Up until now, a large portion of fairy tale analysis has been carried out by therapists or psychoanalysts who are extremely ignorant of the precise social connotations and probably even more so of history. Due to this, a lot of the concepts that have been asserted regarding fairy tales have been absurd in their scope and ridiculous in their reasoning and technique.
Of course, there are many scholars of fairy tales who have made valid arguments about them; from feminist theorists to folklorists and historians, a large number of individuals have made significant contributions to our knowledge of fairy tales, their influence on contemporary culture, and what they signify for our understanding of ancient peoples. Nonetheless, these theories generally appear to concentrate on a particular region’s fairy tales in order to ascertain the significance of those tales. Sometimes the concepts have migrated around, highlighting parallel stories in two different places to make a larger point about a story motif in general. While such study might be useful, it also has its limitations. For example, just because we know that a particular society has a penchant for trickster characters doesn’t necessarily mean that this pattern is widespread or particular to that culture. Likewise, knowing that many civilizations have similar trickster tales reveals relatively little about a culture’s value system in comparison to that of another, and more crucially, how their tales relate to ours. We shall learn how they were different from us and how similar they were to us by examining the differences between us. We will have a stronger foundation for knowing exactly what they were thinking and what was going on if we do it this way.
These systematic cross-cultural studies use metrics to quantify and contrast two cultural traits; in the case of fairy tales, these metrics would be the proportions of certain themes, characters, and other components present in the fairy tales or popular stories of each country. In this way, we would learn about the variations among the many cultures as well as the commonalities. Finding patterns and concepts that bridge all cultural boundaries, sort of universal or almost universal social ideals of humanity, is only feasible and necessary through such comparisons.
Evidently, such analysis cannot be used as qualitatively as may be required to properly comprehend stories and the diversity of human civilization. However, there has been and continues to be a great deal of qualitative research on fairy tales, so such quantitative measures of the fairy tale and the cultures behind them would not be the only way to understand them; rather, it would be a tool that those attempting to understand fairy tales and culture could use to get a better understanding of the thinking of the people behind the fairy tales, how we have changed today, and how fairy tales are likely to impact us now. Read more about torrenty
