Category Archives: Always a Folklorist

Topics primarily tied to the field of folklore study and my background as a folklorist.

A Good One for Mother’s Day, or Why I Like Disney’s Frozen II

Watching Frozen II

Disney’s 2013 hit Frozen was immensely successful.  I enjoyed it, and the song “Let It Go” was an inescapable earworm for quite a while.  You can hear the song here.  But quite a few people (myself included) were not immediately impressed with the sequel, Frozen II, which came out in 2019.  However, I’ve now watched Frozen II several times on DVD as I’ve whiled away the hours during this pandemic.  Not only has it grown on me, but I now like it better than the 2013 production.  The personnel involved are pretty much the same ones who worked on the first film, with Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck writing the story, along with Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez writing the songs, and Christophe Beck composing the musical score.  But, to me, it tells a better story.  Let me explain why.

First, it celebrates the character and heroism of Elsa and Anna’s mother.  Usually in Disney’s fairy tale films, the mother is absent or replaced by a wicked stepmother.  Granted, their mother (and father) did die in the first film, but, through a kind of internal prequel, we get to see their mother, Iduna, as she interacts with her daughters and also (spoiler) as she saves her future husband, Elsa and Anna’s father.  And, another plus in my book, is the song that Iduna sings to her daughters, “All Is Found.”  This is a a lullaby that Iduna sings early in the movie, in the scene in which the parents tell their daughters about the Enchanted Forest.  It reappears later when Elsa and Anna journey to that Enchanted Forest and meet the Northhuldra people, who also know the song.  That is where my respect for the Disney research into the relevant folklore rises to a new level.

The lullaby is not a traditional one.  Anderson-Lopez and Lopez wrote the song so far as I can tell.  It is very lovely.  Here is Evan Rachel Wood singing it in the movie. There is even a meta comment about lullabies in the movie.  Look for it.  Lullabies are a big part of folklore.  I am impressed that they recognized this.  The person who composed the score for the movie, Christophe Beck, also did a good job bringing in the sound of traditional Sami music.  There are other instances of folklore material in the film—lots of them.   My favorites are the references to the traditional kulning, or herding songs, that inspires the “voice” that calls Elsa to the Enchanted Forest and the traditional pattern on the scarf that Iduna left with Elsa and that the Northhuldra people recognized as their own and then the pan-Scandinavian tradition of reindeer domestication.  The folklore is abundant and well researched.

But perhaps the most obvious folklore connection is to the story source—Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.”  Founder Walt Disney had evidently wanted to create a film based on Andersen’s “Snow Queen” since the late 1930s, but it never happened—until much later.  Read about it here.  However, as a folklorist myself, I must say that the plots of both Frozen and Frozen II owe very little to Andersen’s “Snow Queen.”  I reread Andersen’s story from the book on my shelf (book below), and I saw little that informed either of the movies beyond a few common folktale motifs.   The story is similar to that in ATU 425 The Search for the Lost Husband.  But, if you read the Andersen tale (see it here), you will see that there are few plot overlaps with Andersen’s story.  Others have commented on this as well.  But, then, Andersen was writing popular literature.  He was not recording verbatim tales from the folk as would a folklorist.  But he did evidently inspire folks at Disney studios, and that is to our advantage.

Popular printing of Andersen’s tales

So, let me conclude that what I really did appreciate about Frozen II is: 1) that it celebrates mothers, 2) that it uses a lullaby, 3) that it makes use of folklore –and two more things: that it 4) does a good job of representing often neglected “folk groups,” such as blacks, females, the Sami, herders, storekeepers, ice-cutters, etc., and 5) that it emphasizes the importance of “folk wisdom” in such phrases as “do the next right thing.”  To my mind, Disney is both the epitome of rampant capitalism gone wild and also, surprisingly, the representation of all that is still admirable and to be cherished about our collective folklore.  I salute the folks at Disney for trying to meet this last goal with their best efforts in Frozen II. Thank you, Disney.

The Righteous Penny

A Norwegian folktale

In that recent video with illustrations by Violet Moore Higgins and the song “Man of No Dreams,” I had one slide that included the title of a story from the folktale collection—“The Righteous Penny.”  The story is one more often translated as “The Honest Penny,” and you may read one such translation here.  The story includes the amusing motif of a cat that keeps reappearing aboard ship, but what I particularly like is the moral at the end: “He fetched his mother so that she could share in his happiness and did everything for her he could, because he did not believe in what she had always said:  Everyone must look out for himself.” I like Inger Margrete Rasmussen’s translation of the tales, but the best one still in print is the Dover paperback, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, translated by George Webbe Dasent.  The Dover edition includes many of the wonderful illustrations that were created by such well known Norwegian artists as Theodor Kittelsen, Otto Sinding, Per Krohg, Erik Werenskiold, and Dagfin Werenskiold. 

Why the cat was so important

Man of No Dreams

This is a song I wrote back in the 1960s. It incorporates a lot of story motifs that I recalled from my favorite fairytale collection, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon. George Webbe Dasent’s 1859 English translation of this Norwegian collection is most famous, but my childhood favorite was one my grandmother had on her bookshelf. The images here are from that book, accompanied by the song, “Man of No Dreams.”