A Children’s Guide to Folklore and Wonder Tales

People love stories—but why? As children and adults, we interpret the adventures of our daily lives through narrative. Classic narratives give us ways to see ourselves as heroes, tricksters, and maybe even villains; they also give us a way to interpret the foes and obstacles we encounter and to defeat them first in story, so that we can go out with the strength to tackle them in reality. Stories circumnavigate, rather than directly penetrate, themes and questions. They draw a circle around listeners and pull us closer to common understandings and meanings—and to each other, too. This is the vision for this course: to draw your family closer together as you hear stories and explore the deep themes and questions of powerful classic tales.

This course’s lectures cluster around the basic genres of folktales (folktales, animal folktales, pourquoi stories, fables, fairy tales, and legends). Each lecture is relatively independent, allowing you to jump to your favorite stories or the ones your family happens to be in the mood for that day. With this in mind, the lectures do refer back to one another and build on some key concepts, so completing the lectures in order will enable you to feel a sense of trajectory. Key concepts this course covers include rites of passage, the role of trickster heroes, and the differences between oral stories and written texts. Animal folktales and “magic” numbers also receive attention. And the lectures discuss how stories vary across the world; for example, three interconnected lectures on “Cinderella” explore versions of the tale from France, Russia, and Iran, each showing a progressively more proactive protagonist.

The course builds toward one concluding lecture, which returns to previous tales to discuss the overarching themes and questions that link genres and tale types. That lecture includes a final tale that combines many of the themes and recurring motifs of the course. The course concludes by pointing you toward recommended tale collections and resources to continue your storytelling and sharing of classic oral folklore and wondertales.