One of the prerogatives of being the editor of The Green Man Review is having first dibs on almost anything that comes in. I don’t usually do that as it wouldn’t be fair to our staff, but The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales was an item that I claimed immediately! If you purchase only one reference book about the fairy tale tradition this year, this should be it. I have more books than I can count that are devoted to the subject of European fairy tales and their origins, but this is the first comprehensive guide that I’ve seen in print. The subtitle of the book is quite accurate: “The Western fairy tale tradition from medieval to modern.”
Editor Jack Zipes, of whom GMR is quite fond, has assembled the quintessential companion to fairy tales, period. It has some problems, but it’s still the best work on this subject to date. (See our reviews of these works by him: Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry, Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves, and When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition). The Mythcon 24 biography for him notes:
Author, scholar, teacher, translator, activist Jack Zipes has transformed research on fairy tales from the superficial discussions of suitability and violence to the linguistic roots and socialization function of the tales. According to Zipes, fairy tales ‘serve a meaningful social function not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society.” After Zipes, no one can view a Disney rendition with equanimity again.’
Jack Zipes is uniquely qualified to edit a Companion that traces the roots and branches of the Western fairy tale tradition from its very origins when the first sprouts showed up in the oral tradition of myriad cultures to the vast world tree that it is now. He has written more extensively of this tradition than anyone else, including doing the definitive translation of the Brothers Grimm tales. Chuck Lipsig, our Celtic Editor, believes he’s a bit harsher than need be on Disney, but no one doubts that he is incredibly well versed in all aspects of this subject.
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales is close in tone and structure to John Clute and John Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which covers literally all aspects of fantasy. Both books cannot possibly cover everything in their fields but they come very close. And not surprisingly, there’s a fair amount of overlap; for example, each has an entry on Charles de Lint, the author most often cited for creating the urban fantasy genre, and each has decent looks at the role of fantasy/fairy tale tradition in opera. Both works make heavy use of contributing writers: The press release for The Oxford Companion claims “…more than 800 entries written by a team of 67 specialists from around the world, the Companion offers an illuminating look at the classic tales themselves, both ancient and modern, from Jack and Jill and Cinderella to Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz…”, and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy lists some 80 contributors.
Interestingly enough, there’s little overlap in contributors between the two. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is slanted heavily towards popular fiction writers such as Neil Gaiman and Diana Wynne Jones whereas The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales is — not surprisingly — skewed toward academics like Maria Tatar, Gillian Avery, and Jack Zipes. Terri Windling is the only popular fiction writer listed as a contributor in this work, but Terri is indeed one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts on fairy tales of the European tradition.
Where The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales is better than The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is not in the short entries, but the lengthy essays that explore the evolution and development of the fairy tale tradition in individual cultures ranging from the Anglo-Irish culture to the Spanish culture, with an additional focus on how the European traditions changed in North American cultures. Jack Zipes has written an introductory brief that sets the subject matter in its historical and literary context. The combination of the short but useful entries on all things within this area of study, combined with the lengthy essays that I just mentioned, make this a must-buy for anyone seriously interested in fairy tales.
There are weird oversights; e.g., no separate entry on the Wild Hunt motif — see our review of Jane Yolen’s The Wild Hunt for an explanation of this motif — nor does the essay on German fairy tales touch upon this motif which has been an important one in contemporary fantasy fiction. In contrast, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy has a very detailed entry on the Wild Hunt. And green men escape the attention of The Oxford Companion too! (Hey, we notice such things!) The oddest oversight is that there’s no entry for Oxford Companion contributor Terri Windling — a major player in both the use of fairy tale motifs in fiction, and the writing of critical essays related to the same. (Yes, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy has an entry for her.)
Likewise, Maria Tatar warrants no entry — odd given her work on the Brothers Grimm. Tam Lin gets no separate entry, despite being the subject of the following novels: Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin; Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock; Jane Yolen’s picture book Tam Lin; and the retelling in Imaginary Lands, edited by Robin McKinley. The roots here are clearly studied, but the newer branches seem to have escaped detailed examination!
But if you’re seeking a generally very good look at traditional fairy tales, this book belongs in your collection. As Chuck Lipsig noted in his review of Jack Zipes’ Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry: “Zipes concludes that it is necessary for fairy tales to be recaptured by storytellers to create community values, especially among young children, that will combat the dominant free (or as Zipes writes, ‘free’) market culture.” I suspect that the bias of Jack Zipes gets just a bit in the way of telling the whole story of the Western fairy tale tradition, as it appears that his definition of fairy tale is fairly narrow and biased towards non-commodified culture.
Don’t get me wrong — I think this is a lovely book, but it could have been better. Hell, the amazing illustrations and early engravings to 20th-century artists are worth the price of the book. (Small error in the caption for The Mouse King by Maurice Sendak: According to the Web site for Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet, “PNB Choreographer and Artistic Director Kent Stowell collaborated with acclaimed children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak to create Nutcracker in 1983.” The caption says 1998. I was living in Seattle at the time and fondly remember the posters I saw for this production.)
I’ll admit that I’m a tough critic — I know this subject far better than most folks — and I still like The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. I suggest you buy both this tome (it’s six hundred pages of small type) and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (almost eleven hundred pages of equally small type) as the two together will give you a very nice reference collection.
(Oxford University Press, 2000)
