It has been argued that the original context of traditional folk and fairy stories involved little or no differentiation between adults and children and that these tales served predominantly adult agendas. Do you agree with this claim? If so, what factors led to the emergence of a specialized form of storytelling aimed at children? Do we have any evidence of how children responded to those stories? Are there ways to reconstruct the role of children as participants in traditional forms of storytelling?

The issue of media violence surfaces in many contemporary discussions of children's relationship to media. How violent were traditional folk tales? What can looking at children's culture in earlier periods contribute to our understanding of this debate?

Some readers and scholars have understood folk tales as mythic forms, preserving and rehearsing communal values, beliefs and prejudices. Is it useful or plausible to see contemporary children's stories in the same way? Are there formal structures or themes that survive across cultures and historical eras to appear in folk tales and in later so-called children's literature?

Fairy tales migrated into the nursery in the 19th century and were appropriated by children. Once the Brothers Grimm started to collect the tales, they were transformed from entertainment for adults to diversion for children, and in some ways, also an educational manual for children. Then the stories suddenly developed an incredible moral backbone. The Grimms took out most of the sex, but they intensified the violence in the stories -- when it was placed in the service of a lesson or moral. We can only speculate about how violent the original stories were because we don't have the original incarnations.

Violence seems to be in fairy tales from all cultures and in all the various re-scriptings. If we look at the textual evidence, we see violence everywhere. It is in such great national collections as the Grimms', Havonsev's Russian collection or Joseph Jacobs' British collection. It is also in the oral tales that were transcribed by folklorists, in versions for adults, in versions for children, and in the Disney film versions -- which are often more violent than the Grimms' version. Think of the scene of Snow White in the woods. It is quite tame in the Grimms' version -- she is just abandoned and it is narrated in a very dry manner. In Disney, that scene becomes quite nightmarish: we have a terrified Snow White making her way through trees that have become animated. Why the violence is there? It seems to me that we could think about the melodramatic aspect of fairy tales and the way in which they externalize inner conflicts, are so plot driven, and always give us a manichean world of villains and helpless v ictims, violent emotions and brute force, which explains their appeal to children.

Tatar: You could hardly have a plot without some sort of violent, destabilizing event taking place. The 19th century children's literature makes what we have in the 20th century look tame and benign. The violence is also really directed at the child. I think that might be an important distinction to make -- violence directed at the child versus violence directed against the persecutors of the child. Your question really raises the fundamental problem of whether this violence has that therapeutic effect that Bruno Bettelheim talks about in The Uses of Enchantment -- children need those stories in order to purge all the feelings of hostility that Bettelheim believes that they have.

Audience Member: As I looked at the difference between the violence of the traditional fairy tale and the violence of the video game, it struck me that on one hand there's the psychologically motivated scenario of people who should be caring for you trying to destroy you (as in Hansel and Gretel in which the stepmother wants to kill the children and their father goes along with the plan). On the other hand, there's the video game where you have a gun and you are killing aliens with no implicit psychological reference to family dynamics. What do you think about this?

Tatar: I think that the preposterous violence of video games -- with just random shooting and no real plot -- is more frightening to me than something which is cast in a story and worked through while being read or told with an adult who is paying attention to the responses of the child. That would seem to be another important distinction, a scene of storytelling versus the kid alone at the computer. I don't mean to sound old-fashioned, but there is something appealing about the child reading along with the adult versus the child in front of the computer screen.

Tatar: One could see the Internet as site for generating folklore or jokelore, which is a form of folklore. I think James Twitchell's book, Preposterous Violence, looks at what kind of stories engage adolescents and why. I cannot recapitulate the complexities of his argument, so I refer you to his book.

Robert Darnton: My question concerns folklore studies. I gather that what you are trying to do, among other things, is to associate folk tales with myths and to find a mythical dimension in them, which I think could be a very fruitful approach. The objection from folklorists might be that their science is built on distinctions between three genres: myth, tale, and legend. They keep coming back to this fundamental distinction, and I gather you want to erase it. So what is your strategy for erasing it and how would you justify flying in the face of that wisdom among the folklorists?

Tatar: That is a tough question. It has only been recently that I've come to the view that there must be a relationship between myths and fairy tales. I don't think I want to erase the line, but I do want to make it a little more fluid because there is clearly traffic across that line, just as there is also a great deal of traffic between oral tales and literary tales. If one thinks about the origins of fairy tales, one could go back to literary versions of the tales that existed in the Middle Ages.

I think it is important to imagine the system being a little less stable than it was constructed a few decades ago. What intrigues me is the notion that we have Sleeping Beauty, and we have Brun Hilde and those stories are so close to each other. The fundamental issues are the same. We have David and Goliath, Tom Thumb, as well as Ulysses and the Cyclops. Why do these specific plots emerge in myth, folklore and legends as well? I see this as a challenge. I don't have any strategies because this is something new that has emerged in my thinking. Maybe some of you have ideas about those connections.