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This article examines storytelling events as contexts in which propositions about the fairies and folk healers associated with them were appraised and contested. It considers the evidential rhetoric employed in narratives that argued for and against the existence of fairies and the powers of wise folk who trafficked with them. Particular attention is given to narratives of negative evidence including stories that depicted individuals who believed they have had supernatural experiences as deluded, either by their own imaginations or through the chicanery of others. As will be seen throughout, traditions of belief and traditions of disbelief were competing discourses that came into collision, interpenetrating and modifying each other in a dialectical relationship that informed individuals as they negotiated their own attitudes about the fairies and fairy healers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1997, Daniela Hempen published a short research paper in Folklore (108:45-8) about a somewhat unexpected character in some Bluebeard stories. Hempen calls her Bluebeard's female helper. An old woman employed in Bluebeard's home in two tales in the first edition of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812), she is found by the newlywed or newly betrothed heroine already at her grisly work: in The Castle of Murder (Das Mordschloss) (no. 73) scrubbing the intestines of a former victim; in The Robber Bridegroom (Der Räuberbräutigam) (no. 40) with water on to boil, ready to cook the chopped-up corpse of the heroine. To discover the meanings of this odd character, help cannot be sought from the scholarship of the past for, as Hempen remarks, the female helper has been constantly overlooked in 'Bluebeard' criticism. The present essay seeks to rectify this neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on various studies on folklore, compiled as of April 2002. Contemporary status of the fairytale as seen in the light of Jack Zipe's socio-historical approach; Analysis of dragons in twentieth-century fiction.