Tales of Their Times

Abstract

The aim of the article is to examine how the fairytales of storytellers from different times agree with the idea that their attitudes towards life appear in the fairytales that they tell and to consider whether they construct their fairytales so that they reflect the tensions and conflicts in their own times. This is achieved by looking into the tales of a woman storyteller in the nineteenth century when organized collecting began in Iceland, and three storytellers‘ repertoires from the twentieth century, when fairytales still belonged to the living oral tradition were tape-recorded. The survey is concluded by examining three recent plays involving fairytales which the author herself attended.

1. Introduction

From the early nineteenth century, when the brothers Grimm began to collect and publish fairytales in Germany, and long into the twentieth century the research of folklorists focused primarily on the texts of the tales. Scholars studied their origins, nature, and distribution; most of them considered the contents of the folktales to be cultural remnants. It was considered that evolution explained the variety of the tales since human nature was the same everywhere, but variation of conditions and environments meant that different communities were at different stages of development. Fairytales should therefore contain remains of myths, ancient rituals, and customs connected to old religions. The transmission of fairytales was considered to be an automatic process unrelated to individuals, like a stream that flows from its origin in a particular direction or the ripples that spread in all directions when a stone is thrown into the water. Since they were thought to be old and traditional, more attention was paid to what they had in common rather than their variety. By tracing that which was common it ought to be possible to discover the age and place of origin of each fairytale (cf. Ó Giolláin 2000, pp. 44–54).

Under such assumptions, the tellers of the stories were of little significance, they were impersonal transmitters that moved the stories from one place to another. They were, however, sometimes invoked to explain the changes that occurred during the transmission of the stories, which could be attributed to the storytellers. The storytellers were thought to have forgotten material, left it out by accident, or added material and/or confused stories, motifs, or the order of events with each other. Every such episode, or series of episodes, could result in a new version of the fairytale (Honko 2000, pp. 17–18; Georges 1976, pp. 160–61). Other explanations of change assumed that tales changed because they were adapted to differing natural conditions or different social groups with different languages and cultures. In such cases, stable variants of stories were associated with specific areas (von Sydow 1948, pp. 15–18).

In the twentieth century, people gradually realized that stories are told by individuals and they, not some nameless group of ‘folk’ transmit the tales. Differences and changes among tales are not necessarily due to forgetfulness or confusion, they can be made with a specific intention, and it is the rule, rather than the exception, that stories exist in many versions. As a result, some folklorists changed their focus from the texts of the stories to the people who told them. The Hungarian folklorist Linda Dégh created new methods to use in studying storytellers and their tales (Dégh 1989, p. 61).

These ideas were slow in reaching Iceland, and most of the research published about Icelandic fairytales, and their motifs discusses them as literary tales and interprets them without taking into consideration who told them or how. The only research relating the tellers of fairytales to the stories they tell are those by Henning K. Sehmsdorf and Hallfreður örn Eiríksson on the fairytales of Herdís Jónasdóttir (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf 1999, pp. 263–310), and articles and books the present author has written (Þorsteinsdóttir 1998, 2002, 2011, 2012, 2015). Recently two Icelandic folklorists have defended their dissertations where the subject is Icelandic legends in relation to women. Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir (2022) studied how women, femininity, and gendered power relations in Icelandic folk legends are depicted in folktale collections from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Júlíana Þóra Magnúsdóttir (2023), on the other hand, used audiotaped interviews to examine the legend traditions of 200 women born in the late 19th century.

I have long been convinced that when it comes to interpreting tales, the storytellers themselves, both men and women, are of extreme importance: who they are and where they come from (see e.g., Dégh 1989, pp. 52–61; Gwyndaf 1976, pp. 288–90; Pentikäinen 1978, p. 55). We can also draw conclusions about their worldview and repertoire by examining the kind of stories they chose to tell (see e.g., Asadowskij 1926, pp. 64–69; Dégh 1989, pp. 203–4; Pentikäinen 1978, pp. 331–33; Siikala 1990). The Danish folklorist Bengt Holbek used the tales of specific storytellers when he proposed his theory about the structural features of folktales. He concluded that it was possible to divide fairytales into four ‘moves’ labeled I, II, III, and V (IV also exists but is not found in all fairytales). These four moves are characterized by basic oppositions: young/adult, man/woman, noble/low class. These three pairs of opposites characterize three kinds of tension that are created in fairytales: first, the friction between parents and children, then the tension between the sexes, and in the third-place difficulties connected with establishing a basis for marriage and the joining of two individuals with different backgrounds. He therefore considers that all fairytales that end in marriage are always about two main characters, a young pair that eventually joins in marriage. All these features are found in the actual lives of the Jutlandish storytellers whom Holbek uses as examples in his research; he considers that fairytales enabled people to deal with sensitive issues. This is achieved by disguising the real characters and pretending that the events take place in an imagined world but nonetheless discuss openly the tensions between parents and children, in-laws, and lovers. It can thus be said that the meaning of the fairytales is part of their structure and form (Holbek 1987, pp. 410–34).

In my book Sagan upp á hvern mann: Átta íslenskir sagnamenn og ævintýrin þeirra (2011) and an article drawing from that work (2015), I have shown that people who tell fairytales present their attitudes in them in a symbolic fashion and even use the stories to come to grips with their own difficult experiences. I have exhibited that the life and worldview of storytellers can be gleaned from their whole repertoire of fairytales. In my research, I discovered that by examining the repertoires more closely it is possible to find that the storytellers are using particular tales as expressions of difficult life experiences in a symbolic manner (see especially Þorsteinsdóttir 2011, pp. 156–58; 2015, pp. 88–90). Among the eight storytellers I focused on in my research are the three women from the twentieth century collection who will be further subjects in this article. For ease of reading and supporting my findings here, some parts in the covering of these subjects are repeated from the article (2015), although here I am looking at their tales from a different perspective.

The aim of what follows is to examine how the fairytales of storytellers from different times agree with the idea that their attitudes towards life appear in the fairytales that they tell, including their attitudes towards good and evil. I will also consider whether they construct their fairytales so that they reflect the tensions and conflicts in their own times. We will begin in the nineteenth century when organized collecting began in Iceland, pause in the twentieth century when fairytales that still belonged to the living oral tradition were tape-recorded, and conclude the survey by examining three recent plays involving fairytales that the author herself attended.

2. The Boy and the Woman Storyteller

Under the influence of the Grimm brothers, the collection of folktales began in Iceland in the nineteenth century as it did in many other Northern European countries. It can be said that the beginning of such a collection was in 1845 when the English scholar George Stephens (1813–1895) put a proposal before the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries to send a call to all readers of the Society‘s journal in Iceland, asking them to collect folktales, songs, ballads and legends (Gunnell 2022, pp. 392–98). The same year two young Icelanders decided to collect all the ancient lore of the people they could find (Árnason 1954, p. xx). They were Jón Árnason (1819–1888), at that time employed as a teacher to the children of Sveinbjörn Egilsson (1791–1852), a teacher at the Latin school, and Magnús Grímsson (1825–1860), who was then a student at the Latin school. Stories and poems from their collection were published under the title Íslenzk æfintýri, (Icelandic Fairytales) in 1852; this was the first printed collection of folklore to contain material from Icelandic oral tradition. Jón Árnason himself said that the book at first met few friends in Iceland but Icelanders in Copenhagen and German scholars gave it a warmer welcome (Árnason 1954, p. xx). The lack of interest from people in Iceland appears to have discouraged the two collectors, but in 1858 the German scholar Konrad Maurer (1823–1902) traveled to Iceland and collected folktales, among other things. He encouraged Jón and Magnús to continue to collect and promised to find a publisher for the tales in Germany (Þorsteinsdóttir 2022, p. 372). Magnús Grímsson appears to have been the first person to collect stories in an organized way in Iceland; they divided the task so that he collected stories while Jón was to collect poetry, riddles, and other things of this sort (Þorsteinsdóttir 2020). Magnús died in 1860, so it fell to Jón Árnason to complete the work. He himself collected material in Reykjavík, where he lived, but he sought the aid of friends, former schoolmates, and other educated men throughout the country, sending them a list of what he most wanted them to collect (Árnason 1954, p. xx). This procedure was successful, and Jón Árnason‘s collection was published in two volumes (Árnason 1862–1864). Even after the two volumes appeared, people did not stop sending Jón folktales, and a new 6-volume collection was published in 1954–61 (Árnason 1954–1961). It contains nearly all the stories in Jón Árnason’s collection that are preserved in manuscripts in the National Library of Iceland.

Many of those who collected stories for Jón Árnason were educated men, often priests (Gunnell 2012), and undoubtedly knew many foreign stories that had come to Iceland in printed books. At this point the aim was, of course, to collect true Icelandic folktales, according to the ideas of romantic nationalists (see e.g., Maurer 1860, pp. v–vii). It is, therefore, an exceptional stroke of luck for folklorists that one of the individuals who collected stories for Jón Árnason was young and formally unschooled, since for this reason, he did not filter out the stories originating from foreign traditions. Consequently, he opened a window into the extremely varied and international storytelling traditions of his days, when the national characteristics were otherwise being emphasized. Both this collector and the woman storyteller who told him stories are unique in the collection, the former being the youngest known collector, and the storyteller having by far the biggest repertoire. Páll Pálsson (1853–1876) was only nine years old when he began to copy stories for Jón Árnason. He was the son of the farmer and member of parliament Páll Sigurðarson (1808–1873) of Árkvörn in Fljótshlíð in the south of Iceland; in Jón Árnason‘s correspondence, there are indications that Páll Sigurðarson was enthusiastic about folktale collecting. However, Páll Sigurðarson had very poor eyesight—eventually becoming blind—and thus did not trust himself to write down stories. Instead, he put his son to work at this (Páll Sigurðarson’s letters to Jón Árnason are kept in the manuscript collection of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies under the shelfmark NKS 3010 4to). The female storyteller from whom Páll Pálsson got the stories was a pauper on the farm. Her name was Guðríður Eyjólfsdóttir (1811–78). Of all named informants in Jón Árnason’s collection, she contributed the largest number of stories, fifty-eight in total (Þorsteinsdóttir 2023, p. 162). Guðríður was born in Múlakot in the south of Iceland and raised with her parents amongst a large group of brothers and sisters. She was thirty-three years old when she first left her parents’ house and worked as a hired woman at many places in the neighborhood. In 1852 she moved with her brother and his family further east in southern Iceland. She then became a hired woman and housekeeper for a nearby farmer and in 1856, when she was 45 years old, she had a son with him. Only three years later she had become a dependent pauper (i.e., one who could not earn her livelihood) and she spent the last sixteen years of her life on Páll Sigurðarson‘s farm, near her birthplace. Her son stayed with his father, and a few years later he, too, had become a dependent pauper, though not on the same farm as his mother. Information on the life of Guðríður and her son I have found in parish and municipality records and census records that are preserved in the National Archives of Iceland and the Regional Archives of Rangárvallasýsla (ÞÍ 1816–1880; ÞÍ 1855–1870; ÞÍ 1843–1864; HérRang 1852–1892).

One of the manuscripts in Jón Árnasons folktale collection, preserved in the National and University Library of Iceland, has the shelfmark Lbs 536 4to. Where among other things can be found (on ff. 49r–176v) two binders in Páll‘s childlike handwriting. In their first pages, it is mentioned that the first was written in 1862–63 and the latter in 1865. Guðríður’s stories were thus written down too late to be published in the first edition of Jón Árnason’s folktale collection. Consequently, they were only published in Icelandic in the 1954–1961 edition. Some were published earlier in German translation by Adeline Rittershaus (1876–1924), a German philologist, who was the first to do research on Icelandic tales collected in the nineteenth century (Rittershaus 1902).

Some of Guðríður’s stories might be categorized as legends, some are well-known as migratory legends (e.g., ML 6015 The Christmas Visitors, see Christiansen 1958, p. 144), but others have a more particular Icelandic character and are about hidden people (huldufólk), revenants, and outlaws. It should be noted, however, that Guðríður’s legends are often more like folktales than other corresponding Icelandic legends. Guðríður tells quite a few tales where people are taken by or have encounters with super- or semi-supernatural creatures such as the huldufólk, ogresses, and outlaws. It is interesting that when men get caught in such situations, they must show their manliness, fight with and kill these un-friendly creatures, however, when the protagonist is female, she often marries a man of the huldufólk or an outlaw and has a much better life than she would have had if she had stayed in her own world. Guðríður’s legends are often rather violent, including death and even cannibalism, and some are sexually explicit.

Some of Guðríður‘s fairytales do not correspond to the categories in international indices such as The Types of the Folktale (AT, Aarne and Thompson 1973) or The Types of International Folktales (ATU, Uther 2004); some can clearly be traced to literary traditions such as translations of oriental tales or medieval exempla (Þorsteinsdóttir 2023, p. 164). Thirty-three of Guðríður’s stories, more than half, are variants of tale types found in the above-mentioned indices:

Tales of Magic are 20:

ATU 301 The Three Stolen Princesses

ATU 322* Magnetic Mountain Pulls Everything to it

ATU 328 The Boy Steals the Giant’s Treasure (two versions)

ATU 329 Hiding from the Princess

ATU 425 The Search for the Lost Husband (two versions)

ATU 444* Enchanted Prince Disenchanted

ATU 460A The Journey to God (Fortune)

ATU 480 The Kind and the Unkind Girls

ATU 480D* Tales of Kind and Unkind Girls

ATU 554 The Grateful Animals (three versions)

ATU 566 The Three Magic Objects and the Wonderful Fruits

ATU 580 Beloved of Women

ATU 653 The Four Skillful Brothers

ATU 675 The Lazy Boy

ATU 706C The Father Who Wanted to Marry His Daughter

ATU 709 Snow-White

Religious Tales (2):

ATU 759 Angel and Hermit

AT 764 The Devil’s Son a Priest

Realistic Tales (7):

ATU 884 The Forsaken Fiancée: Service as Menial

ATU 900 King Thrushbeard

ATU 934 Tales of Predestined Death

ATU 954 The Forty Thieves

ATU 955 The Robber Bridegroom (two versions)

ATU 956B The Clever Maiden Alone at Home Kills the Robbers

Humorous Tales (4):

AT 1411* The Raven Child

ATU 1535 The Rich and the Poor Peasant (two versions)

ATU 1641 Doctor Know-All

Much research on storytellers has led to the conclusion that men prefer to tell stories where boys are the heroes, while women tell stories of girls, though they also tell stories about boys. Of this, Holbek says:

Male and female repertoires differ. There is a distinct tendency for men to prefer masculine fairytales, whereas women’s repertoires are more evenly distributed between the two genders of fairytales. This may be seen in connection with the fact that men would often tell fairytales away from home, for all-male audiences, whereas women would normally perform only in the domestic circles.

(Holbek 1987, pp. 405–6)

According to this claim, the audience has the biggest influence on what kind of story the teller chooses to tell. This agrees well with the collection of stories Guðríður chose to tell the boy Páll, who according to parish recordings from the years 1862 through 1865, was the only child on the farm (ÞÍ 1855–1870). Of all of Guðríður’s 58 stories, 35 have male protagonists and 22 female heroes (in one case the protagonists are a group of children).

Guðríður tells noticeably more tales with male protagonists, and if we examine her legends we see that on the one hand, she is expressing wishful thinking with stories about girls who escape from poverty and difficult life and experience their dearest dream, while on the other hand with legends that tell of the manliness of the male hero she is strengthening the self-image of the boy to whom she tells the story. Is she perhaps also thinking of the son she cannot have with her who is growing up nearby with unrelated people?

When we look more closely, we see that some of Guðríður’s stories are not merely ideal dreams but may also be considered empowering for girls. Her variants of the tale types ATU 425, ATU 444*, ATU 480, ATU 566, ATU 675, ATU 706C, ATU 884, ATU 900, ATU 955, ATU 956B and AT 1411* can all be interpreted in that way, but a good example is her story of ATU 709, Snow White. In sources from the seventeenth century, it can be seen that this tale type is already well known in the Icelandic tradition (Sveinsson 2003, p. 102). The heroine is best known as Vilfríður (also Vilfinna, Viðfinna or Dýrfinna) Völufegri. The name of the stepmother is Vala, and Völufegri means, literally, ‘more beautiful than Vala’. As in the well-known story of Snow White, the stepmother has a magical object that tells her whether Vilfríður is alive or not: usually Vilfríður is given a place to live with dwarves or magicians (though they are two rather than seven). The stepmother comes again and again with a magical object that is supposed to kill Vilfríður (though never an apple, as these don’t grow in Iceland) and it is usually a prince or a king who rescues her in the end (Sveinsson 1929, pp. 98–102; Maurer 1857).

In Guðríður’s variant the heroine is called Vírfinna Völublóm (Vala’s flower) and it is never stated that she is more beautiful than the stepmother but rather that the latter wants the entire inheritance when the king dies. She therefore invites Vírfinna out for a walk and pushes her into a pit. Vírfinna has a knife, cuts out steps and comes out of the pit. She arrives at a small house where she stays with two magicians (Finns). Each day the Finns go out, put stones in the doorway and warn Vírfinna not to accept anything from her stepmother. The stepmother has a looking glass that she can ask if Vírfinna is still alive. Two times she comes to the house with a golden belt that tightens around Vírfinna’s waist and a potion that Vírfinna drinks. Both times the Finns save her, but the next day they tell her that they are going to die and that she must save herself. She runs away, finds the Finns dead, but when she comes to the seashore, she sees her father’s ship and gets onboard. When she is no longer on land the glass does not answer the stepmother. Vírfinna tells her father everything and when they come home the stepmother tries to lie that Vírfinna is dead but is punished.

At the end of this tale, the heroine must stand on her own feet and save herself, without help from any man. The story does not end with a wedding as is common in the Icelandic tradition. Guðríður presents an attitude towards gender roles that is not common in her time. It is thus possible to deduce the attitude of the storyteller by looking at a single story from her corpus, but it is also possible to see her worldview by analyzing her entire corpus.

3. Three Female Storytellers

Next, we will examine the stories of three female storytellers which were all recorded in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century. The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies preserves tape recordings with about 2000 h of recordings of all kinds of folklore, mostly collected by three collectors. The folklorist Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson (1932–2005) first collected material in the Westfjords in the summers of 1958 and 1959, and in 1964 he began to collect for the Árni Magnússon Institute. From then on he, either alone or with others, continued to collect until 2000. The collections of the married couple Helga Jóhannsdóttir (1935–2006) and Jón Samsonarson (1931–2010) are for the most part from the years 1963–1973. These scholars traveled around the country, visited farms, talked to people, and recorded their stories and narratives as well as persuaded them to recite various kinds of poetry. They also visited people in retirement homes in Reykjavík, where individuals from all parts of the country could be found. We are lucky that they were able to record fairytales that were still living in the minds of many storytellers.

3.1. Elísabet and Guðríður

One of these was Elísabet Friðriksdóttir who was born in 1893 in the Eyjafjörður region in northern Iceland. She grew up there and never moved away, as she and her husband took over the farm from her father. They had five children, and their son eventually took over the farm from his parents. Elísabet lived on the farm until she died in 1975. Elísabet does not say much about her youth in the recordings, but she grew up on a typical Icelandic farm and was not exceptionally poor or rich (see further Þorsteinsdóttir 2002). Hallfreður örn Eiríksson visited Elísabet twice; the first recording, made on 16 November 1969 (SÁM 90/2159–2160), is an hour long; the second, made on 27 and 28 June 1970 (SÁM 90/2315–2318), is nearly two hours long. In addition to telling stories, Elísabet recites some nursery rhymes and sings songs. Hallfreður also asks her, with little success, about local legends of ghosts, hidden people, and placenames (see also Þorsteinsdóttir 2015, pp. 71–2), she only tells one such: a story about a woman who gave a huldukona milk and received a valuable ring as a reward. Most of the stories Elizabeth tells in the recordings are typical fairytales as can be seen from the following list:

Animal Tales:

ATU 15 The Theft of Food by Playing Godfather (in Iceland the tale is always about people, not animals), followed by ATU 1586 The Man in Court for Killing a Fly and ATU 1408 The Man who Does his Wife’s Work

Tales of Magic:

ATU 311 Rescue by the Sister

ATU 327 The Children and the Ogre, including ATU 1137 The Blinded Ogre

ATU 327C The Devil (Witch) Carries the Hero Home in a Sack

ATU 425C Beauty and the Beast

ATU 480 The Kind and the Unkind Girls

ATU 480D* Tales of Kind and Unkind Girls

ATU 501 The Three Old Spinning Women

ATU 510A Cinderella

ATU 554 The Grateful Animals

ATU 711 The Beautiful and the Ugly Twinsisters

Realistic Tales:

ATU 875 The Clever Farmgirl

Humorous Tales:

ATU 1653 The Robbers under the Tree

The recordings reveal that not all of Elísabet’s stories were recorded because she mentions at least four additional fairytales, and in an interview, I had with her son he mentioned more tales he remembered her telling (Þorsteinsdóttir 2011, p. 86; 2015, p. 73).

In Elísabet’s stories, there is a strong empathy for the vulnerable and a clear emphasis on the importance of kindness to everyone. She shares five tales where one might expect a Cinderella-like theme, but only in the story that is actually a Cinderella narrative does Elísabet mention that the parents treated the youngest daughter unfairly. This notion seems to be somewhat distant to her. More central to her tales is the idea that kindness and helpfulness are rewarded, while greed, foolishness, and ingratitude are punished. Some might argue that this is a common theme in fairytales, but Elísabet specifically selects stories where this message can be clearly emphasized. Her collection thus reflects her social ideal of treating all people equally and with kindness.

The effect of the stories of Guðríður Finnbogadóttir are completely different, even though she and Elísabet tell many stories of the same type. Guðríður was born in 1883 in eastern Iceland, the second of eleven siblings, and grew up there with her family. In 1906 she got married and four years later she and her husband bought a farm in the southern part of Iceland and moved there. They had seven children, in addition to which her husband had a daughter with a hired woman on the farm. The daughter was brought up at the farm with her half-siblings. Guðríður lived on the same farm for 40 years, until she moved to Reykjavík where she lived with her daughter until she died in 1982. Guðríður’s daughter told me that her mother was always very cheerful, outgoing, and sociable. She says that her parents got along well and that their relationship did not change with the birth of the husband’s illegitimate daughter. They both told stories, enjoyed music and played the accordion, and often took part in the children’s games. Guðríður enjoyed singing and often sang as she worked (Þorsteinsdóttir 2011, p. 88; 2015, p. 76). Hallfreður örn Eiríksson visited Guðríður four times at her home in Reykjavík and recorded her stories in the years 1966 and 1967 (SÁM 86/858; SÁM 86/886–887; SÁM 88/1574–1576; SÁM 89/1723–1724). The tales Guðríður told him were:

Tales of Magic:

ATU 300 The Dragon-Slayer

ATU 311 Rescue by the Sister

ATU 327 The Children and the Ogre, including ATU 1137 The Blinded Ogre

ATU 425C Beauty and the Beast

ATU 554 The Grateful Animals

ATU 706C The Father Who Wanted to Marry His Daughter

ATU 710 Our Lady’s Child

Realistic Tales:

ATU 870 The Princess Confined in the Mound

AT 888B* The Basket-maker (in Guðríður’s tale the lovers re-unite because the man recognizes the woman’s embroidery)

ATU 890 A Pound of Flesh

ATU 892 The Children of the King

Guðríður says she learned most of her stories from her mother, and that she only told ‘nice stories’. After she tells ATU 300, The Dragon Slayer, Hallfreður asked her whether she learned this story from her mother, and she denies this and says that her mother did not tell such rough stories. A notable aspect of Guðríður’s collection is the prevalence of romantic stories with happy endings. It is also interesting that she places much less emphasis on magical elements and supernatural occurrences compared to other storytellers. An example of this can be seen in her version of ATU 327 The Children and the Ogre, where the children do not receive a magical object from their dying mother, a common feature in other Icelandic versions of the tale. Guðríður seems to be less concerned with magic and more focused on themes that mirror everyday life: the challenges and struggles people face, always concluding with the union of lovers that live happily ever after—all her tales end with “þau unnust vel og lengi” (they loved each other well and long). It may well reflect the story of her own life, and how she got through difficulties in her marriage, which nonetheless ended with the couple living “happily ever after”.

3.2. Kristín Níelsdóttir, the Feminist

The strongest example by far of how a storyteller can tell the story of her own life in a fairytale is found in one of the tales of Kristín Níelsdóttir, who was born in 1910 and raised on one of the small islands in Breiðafjörður, off the west coast of Iceland, where her parents lived as farmers and fishermen (see further Þorsteinsdóttir 2012; 2015, pp. 82–83). The only formal education she ever received was when she attended a school for young women in northern Iceland when she was about 20 years old, as there were no schools in the islands of Breiðafjörður. After that, Kristín moved around the country for some years and worked in several places before marrying a man who also came from one of the many islands in Breiðafjörður. During the first years of their marriage, they lived on two different islands, but then moved to the mainland. She died in 1986. Between 1965 and 1975, Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson, and the married couple Helga Jóhannsdóttir and Jón Samsonarson conducted five recorded interviews with Kristín (SÁM 85/291–293; SÁM 84/93–99; SÁM 86/657–662; SÁM 86/682–687; SÁM 92/2636–2638), revealing that she had a vast memory of nursery rhymes, poetry, humorous verses, and epic poems. In addition to these, her repertoire also included fairytales and legends, many of which were tied to her husband’s home island and her own family. When Kristín was recorded for the final time in July 1975, a family friend, also from one of the islands of Breiðafjörður, was present. Together, they reminisced about various legends from the region. Most of these legends had already been published, and it is likely that Kristín encountered them in printed form, although they were also passed down orally in the area. The legends about her ancestors, however, were not published; she explained that she had learned them through frequent retelling in her childhood home. Since this study pertains first and foremost to fairytales, and the list of Kristín’s legends would be very long, I will only mention her recorded folktales that fit the type indices:

Tales of Magic:

AT 317A* Peasant Girl Seeks Prince (two versions)

ATU 327 The Children and the Ogre

AT 404* Girl Transformed by Jealous Stepmother

ATU 480 The Kind and the Unkind Girls

Realistic Tales:

AT 949A* Empress and Shepherdess Change Places

Humorous Tales:

ATU 1525L* Theft Committed While Tale is Told

Common to all these tales, except one, is the fact that they have girls as their protagonists. Kristín tells only one fairy tale where you could say that a boy has the leading role, the story of the three children of a king (ATU 327). Her variant is very different from the “typical” Icelandic folktales of this tale type. The usual story concerns two siblings whom the evil stepmother sends out to her sister, who is an ogress. Kristín’s fairy tale has three children, and the oldest brother saves his younger brother and sister from an ogress into whose hands they fall by accident. The story is also unusual in that it does not begin with the death of the queen, and the king marrying a new wife who in turn becomes the evil stepmother. Instead, the king goes away to collect taxes and does not return home because he has an affair with the queen in the next kingdom. The children’s own mother sends them away before she dies, in order that they will not become the victims of her husband’s lover. As mentioned, they fall into the hands of the ogress by accident, more precisely because they lose their way. I have spoken with many people who recall Kristín and her family, and they have told me that the story is her own. She had three children and a husband who had an affair with a neighbor woman. In the tale, the elder brother discovers his father’s affair with a new queen, who turns out to be a witch. The witch transforms the boy into a dog to prevent him from revealing the affair, but I believe this reflects Kristín’s symbolic interpretation of her own reality and emotional state. Her eldest son was a teenager when the affair occurred, and it is highly likely that he, like everyone else in the village, was aware of it. Kristín also knew that her son knew, but she was unable to discuss her feelings with him. As a result, in the story, he becomes a speechless animal. This is by far the most striking example I have found of how a storyteller can tell the story of her own life in a fairytale.

What is most unusual about Kristín’s fairytales is that she says she learned most of them as an adult. She appears to have grown up hearing legends rather than fairytales, but her own interest and personality led her to add fairytales to her repertoire as an adult. Most of them are about intelligent and enterprising girls who are usually better than the male characters at finding solutions to difficulties, and it is interesting that many of her favorite legends bear the same trait. These are the stories of her ancestor, who lived on one of Breiðafjörður’s islands at the time when Icelanders still lived in fear that Algerian pirates would land and kidnap people, as had happened in the south and east of Iceland in 1627. The woman was alone at home with her children while her husband was out fishing on Breiðafjörður. She saw a ship approaching the island and was sure that they were pirates. She sent her children inside, stood in the doorway with a scythe for a weapon and was prepared to defend her children with her life. It turned out that the ship was owned by merchants, who had asked her husband to lead them to the harbor. Kristín’s story is recorded three times, and she has clearly told it many times before; nonetheless, it is never told the same way twice. Once she tells it from the point of view of the woman’s daughter, one of the children who was sent into the farm. Sometimes the ship arrives at the island because the crew members need water; sometimes they want to buy milk. In one recording Kristín emphasizes that the ship had black sails, and so on. In some of the recordings, Kristín adds several short legends about this same woman, one about when the woman was sailing on Breiðafjörður along with her husband and they met with very bad weather. The man was terrified and certain that they would drown, but the woman drove him from the tiller and sat there herself and told him how he should set the sails. They made it home safe and sound. All the legends about this woman portray her as an individual who let nothing stand in her way and show clearly that Kristín valued stories of courageous and intelligent women.

As noted above, all of Kristín’s stories, except one, are about strong girls; to emphasize this it could be pointed out that Kristín tells two versions of a fairy tale where a girl rescues a prince from trolls (AT 317*). The type is not in ATU because it only includes types that have been ‘documented among at least three ethnic groups’ (see Uther 2004, p. 12) and according to AT these fairytales are known only in Iceland. It is also worth pointing out a fairy tale I have grouped as AT 994A* Empress and Shepherdess Change Places. Kristín’s tale is about a girl who helps a princess avoid marrying a prince because she has fallen in love with a shepherd and would rather marry him and share his life. In this respect, Kristín’s repertoire demonstrates views that would be categorized as feminist.

4. Going to the Theatre

If the attitude of storytellers appears in the stories they tell, as has been claimed here, should not this also be the case when fairytales are adapted and used as the basis of other works? In the theater year 2022–23, I attended three theater performances where fairytales were either told or used as the basis of a play. The first show was by Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946), an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most respected living playwrights to write in German and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. The gender roles of women and their battle for equality, along with sexual and gender-related violence, are often prominent in her works:

Jelinek’s most recent plays are short dramas without traditional action or psychological depth and consisting of dense monologic blocks of text that are distributed among various icons and clichés of German history, media, literature, and politics. Her play Der Tod und das Mädchen I–V: Prinzessinnendramen [Death and the Maiden I-V: Princess Plays, 2003; premiere 2002] contains five separate pieces, called “playlets” by the author because “princesses don’t deserve a real play”. All five have in common their depiction of the real or figurative death of the maiden at the hands of a man or within the strictures of a male-dominated world. Snow White wanders around the forest in search of truth until felled by the Hunter; Sleeping Beauty is kissed awake by Mr. Right into a reality worse than death; Jackie, glamorous former First Lady, drags all the corpses of her life onto stage, including that of her husband’s lover, Marilyn Monroe. In the two remaining “playlets” Jelinek portrays the life-and-death struggles of women authors through the examples of Rosamunde, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Sylvia Plath. Thus these five mini-dramas depict the cultural myths and ideological representations surrounding “woman”, the princesses of our dreams that prevent us from seeing and stopping real nightmares.

(DeMeritt 2004)

The first three ‘playlets’ were staged at Borgarleikhúsið in Reykjavík in the spring of 2023. The first one is about Snow White and the Huntsman, the second Sleeping Beauty and the Prince who wakes her up with a kiss, and the third is about Jackie Kennedy/Onassis. What interested me was the peculiar perspective on the relationship between Snow White and the Huntsman on the one hand and Sleeping Beauty and the Prince on the other. Snow White is searching for the truth, but the Huntsman says that the only truth is death. He believes that he has power over Snow White’s life, which he once gave her, and ends up shooting her. The prince who awakens Sleeping Beauty also believes that he rules her life; that he created her the moment he kissed her. My interpretation is that Jelinek is telling us that a princess can never stop being a princess and is always dependent on a man.

The next piece is an opera that was composed by the composer and playwright Þórunn Guðmundsdóttir (b. 1960). She has composed several operas based on Icelandic folktales and fairytales, composing both the music and the libretto. I saw a production based on the Icelandic tale about Mærþöll, grouped as ATU 400 The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife. This Icelandic tale was written down around 1700 but first printed in the folktale collection of Jón Árnason (Árnason 1862–1864, II 424–7). The story tells of a young duchess who has no children. She falls asleep out in the woods and has a dream where three women dressed in blue come to her and tell her to go to a certain stream, drink from it, and let a trout swim into her mouth. She will become pregnant, and they will come back when the child is born to choose the name for her. After doing as she has been told the duchess gives birth to a baby girl. The blue-clad women show up; the first one gives the girl a name and tears of gold. The second one predicts that she will have a happy marriage, but the third one is offended by the mother and puts a spell on the girl. On her wedding night, she will turn into a small bird. She will take her human shape for a short while each night and someone must burn the bird skin before three nights are over. If not, she will remain a bird for the rest of her life. When a prince comes to ask for the girl’s hand her father tries to let a maidservant be her substitute. The prince hits them both, one cries golden tears so he will know which is the right one. The maid sails away with the newlywed couple, and the heroine lets her take her place in the bridal bed for the first three nights. The maid sneaks out so the girl can cry golden tears into a cloth that the maid gives to the prince each morning. The third night the prince wakes up and follows the maid. He burns up the bird skin and saves his wife.

The composer of the opera follows the plot fairly closely but often incorporates scenes that appeal to modern audiences. The duke, Mærþöll’s father, gets a bigger role than in the fairy tale: he is ridiculed and made into a greedy man who does not care if his daughter is treated badly because if she cries, he gets more gold.

The third play was a performance by the Theater Group Perlan, a group of actors with disabilities. The group held the performance on the occasion of its 40th birthday in May of 2023, and the first part of the performance was the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. A young man with Down syndrome played the prince and when he came to Snow White where she was lying as if dead, he said: “Maybe I can revive her by kissing her. But am I allowed? I haven’t asked her permission yet.”

It was this incident that got me thinking about how the Zeitgeist influences how a story is told and how it is possible for them to convey messages to their audience. At once the attitudes of each storyteller, playwright, opera composer, and director become clear.

5. Conclusions

In both of the doctoral studies mentioned earlier (Jónsdóttir 2022; Magnúsdóttir 2023), it is evident that the society in which the tales are told influences them. In the older tales, there is a clear reflection of attitudes towards women and their roles in society, but it is also noted that the experiences and conditions of Icelandic women storytellers have influenced their legend traditions and the formation of their repertoires. Men are the overwhelming majority of those who have collected folk tales in Iceland, but both dissertations mention stories collected by women from women. It would be worthwhile to further investigate whether the gender of the collector influences the stories that women tell, and it would be interesting to explore whether the same applies to oral folk literature in the present day.

Both in fairytales and legends, the worldview of those who tell them appears. All the women storytellers I have described told fairytales in their own way and show their attitude towards life, opinions, and even experience. Most of them reveal feminist attitudes long before that concept was created. This is seen for example in the Snow White story of Guðríður Eyjólfsdóttir where no prince is involved, but the girl saves herself, and especially in the stories of Kristín about strong and intelligent girls. All the stories by the female storytellers end well, as fairytales must, and are also empowering for themselves and the girls and women who listen to their tales. The plays leave the audience less certain even though they are clearly critical of sexual and gender-related violence. How do we feel about that the hunter kills Snow White? What happens if the prince does not kiss Snow White—or Sleeping Beauty? And is it acceptable for us to laugh at the greedy father who thinks it a good thing that his daughter is beaten so that he can obtain more gold?

My conclusion is that fairytales always adapt to the current time, as Holbek claimed; they are used to talk about genuine sensitive matters in a symbolic fashion. There is not only strife between generations and lovers, but also conflict between genders. Contemporary works change the traditional stories to present their attitudes and leave them as something different than fairytales, but storytellers in earlier times could easily bring up important issues, still telling traditional stories that ended well.