What follows is a rumination upon the cumulative tale, its characteristics, its appeal and its relation to the fairy tale. As with the latter, cumulative tales span ancient to modern times and are found in virtually all cultures. No doubt their popularity owes much to the manner in which they invite audience participation; that invitation is one of a playful mnemonic challenge posed to both the tale-teller andhis or her audience. As a formula narrative, the cumulative tale or song follows a traditional, readily discernible pattern of repetition, of accumulating characters, objects, actions, that are repeated with each new addition of character, object or action; this repetition may follow a linear chronology from the first introduced to the last, or it may backtrack from the most recent to the first. Rather like a constructed tower of cards, the tale extends itself until it reaches the inevitable collapse - at its best, a resounding memory-racking crescendo of accumulations, which then abruptly stops. With the cumulative tale, the repetitive pattern takes precedence over the plot or, some might say, is the plot. Essentially, the tale exists to add to or multiply itself via those accumulations.

Probably most of us are acquainted with a cumulative song or two, such as the widely distributed ‘The Twelve Apostles’, performance-rich ‘Old Mac-Donald Had a Farm’, and seasonable if rather irksome ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. In The Folktale Stith Thompson (1977= 230-3) briefly discusses ‘the principal cumulative tales’, which he indicates as including ‘The Death of the Cock’, ‘The Death of the Hen, ‘The Fleeing Pancake’ or ‘The Gingerbread Man’, ‘The Fat Cat’, ‘The Fat Troll’ or ‘The Fat Wolf’, ‘The Goat Who Would Not Go Home’, ‘Stronger and Strongest’ (a literary narrative), ‘The Cock's Whiskers’, ‘How the Mouse Regained Its Tail’, ‘Pif Pof Poltrie’ and ‘The Horseshoe Nail’. As Thompson notes, this list is by no means complete. Indeed this writer would at least like to add the German ‘The Louse and the Flea’, the Italian ‘The Cock and the Mouse’, the Irish ‘Munachar and Manachar’, the West African ‘Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears’ and the Ashanti ‘Talk’.

The cumulative tale is also known as a chain tale, one based upon ‘a characteristic series of numbers, objects, characters, days of the week, events, etc., in specific relation’ (Leach and Fried 1984: 207).