Traditional Fantasy

1. Traditional Fantasy Melissa Torres Christie Cardona Kimberly Long

2. Traditional Fantasy • Traditional Fantasy had their beginnings around campfires and around hearthside. • The stories were always fantastic in nature, involving magic, or talking animals. • Originally these tales provided entertainment for adults. , who freely altered details as they told and retold the stories.

3. Traditional Fantasy: A Part of Every Culture • The definition of traditional fantasy is that the literature; originated orally and has no author. • Therefore, we often associate these tales with a collector or a reteller. • Tales from the oral tradition are part of every fabric of every culture.

4. Peculiarities of Traditional Fantasy: • Character Development is disposed and unused. • Characters are meant to be symbolic of certain basic human traits, such as good or evil. • They typically do not change during the course of the story.

5. Continuation: • Plots are simple and direct. (oftensuccess stories) • Setting is quickly established and always in the distance past. • Story lines are accompanied by typical themes. (punishment of evil, perseverance, kindness, power of love, etc.)

6. The Universal Nature of Traditional Fantasy • Tales vary from country to country, but they are alike in form. • Modern literature still uses allusions to traditional fantasy. • Traditional Fantasy is the mother of all literature.

7. Values of Fantasy • The sheer delight of “let’s pretend” and the eager suspension of disbelief, excitement, wonder, astonishment. • It has the ability to work on our emotions with the same vividness as a dream.

8. Continuation: • It has the ability to develop a capacity for belief. • And finally the ability to hope, because it is one of the most precious human values that fantasy can offer us in abundance.

9. Types of Traditional Fantasy People will never agree on category names on whether certain stories belong under certain category headings.

10. Folk tales (stories of thepeople) • Stories under this category are most general or universal in time. • Cumulative Tales = in this stories there are “added upon” as the telling unfolds. The teller starts upon a certain point, then begins again near the beginning, then starts again expanding the chain of events or participants. • Example : • “The House That Jack Built” • “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”

11. Folk tales (stories of thepeople) • Pourquoi Tales – This tales answer questions or gives explanations for the way things are (particularly in nature). • Example: • “Why the Bear is Stumpy-Tailed” • “Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears”

12. Folk tales (stories of thepeople) • Beast Tales –They’re simple, they’re just tales with animals as the principal characters. (They typically represent humans). • Example: • “The Three Little Pigs” • “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”

13. Folk tales (stories of thepeople) • Trickster Tales – The character outsmarts everyone else in the story. Sometimes he can be sly and mischivious, or sometimes he can be wise and helpful. • Example: • “Raven” • “Coyote” • “Jabutti the Tortoise”

14. Folk tales (stories of thepeople) • Noodlehead, or numbskull Tales – Humorous stories that center on the escapades of the characters that are not too bright, sometimes they make a mess of things. • Example: • “Epaminondas” • “Hans in Luck”

15. Folk tales (stories of thepeople) • Realistic Tales – Seem to have their bases in an actual historical event or feature an actual figure from history. They have few elements of fantasy. • Example: • “Dick Whittington’s Cat”

16. Folk tales (stories of thepeople) • Fairy Tales (wonder tale) – is the most magical. In these tales we see enchantments that go beyond talking animals to fairy godmothers, wicked witches, magical objects. They are extremely popular with young listeners and readers. • Example: • “Snow White” • “Cinderella” • “Sleeping Beauty” • “Beauty and the Beast” • “Aladdin and his wonderful lamp”

17. Tall Tales • Exaggeration is the most stylist and common element in this tales. They grew out of the push of the North American continent to settlement. Some of the tall tale characters are based on actual people or on a composite of rough and tumble lumberjacks, sailors, or cowboys. They exist beyond our American Culture. • Example: • “The Seven (or five) Chinese Brothers”

18. Fables • Stories meant to teach a lesson, usually conclude with a moral lesson. There are fables in the ancient Egyptian Culture and India. • Example: • Collection of Aesop’s fables from Greece – (Well Known)

19. Myths • Grew out of early peoples need to understand and explain the world around them and their own existence. Recount the creation of the world and tell of the gods and goddesses, who control the fate of humans. Many myths are similar to the pourquoi tales. Every culture has its myths. The Greek myths are the best known in the western world. • Example: • Myth of Apollo • Musicians of the Sun

20. Epic, Ballads & Legends • They have a really thin line in between them, but their unifying feature is the hero tale, including hero myths. • Epics - are lengthy hero tales or even a series of tales focusing on a hero. • Example: • “The Trojan War” • Ballads – heroes stories in the poetic form. • Example: • “The Iliad” • “The Oddesy”

21. Religious Stories • Classifying religious stories as traditional fantasy, may bother many people, but myth in this sense can be broadly defined as the human quest to discover and share truth concerning the spiritual aspects of existence. • Example: • Old Testament

22. Psychological Fantasy • The inability of the mind to distinguish what is real. • Some adults fear fantasy stories. • (Bettleheim, 1977) disagrees • Believe that children that are deprived of a rich fantasy life are more likely to see a psychological escape. • Fairy tales and folk tales help children identify with heroes of the stories.

23. Violence • Critics believe that the violent acts will breed bad behaviors. • Much violence involves the punishment of evil villains. • Violence in some movies cannot be equated with the violence in fairy tales. • Example: Cinderella by Brothers Grimm

24. Frightening for Young Children • Many adults worry, however they are based on unrealistic fears. • Fairy and folktales provide children a message of hope. • Softened versions of fairytales may instill more distress in children. • Ex. The Three Little Pigs

25. Waste of Time • No other genre fosters creativity than fantasy (both modern and traditional). • We teachers bemoan the lack of creativity, therefore we should promote this genre.

26. Activities: • Short story elements • http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories/cinderella.shtml • http://www.learner.org/interactives/story/index.html

27. Activities: • Twisted Fairy tales: It is a story that uses fairy tales you know and change the characters, settings, points of view, or plots. • Before you start your own fairy tale, remember, there are lots of ways you can change a fairy tale:    1.) Change the main character   2.) Have the story take place somewhere else. 3.) Have the story take place in another time.   4.) Tell the story from a different character’s point of view 5.) Make the problem of the story different 6.) Change an important item in the story.   7.) You can change the ending of the story.