Folklore & Fairy Tale in Historical Settings

 I am very much enjoying watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and getting plenty of surprises! I am getting quite caught up in it. On the book side of things I am currently reading Galileo Goes to Jail, which is NOT a novel about historical scientists playing Monopoly but a collection of essays by historians dispelling myths about the relationship between science and religion.

Also! I’m playing Horizon Forbidden West and while I’m not far, it’s still fantastic.

This is on my mind from watching Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and reading the Winternight Trilogy.

Folklore & Fairy Tale in Historical Settings

I’ve noticed that Guillermo del Toro has A Thing about doing fairy tale stories in historical settings. His big example is, of course, El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), which is a fairy tale type story set in the Spanish Civil War. His recent Pinocchio is set in fascist Italy (seeing a familiar theme here?). There’s also the canceled project he brainstormed on to do an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast with Emma Watson set in Napoleonic France–which of course fell through when Disney announced their own Beauty and the Beast with Emma Watson, a live-action remake of their animated classic.

It is an interesting idea, and the more I think about it, the more I like it.

Del Toro is hardly the only one to set a fairy tale or folktale type of story in a historical setting. Historical fantasy as a subgenre is a well-occupied niche, and within that plenty of examples are focused on fairy tales and folklore. There’s something handy about setting the fantasy story in the real world–that way, you don’t have to go through a lot of the worldbuilding work (although you still have to do some) because the world’s already built! Saves you some work.

There’s something really cool about setting fairy tales in a particular part of history though. One of the things I noted about fairy tales is that they’re not, generally speaking, like epic fantasy–they’ve not got the worldbuilding for it. When you start doing a butt ton of worldbuilding for a fairy tale story, then it stops feeling like a fairy tale (which can be fine, but be aware that’s what you’re doing). What makes a fairy tale feel like a fairy tale is its timeless quality, and how it could happen anywhere at any time. You could easily stick the story of Little Red Riding Hood in the swamps of South Carolina as much as you could in the woods of Germany. If you build up the world too much, then you start to say, “Wait, that can’t happen now/over here, because it happened in that fantasy world where the weird stuff happens.”

And yet paradoxically, sticking it in a historical setting can reinforce this quality? I want to iterate that I mean when it’s put in a historical setting rather than its own fantasy world. The story shows itself to be timeless in a historical setting, because you’ve proven that you can stick it in a specific place. It has become within reach–especially with an example like del Toro’s Pinocchio which is in the 20th century, which feels much more recent than a fairy tale generally does.

Let me try a different example. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden is a Slavic fairy tale-type story set in historical Rus. It’s a story with monsters, spirits, magic, and a cruel stepmother. It doesn’t feel like an origin in the way the story’s told, like, “This is where that story came from,” but “Here is a pattern repeating in this one setting.” It’s helped that the characters themselves know and repeat folklore and fairy tales that relate to the events of the Plot.

In this way, the author isn’t saying, “This happened long ago and can’t happen again.” It’s more as if the author’s saying, “This happened long ago in this way, and if it happens again it’ll be in a slightly different way.” Mind you, the sequels are less fairy tale-like, so that feeling kind of goes away as the story goes on (though they’re still good!), but I think my point on the first book still stands.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: I really like seeing how different ideas can adapt to different times and places. Putting the fairy tale in a fantasy world kind of limits it to a constructed fantasy. Putting it int he real world makes it feel more archetypical. It makes you say (or it makes me say, anyway), “Huh, okay. So this is how it fits in this part of real-world history. But what would happen if we put it in another part of history?” And in my head I’ll start experimenting with putting the piece into other settings. 

What would “Little Red Riding Hood” look like in the modern American Southeast? What would change if we put “Cinderella” in the British Raj? How would we tell “Hansel and Gretel” if it was in colonial America? What if we put “Sleeping Beauty” in Mayan Central America? And so on and so forth. We see how these stories can keep telling us things all over the world and throughout history.

And if we haven’t already, we eventually think of how it would work in the here and now.

That’s my two cents, anyway.

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