WHAT IS A FOLKTALE?

A folktale is a fictitious story told to amuse and amaze the listeners. The action takes place in a far-off time and place : “Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom...” These stories feature kings and princesses, giants and dragons, fairies and sorcerers, magical objects and talking animals. Like the traditional folksongs, the folktales came from France and were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation along the banks of le Détroit.

Everyone who tells a folktale tells it in his or her own fashion. Therefore, each version is a little different from all the other versions. The details change and evolve, but the core of the story remains the same. Two of the folktales you will find here — Cinderella and The Fisherman and His Wife — are found all over the western world. Here you can see how they were told in some of the Detroit River communities.

Nowadays, traditional storytellers are even harder to find than folksingers. The long winter evenings in which people could spend hours listening to a storyteller are now taken up by television, radio, movies and the Internet. The folktales we know are the ones adapted by Walt Disney and other producers of popular culture. You would have to go back several generations to find the traditional storytellers of le Détroit.

Fortunately, we have the opportunity to do just that. In 1938, a researcher named Joseph Médard Carrière visited the Detroit River area and met with several French speaking residents. He collected 26 folktales from various storytellers, one of whom was Joseph Groulx, from Tecumseh. Carrière didn’t have a tape recorder, so he took the down the tales in longhand, using a special spelling system he had developed to take into account local French pronunciation. You can see how he transcribed one of the tales by clicking here (Cendrillonne) and compare it with the modern French transcription (modern transcription) .

Joseph Médard Carrière and Detroit River Folktales

If we know anything of the language and culture of old French settlements in the Mid-Western American states, it is largely due to the work of Joseph Médard Carrière. Born in 1902 in Curran, in Eastern Ontario, Carrière received a doctorate from Harvard in 1932. He held the position of French professor at Northwestern University in Chicago and later at the university of Virginia. He conducted several fieldwork expeditions among francophone communities in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, recording the language and folklore of these isolated settlements. (Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, these settlements had close ties with the Detroit River area.) Carrière is best known for his book Tales from the French Folklore of Missouri, published in 1937. In 1938, he spent some time in the Windsor area. He met some local storytellers, including Joseph Groulx, from Tecumseh. These storytellers dictated 26 folktales to Carrière, who wrote them down in a special orthography he had developed to take into account the particularities of local speech. Carrière died in 1970 and the folktales remained buried in the University of Laval Folklore Archives for over 30 years. A modern transcription of his manuscript, prepared by Marcel Bénéteau and Donald Deschênes, will be published in the near future.

FOLKTALES OF LE DÉTROIT