Unique stories in Flanders On the Classification of Fairy Tales

Most of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century orally collected fairy tales contain one or two texts that are considered unique, either in their country or in their language. Folklorists (who typically emphasize multiple existence, doublets and variations) rate these texts rather as anomalies which make cataloguing rather problematic.In his optimistic revision of The Types of the Folktale (1961) Thompson tried to solve this conundrum by adding extra type numbers. On the other hand Uther (The Types of International Folktales, 2004) simply left them out, although the original texts do exist. Based on De Meyer s catalogue Le conte populaire Flamand (1968), forty one-variant types fit in the Tales of Magic range, i.e. in almost one third of the Tales of Magic types (300-750).The authors have solved the anomaly of these texts by linking them to existing, mainly printed, stories and by valuing them as adaptations, corruptions, combinations Or residues.Some peculiar findings are worth mentioning, ranging from a new version of Goethe s Erlkonig to several Straparola tales or from copying a Russian tale to mixing pieces of the Grimms Kinder- und Hausmarchen into a narrative. Above all, stories of the Arabian Nights proved popular with the Flemish.Among the forty texts examined there was hardly any genuinely new material. This can prove that they constituted the end of a tradition (which was by no means exclusively oral) rather than marking the beginning of a new era.Although more research needs to be done, a new kind of fairy-tale catalogue is feasible, with printed texts as its starting point. Unique stories can thus be assigned to their rightful place instead of simply being ignored.