Folktale is as ancient and universal as human beings. Almost everybody has grown up listening folktales from their mothers, grandmothers, or reading them in their childhood. At that time, these were to them some sorts of entertainment. In fact, the need for a form of entertainment set apart from everyday life, to get release from the overpowering monotony and vagaries of daily life, is as old as mankind and folktales perform this need to quite a great extent. Folktales, with their marvellous characters with magical actions and wonderful attributes, transport the listener or the reader to a dream world, where animals talk like human beings, fairies sing and dance, poor man defeats the demon, rescues the princess and marries her, and ascends the throne in return. In short, it is the dream world, where the listener, the teller, or the reader finds all his dreams fulfilled. Famous Finnish Folklorist Satu Apo in her The Narrative World of Finnish Fairy Tales (Helsinki, 1995), stresses upon the importance of folktale in everyday life as a source of entertainment as well as a stress healer, and also performing many other different functions. She says," The need for a form of entertainment set apart from everyday life is no doubt as old as human culture in general, likewise, the ability to invent stories, to create fiction, to unleash the imagination by means of speech, picture or writing. Inventing, performing and listening to imaginary tales have many functions: to provide aesthetic experiences, joy at the commanding and varying of form, to express and concretize the problems and conflicts arising in culture and to suggest imaginary solutions; to crystallize the prevailing concepts of the fundamental phenomena of life and to pass them on to future generations; to break the dally monotony and to transport the narrators and listeners to a different reality, a world of narrative.
Every nation of every state has its distinctive folktales (Folklore), as it has its distinctive language. The way a language is the self-expression and autobiography of a nation's national life from the very beginning, the old folktales are also in the same way, the self-expression and autobiography of the nation from ancient times. The way, the footprints of all the people, educated or uneducated, civilized or uncivilized, learned or foolish, remain intact in the language of the nation, the customs and traditions, rites and rituals, thoughts and imaginations, etc. remain intact in the folktales of the nation. That is why folklore is as important as Philology and Mythology in order to comprehend the unwritten history of the national life of the people.
The theoretical study of folktales has confirmed the opinions of great linguists like the German scholar Bopp that, Teutons, Celts and the Aryan Hindus etc. were originally of the same root and they are the members of the same genealogical family who lived in central Asia.
Until recently, people did not understand the real value of the tales and thought them to be childish and useless. The German scholars removed this misconception for the first time. The real value of the tales was estimated for the first time in Germany and they were studied in scientific method. The famous 'Collection of Popular Songs' by Herder, published during 1778-79 was the pioneering attempt in this line. The pains taken by the Grimm brothers from 1811 to 1835 is the culmination of this attempt. The tales were collected from the mouths of the old weaver women of Germany and were published. Realistically speaking, it was the labour of the German scholars who exposed before the whole world that the history of one folktale of a nation and the history of one word of a language is more valuable than the history of a big battle.
There are two types of tales. One is composed mainly to give moral lessons, such as the Panchatantra, Hitopadesha, the tales of La Fontane, etc. The other type is for entertainment to people, particularly the young ones, composed by letting the reins of one's imagination loose to gallop away. Whatever may be the purpose of composing these tales in the beginning, now the scholars have extracted the elixir/nectar of ancient history of mankind from them and have enriched storehouse of knowledge. I don't want to prolong this brief preface by discussing them. Th readers will find that some the tales included in this book are similar to tales found in different parts of India, particularly in respect of the main themes of the tales prevalent in Bengal. If they think on the basis of these similarities that these tales are composed under the influence of foreign tales, they are mistaken. There are many reasons for tales of one place being similar with that of another place; the first reason is that the tales are so old that they were composed when the people of Aryan root lived together. In due course of time, when they were separated and scattered in various parts of Europe and Asia, the tales also underwent changes just as the nature and appearances of the people did. But then, the basic features of the tales have remained unchanged and will remain so. That is why the inherent features of many of the tales popular among the Indo-Europeans are basically the same though apparently, they are different in many respects. Therefore, the readers of the tales of Panchatantra and Hitopadesha do not find it unfamiliar when they read the tales of La Fontane. As such, the same tales are told to the children by the nannies in Germany, Norway and France as that of the tales told by the grannies in India with the only difference of their ornamentation, texture and language.
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