Writing quote of the day

This is the quote I am using to set the scene for my paper...woe betide you examiners who think fairy tales are nonsense!

"The scholarly world discovered the folktale in the 19^th century. Before that time there was little serious interest in the phenomenon of oral tales, which were generally viewed by learned persons as a form of amusement proper to simple or uneducated persons, or to children, none of whom had much to teach the rest of us. Accordingly no one thought long about the nature of such stories, no one wondered about how old they were or where they came from, no one asked what they meant to their tellers and listeners."


William Hansen. Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University press, 2002) xi.