Folklore and How the Brothers Grimm and Disney Are Relevant to Folklore

Sims and Stephens define folklore as an entity that touches on the dimensions of human experience and artistic expression. Stemming from the study of literature and anthropology, while containing elements of psychology and sociology. It embraces aspects such as culture, visual and performing arts, music, theater, literature, linguistics, and history.. Folklore has evolved as a framework for understanding how people learn and share their knowledge, while also shaping their identities. It offers insights into how humans communicate and interpret various things.

In Chapter 1 of Richard Bauman’s “A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality,” he states that, “- the recognition that the creation of literary texts depends on significant part on the alignment of texts to prior texts and the anticipation of future texts has drawn critical - and ideological - attention to this reflexive dimension of discursive practice” He describes the beginning of intertextuality, which dates back to latter part of the 17th century, when oral tradition became a key element in the evolution of language and culture. This continued in the 18th century, where oral poetry and its circulation among the people would establish the foundational orientations of the study of oral poetics toward the relationship between different versions and the durability of "oral tradition". Within this philosophical perspective, was the scholarly tradition of folklore and anthropology by the Brothers Grimm using texts that are deemed as cultural objects, meaning they are durable, repeatable, classifiable, and linked to other texts by relationship of descent and similarities (Bauman and Briggs 2003). 

The Brothers Grimm fairy tales were a collection of stories told by people throughout Germany. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected these stories not from the people themselves, but they pulled them from writings that were already published or passed on. They went through many different versions, but the seventh edition still does not take attention away from the first edition of the Grimm's Fairy Tales. Despite the efforts to make the tales more artistic and appealing for the middle-class reading audience. From the beginning these tales were ever theirs, but over time throughout the different versions they made them their own. The relationship between texts continued on, and eventually Disney would release their own adaptation of many stories from the Brothers Grimm.