Activity: What are some of the best stories, jokes, and lessons you’ve been told? Who told them to you? Where do you think they got them? From a book or movie, a family member, a teacher, or life experience? When you imagine a storyteller, what does the storyteller look like? What do you think storytellers of long ago looked like? What kind of experience or training is required to become a storyteller? Can anyone be one? Are folk and fairy tales just for children’s learning experience, or do we need them for all stages of life?
“Elder tales” are folk and fairy tales in which an older character is the protagonist. They may or may not reinforce negative stereotypes about older adults. In the past few decades, several collections of elder tales have been published, usually for adult readers.
A collection that is referenced frequently in literature on aging and ageist stereotypes is Allan B. Chinen’s In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and the Second Half of Life (1989). Chinen is a psychiatrist based in San Francisco who has written several books on aging and midlife that draw on the wisdom of fairy and folk tales. In the introduction to In the Ever After, he says he examined over 4,000 fairy tales and found only 2 percent can be classed as elder tales. He also says elder tales are more common in Eastern cultures, which is reflected in the greater number of tales in his book from Eastern countries.
Chinen argues that the devaluation of older people came as cultures shifted from agricultural ways of life, in which the knowledge of old farmers about the cycles of nature were valued, to industrialized societies, in which technological skills became important and the skills of older, land-based people began to be regarded as irrelevant and obsolete. Eventually, this mindset applied more and more to older people in general.
He writes, “In today’s society, most ideals of human life revolve around images of youth—strength and beauty, for instance. These are the virtues of the hero and heroine, so closely associated with youth. Without any vision of what succeeds youth and its heroic paradigm, the second half of life often seems frightful, a time only of deterioration. . . . Elder tales offer a dramatic alternative to this grim view—a new image of maturity, centered around wisdom, self-knowledge, and transcendence.”
So the Grimms’ tale “The Aged Mother” (retitled “An Old Mother’s Sorrow”) is discussed as a story offering an example of religious transcendence as a task typically undertaken late in life. The Japanese folk tale “The Old Man Who Made Withered Trees Flower” is discussed in terms of return and transfiguration, “the reclamation of long-lost virtues—innocence, spontaneity, and delight.” Chinen notes the tale’s elderly central characters combined with the symbolism of objects associated with youthful life stages as defined by Freud. His interpretation of its meaning confronts stereotypes of elderly people as regressing into immaturity and childlike personalities at the end of their lives. “What appears to be regression is actually a conscious affirmation of a more mythic, intuitive variety of reasoning,” he writes.
Acclaimed children’s book and fantasy author Jane Yolen also published a collection of elder tales, called Gray Heroes: Elder Tales from Around the World (1999). Like Chinen, in the introduction of her collection, Yolen discusses some of the negative stereotypes of older people in folk tales and modern society and the shift from agricultural to technological societies. The characters in this collection, she notes, do not have “senior moments” but “wear their long years well.”
Yolen points out that in oral cultures old people were traditionally the storytellers and repositories of history. She argues that folk tales became more focused on younger characters in recent centuries as people became more literate and cultures became more technological. Folk and fairy tales became literature for children: “So the only stories starring graybeards that were saved for the nursery were the ones in which the child character assumed more importance than the elderly one.”
Unlike Chinen, Yolen speaks more about her personal experience as an aging human in her book’s introduction. In an interview when Gray Heroes came out (available below), Yolen says she was “edging toward 60” when she began putting the book together.
Another recent project similar to elder tale collections is a folklore/photography project begun in 2011 by two Scandinavian women, called “Eyes as Big as Plates.” The project’s title come from a description of a troll in the Norwegian folk tale “Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Finnish artist Riitta Ikonen and Norwegian photographer Karoline Hjorth have received international attention with their project that features older and retired adults dressed in the materials of their surrounding natural landscapes to resemble mythical/folkloric characters.
After beginning in their home region, Ikonen and Hjorth have since travelled as far afield as Japan, South Korea, Senegal, Tasmania, and the United States with their project. Rather than “subjects” or “models,” they call the people who pose in their pictures “collaborators,” as each person is interviewed about their life and has input about where and how they want to be photographed. The collaborators have included retired farmers, fishermen, housewives, plumbers, academics, and opera singers. They range in age from their 60s to their 90s. They have been photographed on coastlines, in fields, in woods, in ponds and swamps, on rocks or on bogs, wearing flowers, seaweed, straw, reeds, fish, leaves, stones, and ice. The result is striking portraits that explore humans’ connection to nature and its life cycles.
In a TedTalk, Ikonen and Hjorth said, “We reasoned that the older the local interviewee, the closer we would be to the talking rocks of these stories. . . . We have the honor of working with some of the toughest and bravest and coolest people around and thoroughly enjoy how some of our works and portraits stomp on stereotypes about age, gender, and nationality. To us, much of Western society is unnecessarily confused when it comes to the usefulness of this absolutely rock-and-roll demographic.”
Below are Yolen's interview and Ikonen and Hjorth's TedTalk. The annotated bibliography page includes detailed information about some elder tale collections.
Photo credits: Header--Wikimedia Commons (cover of Japanese tale Hanasaki Jiji, "The Old Man Who Made Withered Trees Flower") / Thumbnail--JaneYolen.com
“Elder tales” are folk and fairy tales in which an older character is the protagonist. They may or may not reinforce negative stereotypes about older adults. In the past few decades, several collections of elder tales have been published, usually for adult readers.
A collection that is referenced frequently in literature on aging and ageist stereotypes is Allan B. Chinen’s In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and the Second Half of Life (1989). Chinen is a psychiatrist based in San Francisco who has written several books on aging and midlife that draw on the wisdom of fairy and folk tales. In the introduction to In the Ever After, he says he examined over 4,000 fairy tales and found only 2 percent can be classed as elder tales. He also says elder tales are more common in Eastern cultures, which is reflected in the greater number of tales in his book from Eastern countries.
Chinen argues that the devaluation of older people came as cultures shifted from agricultural ways of life, in which the knowledge of old farmers about the cycles of nature were valued, to industrialized societies, in which technological skills became important and the skills of older, land-based people began to be regarded as irrelevant and obsolete. Eventually, this mindset applied more and more to older people in general.
He writes, “In today’s society, most ideals of human life revolve around images of youth—strength and beauty, for instance. These are the virtues of the hero and heroine, so closely associated with youth. Without any vision of what succeeds youth and its heroic paradigm, the second half of life often seems frightful, a time only of deterioration. . . . Elder tales offer a dramatic alternative to this grim view—a new image of maturity, centered around wisdom, self-knowledge, and transcendence.”
So the Grimms’ tale “The Aged Mother” (retitled “An Old Mother’s Sorrow”) is discussed as a story offering an example of religious transcendence as a task typically undertaken late in life. The Japanese folk tale “The Old Man Who Made Withered Trees Flower” is discussed in terms of return and transfiguration, “the reclamation of long-lost virtues—innocence, spontaneity, and delight.” Chinen notes the tale’s elderly central characters combined with the symbolism of objects associated with youthful life stages as defined by Freud. His interpretation of its meaning confronts stereotypes of elderly people as regressing into immaturity and childlike personalities at the end of their lives. “What appears to be regression is actually a conscious affirmation of a more mythic, intuitive variety of reasoning,” he writes.
Acclaimed children’s book and fantasy author Jane Yolen also published a collection of elder tales, called Gray Heroes: Elder Tales from Around the World (1999). Like Chinen, in the introduction of her collection, Yolen discusses some of the negative stereotypes of older people in folk tales and modern society and the shift from agricultural to technological societies. The characters in this collection, she notes, do not have “senior moments” but “wear their long years well.”
Yolen points out that in oral cultures old people were traditionally the storytellers and repositories of history. She argues that folk tales became more focused on younger characters in recent centuries as people became more literate and cultures became more technological. Folk and fairy tales became literature for children: “So the only stories starring graybeards that were saved for the nursery were the ones in which the child character assumed more importance than the elderly one.”
Unlike Chinen, Yolen speaks more about her personal experience as an aging human in her book’s introduction. In an interview when Gray Heroes came out (available below), Yolen says she was “edging toward 60” when she began putting the book together.
Another recent project similar to elder tale collections is a folklore/photography project begun in 2011 by two Scandinavian women, called “Eyes as Big as Plates.” The project’s title come from a description of a troll in the Norwegian folk tale “Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Finnish artist Riitta Ikonen and Norwegian photographer Karoline Hjorth have received international attention with their project that features older and retired adults dressed in the materials of their surrounding natural landscapes to resemble mythical/folkloric characters.
After beginning in their home region, Ikonen and Hjorth have since travelled as far afield as Japan, South Korea, Senegal, Tasmania, and the United States with their project. Rather than “subjects” or “models,” they call the people who pose in their pictures “collaborators,” as each person is interviewed about their life and has input about where and how they want to be photographed. The collaborators have included retired farmers, fishermen, housewives, plumbers, academics, and opera singers. They range in age from their 60s to their 90s. They have been photographed on coastlines, in fields, in woods, in ponds and swamps, on rocks or on bogs, wearing flowers, seaweed, straw, reeds, fish, leaves, stones, and ice. The result is striking portraits that explore humans’ connection to nature and its life cycles.
In a TedTalk, Ikonen and Hjorth said, “We reasoned that the older the local interviewee, the closer we would be to the talking rocks of these stories. . . . We have the honor of working with some of the toughest and bravest and coolest people around and thoroughly enjoy how some of our works and portraits stomp on stereotypes about age, gender, and nationality. To us, much of Western society is unnecessarily confused when it comes to the usefulness of this absolutely rock-and-roll demographic.”
Below are Yolen's interview and Ikonen and Hjorth's TedTalk. The annotated bibliography page includes detailed information about some elder tale collections.
Photo credits: Header--Wikimedia Commons (cover of Japanese tale Hanasaki Jiji, "The Old Man Who Made Withered Trees Flower") / Thumbnail--JaneYolen.com