One of the problems I see with modern portrayals of old folk tales is that there is a tendency of turning into neat "packages" - one single, "definite" version of a story with a clear beginning and end for easy consumption of an audience that will not know the context of the original storytellers. The Brothers Grimm themselves were part of this trend, with their repeated "cleaning" of their fairy tales collection, but many of their successors hardly did better.

Real folk tales and real folklore is considerably messier, with countless variants and narratives mutating and merging into each other. A good example is the text I am currently translating, featuring a particular crumbling well in the #Aargau canton of #Switzerland . This well has an entire myth-cycle associated it, with variant tales in neighboring villages. These range from the Devil lurking down there as a treasure guardian, to the Wild Hunt, to a vast sunken Roman city. These tales are messy and confusing, but that's what makes them so fascinating to me.

In modern media and storytelling, the closest we come to this is #fanfiction . Published media - whether books, movies, or television/streaming series - have their own "canon" events and stories, and fans obsessing over canon. But fanfiction writers make all of this their own, and weave their own contradictory stories with their own lore out of this base - just like the oral folk storytellers of old.