The Fairy Tellers

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina tell spooky stories in honor of the season! Are they ghosts, the devil, or the Wild Hunt? So many things meet us on the roadways and go bump in the night!

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina dive into The Corpse Bride, or rather, the folklore behind the Tim Burton film, The Corpse Bride. Tim Burton credited the Jewish folktale “The Finger” as his inspiration for the famous supernatural stop motion film and so in honor of the spooky season, we thought that it was time to highlight this tale and a couple others featuring cast off brides. The Jewish rea...

Content Warning: Discussions of a Sexual Nature and Innuendo Episode Description: #138 Handmade Husbands In this episode, we discuss the folkloresque nature of The Wicker Husband by Ursala Wills and the soon to be released movie, Wicker, based on the story. The Wicker Husband is a literary fairy tale that reminded Katrina of the style of Oscar Wilde, who used fairy talesque stories to dig into dee...

Happy 7th Pod-Anniversary! It has been 7 wonderful years of podcasting about myths, legends, folklore and fables! For this episode we are back to talking about Cinderella tales but this time we're inviting the guys to have some fun being the persecuted ones! Even though the tales in this episode aren't in ATU 510A, they DO have fancy outfit changes, challenging family members, and even some fancy...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina have a slappy happy fun time talking about goblins from stories found in The Book of Ghosts and Goblins by Ruth Manning-Sanders. A book that Katrina was able to win by chance in a giveaway by the amazing hosts of Fairy Tale Fix , Abbie and Kelsey. Geoff retells the story of The Three Silver Balls (ATU 311 and ATU 302) where we encounter a mischievous goblin and l...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina go back to the previous episode's topic of moralizing fairy tales. If anyone can get a moral out of these tales…seek help. Our brains naturally want to make sense of, and gain life lessons from, the stories that we hear, especially when they are told to us in fairy tale forms. Thanks to people like Charles Perrault and centuries of children’s publishing, fairy ta...

Episode Description: #134 In this episode, Geoff and Katrina tackle a sticky question that comes up time and again when talking about and defining the genre of fairy tales. Are fairy tales supposed to teach a moral? Or are the morals something that readers bring into the tales for themselves? Geoff and Katrina test the theory while looking at a tale type that really lends itself to moralizing, ATU...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States declaring independence from Great Britain. Katrina wanted to acknowledge the occasion by indulging in the story tradition of "tall talk" or more commonly "tall tales". Geoff retells the story of Stormalong, which is a great story to represent America because while these tales became common in the northern east...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina talk about the social historical interpretations for fairy tales. Using the essay Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales by Eugen Weber, we move from talking about fairy tales using the psychoanalytic approach to using historical perspectives to find out when forest might simply be a forest and when famine makes monsters of mothers. Katrina starts off b...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina dive back into Little Red Riding Hood variants in other parts of the world. ATU 123 and ATU 333 can be found in China, Korea, Japan, and the African Diaspora. But while Bruno Bettelheim and others want to talk a big game about the wolf being a representation of the dangers of sexuality, what can we glean from a shapeshifting tiger/old woman, a yokai, and ...a rab...

In this episode, Katrina and Geoff use what we've covered in episodes #126 and #128 to examine one of the most famous fairy tales of all time, Little Red Riding Hood. First, Katrina retells the tale from Charles Perrault and then goes into the Brothers Grimm. But she tells their ATU 123 tale, The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids before Geoff retells the classic Brothers Grimm ATU 333 tale, Little Red...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina talk about Northern European folk and the tales they tell. Last year, Geoff reached out to Free League Publishing to ask them about their role playing game, Vaesen and was gifted some books to explore. While he and Katrina try to figure out the best use of RPGs for them and the podcast, Katrina has dived into the folklore that inspired the game. She starts with a...

In this episode, Katrina and Geoff continue on with this year's curriculum project by talking about the psychoanalytic approach to fairy tales. We're talking Freud. We're talking Jung. We're talking Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. But mostly we are talking about the story Snow White and Rose Red, found in the Brothers Grimm collection. In this story, a bear comes to stay with these two...

February is the time of year where we are all sitting in liminal space. We're waiting for the seasons to shift and change. In this episode, Katrina and Geoff are embracing this space and retelling tales of ghosts and fairies. Do the dead walk among us? Are they partying way too hard? Which would you prefer? Ghosts or fairies? Katrina begins the episode by talking about Daniel Crowley, the anthropo...

New Year, New Project! In this episode, Katrina and Geoff kick off their new project and take a break from talking about ATU tale types and motif indexes, to discuss a different way of examining tales, structuralism! Now, don't run off all at once! We're going to break down Vladimir Propp's approach to tales and discuss how being able to recognize Baba Yaga as a villain or a donor character actual...

In this episode, Katrina and Geoff journey into Norse mythology. The tale of The Mead of Poetry has many twists and turns with a wide cast of characters from dwarves, giants, and gods. How does a vat of godly spittle turn into a much sought after beverage? Its a winding road that Katrina is happy to travel in search of the gift of storytelling.   Check out: Not My Fantasy Podcast and our latest ep...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina issue two rare corrections. After falsely claiming in episode #123 that there isn't an ATU type 666, they set the record straight by apologizing for the terrible lie and righting their wrongs. With the tale of Hero and Leander, they show that everyone makes mistakes. Some mistakes (like tempting Fate) are worse than others but even Renaissance historians got thin...

In this episode, Katrina is back from another year of the American Folklore Conference. She talks about the fun of academic conferences and being around the same nerds that understand a good ATU type joke. In the course of some of that joking, Katrina ended up with a ribbon on her name tag that said ATU SIX SEVEN, which then prompted academics to ask her "What's ATU 67" which allowed her to take p...

Content Warning: Suicide and Murder In this episode, Geoff and Katrina dive back into the world of the French salons to talk about Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy and further their discussion on Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale by Kimberly J. Lau. While France was spreading their imperial reach, the imagination of the French salons were abuzz with travelogues...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina discuss stories that look at the corrupting power of wealth. While doing an Instagram challenge in July, by Tish Black (author of Ebony, Blood, and Snow: New Stories from Old Tales ), Katrina kept finding stories from around the world talking about how growing wealth can cause a degrading of the soul. They take three of those tales and retell them while discussin...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina talk about the upcoming "posthumous partnering" of Stephen King and Maurice Sendak in a children's book of Hansel and Gretel in September. The news of this collaboration reminded Katrina of another book Maurice Sendak did with a dead partner, Wilhelm Grimm. In the 1800's before the Grimm Brothers were a household name, Wilhelm penned a letter to Mili, which conta...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina delve into the world of King Louis XIV's French Salons. During this time period, many women of the nobility were meeting together in the salons and stretching their creative skills in storytelling and writing. While Charles Perrault was trying to prove that the French folktales carried as much weight as the myths of ancient Greece, his niece, Marie-Jeanne L'Herit...

In this episode, Geoff shares that his son is currently having him read through ALL of the Grimm Brother's collection of tales. And while on this journey, his son has really gotten a kick out of some tales more than others. And Geoff shares one of those tales with us; the tale of Clever Gretel. Armed with a quick wit and a desire for good food and drink (and a pair of red shoes), Gretel is ready t...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina fight to break their Mer-MAY curse by attempting to get an episode all about the most famous seductresses (or kidnappers) of the sea (or lakes). These little (or big) mermaids might come from different lands but they have one thing in common, they are man hungry. With three different tales, Katrina and Geoff take turns telling tales of female heroines, magic (or...

In this episode, Geoff and Katrina turn to a pair of tales from Ethiopia that illustrate how stories can talk about what we value without being overly didactic. They retell two stories stories come from Elizabeth Laird’s When the World Began: Stories Collected in Ethiopia. Katrina starts us off with "The Shield of Kindness," where three sons are tested not on strength or bravery, but on kindness a...