Thompson's world folk story Jin Dian: Only by seeing eternal joys and sorrows can we have true beauty and goodness.

There is a saying in the reading manual: You may have unlimited wealth, boxes of jewels and cabinets of gold, but you will never be richer than me. I have a mother who reads to me.

I believe that most mothers who read stories to their children will choose this Thompson world folk story Jin Dian.

This book was compiled by Stith Thompson, a great contemporary American folklorist, and translated collectively by translators such as Ma Yiming and Hu Jintao, members of Minglu Society.

The original version of this book is known as "an irreplaceable classic fairy tale version in the English world". The old version of Chinese introduced in 1980s is a wonderful childhood memory of many young parents. The stories in the book are accompanied by the growth of children from generation to generation, conveying love, wisdom and strength.

Jin Dian, a World Folk Tale by Thompson is a collection of classic folk stories and fairy tales in the history of contemporary literature and folklore. This 100 story comes from 17 regions and nationalities with a long history in the world. Thompson and his students spent half a century sorting out and editing 100 classic fairy tales with the most national characteristics, the highest literary achievements and the longest circulation, so that children can enjoy the most authentic folk stories.

AT classification: children find the invisible code of folk stories

Stith Thompson, the editor of this book, initiated the advanced system of world folklore research-"Arne-Thompson system", namely "AT classification", also known as "historical evolution and geographical distribution".

AT is the initials of Arnay and Thompson. AT classification is a common method to analyze the types of sample plots in the world.

19 10, Arnay, Finland published an index of story types, which analyzed and compared the folk stories of Finland, other Nordic countries and other European countries, classified the different versions of the same plot of these stories into one category, wrote down a concise summary, and then classified and numbered them uniformly.

After this book was published, it had a great influence. 1928, the author of this book, Thompson of Indiana State University, published the Index of Folk Stories, which supplemented and revised Anai's system based on a wider range of folk stories.

Their classification system is collectively called "Arne-Thompson system" or "AT classification" for short. The folk stories they sorted out mainly consist of five parts: animal stories, ordinary folk stories, jokes, program stories and unclassified stories.

Therefore, the folktales in Thompson's world folktale Jin Dian are not randomly compiled into a book. The author Thompson classifies different articles with similar plots in these 65,438+000 stories into one category and arranges them in order.

Several adjacent stories in the book have similar structures, such as the first story, Jumping Shoes, The Girl in the Tower and The Devil Married Three Sisters. These stories are almost identical in structure except for their different names and backgrounds. They all tell the story of a woman, and the expressions at the end are similar.

For example, the stories in the middle have similar titles, such as Ample and Bata, Doctor and Apprentice, Boots and Trolls. The story is also the structure of the two protagonists, but in the end the two sides have completely different endings.

The author uses AT classification to classify the same types of subjects together, which can make it easy for young readers who have a certain reading ability to find the similarities and form their own thoughts on folk stories.

For example, there are often magical people in folk stories, and vicious stepmother or the youngest child in the family often appear in character setting. If you just read these stories, it won't be so easy to find.

After finishing by the author Thompson, children will find that many elements in the original folk stories are common, or children can sum up the characteristics of folk stories themselves. This kind of reading thinking is especially suitable for the arrangement of cultural and sports units in primary school Chinese textbooks. Children will extract their own views from multiple texts, which is exactly where the ability of group reading is cultivated.

The most primitive story: restoring the truest suffering for children

After reading Jin Dian, a world folk story, we may have a preliminary feeling that these stories seem particularly colloquial.

In fact, the author Thompson only collects and classifies folk stories. He didn't do secondary processing, and he didn't beautify many seemingly gloomy stories.

He kept all the folk stories as they were when they first spread. For example, at the end of The Farmer and the Snake, the farmer found some dogs and ate the fox. Snow White's stepmother was finally forced to put on red-hot dancing shoes for her and jumped to the ground to die. In the hen that lays golden eggs, the ending is that the mother is convicted and sentenced to death.

This makes readers, large and small, who are used to the happy ending of "the princess and the prince live happily ever after" not adapt. But on second thought, this is what folk stories should look like.

Folk story is one of the important themes of folk literature, and it is an oral literary work in the form of fiction created and disseminated by the working people at the bottom. It always tells the relationship between people in the form of strange language and symbols, and it is a narrative story with a wide range of topics and full of fantasy.

Folk stories are basically based on the life of the bottom people, but they are not limited to the actual situation and what people think is true and reasonable. They often contain natural and whimsical elements.

Therefore, spreading in the bottom of society and word of mouth will definitely add the narrator's own values, so some views may be very inconsistent with people's social norms now, but they may be generally accepted at that time.

So after reading these stories, children will have their own guesses. Comparing their happy life with the social state at that time, their deepest "happiness" and their involuntary psychological state of "cherishing a good life" may be the value of this book.

As the saying goes, only by seeing eternal joys and sorrows can we have real beauty and goodness.

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