Symbology: Fairy Tales Uncovered

Monday, February 15, Dragons. The Agreement - M. Oriental mythology represents the dragon as a positive force, representing power, strength, and good luck. Dragons are revered beings in China and, although fierce, are rarely mean-spirited. Usually long and serpentine, with four legs, Chinese dragons have attributes of other animals: Four-toed dragons are associated with the four elements of antiquity earth, fire, air, water ; five-toed dragons are symbols of Chinese emperors. Only the emperor can use this image, for others there are severe penalties for doing so.

Dragons symbolize power, prosperity, and nobility, and they have friends in high places. These powerful creatures represent everything from chaos, power, and the ultimate foe, to wisdom, protection, and the unconscious. Dragons can be benevolent, lazy, or demanding. Not only are the concepts that dragons symbolize quite diverse, but how they are represented is equally so. Dragons can be serpents, reptiles, birds, or snakes. Some breath fire, some do not; the possibility of fire-breathing dragons - as with dinosaurs - is supported by the existence of the Bombardier beetle, which spews chemicals from two sacs inside onto a predator outside, burning the would-be attacker.

Alternatively, the assumption that tale variations are meaningful entails that the myriad variants are so many equivalent permutations on enduring themes. This view accounts for the correlated facts that folktales are stable, and yet no two variants are ever alike—an insight that has been available since the inception of modern fairy-tale studies.

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Their point, largely disregarded, deserves to be reinstated. The Grimms declined on principle to associate tale variations with corruption and inauthenticity. Alternatively, they propose thinking about tales in terms of stable blueprints incessantly recreated in plural retellings. They say that they often conflated complementary tale variants in one text and kept diverging variants in the notes, so as to include everything they collected and to preserve every particularity they noticed.

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In short, the Brothers Grimm maintained that tradition is all about the creative retellings of capacious blueprints, which is why they chose not to select a single variant of each tale. Yet the Grimms never set out to make sense of the themes by means of the variants. It took a Freudian folklorist to bring together variation and meanings. Alan Dundes remarked that folktales have two defining characteristics. How do allomotifs and Freudian symbols actually fit together? Note that Dundes reasons along Freudian lines. Take, for example, the Ozark taleteller who used decapitation as a conscious euphemism for castration.

This metaphor—unlike the unidirectional Freudian symbol—works both ways: If symbols were indeed the surviving remnants of bygone metaphors, then compiling a list of fossilized symbolic translations would be the way to go. Alternatively, recognizing that metaphorical processes are ongoing—and that metaphorical mappings comprise multiple entailments, which allow perennially creative variations—clears the way for exploring the dynamic patterns of metaphor.

This perspective leaves no room for metaphorical patterns, either. When Holbek gets around to mapping allomotifs in one tale, he writes: Fairy-tale symbolism is a conscious language that screens sensitive matters. Alternatively, exploring the dynamic patterns of metaphor is bound to encourage open-ended quests on fairy-tale symbolism. The stepmother who fails to nurture the children … reemerges in the woods as … a cannibalistic fiend.

He pointed out that the transposition of a figure of speech into a literal meaning is itself a metaphorical process. A metaphor always works both ways … it is like a two-way street. Given a metaphor that links different conceptual domains, symbols are the elements in each domain that are homologous to—and, thus, permutable with—elements in the other domain. The metaphor restores this semantic field. It follows that conceptual metaphors are mostly not symmetrical.

While one can metaphorically map the act of grasping an object to an act of understanding e. The point, again, is that the thrust of metaphoric thought lies in using concrete imagery for abstract propositions. The foregoing discussion suggests that i fairy tales hinge on live metaphors; ii metaphors map relevant aspects of one conceptual domain to other conceptual domains; iii such mappings constitute a network of symbols, of which different tale variants choose alternative allomotifs; and iv metaphorical mappings often use concrete imagery to construct abstract propositions.

These insights entail that i the meanings of fairy-tale symbols are not set once and for all; rather ii the values of symbols hinge on the metaphorical transpositions at play in tales; therefore iii comparing the allomotifs in tale variants is crucial for determining the active metaphors; and iv such metaphors likely use sensorial imagery to convey abstract propositions. The first has to do with metaphor as a structural fairy-tale feature. Propp showed that fairy-tale adventures are journeys in space, their overarching theme being maturation into adulthood.

Note that these two features correlate: Differently put, fairy tales use the concreteness of spatial journeys to reason about maturation processes. This is a basic metaphorical process. First, although Propp defined the optimal span of the fairy-tale genre, he never asked what the minimal condition that a fairy tale must fulfill might be. Accordingly, I submit that the minimal fairy tale features a feminine enchantment. In its minimal form, a girl walks into the woods and comes of age.

Virtually all the available variants mostly from France mention an innocent girl who strolls into the woods and meets the wolf. While Perrault elides the pricking references, he describes the girl collecting flowers along the way. Moreover, Perrault implies that the carrier of flowers heads to her deflowering. It is noteworthy that the wolf meets the girl at the crossroads to set her on her blood path, and again at the forest cabin to take her to bed. The illustrator Walter Crane, in his Little Red Riding Hood illustrated booklet , effectively summarizes this two-tiered intervention.

Routledge, , 2. Thus, Crane like Perrault both associates the girl with the flowers and hints at her looming deflowering. Indeed, shape-shifting is a lunar attribute every month the moon changes its shape as it wanes, vanishes, and waxes. Essentially, this variant maps the tangible act of walking along the path to the abstract realm of morals.

After the wolf lures the girl into leaving the straight path, the straying girl follows her own uncharted path of flowers: A shattered wine bottle involves, of course, a red flow. Thus, the brothers convey the basic fairy-tale leitmotif: But the broken-bottle metaphor is actually transparent enough that the brothers moved to contain its implication. Therefore, the Grimms manage to preserve the sexual symbolism and to present a morally prim tale.

Such procedures should be heeded in debates about whether the Brothers Grimm were faithful to the tales they edited. Rather, it is meant as a quick illustration of the point that fairy tales are built on metaphorical mappings among codes, which numerous variants express in various ways.

Francisco Vaz da Silva

Put in a nutshell, grasping the metaphors in the variants of a tale—that is, mapping the tale imagery to abstract propositions—is what the study of fairy-tale symbolism is about. Although the study of fairy-tale symbolism is old, it is only just coming out of the woods, and a long, winding path lies ahead. Little Red Riding Hood. University of Florida Digital Collection. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension Selected Essays, — The Meaning of Folklore: The Analytical Essays of Alan Dundes.

Edited by Simon J.

Epub Ebooks Download Symbology Fairy Tales Uncovered Chm By Michelle Snyder

Utah State University Press, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Edited and translated by James Strachey. The Interpretation of Dreams. Edited by Angela Richards. Translated by James Strachey. The Penguin Freud Library.

The Symbologist: Dragons

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The University of Chicago Press, Princeton University Press, Vaz da Silva, Francisco. Edited by Maria Tatar, 97— Cambridge University Press, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Essai sur le conte de tradition orale Paris: Gallimard, , 60—64 , offers a good discussion of opening and closing formulas in connection with the general otherness of fairy tales. Lang, Custom and Myth London: Longmans, Green, , 12—13 , 21, Holt, , 1: Andrew Lang, Introduction to Cinderella: Marian Roalfe Cox London: Nutt, , Indiana University Press, , Champion, , Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the French are my own.

The French text in question is in C.

Barde, , — Academia Scientiarum Fennica, , , seems inclined to moor the transformation sequence in the Middle East. Wiley-Blackwell, , 40— Scribner, , 52—53 , 72— Longman, Green, , The original English essay by R. An Essay , ed. Abram Smythe Palmer London: Prentice-Hall, , 63 n.

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams , ed. James Strachey New York: Norton, , Freud, Interpretation of Dreams , Freud, Introductory Lectures , Freud, Introductory Lectures , , Freud, Interpretation of Dreams , n. Introductory Lectures , Freud borrowed this idea from Hans Sperber. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams , — Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language: Grove, , 6.

Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: Peregrine Books, , — A Casebook , ed. University of Wisconsin Press, , Basic Books, , Darnton, Great , Maisonneuve et Larose, , 1: The text selected by Darnton is on pages — University of Wisconsin Press, , 15—16 ; and Zipes, Trials , 21— On the Relation of Mythology and Psychoanalysis. For a fine discussion, see Robert A.

Princeton University Press, , 40— Shambhala, , 43 italics in the original. Princeton University Press, , 21—22 ; cf. Joseph Campbell, Flight of the Wild Gander: New World Library, , 12 italics in the original. This is a reprint of the book that was originally published in by Viking.

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Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore , ed. Alan Dundes Lanham, MD: For a lucid explanation of the historical-geographic method, see Stith Thompson, The Folktale Berkeley: University of California Press, , — Kaarl Krohn, Folklore Methodology , trans. Alan Dundes, , Englewood Cliffs, N. Prentice-Hall, , , Arno, , 6. Krohn, Folklore , ; Thompson, The Folktale , — Reimer, , Realschulbuchhandlung, , The Complete First Edition , ed. Jack Zipes Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, , Realschulbuchhandlung, , 13— See a fine translation of this passage in Tatar, Hard Facts , — Philip Pullman, Grimm Tales: For Young and Old Harmondsworth: Penguin, ,