THE INTERPRETATION OF FAIRY TALES

The fairy story has a moral and a clearly symbolic underlying structure. It has a message relating to attitudes maintained between the members of a family (Brewer 1980). In one story, told in 1973 (a variant of 'One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes', AT 511, found in Grimm 1992: 130), recorded by Falassi, the fairy (a beautiful lady) and a goat represent good, maternal figures. An aunt represents the hostile mother figure. Falassi reports the fluidity of the storytelling occasion, the recognition of variants, and at the same time the sense that one story is not another, even when elements of one get mixed with another. 'The deep structural pattern holds, then, while the surface renderings are pleasantly (if conventionally) diverse.'