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This article, for Ines Köhler-Zülch, is dedicated to her warm personal hospitality and great intellectual generosity
Grimms' Children's and Household Tales, and in particular, its prefaces, mark the historical origins of fairy-tale studies. Although its title is generally translated into English as Grimm's Fairy Tales, folk narrativists well know that the collection's 'fairy tales' are a minor component among a broad variety of folk tale subgenres. Folktales tend to reflect the belief system and the world of their intended audience. Taking their characters from the everyday world, they are peopled with husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends, an occasional doctor, lawyer, priest or preacher, a few thieves, and - in societies with an agrarian component - many peasants. In a typical folktale one person appropriates another person's money, dignity, or honor. Marital strife looms large.
In terms of plot, a large proportion of folktales have dystopic endings'. A typical example, the tale type ATU 1430, recounts the fruitless consequences of building castles in the air. In Grimms' tales it appears as KHM 164, Lazy Heinz:
A peasant dreams of selling his jug of honey and using the profit to buy chickens. In his daydream, he'd sell their eggs and buy a piglet, which would soon produce more piglets. The piglets' sale would allow him to purchase a goat... and so on until he imagines making so much money that he would build a house, marry, and have a son. As the peasant's daydream continues, he'd beat his son (in a typical displacement of an impoverished peasant's own ill treatment). As the peasant flails about, he knocks his precious jug of honey from the shelf above his head. It falls to the floor and breaks, destroying the lazy peasant's honeyed future in the dust and dirt of his hovel.
As in many folktales, the protagonist's position in the plot begins at a socially low level, rises dramatically, and then falls, equally dramatically. Like Lazy Heinz, folk tales are generally brief, related to everyday life, and have a simple linear plot that is easy to remember.
Fairy tales differ from folktales both in their cast of characters and in the trajectory of their plots. Two major kinds of plot dominate the genre of fairy tales; both...