Literature refers to overarching themes in relation to folktales and that the telling of them is often community based if not nationwide however, I'm interested to hear if individual interpretation of the stories told can also come in to play rather than just collective understandings.
In my opinion, a fairy tale, like any other text, is interpreted by each reader in his own way. When reading a fairy tale, the world of the author and the world of the interpreter collide. An example of the fact that the text of a fairy tale can be interpreted by the reader is the fact that on the basis of old fairy tales as primary texts, new interpretations, new versions of fairy tales as secondary texts are created.
Dear Marie,
The short answer is: why not? But this raises a second question: why might it be problematic to ask the question in the first place? This has a lot to do with certain views stemming from Romanticism on the relation between folk tale and the collective. These views are closely related to nation building and cultural nationalism. In such views folk tales are reflections of a nation's imaginary or its collective past. There is a tendency to believe that tales emerged from the collective and have no authorship. They crossed the line from the oral to the written as a result of the work of collectors who often feared that they might become extinct: viz. Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeat's work collecting stories in the Irish countryside and how this was all of a piece with the Celtic Revival and the rise of Irish (cultural) nationalism (for more details see Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage, 1996)
See also Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 2006.
The work of collecting fairy tale was often done by grammarians and philologists who were interested in tracing the origins of the national language: the Brothers Grimm for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm.
The problem is that we have a tendency to believe that these versions are set in stone and not possible versions of tales: compare the French version of Little Red Riding Hood (Perrault) for example.
In a more general sense we should be wary of how the written skews our view anyway: For more on this see Ong, Walter Jackson. Orality and Literacy : The Technologizing of the Word. Repr. ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
Another stand of inquiry is the work done on Russian folk tales by Vladimir Propp (The Morphology of the Folk Tale)
https://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/Propp.htm
A quick perusal of the various "functions" identified by Propp in Russian folktales shows us that these functions can be found in tales from other cultures and even in Harry Potter and modern fantasy in general.
This brings me to the work of Richard Bauman in performance studies. In his work you will see how epic story tellers in the Balkans tailor the stories they tell to the audience present. These storytellers bring in new elements and weave them together with older strands of a story which results in constant renewal and the maintenance of tradition at the same time. This gives us a more realistic view of the state of affairs and moves us away from narrow gauge purist thinking on originals and true versions of tales. Bauman has a huge body of work but you could start with this: Bauman, R. (2013). Discovery and Dialogue in Ethnopoetics. Journal of Folklore Research, 50(1-3), 175-190. doi:10.2979/jfolkrese.50.1-3.175 Furthermore, an epic is hardly ever told in full (but the reference escapes me here)
To conclude (though there is an awful lot more to be said on this),
Individual interpretations and collective understandings are equally valid points of departure and also subject to constant flux and shift, viz politically correct bedtime stories (originally meant as as satire but now taken extremely seriously by some)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_Correct_Bedtime_Stories
Good luck with your work,
Peter
Fairy tales function as myths, which is to say that each time they are retold they are a little different and they usually have lessons for us to learn.
In such a source "text" different people are likely to have different interpretations, or to focus on different elements of the story as they "make meaning" from it.
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