Tales of magic, tales in print

On the genealogy of fairy tales and the Brothers Grimm

Willem De Blecourt

• Editore: Manchester University Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526162823
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: European Literary Criticism

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century folklorists, and the general public in their wake, have assumed the orality of fairy tales. Only lately have more and more specialists been arguing in favour of at least an interdependence between oral and printed distribution of stories. This book takes an extreme position in that debate: as far as Tales of magic is concerned, the initial transmission proceded exclusively through prints. From a historical perspective, this is the only viable approach; the opposite assumption of a vast unrecorded and thus inaccessible reservoir of oral stories, presents a horror vacui. Only in the course of the nineteenth century, when folklorists started collecting in the field and asked their informants for fairy tales, was this particular genre incorporated into a then feeble oral tradition. Even then story tellers regularly reverted to printed texts. Every recorded fairy tale can be shown to be dependent on previous publications, or to be a new composition, constructed on the basis of fragments of stories already in existence.Tales of magic, tales in print traces the textual history of a number of fairy tale clusters, linking the findings of literary historians on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to the material collected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century field workers. While it places fairy tales as a genre firmly in a European context, it also follows particular stories in their dispersion over the rest of the world.

1

The devil in the detail

Hairs and feathers

A rich man finds a box floating in a stream. It contains a little child and, since the man does not like children, he puts him in a canoe, whereupon the child is found by a miller and raised at the mill. Years later the rich man passes by the mill. He recognizes the youth and sends him to his wife with a letter, containing the instruction to kill the bearer immediately. On his way the boy passes through a forest where he meets an old man, who turns the letter over three times. It now reads: marry this man to our daughter! That is done. When the rich man finds out about it, he thinks up an additional condition to get rid of the boy: he has to fetch the three feathers of the Phoenix Bird. Luckily, the boy comes upon three doves.

One dove said: whoever wants to go to the Phoenix Bird, has to go the whole day, then in the evening he will arrive at a gate, which is locked. The other dove said: underneath that tree lies a golden key, which fits the gate; behind the gate two men were sitting, the first said: he who looks for the Phoenix Bird, has to go a long way over a high mountain, and then he will finally arrive at the castle.

In this castle lives a little white woman, who warns the boy that the Phoenix will eat him. She hides him under the table. The Bird comes home, smells human flesh and goes to sleep. The woman pulls out one feather, and then two more and gives them to the boy so that he can go and marry the rich man’s daughter.

The story summarized was published at the end of 1812 in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm and has remained part of the collection as KHM 29.¹ It had been told to them earlier that year by Marie, one of the Hassenpflug sisters, and it rattled a little. Why would the hero have to marry the same girl twice? Why would the rich man first save the child and then put him back into the stream? Why would the antagonist be a Phoenix and behave like a giant? In another version of the same tale, usually attributed to Marie’s younger sister Amalie Hassenpflug,² the hero is sent for the three hairs of the devil. The Grimms found this the more original, since they could compare it with a passage from the medieval Gesta Danorum (The History of the Danes) by Saxo Grammaticus, where a hair is taken from a giant as a souvenir. This corroborated their opinion that ancient notions, derived from mythology, were involved in fairy tales.³ Ever since folklorists have called stories that resembled this one after the version with the devil.

The story of the quest for the devil’s hairs, however, is an early nineteenth-century invention; there is no previous trace of it and it is only speculation that it ever existed in this form at some point during the Middle Ages, the period where fairy tales are generally situated. Nevertheless, according to Lutz Röhrich in his Folktales and Reality – originally his Habilitation and first published in German in 1956 – it was no coincidence that in KHM 29 a boy had to pull hairs from the devil’s beard, ‘however jokingly it may sound’. The passage complied to both the concept of someone’s power residing in their hair and to the principle of pars pro toto magic where a few hairs could replace a whole scalp. The motif itself was therefore fairly ancient.⁴ The removal of feathers from a monstrous bird did not enter consideration. Röhrich primarily saw the background of fairy tales as a kind of belief, a magical worldview. Similar rules of magic were to be found in, for instance, stories with resurrection themes, which in hunter societies had ritual equivalents. But in some fairy tales it concerned relics, he wrote almost as an afterthought.⁵ On the one hand Röhrich’s book depicts fairy tales as the products of the Enlightenment and their appearance as springing from fantasy; on the other it allows for parallels between stories, worldview and even practice (though not necessarily of the people who told the tales). Since the parallels are abundantly illustrated while the idea of relics which were worked into later stories remains at the stage of general remarks, the argument is off balance and the overall impression the book provides is of ancient fairy tales roots. The book’s ambiguity places it in the transitional state of 1950s German folklore studies,⁶ and its translation in the early 1990s is thus slightly mistimed (even with two additional chapters since the second edition), if not misplaced.⁷

In his later work Röhrich veered towards the relics point of view. Thus, he wrote in 1989, when some fairy tales contain motifs which were formerly or elsewhere part of living belief, this does not imply that these tales were as old or widespread as these beliefs. And, he added, generalizations were impossible; the relationship between oral and written forms of transmission was too complex to generally decide for one or the other.⁸ This is the conciliatory view, presently adhered to by most fairy tale scholars for whom the relation between the written and the oral is one of ‘continuous interdependence’.⁹ In its commonness this is highly dependend on how fairy tales are categorized and defined. It also does not immediately clarify what this denotes for the hairs versus feathers issue, to be collected from some kind of monster. Röhrich also wrote a later essay on the related story of the Healing Fruits (ATU 610) where the hero has to perform a similar task: here it unequivocally concerns feathers of a bird, in the first case called Greif (griffin). In this context he considered it an anthromorphized bird – in a Swiss variant a bandit is named ‘Vogel Strauss’ (i.e. ostrich) – and remarked that it pointed to a late development and thus to a relatively young fairy tale.¹⁰ By implication the devil remained older.¹¹ If the issue is to be clarified, then the focus of the argument has to be adjusted to include the tellers and their possible sources.

Marie Hassenpflug may have been partly inspired by the ‘Histoire de Kébal’ in the Bibliothèque universelle des romans of 1777. Here the boy is the extramarital son of the merchant by a slave and it is the merchant’s wife who wants to get rid of him, both of which sound much more sensible than in the Hassenpflug rendering. When the merchant finds the boy again, however, he sends him to his wife to do with him as she pleases. Now the boy replaces the letter himself. In a 2005 article Heinz Rölleke has suggested that, since the Kébal story was published several times in French, the Hassenpflugs would have known about it because of their Huguenot ancestry, thus presuming an oral tradition. Whereas Jacob Grimm was familiar with the published French version – he summarized it – the girls, apparently, were not.¹² In an earlier article on the same stories Rölleke had explicitly warned that, even if there was a French book lurking in the background, it does not follow that it had been read. In his view the personal contributions by the young female informants of the Grimms are negligible; they had transmitted stories which they had heard from their mother or grandmother and there their role ended.¹³ Apart from the difficulty of presuming a tale with a male hero to remain unaltered when transmitted by women (for they would have stressed the female elements), the question arises: Why would Marie Hassenpflug have been incapable of reading the French text? Or why could she not have remembered a story once read to her? After all, she retold several other stories from the same publication (see Chapter 3) and, as Rölleke remarks, the story in the KHM contains passages which are equivalent to the French text and are not in Jacob’s excerpt. She is also likely to have added the quest for the feathers to her story.

In the version of ‘Male’ telling of the love between a princess and a woodcutter, the latter has to obtain not only the devil’s hairs but also answers to questions such as ‘why a princess cannot be cured, why a deep well is without water and a fig tree without fruits and why a ferryman is not being relieved from his duty’. As this is a very well-told story, with crisp dialogue between the devil and his wife and with the conclusive morale ‘who does not fear the devil can pull out his hairs and win over the whole world’,¹⁴ it is doubtful whether the then twelve-year-old Amalie Hassenpflug was the author responsible. Wilhelm Grimm found her stories ‘adequate’ (passabel) but also bordering on the cliché.¹⁵ The brothers were also acquainted with another ‘Male’: Amalie Henschel, who was part of the group of people who provided them with stories – she will have been seventeen or eighteen at the time.¹⁶ In all likelihood ‘Male’, like Marie, had listened to it or read it herself somewhere – if she had merely conveyed a family tradition, she would have made more mistakes, no matter the remedial editing by Wilhelm Grimm. In comparison to Marie’s story, she had left out the hero’s birth and added a couple of answers the devil needed to part with, together with his hairs.

About half a year after the publication of the first volume of the KHM, during the summer of 1813, the Grimms noted down a third variant of the tale, from Zwehrn and therefore related to them by Dorothea Viehmann. It contained a devil and hairs, too, although how they entered this last text is harder to judge because it was published only in the revised KHM volume of 1819 and heavily edited by Wilhelm Grimm, who now used several versions of the same story to reach the most satisfying reconstruction (cf. Chapter 5). By then all the previously disparate elements were moulded together: the abandoned child, the letter, the quest and the tokens of its accomplishment.¹⁷ Previous scholarship has discussed the two main constitutive parts of the story: the so-called ‘Urias letter’ and the questions asked of a higher, usually monstrous being.¹⁸ By focusing on a seemingly insignificant detail instead, I will juxtapose notions of an old and oral tradition, symbolized by the hairs, with a written and printed distribution, represented by the feathers.

Fairy tales

When fairy tales are the subject of historical research, they need to be defined historically. A hodiecentric historiography in which a present description of a fairy tale is projected into the past is to be avoided as much as possible, although it may, on occasion, reveal certain contrasts or provide some clarifying distance. From the relativistic perspective of the cultural historian fairy tales were simply what people thought them to be at the time. Separately fairies and tales about them have a respectable history, together they have not: the English compound fairy tale gained currency only in the middle of the eighteenth century, when it represented a translation of the French conte de fée.¹⁹ The French term, in its turn, acquired a specifi c meaning in the late seventeenth century, when a number of aristocrats started to write contes des fées. According to the German dictionary initiated by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, a Märchen, which is now considered as the German equivalent of a fairy tale, was originally, in the most common sense of the word, a mere rumour, not necessarily believabl...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• The magic of the printed word: a prologue
• 1 The devil in the detail
• 2 A quest for rejuvenation
• 3 The girl in the garden
• 4 Magic and metamorphosis
• 5 The substitute storyteller
• 6 Journeys to the other world
• 7 The vanishing godmother
• Epilogue: towards a theory of talecraft
• A very select bibliography
• Tale type index
• References to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen
• Index