Goals and Favorite Fairy Tale

I first heard about this class because it was an Honors Elective and I needed to take another one of those to complete my Honors requirements. The reason I chose it over the other options is that it was the one that interested me the most. Fairy tales interest me as they're something that was never really able to develop in America due to the time period in which it was founded, so by their very nature they give an interesting glimpse into stories from various cultures through history.

In this course, I hope to gain a greater knowledge of how these stories came about and how they functioned within a culture. I'm also interested in learning the differences between fairy tales, folk tales, myths, legends, and straight fiction, as well as where urban legends and cryptids fall among these categories.

My favorite folk tale is the story of Koschei the Deathless, though that's a bit tricky to define. Koschei is an antagonist in several Slavic fairy tales, such as Marya Morevna, Ivan Sosnovich, and Tsarevich Petr and the Wizard. These stories are not connected to one another save that Koschei is the villain or rival in all of them, but it is this character that interests me. Koschei is a creative villain, a wizard who hid his death in a needle, which was placed in an egg in a duck in a hare in an iron chest under a tree on the island Buyan, itself a mythical location said to move around the ocean and be the source of all weather. The quests the various heroes must go on to obtain his death are entertaining, and the character himself shows some interesting breath to his personality, such as both freeing a captured prince and chopping a protagonist into pieces and throwing them into the coean (don't worry, he got better). He also serves as a male counterpart to Baba Yaga in some stories, presenting an interesting dynamic between two villains. Koschei himself has never been popular enough to gain much traction in American fairy tale adaptations, but he did inspire the idea of liches in modern fiction.