Folk and Fairy Tales. By Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, eds. (Peterborough, Broadview Press, 2002. xxv + 454 p., preface, introduction, index, selected bibliography, list of sources, colour and black/white photographs, $24.95 CDN, $18.95 US, ISBN 1-55111-495-X)

This book is an anthology of folk tales, mostly Märchen. The stories are grouped into related sets, each with its own introduction. Some sets, such as the section on “Cinderella,” consist of different versions of the same story. Other sets are thematically linked. The section on Damsels in Distress, for example, includes “Snow White,” “Rapunzel,” and “The Goose Girl”. The anthology also includes literary fairy tales written in the nineteenth century by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde, modern rewrites (both prose and poetry) of traditional fairy tales, critical essays about fairy stories, and a few plates of visual art based on traditional fairy tales. My initial reaction to this anthology was that the critical material was sparse and the introductory sections light. I found it unsatisfactory, until I thought about the intended audience. Hallett and Karasek state in their preface that the anthology is meant for students who were exposed to fairy tales in childhood (xi), but have never had occasion to think seriously about them (xii). The book is probably appropriate for students at this level. Although the editor’s commentary is not particularly in-depth, they do address differences between the folk tale and the literary tale (xv-xix), the different biases of different compilers (see, for instance, xvii-xviii, 2-4 and 18-20) and gender issues (see 57-59, 77-78 and 97-98). Only five critical essays are included, but they are philosophically varied and interdisciplinary. Although the text is suitable for introductory students, some of the questions included in the Instructors’ Companion are not. My sister, classicist Maura Lafferty, pointed out that different sets of questions in this booklet appear to have been written by different authors and that these sets vary in their overall usefulness. Some sets of questions could profitably be discussed by undergraduates working directly from the text itself; other questions require knowledge that undergraduates might not have. For instance, a question about “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” reads: “What is the psychological interpretation of the girl’s journey?” Students may not know enough about psychology to even begin to address this question. Another question from this set is even more problematic: “How do you account for the elements of Christianity in this story?” Students are very unlikely to know enough about the social context of the story and the personal history of its narrator to even make plausible guesses and the commentary does not provide much help. Presumably, however, most instructors, if they choose to use the Instructors’ Companion at all, will pick out the material that seems useful and ignore the rest. Some care has obviously been taken to make sure that the different parts of the book interrelate with each other. Bruno Bettelheim’s essay, “The Struggle for Meaning” (376-391) appears to build, to some extent, on Max Lüthi’s essay “The Fairy-Tale Hero: The Image of Man in the Fairy Tale” (365-376). Bettelheim’s essay and Kay Stone’s essay, “The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales” (391-415) both include some discussion, from very different perspectives, of the significance of marriage in fairy tales. Many of the stories referred to in these essays also appear in the book, allowing for easy reference. This is true not only of the more common stories, but, to a lesser degree, of less known stories, such as “The Goose Girl,” referred to by Lüthi (367-68), and “Molly Whuppie,” referred to in an informant quote in Stone’s essay (398). Stone quotes from Anne Sexton’s “Cinderella” (405-406), which appears in its entirety in the poetry section (325-328). Marina Warner’s essay, “Go! Be a Beast: Beauty and the Beast,” …