## Oral folk tales and children's literature  
In terms of publishing, from the very first written records of oral literature in Europe, a tendency to treat oral folk tales as children's literature can be observed: collections tend to comprise a small number of folk tales with a plot and vocabulary adapted to a child audience, and featuring illustrations. Thus, alongside scholarly editions, which almost always include critical paratexts and a reasonable number of folk tales, we have books for school-age children,  
many of them single-narrative volumes. One of the many examples is the book Histórias que o povo conta, written for children by Ricardo Azevedo, in which we find a written version of the aforementioned Beija-flor (hummingbird) folk tale, taken from the oral tradition (Azevedo, 2002, pp. 32-38). In this context, the author has greater freedom in setting down the oral story in writing than that available to researchers of oral or ethnopoetic literature. The writer appropriates the literature of oral tradition, of collective authorship, and assumes individual authorship of the story in written form, just as the storytellers have ownership rights to their rendition of the tale in oral form. This trend has been increasing in Brazil in recent years, with the growth in the production of children's books edited from oral narratives of African origin (diversified), especially in the wake of Law 10.639 of 2003 which, as mentioned earlier, makes the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture compulsory in schools. From the very outset, it is clear that Brazilian oral literature has been strongly marked, through contact, by the African contribution, especially that of Bantu oral tradition, and we can conclude that Brazilian children's literature written in the twenty-first century incorporates African narratives of diverse origins through a process in which Brazilian writers recreate oral stories that were written by European researchers and writers on the basis of collections made in Africa.