French Folklore: Stranger and darker than the fairy tales suggest
French folklore is one of the richest and most varied in Europe, and it has been systematically underestimated because Charles Perrault’s sanitised fairy tale versions became so dominant that the older, stranger, and considerably darker tradition behind them became almost invisible. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are the surface. Beneath them is the Ankou driving his cart of the dead through the Breton night, the Korrigans dancing around standing stones that predate Christianity by thousands of years, the Vouivre flying through the Jura with a blazing jewel in her forehead, and Mélusine building a castle for her husband while hiding what she becomes every Saturday.
France’s extraordinary regional diversity means its folklore tradition is not one tradition but many. Brittany is Celtic in its roots, its language, and its supernatural inhabitants. Normandy carries Viking and Anglo-Norman influences. Provence sits on a Roman and pre-Roman southern Mediterranean substrate. The Franche-Comté and Burgundy have their own dragon traditions. The articles below cover the full range.
France sits at the crossroads of European supernatural tradition. It received Celtic mythology from the west through Brittany and the pre-Roman Gauls. It received Germanic and Norse tradition from the north through Frankish settlement and Norman conquest. It preserved Roman and Mediterranean traditions in the south. And it produced, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some of the most sophisticated literary treatments of fairy and supernatural material in medieval Europe — the Arthurian prose cycles, the lais of Marie de France, the Roman de Mélusine — that shaped how the entire Western tradition thought about fairies, enchantresses, and the supernatural woman.
The sanitised Perrault versions are the end of a long process of literary refinement, not the beginning of the tradition. The beginning is considerably stranger, more dangerous, and more interesting. The articles on this site go back to the beginning.