Literary Tales

Tales taken from the oral tradition are sometimes rewritten to make the plot and/or the language more polished and more acceptable to its audience. Sometimes an author writes a tale which is based on traditional tales in plot and style. Both of these types are called literary tales. Sometimes such stories are themselves absorbed into the oral culture and become traditional literature again.

Literatury fairy tales and oral fairy tales freely exchanged plots, motifs, and elements with each other and with the tales of foreign lands. Various folklorists of the 18^th century attempted to recover the «pure» folktale, uncontaminated by literary versions; but while oral fairy tales likely existed for thousands of years prior to their literary forms, no such pure folktales exist – nor do pure literary fairy tales, not drawing on the folk tradition, exist. Once literary forms of the fairy tale existed, forms of transmission can be impossible to trace; oral story-tellers may even seek out readings of literary fairy tales in order to increase the number of stories and motifs they could use in their own tales.