Most folklorists and scholars of popular tradition agree that folktales and fairy tales existed in preliterate or non-literate oral cultures long before they came to be written down. In Europe in the later eighteenth century popular oral traditions were “discovered” then “rescued” by liberal writers with a strong if sentimental sympathy for the way of life, uncorrupted language and unadorned poetic utterances of the common people, those from poor rural backgrounds who, from the 1760s onwards, had begun to play their part on the stage of history. Romantic nationalism produced song and ballad collections of a partial, or less than rigorous authenticity such as Macpherson’s The Works of Ossian (1765), …
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Citation: Crehan, Stewart. "Kinder- und Hausmärchen". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 March 2020 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14205, accessed 22 November 2024.]
