The World of the Irish Wonder Tale: An Introduction to the Study of Fairy Tales

Edith Fowke is a professor emeritus at York University and author of the
recently published Canadian Folklore: Perspectives on Canadian Culture.

Dr. Gosse, an English professor at the University of British Columbia, wrote of The Irrational in the Nineteenth-Century Novel and The Transformation Process in Joyce’s Ulysses before turning to the study of wonder tales. Not surprisingly, then, his approach is academic: this is no book for those who simply like to read strange stories of ancient heroes, magical happenings, and strange transformations. Dr. Gosse discusses the psychological, anthropological, structural, comparative, and typological systems of analysis. His method is to retell typical Irish tales (including quotations from the originals in italics), and then discuss their patterns, archetypical characters, themes, and meanings.

Analyzing and interpreting folktales has become a growth industry, and Dr. Gosse draws upon the work of the earlier scholars. Naturally he refers to Stith Thompson’s The Types of the Folktale (Folktale Fellows Communications, 1928, 1961) and The Motif Index of World Literature (University of Indiana Press, 1932-36), and he points out some problems with plots overlapping and with the organization of the motifs. He also uses Vladimir Propp’s The Morphology of the Folktale (1928; University of Texas Press, 1968), listing his 31 functions and showing how they can be applied to a complex Irish tale. He also outlines the modifications introduced by two later structuralists, Eleazar Meletinsky and Susan Reid. He calls upon Freudian and Jungian theories to interpret various tales, and he quotes frequently from Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (Knopf, 1976) and Max Luthi’s Once upon a Lifetime (University of Indiana Press, 1974).

Dr. Gosse emphasizes that the wonder tales have links with primitive rituals and taboos and with the infant’s perception of the world. He stresses the importance of the testing of the hero and of transformations related to the winning of power. His aim is to show that the wonder tale has underlying psychic and cosmic meanings: it helps us to realize that fate is “the inevitable result of action taken” and “that we should respond to fate not as a blow to bring us down but as an opportunity to integrate that which furthers our individual destinies” (p.198).

Dr. Gosse’s method of illustrating the various theories by referring to particular tales is excellent. Some may feel that he sees more in the wonder  tales than is really there, but he makes a good case. Those willing to follow his analysis will find the book rewarding, but they should be warned that the theories are not simple and the book, although interesting, is not an easy read.