Between Tradition and Transformation: ATU Classification and Lüthian Formal Analysis of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s The Girl from the Sea and Other Stories

Abstract Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is among the most celebrated of Portuguese poets, yet the eight literary fairy tales gathered in English as The Girl from the Sea and Other Stories (2020), first published separately in Portuguese from 1958 onwards, have rarely been read for their form. This essay reads the collection, together with the separately published Saga , as Kunstmärchen, fairy tales composed by a named author who deliberately reworks an inherited tradition. Bringing two frameworks to bear, the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) index of international tale types and Max Lüthi’s account of the formal characteristics of the European fairy tale, we argue that Andresen’s tales are at once deeply traditional and quietly transformative. Read by type, several of the tale-type attributions the collection might seem to invite prove untenable on close reading and are revised here; read by form, the tales display a consistent fairy-tale poetics whose abstract style is realised through Andresen’s distinctive language of stone, glass and metal. The supernatural woman of “The Girl from the Sea,” set beside Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (1837) and Oscar Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul” (1891), shows what is at stake in such transformation. Reading the built fairy tale in this way, we suggest, has consequences for how the genre is taught.