FROM THE ENCHANTED FOREST TO THE BATTLEFIELD: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FAIRY-TALE AND WAR NARRATIVES

Abstract

This article aims to identify deep structural, functional, and cognitive parallels between fairy-tale and war narratives, and to substantiate the central hypothesis of the study: the war narrative is not the antithesis of the fairy tale but rather its transformation – the same deep narrative schemas operating in a fundamentally different ethical, emotional, and ontological environment. Methods. The study employs a combination of comparative, structural-semiotic, and functional methods, narrative analysis, and fieldwork methodology (interviews with servicemembers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine conducted in 2024). The empirical base comprises Ukrainian fairy tale texts from the anthology From a Living Source (1990), war narratives from the collection Strong in Spirit: Stories of Sappers of the Russian-Ukrainian War (2025), and digital folklore samples. Results. The comparative analysis establishes that fairy-tale and war narratives share common cognitive and symbolic mechanisms: structuring chaos through binary oppositions, typifying experience through archetypal figures, and constructing networks of meaning. At the same time, significant differences in their realization are identified: the fairy tale tends toward closure and the restoration of equilibrium, while the war narrative registers rupture, fragmentation, and the fundamental incompleteness of experience. Key figures undergo transformation: the hero loses heroic distance and acquires the traits of a witness-hero; the enemy exceeds unambiguous demonization; the miraculous yields to contingency without disappearing as a cultural need. Special attention is given to the internet meme as a new form of micronarrative that inherits the fairy tale’s functions – to explain, to order, and to unite – realizing them in an ironic, compressed, and visually-verbal format. Conclusions. Fairy tales and war narratives represent different states of a single narrative matrix rather than fundamentally distinct cultural systems. The war narrative does not destroy the fairy-tale model but tests it at the limits of the possible: archetypal structures are transformed but do not disappear. This demonstrates that the fairy tale is not merely a genre of the past but a fundamental form of human cognition that retains its efficacy even when the world ceases to conform to its laws. Contemporary digital micronarratives (memes) continue the fairy-tale tradition under new media conditions, confirming the adaptability of folkloric mechanisms in extreme sociocultural circumstances.