Of the Fairy Archetypes in the German Grimm Brothers' and Japanese Yei Ozaki's Tales
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Date
2022
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Abstract
Fairy tales are stories intended for children, featuring fanciful and magical characters. They are traditional stories passed down orally from one generation to the other before being recorded in books by authors and translators. These tales have no individual ownership; they are owned by the traditional community that produced them. Hence, this study focused on a comparative analysis between the German fairy tales compiled by the Grimm brothers and the Japanese fairy tales compiled by Yei Theodora Ozaki by enumerating and expatiating on the ‘fairy’ archetypes in these tales. On the one hand, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, popularly called the Grimm brothers, were born in the German city of Hanau and are responsible for collecting and recording the oral storytelling tradition of their countryside titled Grimms’ Fairy Tales in 1812. The popular tales that resulted from their collection are the likes of ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’, ‘Rapunzel’, and ‘The Elves’. On the other hand, Yei Theodora Ozaki, an early 20th century translator of Japanese short stories and fairy tales, was born into a Japanese family of Baron and Bathia Ozaki. Her first publication of Japanese Fairy Tales was in 1908. The popular Japanese tales that resulted from her collection are the likes of ‘The Jelly Fish and the Monkey’, ‘The Story of Princess Hase’, ‘The Ogre of Rashomon’ and ‘The Mirror of Matsuyama’. According to the Archetypal critical approach adopted for this study, it is believed that archetypes determine the form and function of literary works and a text’s meaning is shaped by the cultural and psychological myths that are used to drive them. It is also discovered that these archetypes served as the basic mode of expressing the beliefs, fears, and anxieties that the writers pass across to their readers. For the purpose of this study, the fairy godmothers, fairy elves, fairy names, fairy actions, and fairy locations were revealed as the fairy archetypes that serve as symbols to represent the mythical essence of the selected texts. This study revealed outstanding similarities between the German Grimm Brothers’ tales and the Japanese Yei Ozaki’s tales with the use of magical powers, mystical world, mystical affairs, and luminous spirit in the expression of their sociocultural experiences. Meanwhile, certain differences discussed in the study are discovered in their mode of cultural expression based on their topicality and cultural beliefs. Attention was also given to the stirring literary qualities replete in these tales.
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Fairy tales, Children literature, Sociocultural experience, Archetypes, German Tales,, Japanese Tales