Good, Evil, Faerie Queene
Here's a good essay about good and evil in folktales and how it's a relatively new development that this is the dominant mode of stories. It talks about how we often project our modern narratives on to ancient folk tales etc and some of the history of how (for example) the Grimm's did so deliberately and politically. The Good Guy/Bad Guy Myth by Catherine Nichols.
You should read it and probably ignore what I have to say.
Okay then. I don't disagree with the essay at all, but I think that the real difference is that the good versus evil clash of values idea was only one strain of story. For example there's a gap in her timeline of King Arthur stories: There are the 12th Century French poets, in which the knights fight monsters. Then in the 19th Century Tennyson makes Arthur the British ideal and he fights moral failure in human form.
Meanwhile in 1590 you have Edmund Spenser writing The Faerie Queene and the knights hanging out with Arthur are explicitly allegories for virtues and their enemies are allegories for vices, or sometimes that vice personified. Also there are monsters. Meanwhile the poem is nationalist (or proto-nationalist) and pro-Tudor, with Merlin in full prophetic mode stating that history has/will lead to the glorious reign of Elizabeth.
Now this isn't a folktale; Spenser was writing this for the Elizabethan court, so it's full of Renaissance allegory and references etc. It's still a pre-cursor to the modern mode of stories that has uniquely come to dominate our fiction. Making good and evil the major theme of all stories is a relatively recent development yet I also think that there are examples of that mode of story (as one of many options) going back further.
You should read it and probably ignore what I have to say.
Okay then. I don't disagree with the essay at all, but I think that the real difference is that the good versus evil clash of values idea was only one strain of story. For example there's a gap in her timeline of King Arthur stories: There are the 12th Century French poets, in which the knights fight monsters. Then in the 19th Century Tennyson makes Arthur the British ideal and he fights moral failure in human form.
Meanwhile in 1590 you have Edmund Spenser writing The Faerie Queene and the knights hanging out with Arthur are explicitly allegories for virtues and their enemies are allegories for vices, or sometimes that vice personified. Also there are monsters. Meanwhile the poem is nationalist (or proto-nationalist) and pro-Tudor, with Merlin in full prophetic mode stating that history has/will lead to the glorious reign of Elizabeth.
Now this isn't a folktale; Spenser was writing this for the Elizabethan court, so it's full of Renaissance allegory and references etc. It's still a pre-cursor to the modern mode of stories that has uniquely come to dominate our fiction. Making good and evil the major theme of all stories is a relatively recent development yet I also think that there are examples of that mode of story (as one of many options) going back further.
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