs) (Ashliman 2008; see also University of Missouri Libraries 2021). These tale-type indices, which help scholars identify tales and their variants, remain a key resource in folktale research.
Oral and written variants of The Three Pigs have been found in Britain, Italy, and the United States (Virginia, North Carolina, African American in Joel Chandler’s Nights with Uncle Remus). These stories share similar plots, but can differ in the kind, number, and fate of the animal characters. Protagonists can be pigs, geese (Bernoni 1885; see also Haviland 1965), or rabbits (Harris 1880), and although the wolf is the most common predator, in some versions the fox takes on that role (Nanny Goose 1813; Cundall 1850; Lang 1892). The number of prey animals can be unnumbered as in the case of the rabbits, but typically range from one to seven. Gender also varies: the pigs, especially