FROM ORAL TRADITION TO GLOBAL ADAPTATION: THE DYNAMIC NATURE OF CULTURAL MEMORY IN GRIMM'S FAIRY TALES

Abstract

Through two centuries of adaptation and reinterpretation, Grimm's Fairy Tales have transcended their nineteenth-century German origins to attain global cultural significance. This paper investigates the evolution of cultural memory by tracing the transmission of Grimm's Fairy Tales from the oral legacy to written literature and the retranslations in literature, cinema and global popular culture. The paper uses a qualitative text analysis method to examine some of the Grimm's Fairy Tales and their contemporary adaptations, focusing in particular on interpretations in Disney films and other modern cultural forms. These adaptations often result in changes to the characters, themes, genders and moralities, reflecting the social values of the time, but they do not lose the symbolic patterns and story structures that preserve the cultural memory embedded in the original stories. In addition, the study examines the transformation of Grimm's Fairy Tales from local to transnational expressions of German cultural identity by looking at how they have been disseminated internationally and their ability to transcend linguistic, cultural and geographical barriers without losing their symbolic meaning. Through its focus on the process of adaptation as something more than cultural replacement, this study is making a contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in literary Studies, folklore, adaptation Studies, and memory Studies. It suggests that the continued vitality of the Grimm's Fairy Tales is in how they have been continually reworked and reinvented, allowing successive generations to reimagine cultural identity in a way that remains grounded in the past. Finally, the paper demonstrates how the global circulation of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, and its continuous re-interpretation, illustrate the dynamic and ever-changing nature of cultural memory in the modern world.