She said, I said
Ah, quoth Mija:
The question on my mind today is: why do the fairytales need changing?
That's an excellent question, to which my response would be: "Why should should the fairytales not change?"
After all, fairytales and other such stories have their roots in oral tradition, where stories are passed from generation to generation, changing and evolving along the way. What we're witnessing today is arguably another form of that progression. Of course the medium is changing, but the important point is that the natural state of any of these stories is one of flux.
Arguably, by casting these stories in print, we lose something of the original flavour, since change is an inherent part of that, but then print (and subsequently all other forms of media that allow the dissemination of the story) will eventually allow the evolution to continue by enabling them to reach a wider audience (Does Darwinism apply to storytelling?).
Part of the problem I have with the copyright system (particularly with the ever lengthening extensions that seem to be granted in the US with frightening regularity), is that it seeks to foil this evolution by preventing others from modifying these stories (says Mark completely failing to understand the intricacies of copyrights). This is not a good thing. I have to take companies like Disney (look, I had to single them out eventually) to task for lobbying for these extensions, when they in particular have benefited so obviously from stories that have reached the public domain.
On a slight, but interesting, tangent, I recall coming across a discussion somewhere (for the life of me I can't remember where, or even in what medium), discussing the differences between popular music at the turn of the century and the present day. The difference being that popular songs once evolved and grew in a similar fashion to stories, travelling around the world by word of mouth alone, and gradually being refined along the way.
Change isn't just good, it's the natural way of things.
Someone tell the RIAA.
1 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: She said, I said.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://ensuingchaos.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/50
Mark responded to my musings on Modern Fairytales, countering with the argument that fairytales traditionally have been transmitted in an oral format. He pointed out that the oral tradition is much more susceptible to change and that fairytales are in... Read More
The Grimm brothers would agree with you - they were linguists who combined their love of European storytelling with a study of how language (and the sound-set of a language) changed over time - what they found was that sounds tended to change towards their simplest related sound - does that ring a bell re: Disney or am I just being bitchy?
You're a parent of two small children - that gives you licence to bitch about Disney at least five times each day (six times on a Sunday :)