Before we make any definitive statement on what a folktale "means," Bengt Holbek helps clarify HOW to ask that question.

1) For example, let's first ask, whose meaning?

Ancient people? People telling stories through centuries?
folklore fieldworkers? Publishers of folklore books, and their readers?
Storytellers recorded by folklorists, and audiences around those storytellers?

Folklorists are most interested in what Lynne McNeill called the "source", the specific people from whom folklorists collect folklore. And so, that's whose meanings we want to interpret first.

2) Then let's decide what qualities make our interpretation "solid":

Transparent (includes an explicit description of HOW to interpret),
Comprehensive (engage the whole text; can't choose only details that fit your argument and omit the rest)
Consistent (the same analysis works for other texts besides the one you're interpreting)
...and of course it can't contradict known facts
(for example, it's a known fact that over centuries folktales were told mostly by adults to adults, not children).

Reading

Early psychologists (Carl Jung is the most famous one) hypothesized that folktales help an individual grow and overcome trauma; Jung was not a folklore fieldworker, and interpreted meanings for his upper-class, urban patients.

Read a folktale told by the most successful professional American folktale teller, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and notice that Jungian interpretation is part of her text (notice also that after the folktale she tells a legend: is this other story part of the therapy? Jane Muncy, whose text of "Merrywise" we read at the start of Module 4, also told folktales as a professional therapist; she later shared her thoughts about how folktales work.

Maybe they’re onto something? Could therapy also have been part of the meaning in traditional oral storytelling communities? Bengt Holbek's chapter outlines rules for interpreting what oral folktales meant for the rural people who told them to fieldworkers in the 1800s.

Estimated time: 45 minutes

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, (1992). “Bluebeard”, in Women who run with the wolves : myths and stories of the wild woman archetype,

PDF File : Estes_1992_Bluebeard.pdf
Audio Recording : PinkolaEstes1991Bluebeard.mp3

Carl Lindahl, (2015). “Jane Muncy Fugate: Healing Tales for a Mountain Child and Troubled Adults,” in American folktales: From the collections of the Library of Congress, pages 279-293.

UW Library : American folktales: From the collections of the Library of Congress

Bengt Holbek, (1985). “The Many Abodes of Fata Morgana or the Quest for Meaning in Fairy Tales.” Journal of Folklore Research, 22(1), pages 19-28.

UW Library : The Many Abodes of Fata Morgana or the Quest for Meaning in Fairy Tales.

Rationale: Consider how storytellers add personal meanings to their folktales, and explain what their own stories mean. (We'll also encounter a variant of "Bluebeard", ATU 312!)

Lecture

In this lecture keep the following ideas in mind:

How do explanations by university-trained, professional American folktale tellers help interpret what folktales meant for people in preindustrial, traditional farming communities?
How do these questions and descriptions help me become a more effective teller of folktales?

Bonus

Is folklore like modern abstract art? The question is not as strange as it may seem. Dig into Henry Glassie's interpretation of mumming in Ballymenone: Henry Glassie, “Meaning,” in All Silver & No Brass (1976), pages 94-121.

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