TALE, a general term, in the usual acceptance of the word, for fictitious narratives, long or short, ancient or modern (O.Eng. talu, number, account, story; the word is common to many Teu tonic languages; cf. Ger. Zahl, number, Erzahlung, narrative, Du. teal, speech, language). In this article "tale" is used in a stricter sense, as equivalent to the German "Volks-marchen" or the French "conte populaire." Thus understood, popular tales mean the stories handed down by oral tradition from an unknown antiquity. So understood, popular tales are a subject in myth ology. The Homeric epics, especially that of the Odyssey, con tain adventures (those, for example, of the Cyclops and the husband who returns in disguise) which are manifestly parts of the general human stock of popular narrative. Other examples are found in the Rigveda, and in the myths which were handled by the Greek dramatists. The Thousand and One Nights (q.v.) is full of popular tales, and popular tales are the staple of the mediaeval Gesta Romanorum, and of the collections of Straparola and other Italian story-tellers. In all these and similar gatherings the story, long circulated from mouth to mouth among the people, is handled with conscious art. In the Histoires ou contes du temps passé of Perrault (Elzevir, 1697), we have one of the earliest collections of tales which were taken down as they were told by nurses to children.
The success of Perrault's popular tales brought the genre into literary fashion, and the Comtesse d'Aulnoy invented, or in some cases adapted, "contes," which still retain a great popularity. But the precise and scientific collection of tales from the lips of the people is not much earlier than our century. The chief impulse to the study was given by the brothers Grimm. The first edition of their Kinder- and Haus-Miirchen was published in 1812. The English reader will find a very considerable bibliography of popu lar tales, as known to the Grimms, in Mrs. Alfred Hunt's trans lation, Grimm's Household Tales, with Notes (1884). In addition to the miirchen of Indo-European peoples, the Grimms became acquainted with some Malay stories, some narratives of Bechu anas, Negroes, American Indians and Finnish, Estonian and Mag yar stories.
For European tales, the bibliography in the translation of Grimm already referred to may be used, and the Maisonneuve collection, Les Litteratures populaires, may be recommended. There are abundant materials and discussions in Frazer's The Golden Bough. See also