Allow Me, If You Will, the Express Opportunity to Establish the Validity of My Tale So that You Will Not Overlook It as Inauthentic and Therefore Un-

worthy of Your Time Since All Credibility Originates in the Source of the Work which I Feel Compelled to Defend for Your Sake Lest You Refuse to Benefit from the All-Important Message for which this Tale Is the Vehicle…
A Comedy

(My apologies for part of the title getting cut off... Aparently there is some sort of a word limit--note to self or any aspiring bloggers: 150 characters--to this thing... Who knew? Guess they don't deal in Academic Writing with much frequency...
But now that that nasy business has been settled let us embark on the actual purpose of this particular presentation, the project of the article in question)

One interesting thing to note about literary fairytales, depending in part how you define the genre, is the inexorable lengths that the authors go to in efforts to establish the credibility of the source and the authenticity of the tale(s). Barring, for the sake of argument, such examples as Giambattista Basile's The Pentameron—wherein the individual stories are presented within the structure of a frame story that creates the "authentic" storytellers as the "sources" of the individual tales so as to legitimize the tales presented—and the Grimm brothers' versions of tales—where, in the interest of presenting themselves as authentic sources for fairytales catalogued with great detail their own sources while simultaneously partaking in certain actions as changing the style and presentation of the tale (by their own hands) for the sake of making them seem much more rustic and therefore credible—literary fairytales often tend towards an incomprehensible drive to prove their non-existent pedigree even when it is clearly the case that no such pedigree exists (the reason it becomes necessary, for the purpose of this explication, to ignore the types of examples above described).

Both "The Philosopher's Stone" and "A Wondrous Tale of a Naked Saint" present cases for their own authenticity and significance—though notably by different means which link in turn to their particular and exact projects in the genre. Because I feel like it, I am going to start by discussing the case of Wieland. I am going to pretend that this is due to the chronological perspective, which is in faith the order of Zipes' arrangement and therefore also presumably the order in which I read them, but is actually because I know that it is better form in writing (for the sake of seeming coherent and structured to and of elucidating and simplifying for the reader by means of a much easier style to follow which in turn will increase my reputation with said reader increasing, in turn, my credibility as well—or at least not harming either, which would be a likely outcome of using inconsistent ordering of the same subjects) and when I started writing the paragraph I already wrote "Both 'The'" before referencing the text to determine recall the precise titles of the two tales and it would have been too much effort for me to have deleted that extent of my progress or to reorder them by the time I actually explained that I was going to discus them individually. In Wieland's case, the tale begins by referencing, in historical form, the recounting of the lives of Tristan and Isolde, a well-known detail in the tapestry of tales—and also a tale which, itself, claims to be historical—beyond mere name-dropping to the point of presenting a thorough knowledge of the history—accurate or otherwise—in depicting some of the more a-contextual details, as the alternate name of the fair Isolde. Of course, this lends itself well to his own period and style of writing, in the mode of Enlightenment, since it presents a very rational and precise type of account of the tale's pedigree. Simultaneously—and also in the name of the Enlightenment—he undermines his own façade in the purposeful insertion of inaccuracies to the end of acknowledging and advertising to the reader that the tale, though it fits keenly into a tradition, is by no means a truth, most likely because of the irrationality that is presented in it (of magic and transformation).

Because I really don't feel inclined to write any more on the topic right now, I am strongly tempted to just give up and call it quits right now without even attempting to discus the way in which Wackenroder employs similar techniques to a different ends, but I do not want to take all of the extra energy necessary to delete and rework the first couple of lines in the preceding paragraph. Of course, I could always simply request of you, the reader, a slight favor, that you might indulge me by pretending that I did discus and reveal to you this truth since it should be evident when you read the text, but then I am reminded that you cannot be trusted in such an event, so I cannot achieve my desire. I am relegated to following through on my promises and actually answering the expression of Wackenroder's credibility. The credibility comes, in this case, from its "foreignness" since, by Wackenroder's time, the Enlightenment had made great strides in eliminating any sense of mysticism in Germany—to which Romanticism was the direct answer—and the Middle or Far East, source of the One Thousand Nights and A Night and numerous other tales that would just have been getting published and translated, was considered to be a place where magic was still believed in—and perhaps even possible. By linking to that tradition, the newness and inconsistencies with the European folktale genre would not be taken into question, and because the "Orient" was considered to be a place engulfed in mysticism, the absurd tale secures more credibility than if it were to be successfully accounted for as a traditional German folktale.

I am going to sleep now.