Tales of magic, tales in print: On the genealogy of fairy tales and the Brothers Grimm 9781526129703

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
The magic of the printed word: a prologue
The devil in the detail
A quest for rejuvenation
The girl in the garden
Magic and metamorphosis
The substitute storyteller
Journeys to the other world
The vanishing godmother
Epilogue: towards a theory of talecraft
A very select bibliography
Tale type index
References to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen
Index

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ales of magic, tales in print

T

On the genealogy of fairy tales and the Brothers Grimm

Willem de Blécourt

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Tales of Magic, tales in print

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Tales of Magic, tales in print ON THE GENEALOGY OF FAIRY TALES AND THE BROTHERS GRIMM Willem de Blécourt

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester

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Copyright © Willem de Blécourt 2012 The right of Willem de Blécourt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN

978 0 7190 83792 hardback

First published 2012 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Acknowledgements — vi Abbreviations — ix

The magic of the printed word: a prologue

1

1 The devil in the detail

23

2 A quest for rejuvenation

51

3 The girl in the garden

80

4 Magic and metamorphosis

108

5 The substitute storyteller

136

6 Journeys to the other world

164

7 The vanishing godmother

192

Epilogue: towards a theory of talecraft

219

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A very select bibliography — 231 Tale type index — 235 References to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen — 237 Index — 239

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Acknowledgements

Some people express such a strong conviction on the fundamental orality of fairy tales that it can best be called a ‘belief’. As long as they were not written down, oral narratives cannot be assumed not to have existed, so it is argued. Or in a slightly more sophisticated manner: ‘the absence of evidence does not signal the evidence of absence’. Thus it should be assumed that they circulated by word of mouth, especially among illiterate people. This is a very strange argument for several reasons. It turns an assumption into a certainty and leaves no room for hesitation or doubt. It also displays a disturbing ignorance of European history in general and the history of fairy tales and fairy tale theory in particular. Yet the believers in orality are to be found not just among the general lay public or among female writers of fiction, they also occupy positions within academe and publishing. Rather than keeping an open mind to different opinions, some even produce negative reports about proposals to publish a new study which favours the literary provenance of fairy tales. They do not seem to be able to engage seriously with their content and must find it rather threatening (I think). This is (Kuhnian) ‘normal science’ in full operation: the theoretical underpinnings support the empiral findings and vice versa, in an everlasting loop. As a result, the publication of this book (like others which break through the paradigm) encountered many obstacles and in the process was seriously delayed. Luckily in the end a number of readers supported my project, or were at least willing to enter the debate; some even reconsidered their own opinions. I salute their courage! But first of all I need to express the profound debt I owe to my own teachers at the University of Amsterdam who almost forty years ago guided me on the narrow path of folklore research: Bob Scholte, the critical anthropologist who introduced me to the work of Alan Dundes (always fun, even if you disagree with psychoanalysis), Dell Hymes’s ethnography of speaking and Jojada Verrips, who showed that it was possible as well as fruitful for anthropologists to study their own society and put me into touch with publicist

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

vii

Tjaard de Haan. Despite an impressive Ph.D. thesis on the influence ‘high culture’ asserted on popular media, including the literary influences on fairy tales, the latter never secured an academic position. After the Second World War, folklore had become a suspect academic field in the Netherlands, which engendered a critical approach by itself. With De Haan, I collaborated on my first volumes of Dutch folk tales. In the early 1980s the only folklorist at a Dutch university was Jurjen van de Kooi in Groningen, whose monumental work on Frisian folk tales and fairy tales has received very little attention among Anglo-Saxon scholars. He, too, emphasized the literary influences on fairy tales; he also supervised my work on nightmares. In the Netherlands, however, there have never been enough fairy tale texts collected to make further serious research worthwhile. The last traditional story tellers had been interviewed and the two most prolific Frisian narrators in the 1970s had only a single collector as their audience and presented him with stories which were largely unknown to anyone else. The situation in Flanders was quite different: in the late nineteenth century the Catholic clergy had a huge impact on the dissemination and writing down of fairy tales. The two main unpublished collections there were compiled by school teachers who had enlisted their pupils and colleagues to support their undertaking. Given folklorists’ strong sense of territory, plus the scarcity of fairy tale texts in the Dutch language, my own (historical anthropological) work focused on genuine oral traditions, among them witchcraft legends. Fairy stories and tales of magic in particular started to come my way only after I had expanded my research boundaries from the Netherlands to the whole of Europe. The present project has greatly profited from extensive discussions with a number of colleagues, first of all Sue Bottigheimer, whose thinking on fairy tales developed in parallel to my own. When we do not meet in person in outlandish places, she always remains just an email away. Theo Meder at the Amsterdam Meertens Institute, which provided me with an academic affiliation, conducted heated debates with me until our collaboration on Verhalen van stad en streek (Amsterdam 2010), the Dutch equivalent of Lore of the Land, resulted in our mutual appreciation. In Göttingen the members of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, especially Christine Showajei Kawan, Hans-Jörg Uther, Doris Boden and Ulrich Marzolph provided me with access to their work, files and copy machine, as well as willing ears and knowledgeable mouths, while Axel Füllgrabe kindly took care of logistics. German readers may find concise versions of Chapters 2 and 4 in the pages of the Enzyklopädie (as well as a summary of werewolf history). Andreas Johns put me on the track of the late eighteenth-century Russian fairy tale publications and Maria Baker very helpfully summarized some I could recognize only by their type number. Close friends and colleagues Owen Davies, Hannie Hoekstra, Eva Labouvie, Machteld Löwensteyn, Caroline Oates, Christa

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Tuczay, Jojada Verrips and Frits van der Waa have given their time, attention and thoughts. During one of her visits to our country home Krisztina Roberts instantly translated a Hungarian text. Cornelie Usborne, my historian wife, lived through this protracted project and (now and then) managed to divert my attention to the pressures and pleasures of daily existence. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared in Dutch, of Chapter 4 in German, and my study on Hansel and Gretel has found its way into Chapter 3.1 The late Celtic scholar Alan Bruford once remarked: ‘Most of my arguments will depend on the assumption that a given story has spread to folk tradition from a literary original and it will never be possible to prove this finally against an opponent who is emotionally convinced that the process must have been the reverse’.2 The same applies to this study. Only in a slightly more optimistic mood I hope this book will please the converted and encourage at least some of the ‘oralists’ to consider the case for the literary roots of tales of magic. Notes 1 ‘“De gouden vogel”, “Het levenswater” en de Walewein. Over de sprookjestheorie van Maartje Draak’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse taal en letterkunde, 124 (2008), 259–277; ‘Der Zauberer und sein Schüler – Die Erzählung und ihr historischer Ursprung’, in: Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Christa Tuczay (eds), Faszination des Okkulten. Diskurse zum übersinnlichen (Tübingen 2008), 43–72; ‘On the Origin of Hänsel und Gretel: An Excercise in the History of Fairy Tales’, Fabula 49 (2008), 30–46. 2 Alan Bruford, Gaelic Folktales and Medieval Romances (Dublin 1969), 4.

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Abbreviations

ANE ATU EM EM KHM

Marzolph & Van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Type number according to: Uther, The Types of International Folktales. Enzyklopädie des Märchens, 15 volumes (Berlin 1977–2015). Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Göttingen. Number according to Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1857).

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The magic of the printed word: a prologue

One of the seeds that germinated into this book was planted at the end of the 1980s. After finishing my research on five hundred years of witchcraft accusations in a small province of the Netherlands, I finally found the time to read Manfred Grätz’s thesis, Das Märchen in der deutschen Aufklärung (The Fairy Tale in the German Enlightenment), about the reception of the printed French fairy tales in eighteenth-century Germany and the subsequent development of a German corpus of similarly printed stories from which, by the early nineteenth century, the fairies were dropped. All I took from Grätz’s book then was his remark: ‘Only the witch, in which one does not believe any more, becomes a fairy-tale witch; only children can still be frightened by it.’1 This implied a relatively harmless witch, different from the witches of earlier times, devastating children and crops; the fairy tale witch, living secluded in the woods, had always been a literary figure, in contrast to the witch of everyday life, who usually lived in the neighbourhood of her accusers. Grätz’s observation also fitted the argument of a class-related disappearance of ‘thinking and acting in terms of witchcraft’, or, in short, the witchcraft discourse. Fairy tales were communicated mainly in bourgeois households where religion was interwoven with romanticism. If some people still accused others of witchcraft, it happened in society’s lower and orthodox Christian circles. Although Grätz’s remark was applicable to the history of the witchcraft discourse, I did not realize its full implications then. His book also caused a nagging feeling. Grätz maintained that in the eighteenth century the concept of Märchen was not as refined as it later came to be, and that in as far as there was an oral tradition it mainly concerned other genres such as legends and anecdotes. That coincided with my findings: The word Märchen, or little mär, is similar to mare, an old Dutch word for rumour (and not for fairy tales), which occurred frequently in the witchcraft sources. My uneasiness was caused by something else. While both Grätz’s observations and the supporting empirical basis were very convincing – they still are on rereading, and not just because of the several links with my own research – he left it to

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TALES OF MAGIC, TALES IN PRINT

other researchers to connect his thesis to the collecting and editing activities of the nineteenth-century folklorists, or indeed the Brothers Grimm.2 His research was already huge and his choice can only be respected, but at the same time even some tentative hints about the written character of the later tales would have bolstered his own argument.3 For if the orality of fairy tales is questioned, it is necessary to engage with the material from the nineteenth century, the first period when the stories were purposely collected from oral sources. Some years later, a number of lines from early modern storytelling into the nineteenth century were drawn by Rudolf Schenda in his book Von Mund zu Ohr (From Mouth to Ear), in which he put forward the thesis that only a very small part of nineteenth-century European oral tradition consisted of fairy tales and that these were disseminated by an enormous flood of printed material.4 Since he did not, however, pay much attention to individual tales, his book failed to dispel completely the sense of lack that had settled itself in my mind. According to some fairy tale theorists, ‘lack’ initiates a fairy tale quest,5 and I was therefore stuck with the question: How did the eighteenth-century printed tale turn first into the told and then printed tale of the nineteenth? Tales of Magic, Tales in Print aims to suggest a possible and plausible answer and in doing so hopes to provide a new view on the history of fairy tales. As it will be argued that fairy tales are not more than a few centuries old and that they did not constitute a continuous oral tradition, several commonly accepted opinions, including some academic ones will be jolted. Little Red Riding Hood did not exist in the twelfth century;6 her tale was authored only at the end of the seventeenth on the basis of a saying. The older story about a little girl with a red garment who was found in the company of wolves missed not only the grandmother but more significantly the clash between the genders which defined the later tale. Nor did the Golden Bird circulate in late sixteenth-century England;7 the phrase ‘For fear you make the golden bird to weep’ in George Peele’s play The Old Wives Tale refers to a rare enough weeping bird, which may carry its own story. But even if there was such a story, it was certainly not the one which was formulated in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Neither was the plot of the Irish medieval cattle raid ‘borrowed from folklore’;8 the story of the shape-changing magicians may have contributed to what later became a fairy tale, but not the other way around. If some fairy tales, such as the Dragon Slayer, the Magician and His Pupil, the Magical Flight, the Girl without Hands or the Water of Life appear to have a history reaching back into the sixteenth century or into medieval times, the question is whether these predecessors can reasonably be called ‘fairy tales’, without granting them characteristics and meanings they did not previously possess. The popular notions of fairy tale history, current during the last two centuries, ever since Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm composed their Kinder- und Hausmärchen

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A PROLOGUE

3

(henceforth KHM), suffer from one major handicap: they are built on assertions rather than on evidence. In The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, for instance, its editor Jack Zipes writes that ‘wonder tales’ were told among peasants ‘for thousands of years’. From the fourteenth century onwards, a new narrative genre came into being which was based on these wonder tales, the literary fairy tale. ‘Though peasants were marginalized and excluded in the formation of this literary tradition, their material, voices, style and beliefs were incorporated into the new genre.’9 Unfortunately, there is no proof for such a statement. As Ruth Bottigheimer has argued on a number of occasions, theories which presume a century-long oral tradition ‘cannot be documented’.10 The term ‘literary fairy tale’ appears to be a pleonasm and even its birth in the fourteenth century is debatable. When folklorists and other fairy tale experts write about ‘oral traditions that have remained amazingly constant for centuries and across diverse cultures’,11 or ‘an art form quite likely extending back to the dawn of civilization’,12 they do so without substantiation, misinterpret the available material and in a number of cases, frustrate research into the traceable history of the stories. Authors adhering to the orality premiss have considered every ‘literary’ fairy tale – in this context every written or printed trace of a fairy tale – as secondary. In their eyes it concerned merely a derivation of something already in oral circulation, which itself was out of reach, not recorded and beyond history. This approach was not entirely consistent, since every text could be moulded into orality: a printed fairy tale was either close to its oral source or completely deformed or something in between. The yardstick for this assessment was usually the ‘same’ story in its nineteenth-century guise, or the folklorist’s fantasy as to what a story would have looked like. Nineteenth-century texts and twentieth-century opinions thus determined the value of earlier tales. This is history upside-down: presentist and anachronistic. And it is in urgent need of revision. Fairy tales, often placed outside history, need to be historicized again,13 and the work of Schenda and Grätz forms a solid basis for this. During the last decades fairy tale research has made great strides, although most of it is better available in German than in English, as is witnessed by standard works such as the multi-authored Enzyklopädie des Märchens (1977–2015) and Walter Scherf’s two-volume Märchenlexikon (1995). The latest edition of the tale-type index, compiled in Germany under the directorship of Hans-Jörg Uther, also provides an invaluable bibliographic tool. By marking stories with a type number, now indicated with ATU, it brings order into the enormous mass of them, even though this has its downsides, too. For the purpose of this book profuse and grateful use has been made of all these publications, as well as of the numerous studies by Heinz Rölleke into various aspects of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen.14 Next to this recent research, the early-twentieth-century annotations

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to the KHM, by Johannes Bolte and Georg Polívka, are still of immense value as a reference work for nineteenth-century texts. When in the context of Grimm studies but equally applicably to other work on fairy tales, Zipes complains that ‘continental’ research is limited by its empiricism and could profit from ‘more critical reflection’, he has something of a point.15 But interpretations, including his own, are often too hasty, with only a weak base in both history and historiography. Because Tales of Magic, Tales in Print is meant as a synthesis (and critique) of existing scholarship, I have refrained from undertaking new library and archival research into prospective or merely suspected printed versions of particular tales or into possible documentation (letters, diaries) of readings, recitals and other events in which stories were transmitted. In the case of the Grimms there is only an extremely small chance that such sources have not been found and published yet, anyway. To the sceptical reader some of the observations and conclusions in this book may therefore be as unfounded as I deem the prenineteenth-century oral history of fairy tales to be. That may not be remedied: historical sources are never perfect and history cannot be written without at least some tentative reconstruction. The difference is one of degree and of scale. The reconstructions undertaken in some of the following chapters concern actual story telling situations or, to be more precise, story-collecting situations – especially those involving Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The notion of a developing personal story repertoire, at least at the receiving end, plays an important role in this and can frequently be supported by texts and dates. When a printed source for a particular tale, or tale fragment is shown, this is mostly done on the basis of textual comparison; there is, as yet, no other evidence that particular families or individuals possessed a copy of the publications they apparently quoted from. In the case of one particular book, Giambattista Basile’s mid-seventeenth-century Lo cunto de li cunti, also known as the Pentamerone, I have even based my line of reasoning on the probability that some of the families the Grimms were acquainted with and received stories from, such as the Hassenpflugs and Ramuses, did not have it on their shelves. Occasionally it also becomes necessary to surmise an as yet unknown printed link in the chain of tradition. But such few unfounded and always correctable assertions are dwarfed by the vast orality thesis, which is purported to cover a whole historical undercurrent. It rests on the assumption of its existence, trapping its champions in a never-ending loop. Rather than being recorded, orality is written into fairy-tale history; at the end of his book Grätz challenges oralists to provide evidence,16 well aware that in this particular case the evidence consists of its own absence. On the other hand, the alternative of a printed history of fairy tales is merely fragmented now and then.

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A PROLOGUE

5

Yet in the 1980s, in the wake of the second feminst wave, the notion of the orality of fairy tales received another boost. Women and especially lower-class women, it was argued, had been the main carriers of traditional tales and, as literacy was very much an upper-class preserve, genuine female stories naturally went unrecorded until the nineteenth or even the twentieth century. As such they resembled the areas of secret female knowledge that some have considered to be the hidden history of witchcraft. In contrast to witchcraft studies, however, where Brabara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English conducted a similar argument regarding the secret survival of the healer witch (and have since been relegated to an obscure place in witchcraft’s historiography),17 there was no early feminist core text addressing the history of fairy tales.18 The main author here is the English cultural critic Marina Warner, whose book From the Beast to the Blonde of the mid-1990s contains sections on early modern archetypes of female storytellers such as Sybille and Mother Goose.19 But nowhere does she succeed in substantiating convincingly that historical female narrators of oral stories actually told fairy tales, rather than just tales about fairies (or mere rumours) – a crucial distinction.20 ‘The connection of old women’s speech and the consolatory erotic, often fanciful fable appears deeply intertwined in language itself, and with women’s speaking roles, as the etymology of “fairy” illuminates’, Warner states, to conclude on the next page that ‘although the ultimate origin [. . .] of a fairy tales can never really be pinned down [. . .] one salient aspect of the transmission of fairy tales has not been looked at closely: the female character of the storyteller’. Indeed, ‘the predominant pattern reveals older women of a lower status handing on the material to younger people’.21 This is primarily rhetoric rather than sound historical practice: Warner, who is more familiar with French literary sources than with records of oral tales (or with research on female and male speaking), repeatedly resorts to wishful thinking, connects pieces of decontextualized evidence that were never linked in the past and makes mistake after mistake22 – as I will show below, it is also far from impossible to indicate first versions. From the Beast to the Blonde is a work of art: carefully and intelligently composed, beautifully scripted; but it hardly has any historical value. Most lamentably, this seemingly feminist work denies female storytellers their own creative agency: ‘Women writers like Marie-Jeanne l’Héritier and MarieCatherine d’Aulnoy mediated anonymous narratives, the popular vernacular culture they had inherited through fairy tale’, writes Warner,23 as if the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French aristocratic conteuses, as well as the later female informants of the Grimms for that matter, were merely narrative brokers, incapable of managing their own storytelling. In the German case women’s texts may not have been transmitted unaltered, but that should not prevent the student from recognizing female authorship. Since there were

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also male writers, and certainly male compilers, of fairy tales a gendered approach is needed, analysing masculine and feminine themes in connection with the stories’ production and reception.24 Although he thinks Warner ‘admirable’ Jack Zipes does not so much defend the old woman as the ‘illiterate peasant’ as the primal source of fairy tales. In his convoluted view of history ‘most people in the medieval and Renaissance period could not read’, while he judges Latin as ‘the dominant script and print language’,25 which would have made any written to oral transference unfeasible. Not only does this reduce historical change to its starting point – the interdependent developments of the Reformation and the invention of print ensured that more and more people learned to read in their own national languages; it is also irrelevant as a counter-argument to the literary origin thesis, as that would state (as I do in this book) that the main influence of the printed stories on oral retellings took place in the nineteenth century. As Laurence Harf-Lancner argues, the medieval stories in which fairies participated were composed for an aristocratic public that could not understand Latin;26 moreover, prints were preceded by widely circulating handwritten copies and medieval reading skills are possibly underrated. The more interesting question to ask about the premodern period would be why none reported fairy tales in oral circulation. The apparent ‘great deal of evidence’ of ‘wonder tales’ in ‘pre-Christian societies’ hinges on theories about the relation between mythologies and later fairy tales and is rather evasive. Zipes dismisses the ‘positivist approach’ of Ruth Bottigheimer, countering her argument of narrators’ failing memory (which is, in fact, part of Albert Wesselski’s theory, see Chapter 2) with ‘the fact that many cultural groups such as the Somalians cultivated their tales only through oral transmission up through the late twentieth century’.27 Again one may question the relevance of the remark. Even if Somalians, or Von Sydow’s earlier ‘Red Indians’,28 had transmitted tales unaltered through centuries, European fairy tale communication took place in a printed environment. Fairy tale students can scarcely neglect the nineteenth-century oral reception of printed texts,29 but there is no sign that Zipes ever made this the focus of his research. Grätz, whom Zipes depicts as ‘obsessed by his printed documents’, would have lent more credibility to his ‘contentions’ had he ‘discussed the possibility of oral influence on the literary tradition’.30 This amounts to postulating that ‘simple forms of narrative’, including the fairy tale, ‘owe their origins to oral transmission’. Questioning the premiss does not seem an option. Zipes’s careless and contrived verbosity harks back to the 1970s when it was intertwined with a vaguely Marxist belief in an inpenetrable ‘peasant’ history of everyday life. This included a ‘radical’ theoretical projection of a stringent class division on European society, whose great majority of ‘common’ people

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A PROLOGUE

7

‘were illiterate and nurtured their own forms of culture in opposition to that of the ruling classes’.31 When in the nineteenth century folklorists finally put the stories in writing, they also adapted and ‘censored’ them, thus providing Zipes with an excuse to ignore them. Over the last thirty years Zipes has expressed his political motives less and less and moved the oral to literal transition back to the Middle Ages, while adhering to the notion of peasants as the main bearers of fairy tales. The censoring now occurred several hundreds of years earlier.32 This may explain his conflating of the literacy process; it does not imply that his fairy tale theory is any more convincing. Zipes has in common with the 1970s feminists a failure to acknowledge the already existing bias of the constituting elements of their political theories; the orality of fairy tales had always been ideological rather than historical and a genuine critical theory should have deconstructed this instead of building on to it. As it is, Zipes’s pseudo-historical assertions occupy only a very small part of his publications. His findings are much more reliable when dealing with the history of ‘literary’ fairy tales, even though he insists that it would be ‘misleading to talk about a diachronic history of the literary fairy tale with a chain reaction that begins with Straparola, leads to Basile, then the French writers of the 1690s, and culminates in the works of the Brothers Grimm’.33 Nevertheless, this suffices as a rough sketch of fairy tale genealogy, albeit with the necessary correction regarding orality. The stories of the French authors writing around 1700, studied by Warner, belonged to a literary tradition, which also incorporated novels. It had very little in common with any contemporary ‘folk’ culture;34 the courtiers’ material was obtained from published sources and they made ample use of Italian narratives such as Basile’s Pentamerone and a number of stories from Straparola’s earlier Piacevoli notti (Pleasant Nights), the latter available in French translation since the 1560s. They adapted medieval Arthurian romances and widespread prints such as the history of Fortunatus and his sons. When they ran out of occidental material, they turned to the Orient; Antoine Galland bought a manuscript of the Arabian Nights, translated and edited it and had it published by the early eighteenth century. Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’oye was still West-European; most of his stories were reworkings of tales in the Pentamerone. His Griseldis derived from Bocaccio’s Decamerone;35 the story of the Three Wishes was already popular in the Middle Ages and also available in print.36 In her turn Marie-Catherine Jumel, Countess d’Aulnoy leaned heavily on Straparola; at least nine of her stories are in some way or another related to the works of the Venetian author. While her ‘L’oranger et l’abeille’ was in large part based on Basile’s ‘Rosella’, the transformation flight with its sexual connotations, for instance, was a reworking of the fight between the magicians from Straparola’s story ‘Maestro Lattantio’ (see Chapters 3 and 4). Other writers of fairy tales like de Murat and de Mailly

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were likewise influenced by Straparola.37 In the context of the French court circles Mother Goose was merely an image, referring only to an idea of orally transmitted tales by chattering elderly lower-class women. As the subtitle and frontispiece of Perrault’s story book, it was also a comment on his younger female contemporaries.38 In a mixture of subtle satire, criticism and competition, the bourgeois Perrault choose to distance himself from the women writers, by his contrasting presentation and by his concise and moralistic style. By far the oldest of the storytellers, he posed as the cross-dressing wolf, attempting to teach younger girls not to stray from the path. This is not to suggest that people from lower social strata kept silent; rather that what they recounted to each other were not fairy tales. Indeed most of the longer French fairy tales, full of fairies and love affairs, as they had taken written form at the end of the seventeenth century, hardly lent themselves to being reproduced orally. Some of them could, however, be written down and adapted from memory, be recited again, memorized (if only vaguely), recorded, edited and appear in print again. Zipes points out that in the course of the eighteenthcentury French mass production of chapbooks most ‘of the fairy tales were abridged, and the language and style were changed so that they became comprehensible for all readers including the young’.39 Stories could also be fabricated while maintaining the fairy tale spirit, either French or Oriental; the boundaries between an artificial, newly authored tale and a printed one with a literary tradition were extremely thin. This process of permutation was, in all likelihood, what happened and not once but several times: more or less simultaneously with different stories and over the length of time with the same story that, after some manipulation, could easily turn into another story. In this way some stories proliferated while others were popular only for a shorter time or within fewer areas and many disappeared altogether. D’Aulnoy’s Yellow Dwarf is just one example here: still popular in nineteenth-century England,40 it somehow failed to catch the attention of folklorists on the continent and never made it into the type catalogues.41 Apart from print the dissemination of a story is ruled by mere coincidence and individual taste; thus there is no clear pattern explaining its longevity or demise. Traditional elements, for instance, did not automatically guarantee survival, as the fate of de la Force’s ‘L’enchanteur’ with its Arthurian motifs testifies. The process roughly outlined above, however, took place primarily among members of the nobility and the bourgoisie. Only during the nineteenth century did fairy stories percolate down to the lower classes, as a form of ‘gesunkenes Kulturgut’ – and even then it may only have been because a collector asked for it and his informant dimly remembered having heard it at school or having read it at some point.42 The situation where one finds an experienced

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storyteller, in command of a well-rehearsed repertoire of fairy tales, such as for instance in mid-twentieth-century Hungary, is the result of a fairly recent development, considerably aided by the teller’s knowledge of printed stories. In late nineteenth-century Denmark, the prolific researcher Evald Tang Kristensen’s major narrators of fairy tales constituted only 2 per cent of his informants; only sixteen (out of 127) had a repertoire consisting of ten or more fairy tales.43 These repertoires will also have originated from books and journals. The average nineteenth- and twentieth-century European storyteller only knew a handful of genuine fairy tales, or, to use the official name, Tales of Magic.44 There is ample documentation of those stories that were part of earlier oral circuits. Anecdotes, jokes, legends, love stories, bits of sensational news had been around for centuries, although also in print and as song texts.45 These were the kind of stories told during winter evenings and other events; there is no indication that tales of magic were included. Grätz quotes Christian Ludewig Hahnzog, a minister in a village near Magdeburg, who fulminated against the stories told at the spinning evenings containing all kind of superstitious nonsense, but apparently no fairy tales.46 A similar conclusion can be drawn from reports on spinnings in the Osnabrück newspaper between 1766 and 1788, in which no mention is made of stories resembling fairy tales either.47 Oral stories were more or less subject to change, as much as they were part of people’s everyday experience. Fairy tales, by definition, were not. From the Grimms onwards they were seen as ‘more poetical’, as opposed to the ‘more historical’ legends.48 In the words of Stith Thompson, the fairy tale ‘moves in an unreal world without definite locality or definite characters and is filled with the marvellous’.49 Or even more relevant here: ‘a wonderful story, not tied to the conditions of real life’.50 Although there may be a slight circularity in these descriptions – a fairy tale or Märchen has the characteristics of the stories the Grimms classified as such – what counts here is that the brothers did notice the difference between what they found in their beloved Pentamerone and Perrault on the one hand and in the localized German traditions on the other, even though their knowledge of the latter was gained hardly by direct contact with storytellers and foremost by reading. This book is about fairy tales; it is not about folk tales in general and even within the broader category of fairy tales it is limited. Its title Tales of Magic refers to that subcategory that researchers have called the genuine fairy tale. The German term is Zaubermärchen, the French contes merveilleux, and they stand apart from the fable or animal tale, the religious tale, the romantic tale (without magic), formula tales or the whole load of anecdotes. Basically, the stories on which I focus here have been classified within the ATU 300–750 range, from the Dragon Slayer to the Three Wishes. This section of the fairy tale catalogue,

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however, still harbours the occasional oddity: as I will argue in more detail below, stories about death and devils, for example, are either religious tales or anecdotes. Deeply engrained in Christianity, they do not belong among the Tales of Magic. The story about the hunchback who finds himself in a gathering of fairies, or witches (ATU 503), may have some magic in it,51 but is in the first place a so-called migratory legend, a story about everyday figures such as nightmares or werewolves; alternatively, it can be seen as an anecdote. It is no fairy tale, certainly not in the strict sense, and it ended up in the catalogue only because of its inclusion in the KHM (182). To paraphrase the earlier quotation: Witches could appear in fairy tales only when they had ceased to be part of the mentality and actions of the group of people who read and told these tales. The hunchback story, however, still occupied a corner of the witchcraft discourse. Or to argue the other way round: neither the legend of the man who takes a drinking cup from a meeting of witches (or fairies) nor the story about the man who travels ‘through thick and through thin’ to feast with the witches in a wine cellar has ever been listed as a fairy tale, although they may be classified in the same slot as the hunchback story. There is no need to redefine the former two. Everyday magic in one form or another is constantly present in the background of this book, although it manifests itself only sporadically in the actual text. It supplies the counterpoint to the fairy tale magic without always being made explicit. Persons ascribed as witches – for witchcraft was primarily an accusation; a witch’s actions became mainly important within the witchcraft discourse – were not known to keep little boys for future consumption. Like the wood, that had always been a literary motif. The story of Hansel and Gretel is an early nineteenth-century invention by young women who resorted to literary tradition and did not see the world from the perspective of the oral witchcraft discourse. Rapunzel’s witch, too, became a witch only in a German literary setting. Witches in daily life, on the other hand, were deemed to influence the well-being of other living creatures simply by their bodily presence: their look (hence the evil eye), their touch, and even their words (which possessed a physical component). To counter them, victims often called in the help of a magical expert, a cunning man, a fortune teller or a priest. Fairy godmothers were not very efficient. In some areas of Europe fairy lore was still current, expressing similar fears and concerns about failure and bad luck as was done in the witchcraft discourse, only in different social settings.52 The gap between the fairies in fairy tales and those of everyday life was as big as between an aristocrat at the French court and a peasant in a remote Irish village; in essence, it concerns two completely different kind of creatures. Witchcraft as a concept of misfortune was also saturated with sexuality: within European patriarchal society witches represented the opposite of children

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producing women. They destroyed life instead of bringing it forth and nurturing it.53 Everyday shapeshifting had its sexual component as well, if only because it was hard to think about animals without invoking their sexual habits. Werewolves, for instance, were society’s designation of sexually deviant men, those who committed sodomy and other unproductive sex, whether in the form of homosexuality, bestiality or incest.54 Like the woman, the sexually active man was judged by procreative standards; if incest produced offspring, it was unacceptable. In fairy tales such werewolves do not figure: Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf with its human characterictics is only reminiscent of a heterosexual predator. And fairy tales themselves have become asexual – a process well on its way during the eighteenth century.55 Whatever trace of sexuality remained was expurgated by the brothers Grimm; if they did not always succeed, it was because they had failed to recognize the metaphors. A fairy tale like Donkey Skin (ATU 510B) about a king with incestuous cravings for his daughter could be admitted to the fairy-tale canon only because the king’s lust appears not to have been satisfied. However, the animal skin the princess is covered with upon leaving the court indicates that she has been categorized as an animal, and thus defiled by her father.56 The story’s original theme, still recognizable in the Pentamerone story L’orza (II.6) where the heroine becomes a she-bear, concerned her rehumanization and thus addressed genuine social issues,57 whereas the later fairy tale was primarily meant for amusement. For the adult readership and those listening to recitals this may have included sexual references at some stage. But as the stories were adapted for a more juvenile audience, such references were more and more disguised and desexualized, and an educational layer was added, first by Perrault, then by Beaumont and finally by the Grimms. As Grätz concludes: During the 1770s and 1780s it is therefore possible to observe a tendency in which the Märchen, which before was primarily found in the form of French contes des fées for adults, was increasingly promoted as a means to educate children. For this purpose it had to be modified in several respects: the texts were made shorter, the language rendered smoother and more fluent, and more dialogue was introduced. In this way not only the dialogues within the narratives became more vernacular, but the author also included the readers or the listeners more often in the presentation and addressed them directly. The literay character of the Märchen dwindled while its discursive character increased. That is to say: the Märchen changed more and more from a story to be read into a story to be told.58

In my view fairy tales are defined by this process of detachment – and I would hesitate to call the Italian stories by Straparola and Basile ‘fairy tales’, for one reason because they did not stress the fairy part themselves, although they clearly constituted an important phase in fairy tale development.59 In the course of their evolution they also lost all relations with everyday fairies, if they ever had them

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in the first place. And they hardly depicted any social reality other than that of their authors. Only in the nineteenteenth century and afterwards, when retold in lower-class settings, by artisans, fishers or peasants, such tellers attached some of their own experiences and social hardships to fairy tales in an attempt to familiarize them at least slightly.60 Within the frame of the transition from the literal to the oral, giving attention to the work of the brothers Grimm is crucial – stating that their recordings were insufficient and that they primarily have to be seen as authors of literary fairy tales curiously fails to assess properly their determining influence on storycollecting. Yet a fairy tale history also needs to focus on particular narratives and trace their interrelations in time and space. In the course of their fifty years’ work on the KHM Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm recorded or copied about three hundred stories, which are still dispersed over various publications.61 In their attempt to distance themselves from the French fairy tales, Feenmärchen in German, the brothers still employed a broad sense of fairy tales. Although not a few Germanized French stories ended up in their compilation, they still saw a Märchen as a fantastical story, whether it was a fable, an anecdote or a proper tale of magic. They actually contributed themselves to narrowing the concept down again when, following the English selection and translation of their volumes in the 1820s, they assembled a popular edition with a mere fifty stories. Here most of their ‘French’ stories found a place, resulting in only a small difference from Perrault’s Mother Goose. In the popular edition 70 per cent of the stories have later been classified as Tales of Magic; in the last, 1857 full edition it was just under 50 per cent. As for the answer to my query it is necessary to look at a single story, or a cluster of stories in considerable detail; there are still too many tales of magic to deal with in one book. Taking the official category Tales of Magic as a departure is also hardly helpful, since the latest version of the tale catalogue lists circa 270 of them – not every tale type can be counted as a story. Even a more streamlined category, with the devils and assorted figures left out, would number too many stories to discuss properly in one book.62 A selection was necessary and my sometime eclectic choices had better be explained at the outset. In one instance, the example of Chapter 2, I have let my Dutch background prevail. Already in the late nineteenth century it was suggested, by an author in the journal Folklore (who taught literature at London University) that the story of the Golden Bird (ATU 550) was of the same kind as the (unknown) story that must have stood at the basis of the Flemish medieval Arthurian romance of Walewein, then presumed to be a translation of an unknown French original. This deduction was later corrected, elaborated and connected to the theory of story types in the Dutch Ph.D. thesis of Maartje Draak, published in 1936 and reprinted in 1975. Although Dutch literary medievalists were initially in doubt

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about the value of the link between poem and (hypothetical) fairy tale, it is now taken for granted and even exported. Nevertheless, the underlying assumptions of the Golden Bird’s orality are substantially flawed, based as they are on a circular argument and a reification of the concept of a story type. Furthermore, it turned out that the solitary, early twentieth-century advocate of a literary history of fairy tales, the Austrian Albert Wesselski, wrote a paper on this particular set of tales. It was posthumously published and argued in favour of a literary tradition, but without knowledge of the previous Dutch research. Apart from the chance to finally bring both together, this also provided the opportunity to delve into the Austrian’s theories and the objections voiced by contemporaries.63 Not surprisingly, the following display of the conception, ancestry and offspring of the Golden Bird corresponds with my main lines of argument: it dwells on the construction of the story type, the way the story found its way into the KHM; upon the previous stories which constituted it and the later stories which grew out of them. A fairy tale is never just a story, it is always a complex of stories, a series of texts, synchronically as well as diachronically. In another instance (Chapter 4), the main story was chosen because its nineteenth-century subject is the acquisition of magical powers through reading – and therefore irresistible in the context of this book. The Magician and His Pupil (ATU 325) in which superficially magic is conquered by magic, moreover provides a counterbalance to the, at least within Europe, much more widespread warning about the dangers of occult knowledge. The latter is expressed not only in the poem ‘Zauberlehrling’ by Goethe, in Dukas’s L’apprentice sorcier and even in Disney’s film Fantasia64 but also in a migratory legend labelled Inexperienced Use of the Black Book. It thereby underlines once again the difference between a tale of magic and a more traditional legend, now embedded in the elitist dimensions of the witchcraft discourse as a warning to stay away from books of magic. Moreover, the Magician story figured prominently in the debate about the Oriental origin of fairy tales. This was started in the midnineteenth century by Theodor Benfey, continued in the early twentieth century by Emmanuel Cosquin and never brought to a firm conclusion. In one sense, the distinctly European Frau Holle (featuring in ATU 480) forms the female counter-image of the malevolent sorcerer. She, however, started her life not as a fairy tale figure but as a subject of legend. There is some discussion as to her connection to the holden (good people) and subsequently to the unholden (evil people) who became an equivalent of witches, but, whatever the precise case, in the late eighteenth-century German story that bears her name she had come to replace the good fairies. As such, she illustrates how fairies disappeared from the fairy stories as they became Germanized. That is one of the reasons she inhabits the final chapter.

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The possibility of a connection between Jack and the Beanstalk (ATU 328) and a shamanistic World Tree – at least both tree and stalk offer a vertical route into another dimension of reality – had occurred to me some time ago because of the Dutch story of a Great Ship with a mast reaching into a never-never land.65 Since then I have become sceptical about so-called traces of shamanism in European prehistory or even history.66 Other authors, however, still suggest that journeys to the Otherworld such as are depicted in fairy tales are ‘characteristic of shamanistic tradition’ and that ‘it seems possible that earlier accounts of shamans’ journeys have influenced the pattern of the tales’.67 From this perspective the Golden Bird also has shamanistic connotations, because some of its versions contain the theme of ressurrection from the dead after being cut into pieces. By fragmenting stories and detaching them from their contexts all kinds of claims and interpretations become probable. Such a way of thinking once more tries to tie fairy stories to historical magical practices and a counter approach advocating the opposite, needs to engage with it. The story which forms the centre of Chapter 6, the Sky High Tree (ATU 317, formerly AaTh 468), offers thus not only an example of a post-Grimm fairy tale recorded from oral presentations, it also serves the purpose of tackling the question of the age of fairy tales from a slightly different angle. A previous version of this chapter included a discussion of the Juniper Tree (ATU 720), precisely because of its resurrection theme and my contrary view on its original significance (which involves a play on the double meaning of the word ‘spirit’); the chapter’s coherence demanded its omission. Since its creation by Straparola, the Magician and His Pupil has remained relatively stable over the centuries; only in the nineteenth century a few new (but in themselves traditional) elements were added. The Golden Bird is primarily an offshoot of a much older story, the Water of Life (ATU 551) and as such a cognate of several other stories as well. The Sky High Tree turns out to be a late, mid-nineteenth-century compound, a mixture of previously unrelated tales. As such it still exists in two forms today. Frau Holle represents a Germanized French story, which itself was Gallicized Italian. My selections, automatically favouring those fairy tales that were successful enough to have a history, thus each display different ways of how stories could evolve. Although from that point of view the choice of other groups of stories may seem equally justified, I did not see any reason to change this, the more so since the selected stories also neatly illustrate the most important fairy tale theories. I have furthermore not encountered any sign of a pre-nineteenth-century orality in any other magical tale within the ‘oral’ repertoires of the providers of KHM tales. The ramifications of this for historical genre theory will be discussed towards the end of this book.

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Each chapter also contains a section about the shape the particular story (or stories) took in the several editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and about the people who provided them. The text of the Golden Bird was first conveyed to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm by an acquaintance in Marburg, who had retrieved it from a woman who has remained anonymous. The Magician and His Pupil was mediated by Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff from Münsterland and the story about the fast upward-growing vegetable by one of her von Haxthausen cousins in Paderborn. Chapter 3 and 5 are built around the two other main groups of informants of the brothers; the former about the Wild and the Hassenpflug families in Kassel, as well as Friederike Mannel from Allendorf, the latter about the Ramus sisters in Kassel and Dorothea Viehmann, the Märchenfrau from Zwehrn (iconized in English as ‘Gammer Grethel’); the last two prove to be more of a unity than previously suspected. It may be generally assumed that Jacob and Wilhelm roamed the German countryside in search of storytellers; this at least is expressed in fictional works such as the film The Brothers Grimm by Terry Gilliam (2005) or the detective novel Brother Grimm by Craig Russell (2006). In historical reality, however, the brothers primarily stayed at their then home in Kassel. Jacob did visit Allendorf together with his artist brother Ludwig, but Friederike Mannel sent her stories to Kassel in writing. Wilhelm, in his turn visited the country estate of the von Haxthausens in Bökendorf and even wrote down a couple of stories there,68 but the bulk of the material from the von Haxthausen and von Droste-Hülshoff families arrived in Kassel by stage coach. Dorothea Viehmann visited the brothers in Kassel, rather than they going to neighbouring Zwehrn to listen to her storytelling. Much of the Grimms’ story acquisition had a written basis and, if there was a storytelling event, it was certainly not situated in the countryside among peasants.69 The fairy tales discussed in Chapters 3 and 5 more or less chose themselves. The Magic Flight cluster (ATU 313) demanded attention because it appeared to be the one story theme most represented in the KHM, with versions by Friederike Mannel, Dortchen Wild, Jeannette and Marie Hassenpflug and Ludowine von Haxthausen. The story of Hansel and Gretel (ATU 327), a collaboration by Marie Hassenpflug and Dortchen Wild, is also part of this group. The most enigmatic stories of the elderly and lower-class Dorothea Viehman are the Expert Huntsman (ATU 304), the Carnation (ATU 652) and the Iron Stove (ATU 425). They have each been granted a special section within the chapter discussing the particularities of her repertoire and the way it corresponds to those of the other female providers of stories, who were all young and belonging to the same or higher classes as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm themselves. The story of the Goose Girl (ATU 533), originally shortlisted here for an elaborate treatment because of its presumed relationship with Berthe with the Goose Feet,

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taken by some as the paradigmatic female storyteller, was eventually assigned only a mere paragraph because of its lesser importance. The opening tale of the first chapter, finally, the Three Feathers of the Ogre (there confused with the Phoenix), appeared to be one of the very few tales of magic in the pre-KHM volume Volks-Sagen, Märchen und Legenden (1812) by Johann Gustav Büsching. I have used it to discuss the main problems of fairy tale research: variation, orality and, in the story’s reincarnation as The Healing Fruits (ATU 610), the concept of the conglomerate tale. Moreover, the tale type was the subject of a monograph published in 1916 by the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne, the original compiler of the fairy tale classification system, and thus shows the intracacies of the main twentieth-century fairy tale ordening and analysing principle, the geographical-historical method, in full action. In catalogues the tale type can be found as the Three Hairs of the Devil’s Beard (ATU 461); my retitling reflects a critique of previous fairy tale scholarship: if the Grimms could relate better to the story when it had hairs in it instead of feathers, it does not mean that this was the predominant version in the first half of the nineteenth century. This opens the door to exploring the possibility that particular features in the KHM owed their existence in the last instance to the preferences of the brothers, not directly through Wilhelm’s editing but as the result of a subtle interplay between the brothers and their main female informants. While favouring a historical approach to fairy tales and thus giving priority to printed texts, in the circumstance of story-collecting events, I have fallen back on ethnographic sensitivities to allow for a discussion as precise as possible of the talecraft that stood at the basis of Europe’s best-known collection of fairy tales, the KHM. In the following chapters the stories themselves have been used as organizing principle; the chapters are roughly ordered in the historical sequence in which they were conveyed to the brothers Grimm, from the pre-Grimm Ogre’s Feathers to the post-Grimm Sky High Tree. Theoretical excersions have been placed within this frame, mostly as a counterpoint to the historical analysis of the story clusters. This resulted in a series of portraits which together should give a fair idea of European fairy tale history during the past two hundred years. Matters of interpretation have been mostly (but not always) left aside and the attentive reader will discover why. Too easily undertaken on too flimsy a basis, they generally tell more about the interpreter than about the stories. There will thus be no ancient mythology, whether solar or lunar, no unconscious, collective or not, no archetypes, no human universals, not even a single allomotif. Those who look for liminalities and intiations may be disappointed, too. There will also be no social history, whether about marriage, siblings or economic hardships, for which there are much better and more reliable sources. Neither have

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observations about ‘father binding’, ‘processes of maturation’ or ‘national identity’ been attended to. The question why fairy tales are so popular these days can be answered only when it is first established that some fairy tales are popular and among what sort of people (apart from self-proclaimed ‘fairy tale specialists’) and many others are not. That will not be done here. Fairy tales are primarily stories and whether they have any value beyond that remains to be seen. Different fairy tales have different histories; sometimes this history is caught within a tale type, often it transcends it. In the following pages some of these histories are traced across time, sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, and across countries, wherever the trail led (and with help from others where my limited language skills failed). Whereas the Grimms remain the indispensable pivot of such an undertaking, both previous versions of a KHM story and its afterlife are considered: the stories and fragments published before the nineteenth century and the later publications, whether they were reworkings of oral recordings or existing literature. Fairy tale research necessarily has to be international and transcending historical periodization. I wish the reader a magical journey. Notes 1 Manfred Grätz, Das Märchen in der Deutschen Aufklärung. Vom Feenmärchen zum Volksmärchen (Stuttgart 1988), 128. 2 In about a dozen cases Grätz indicates where he has found a likely predecessor for a story collected by the Grimms; he did not systematically research the possible sources for the oral stories in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. As he writes: ‘Until now there has been no detailed research of the influence of French and Oriental motifs on German fairy tales recorded at the end of the nineteenth century’, Das Märchen, 87. 3 As he stepped on several German toes – for instance he gave a rather outdated versions of the state of the art of folk narrative research – the reception of Grätz’s work in Germany was rather lacklustre; see for a more enthusiastic review: Ruth B. Bottigheimer in German Quarterly 63 (1990), 537–539. 4 Rudolf Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr. Bausteine zu einer Kulturgeschichte volkstümlichen Erzählens in Europa (Göttingen 1993). 5 Cf. Katalin Horn, ‘Mangelsituation’, EM 9 (1999), 130–133. 6 Jan M. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales. The Medieval Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor 2007), 100ff; cf. Albert Wesselski, Versuch einer Theorie des Märchens (Reichenberg 1931), 19–20. 7 Derek Brewer, ‘The Interpretation of Fairy Tales’, in: Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri (eds), A Companion to the Fairy Tale (Cambridge 2003), 15–37, esp. 32; cf. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde. On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London 1995), 13, who still has ‘Golden Beard’. 8 Dáithi Ó hÓgáin, The Lore of Ireland. An Encyclopaedia of Myth, Legend and Romance (Woodbridge 2006), 185.

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9 Jack Zipes, ‘Introduction. Towards a Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale’, in Jack Zipes (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford 2000), xv–xxxii: xvi; the same sentence can be found in: Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (New York/London 2006), 45. Cf. the review of the Companion by Manfred Grätz in Fabula 43 (2002), 360–365, esp. 362. On ‘wonder tales’ see note 44 below. 10 Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘Fairy-Tale Origins, Fairy-Tale Dissemination, and Folk Narrative Theory’, Fabula 47 (2006), 211–221: 216. Also: Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany 2009). 11 D.L. Ashliman, Folk and Fairy Tales. A Handbook (Westport/London 2004), vii. 12 Steven Swann Jones, The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination (New York/ London 2002), xii. 13 Cf. Hermann Bausinger, ‘Geschichtlichkeit’, EM 5 (1987), 1129–1131; Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘Fairy Tales, Folk Narrative Research and History’, Social History 14 (1989), 343–357. 14 See apart from his editions of the KHM and its tributaries his numerous short essays, compiled in: Heinz Rölleke, ‘Wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat’. Gesammelte Aufsätze zu den ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’ der Brüder Grimm (Bonn 1985); Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Trier 2000). In the following, essays from these volumes are usually referred to in the original publications, since they were more easily accessible. 15 Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (Houndmills/ New York 2002), xii–xv – quotations are taken from the preface of the second edition. 16 Das Märchen, 270–271. 17 Barabara Ehrenreich and Deirde English, Witches Midwives and Nurses. A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury 1973/London 1976); feminist historians have since distanced themselves from it because of the lack of underlying evidence, as well as alternative indications to the contrary. For a profound refutation see: David Harley, ‘Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch’, Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), 1–26. 18 Donald Haase, ‘Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship’, in Donald Haase (ed.), Fairy Tales and Feminism (Detroit 2004), 1–36, considers a 1970 NYRB article by Alison Lurie as such; reprinted with slight alterations in: Alison Lurie, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children’s Literature (Boston [etc.] 1990), 16–28. Although it does contain the main catch words of ‘oral’, ‘female’ and ‘lower class’, its impact is not visible in fairy tale historiography; cf. the articles in Sigrid Früh & Rainer Wehse (eds), Die Frau im Märchen (Kassel 1985/Krummwisch 2005), especially by Kay Stone, Jack Zipes, and Natascha Würzbach; see also Linda Dégh, ‘The Nature of Women’s Storytelling’, in her Narratives in Society: A Performance-Centered Study (Helsinki 1995), 62–69. 19 This book was preceded by a series of lectures in Rotterdam, see: Marina Warner, The Absent Mother, or Woman against Woman in the ‘Old Wives’ Tale’ (Hilversum 1991).

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20 Also made by Ruth Bottigheimer, see her ‘The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literate World’, in: Davidson and Chaudhri (eds), A Companion to the Fairy Tale, 57–70, esp. 57: ‘Tales about fairies and fairy tales differ considerably from one another’. Cf. Linda Dégh, Folktales and Society. Story-telling in a Hungarian Peasant Community (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 2nd edn, 1989), 140: ‘The supernatural beings of the märchen – the witches, monsters, magicians, and fairies – have nothing in common with the realistic, flesh-and-blood characters of local folk belief.’ 21 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 14–17. 22 For instance, much of what she writes about the Brothers Grimm is false: their sister was called Lotte, not Dorothea (20); Viehmann was not discovered by the Bökendorf circle in which Brentano did not participate (191); the KHM never had any pronoun in its title (348); the Wild and Hassenpflug sisters did not tell any stories in the vernacular, i.e. dialect (393). 23 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 24. 24 Oddly enough, Haase in his ‘Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship’, mentions gender only in the context of reception research; he neglects Holbek’s work on the topic which stresses production and content, see chapter 3.II. 25 Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, 47. 26 Laurence Harf-Lancner, Le monde des fées dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris 2003), 19. 27 Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, 48. 28 Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, Selected Papers on Folklore (Copenhagen 1948), 47. 29 Annemarie Zorger, Buchmärchen im Volksmund (Frankfurt am Main 2008). Originally an unpublished Ph.D. in 1941. 30 Jack Zipes, [review of Grätz, Das Märchen in der deutschen Aufklärung], Colloquia Germanica 23 (1990), 192–194; see also Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, 254 note 45. 31 Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (London 1979), 6. 32 Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, 48 quoting Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales, 36, who presents this as a matter of fact. 33 Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, 62. In The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York/London 2001), Zipes juxtaposes the main texts of this chain. 34 Cf. ‘The Rise of the French Fairy Tale and the Decline of France’, in: Jack Zipes, When Dreams Came True (New York/London 1999), 30–48. Raymonde Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du xviie à la fin du xviiie siècle (Paris 2002), has simply stamped those stories as ‘oral’ which Delarue and Tenèze have listed in their catalogue; however, this shows the nineteenth-century reception of the printed contes des fées in the late nineteenth century, rather than the seventeenth-century presence of oral stories. 35 Maren Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition (Heidelberg 1995), 357–361. 36 Lutz Röhrich, Erzählungen des späten Mittelalters, I (Bern 1962), 62–79, 253–258; Christa Tuczay, ‘Das Motiv der drei Wünsche in Schwank, Legendenmärchen und Witz’, Fabula 40 (1999), 85–107.

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37 Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia 2002), 125–129; see on de Murat: Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton 2001), 70; on de Mailly: Günter Dammann, ‘Conte de(s) fées’, EM 3 (1981), 131–149, esp. 134–135. 38 Harries, Twice Upon a Time, 28–32, 51–57. See also: Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 171. 39 Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, 75. 40 Iona & Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford/New York, 2nd edn, 1992), 66–67; also published in Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (New York/London 1928), 30–50. If this tale showed similarities with passages from Spencer’s Faerie Queene, it may be assumed that d’Aulnoy had read the latter. 41 Notwithstanding the presence of several German versions: among others in J[ohann] A[ndreas] C[hristian] Löhr, Das Büch der Maerchen für Kindheit und Jugend (Leipzig 1820) II, 430–445, no. 32. 42 Ingrid Tomkowiak, Lesebuchgeschichten. Erzählstoffe in Schullesebüchern 1770–1920 (Berlin/New York 1993). 43 Bengt Holbek, Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Danish Folklkore in an European Perspective (Helsinki 1987), 86, 176–177. 44 Lately the term ‘wonder tales’ is increasingly used as a synonym of ‘fairy tales’ and in particular of ‘tales of magic’, either because fairy stories are not about fairies (as in Russia), or to distinguish them from stories about fairies (as in Ireland). I have chosen to retain the trusted nomenclature, because ‘fairy tales’, French: contes des fées, was the original name for the stories which are discussed here, and because ‘wonder’ is primarily a religious, Christian concept, which ill fits the romantic notions underlying fairy tales. 45 See for early inventories: Lutz Röhrich, Erzählungen des späten Mittelalters und ihr Weiterleben in Literatur und Volksdichtung bis zur Gegenwart: Sagen, Märchen, Exempel und Schwänke (Bern 1962, 1967); Elfriede Moser-Rath, Predigtmärchen der Barockzeit: Exempel, Sage, Schwank und Fabel in geistlichen Quellen des oberdeutschen Raumes (Berlin 1964); Wolfgang Brückner (ed.), Volkserzählung und Reformation: ein Handbuch zur Tradition und Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus (Berlin 1974). 46 Grätz, Das Märchen, 145–148; for further instances: Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 105–114. 47 Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 58, n. 127. 48 Brüder Grimm, Deutsche Sagen (München 1993; orig. 1816), ‘Vorrede’. 49 Thompson, The Folktale (New York 1946; reprint Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1977), 8. 50 Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen IV (1930), 4; cf. Hermann Bausinger, ‘Märchen’, EM 9 (1999), 250–274. 51 Ina-Maria Greverus, ‘Die Geschenke des kleinen Volkes’, Fabula 1 (1958), 263–279; cf. Hans-Jörg Uther, ‘Gaben des kleinen Volkes’, EM 5 (1987), 637–642.

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52 See for British fairies: Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth 1973), chapter 19; Katherine A. Briggs, The Vanishing People. Fairy Lore and Legends (New York 1978); Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things. A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (London, 2000); Lizanne Henderson & Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century (East Linton 2001). 53 Cf. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze. Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven/ London 2004); in her epilogue, however, she attempts to connect Hansel and Gretel to the witchcraft discourse; a discussion of witchcraft legends would have been more appropriate. 54 Cf. Willem de Blécourt, ‘“I Would Have Eaten You Too”: Werewolf Legends in the Flemish, Dutch and German Area’, Folklore 118 (2007), 23–43; ‘The Werewolf, the Witch and the Warlock. Aspects of Gender in the Early-modern Period’, in: Alison Rowlands (ed.), Witchcraft and Masculinities (Basingstoke 2009), 191–213. 55 Grätz, Das Märchen, 71–75. 56 Cf. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 319 passim, who rightly denotes the animal skin as the ‘skin of shame’. See also: Christine Goldberg, ‘The Donkey Skin Folktale Cycle (AT 510B)’, Journal of American Folklore 110 (1997), 28–46, who finds the skin ‘essential’ for the tale and states that it can ‘indicate something about the wearer’, but concludes that the animal skin developed out of a human one, using mostly nonEuropean and more recent tales in support. The principle of the ‘contemporary ancestors’ which is applied here has long been condemned to the rubbish heap by anthropologists. 57 Cf. for the many ways fathers tried to justify such a union, Wesselski, Versuch, 139–140. 58 Grätz, Das Märchen, 186. The remark by a reviewer that this was not confined to Märchen only strengthens this observation: see Fabula 31 (1990), 144–147. 59 Cf. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather; Nancy L. Canepa, From Court to Forest. Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale (Detroit 1999). 60 Hence Holbek could write: ‘fairy tales create a make-believe universe into which the participants in the narrative event project themselves’, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 201. 61 See apart from the main editions of the KHM and the annotations: Bolte & Polívka, ‘Märchen aus dem Nachlasse der Brüder Grimm’, Anmerkungen III (1918), 490ff; Heinz Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm (Cologny/Genève 1975); Rölleke, Märchen aus dem Nachlass der Brüder Grimm (Bonn 1977). Brothers Grimm, The Complete Fairy Tales translated by Jack Zipes (London 2007) is still incomplete, for one reason because it misses the variants presented in the annotations. 62 Scherf’s two-volume lexicon can only partly account for the geographical and temporal variation of particular stories; he is also more interested in family relations within stories than in historical comparisons. A complete historical overview can only be achieved through teamwork. 63 Stith Tompson’s student Emma Emily Kiefer missed this particular paper in her study Albert Wesselski and Recent Folktale Theories (Bloomington 1947).

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64 Goethe will have been inspired by the Greek story in Lucian’s Philopseudes (Lover of Lies), of which a German edition had appeared in 1762. That this story would solely have been in oral circulation for two thousand years is stretching the limits of credulity, cf. William Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread (Ithaca/London 2002), 35–36. 65 Willem de Blécourt, Volksverhalen uit Noord-Brabant (Utrecht/Antwerpen 1980), 280–282; see also: Jurjen van der Kooi, ‘’t schip van Ternuten. Een “zeemanssprookje” tussen actualiteit en historisering’, Driemaandelijkse bladen 45 (1993), 101–122. 66 Cf. Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Return of the Sabbat. Mental Archeologies, conjectural histories or political mythologies’, in: Jonathan Barry & Owen Davies (eds), Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke 2007), 125–145. 67 Hilda Ellis Davidson, ‘Helpers and Adversaries in Fairy Tales’, in Hilda Ellis Davidson & Anna Chaudhri (eds), A Companion to the Fairy Tale (Cambridge 2003), 120. 68 ‘Der Geist im Glas’ (KHM 1815, no. 9; 1819, no. 99), ‘Das Wasser des Lebens’ (KHM 1815, no. 11, later no. 97), ‘Der Dreschflegel vom Himmel’ (KHM 1815, no. 26; later no. 112), ‘Die Alte im Wald’ (KHM 1815, no. 37, later KHM 123), see Wilhelm Grimm’s copy (reprint Göttingen 1986), xiii–xiv. 69 A laudable, though limited attempt to dispel the popular myths around the Grimms is: Valerie Paradiz, Clever Maids. The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales (New York 2005).

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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

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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 nineteenthcentury 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

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THE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL

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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

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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 specific meaning in the late seventeenth century, when a number of aristocrats started to write contes des fées. According to the German dictionary

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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 believable. More specifically, it was a conscious lie, something made up, a fantasy, something imagined and thus also a story produced from imagination.20 As Grätz summarized it, the concept of Märchen extended from ‘report’ and ‘news’ via mere ‘narrative’ and ‘rumour’ to the derogatory indication of every false story.21 In Dutch the term later used for ‘fairy tales’ was even wider; ‘sprookje’ derived etymologically from ‘spraak’, everything spoken. In the eighteenth century it became restricted to the Perrault version of fairy tales, which was so successful that subsequent collections, now also comprising German tales, went by the name of Nieuwe Moeder de Gans (New Mother Goose). The Latin fabula was more or less equivalent to the German Märchen in its more original meaning as it referred to rumours and what some would call ‘superstitions’ – never to the much younger ‘fairy tale’.22 In the second half of the eighteenth century, also under the influence of French fashion, the German term Märchen became more narrowly defined as Feenmärchen, a tale with or about fairies. Books appeared with titles such as Neue Feen- und Geister-Märchen (New Fairy and Ghost Stories) in 1768, Einige Feenmährchen für Kinder (Some Fairy Tales for Children) in 1780, or Kleine Romane, Feenmärchen und unterhaltende Erzählungen (Romantic Tales, Fairy Tales and Entertaining Stories) in 1799.23 Etymology alone can never properly explain the evolution of a particular concept; its practical application also needs to be considered and in this case the German particularity of stringing words together adds considerably to their meaning. In 1812 the Grimms themselves avoided the term Feenmärchen. In an attempt to remove overtly French influences, they preferred Kindermärchen, children’s tales, and Hausmärchen, household tales. The last expression was chosen because the stories ‘stayed at home’ as a cultural ‘heritage’; they were equivalent to Abendmärlein and Rockenmärlein, small ‘evening’ and ‘distaff’ stories.24 While all these compounds were produced, the single Märchen eventually became consigned to the fairy tale in its present-day parlance, a cross between the French contes des fées and the slightly broader meaning used by the Grimms. The history of the term ‘fairy tale’ and its equivalents points to the emergence of an international genre in the eighteenth century. This has been obscured by the assumptions of orality of nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists who wanted to forget about the French printed past. The general public followed them since it was much more appealing to situate oral stories in a distant national prehistory than in a nearby country whose dominance had just been overcome. In France itself fairy tales re-emerged in oral form only during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in regions with a strong separate identity such as Bretagne and Lorraine. The process of distancing from

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the French heritage was the single important feature of nineteenth-century fairy tale development. Ironically, the Oriental, or pseudo-Oriental narratives which had been part of the French popular appeal were exempted from this and even granted a higher status in the chain of origin which scholars began to construct (see Chapter 4). The book Kinder- und Hausmärchen was originally envisioned as an international project; beside German material the first edition contained stories with a French, Dutch and even Scottish ambience. For the second volume Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm initially planned, among other non-German texts, translations from the Italian Pentamerone. Their volumes, usually cited from the last edition of 1857, were the result of a long process of collecting, writing and publishing that had started about fifty years earlier, in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This publishing history deserves special attention, in particular because the Grimms regularly adapted their selection and edition of stories, thereby creating a specific ‘fairy-tale’ style.25 The very first KHM volume appeared at the end of 1812 and partly in 1813 (because of a printing error); the second one in 1815. Both were revised in 1819 when the annotations were relegated to a separate volume that became available three years later in 1822. With the second printing the book became more German in character, although not so in the annotations. From 1825 popular versions of the book were marketed with a selection of fifty tales. From 1837 onwards a steady flow of constantly revised full editions was published till the final volumes of 1856 and 1857.26 In the course of the nineteenth century the book was translated into most European languages. By their selection of texts and by the accompanying annotations in which they discussed different versions, historical parallels or specific motifs the brothers laid the groundwork of fairy tale research. The early years were formative for this, also because of the brothers’ work on related projects such as the Altdänische Heldenlieder (Old Danish Heroic Songs, 1811), Ueber den altdeutschen Meistergesang (About Late Medieval German Songs, 1811), Altdeutsche Wälder (a three-volume collection of essays and texts, 1813 and 1815) and the Deutsche Sagen (German Legends, 1816 and 1818). Folklorists have repeatedly commented on the nature of the stories in the KHM. Rölleke, to name just one example, remarked that ‘not all the children’s and household tales are fairy tales’.27 Earlier, in the 1930s, the Austrian literary scholar Albert Wesselski had observed that, among the two hundred tales of the last KHM edition, only about sixty could be considered as genuine fairy tales; the rest consisted of a mixture of legends, fables, anecdotes and whatever other subgenre could be recognized.28 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were especially interested in stories with an oral cachet in which ancient, mythological traits had been transmitted. Their developing dislike for overtly French tales – among

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others they dropped Perrault’s Puss in Boots and Bluebeard and d’Aulnoy’s Okerlo from the second edition – was also informed by a Protestant sense of economy, a stylistic thriftiness which clashed with Catholic abundance. Even when exhibiting a soft spot for the Pentamerone with its exhuberant ‘bombastic’ language, it became ‘quiet’ and ‘plain’ in Jacob’s rendering.29 In their view the two paradigmatic Märchen had been written (although they probably thought of them as recorded) by Philipp Otto Runge, a Hamburg painter. Both his stories had a history which set them apart from the contes des fées. The Fisherman’s Wife, about a woman who wishes for increasingly more splendid abodes and successively becomes king, emperor and pope before her wish to become God reduces her to her original humble state, was foremost a Christian parabel on pride.30 It was developed by Christoph Martin Wieland in his ‘Pervonte’ from an adaption of the Straparola story of the Lazy Boy and a proverb. In this particular form it was relatively young although message and structure had already been in circulation for a couple of centuries. Wesselski pointed at a mid-thirteenth-century story about a woodcutter, who first wants money, then to become sheriff and finally bishop, before tumbling back into his old trade.31 The other Runge story, the Juniper Tree, had in all likelihood been in a previous incarnation a late medieval riddle and existed as a song before being turned into the story of the boy who was slaughtered by his mother, eaten by his father and resurrected by his weeping sister. The character of both tales, partly old but in a fresh appearance and without an obvious common denominator, is indicative of a relatively new genre in transition, of an attempt to find a German answer to a French phenomenon. Types and tales Within its subcategory Tales of Magic, the type index as it was developed during the twentieth century, first by Antti Aarne and then by Stith Thompson, incorporated both the French ancestry and its redefinition by the Grimms. That is to say, most French contes des fées remained unclassified and only the few which were later collected from ostensive oral sources were given a numerical label. The French stories were joined with those from the KHM which showed some magical traces, however remote – hence Runge’s experiments ended up under the numbers ATU 555 (the Fisherman’s Wife)32 and 720 (Juniper Tree), although the magic in them was rather superficial and metaphorical (and the fish can hardly be considered as an ‘animal helper’ since the Fisherman is not questing). The story about the quest for the bird’s feathers, or the devil’s hairs, was included in the index under number ATU 461, more so because of its occurrence in the KHM than because of its French ancestry. Its two halves were pigeonholed

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under ATU 930 (the letter) and ATU 460 (the questions). In a number of other cases story types were devised because variants had been recorded in Scandinavia. Yet other types sprang into being for the simple reason that a story was displayed in a fairy tale collection and did not seem classifiable in an already existing type slot – only in the last edition of the index were strict criteria of multiple international existence applied. This inclusive classification policy evoked criticism from various angles and of diverse weight. Max Lüthi, the Swiss author of the often reprinted German handbook on fairy tales, found a description of the ‘Zauber- and Wundermärchen’ problematic, because all the terms to capture them remained imprecise.33 The Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp thought Aarne’s classification chaotic and inconsequent because it lacked a clear criterion.34 Propp nevertheless supported Aarne’s subcategory Tales of Magic as a ‘necessary working hypothesis’ and concluded that these tales showed such profound structural similarities that the entire group could be taken as one type. It is, however, difficult to follow Propp in this last assessment. He thought of fairy tales as natural entities, particularly present among Russian peasants, to be studied on the basis of similar principles as had been used at the classification of biological species. Literary fairy tales were, in Propp’s view, too fabricated to be subjected to his scheme. While his approach may occasionally be useful in studying the composition of tales, Propp’s postulates render it unfit for historical research, the more so as the details disappearing in the structure may be vital for tracing the ancestry of a tale.35 Moreover, by basing his study solely on one hundred texts of Afanas’ev’s collection, Propp avoided further Russian as well as international comparisons. This is the more problematic because Propp did not dwell on the criteria for this selection and simply stated that one hundred texts were more than enough for his analysis.36 A lack of internal coherence and common denominators of the Tales of Magic is foremost generated by its initial construction. Aarne’s successor Stith Thompson failed to give this much thought, and merely added numbers. By the time the latest revision was carried through, about a century later, the system had acquired such a life of its own that a drastic revision would have upset any link with the regional catalogues the international type index was built on. Stith Thompson vehemently contradicted Wesselski’s opinion on Märchen. He wrote indignantly: ‘If the term Märchen is to be confirmed to the very special style suggested by Wesselski, we shall find that a large number of versions of our best known Märchen are not Märchen at all.’ They were of course, he contended, much older than the sixteenth century.37 Other than an over-simple denial, Thompson carefully avoided touching upon the genre dimension of Wesselski’s argument. To him it was merely a matter of terminology which

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‘much hairsplitting’ had been wasted on ‘and much useless effort devoted to’.38 His book, based on the first revision of Aarne’s catalogue, is more descriptive than analytical.39 Viewed in relation to the other sections in the catalogue, the Tales of Magic foremost present a residual category. It is not so much a matter of defining what exactly constitutes ‘magic’ as to notice the distinction with animal tales or fables, religious tales, novellas or anecdotes. Whereas the genre deliniation and historicity of those last stories is well established, especially through separate collections, the Tales of Magic are merely a construction of folklorists, reified by constant use – even though it sometimes caused trouble to fit tales to a type.40 According to the Danish folklorist Bengt Holbek, a number of stories categorized as Tales of Magic ‘are more closely related to such genres as popular legends, religious legends and fables than to fairy tales’.41 Next to the distinctive Russian Borma Jarizhka (ATU 485), the Aesopic fable the Axe Falls into the Stream (ATU 729, now renamed the Merman’s Golden Axe) or the Arabian Nights tale Luck and Wealth (ATU 736), he singled out stories which figure Death or the dead, for instance Death’s Messengers (ATU 335), Friends in Life and Death (ATU 470) and the Greateful Dead (ATU 505), the last three stemming at least from late medieval times.42 His list of misfits is open to discussion as it seems to have been informed by the absence of a marriage, one of Holbek’s main criteria of a Tale of Magic. Nonetheless it does again point to internal discrepancies. In the context of a discussion about the Three Hairs of the Devil’s Head, a brief excursion into the genre characteristics of those tales of magic with the devil as prime opponent may be elucidating. This concerns the Smith and the Devil (ATU 330), the Bargain of Three Brothers with the Devil (ATU 360), and Bear-Skin (ATU 361) – the Man as Heater of Hell’s Kettle (ATU 475), the only dislodged devil type mentioned by Holbek, was a nineteenth-century invention (see Chapter 5). In his section on ‘Devils and Demons’ Thompson did not refer to these specific tales but primarily discussed religious tales and anecdotes, in itself an ominous sign of the devil’s displacement.43 Issues of genre already emerge with the first story; as it was diplomatically formulated, it represents an ‘example of the problem of how to precisely delineate a genre’.44 To put it more directly: in terms of its content it is better placed among the anecdotal confrontations with the devil and it also shows correspondence with legends of gods and saints walking on earth.45 Although printed together with Perrault stories and in that context meant as moralistic tale for children, the story of how a smith ousted the devil and death never resembled any magical fairy tale. It also had a different pedigree, as it was transmitted through European collections of sermons, among them German ones. Different subtypes also circulated in broadsides, both in Germany and the Northern and Southern Netherlands;

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in France the blue book ‘Bonhomme Misère’ was widely distributed.46 The central element of the Bargain of the Three Brothers with the Devil was also used in sermons; it was separately classified as an anecdote (ATU 1697).47 The story about the soldier who likewise entered into a pact with the devil and had to refrain from bodily care for a period of seven years is less anecdotal, which does not make it a tale of magic either. It was even more specifically German than the previous one, as it was incorporated in Jacob von Grimmelshausen’s seventeenth-century Simplicissimus.48 In early modern Europe pacts between men and the devil, written in blood, were a reality to the extent that they were actually carried around, their bearer hoping to gain riches.49 For this reason alone the devil stories are better considered as migratory legends; jokes about one of the main figures of Christian mythology were not exactly tales of magic either. From the perspective of devil stories, the devil in the Three Hairs becomes an alien figure. The feathers of the ogre In September 1812, a few months before the publication of the KHM, Johann Gustav Büsching brought out his volume of Volks-Sagen, Märchen und Legenden, primarily relating to the eastern parts of Germany. To translate this title as ‘folk-legends, fairy tales, and saints’ legends’ would be highly inaccurate and ignore the book’s content of mainly historical, localized legends. When Büsching discussed ‘Volksmärchen’ he referred to ‘Volkssagen’ and he classified the works of Ludwig Tieck and of Peter Lebrecht, which came much closer to our present idea of fairy tales, as ‘volksromane’. Lebrecht was, in fact, only a pseudonym of Tieck. His stories, among them Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb, were written and sometimes adapted for the stage, if only because of their length.50 Büsching’s own five ‘Kindermärchen’ are much closer to the term ‘fairy tale’ as it is used nowadays. They included the two texts from Runge, next to a ‘Märchen von der Padde’ and ‘Das Märchen von Popanz’.51 The tale of the toad dealt with a beautiful girl who had annoyed an abbess and was changed into a toad. In that shape she helps the youngest of three princes to bring home the goods that will secure his inheritance of the kingdom. Although it ran parallel to the story ‘La chatte blanche’, originally written by Madame d’Aulnoy in the late seventeenth century, which had become popular in German translation and through broadsides and reprints; it will have been based on the older, sixteenthcentury Italian version which featured a frog.52 A ‘Popanz’ is both a bogey and the name of a puppet in a marionette play; it is best translated as ‘ogre’. The Popanz story features a princess who has fallen

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in love with a pastrycook while being promised by her parents to an ugly prince who through his mother possessed some fairy powers. At one point the amorous couple are caught in flagrante, which makes the prince so angry that he turns all the inhabitants of the castle into stone. The pastrycook manages to escape and the princess’s godmother was also unaffected because she was a fairy herself. She now tells the pastrycook how to liberate his love: he has to obtain seven feathers from the ogre’s tail and the answers to seven questions. After he is magically transported to the ogre’s place, he succeeds with the help of the ogre’s wife, whereupon they escape together in the land and water ship they steal from the ogre. Each of the feathers has a special function: one disenchants a dwarf who becomes a giant and lifts the castle and turns it around in order to bring the courtiers and the princess back to life again, another to power the ship. When the hero has returned and undone the prince’s work, the king is all too willing to permit the marriage; the hero has proved his worth and the king is not amused with the actions of his former prospective son-in-law. But the pastrycook sails off again to deal with the other enchantments he has now the answers for. He wakes a princess from a thousand years’ sleep by shooting her dog who actually was her lover and then has to decapitate both to bring the dog/prince back to life. Using yet another feather, he also frees the husband and son of the woman he took with him from the ogre. And he restores the ugly prince to his real shape.53 Büsching, who referred to the Popanz tale as ‘oral’, is unlikely to have heard it, since his version is too intricate and convoluted to be an oral tale. He probably merely presumed its orality; as an archivist he lived with texts.54 With its fairy godmother, the story has all the characteristics of an eighteenth-century French conte de fée; Jacob Grimm certainly thought that it derived from a French book. According to Wesselski, Büsching, or possibly his supplier, had largely invented the story and, in as far as it was traditional, orientated himself on a Czech chapbook, in circulation since the 1790s and translated into German in 1796.55 The latter was a rather lenghty narrative, already containing the combination of the letter episode with the quest for, in this case, three golden feathers from the head of the local legendary figure Rübezahl, here a man permanently looking like a fiveyear-old boy.56 Because the names of the main protagonists are German, rather than Czech, Wesselski postulated an earlier (still unlocated) German version. The existence of five different versions (not counting Kébal) does not necessarily point to chance recordings of a much more wide spread oral tradition, but in all probability to a historical literary interdependence. Amalie Henschel told her story just after the publication of Büsching’s book and she replaced the ogre with the devil – which provides a marker, enabling recognition of the reception of the Grimms’ text. Her story was ‘reiner’ (purer) than Büsching’s,

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Jacob Grimm found, although it still contained some foreign influences. Also without the birth and letter episodes, it looks like an adaption of the Büsching version, even improving upon it in its simplification, had it not been for the fact that the rewards the hero receives on his way back from the devil are similar in her version and in the chapbook: soldiers to aid him against the king. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that, rather than the Popanz tale, the German translation of the Czech chapbook contributed to Amalie’s story, the more so because the questions asked of the monster are also similar (and not in Büsching): about an ill princess, a non-functioning well, a whithered tree and a ferryman without a retirement policy.57 Yet she also omitted elements and she featured the devil and his golden hairs instead of the boy with his three golden feathers. But whereas the omissions can be ascribed to a selective memory, the substitutions may have had a different rationale. Transmitting tales Among folklorists the concept of orality is often so central that it becomes an article of faith rather than a conclusion following from research. In his seminal work of 1989 Holbek, for instance, asserted that ‘the notion that the fairy tales recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries are merely adaptations of Feenmärchen from the 18th century is patently absurd’. He did not explain why this would be so, but continued with the rhetorical question: ‘Why should it be impossible for folktales to exist in oral tradition for thousand of years?’ Somewhat further on he stated: ‘It is manifestly impossible to explain any significant part of oral narrative tradition as being derived from literary sources’.58 He specifically directed his argument towards the members of a then emerging German school of thought who pleaded for a more historical narrative research;59 Holbek’s formulations become particularly relevant when seen from the opposite point of view. How, it has to be asked, would it have been possible for oral traditions to remain unaltered for centuries? Only, to give a provisional answer, if they were supported by an unchanging worldview and practice – which is contradicted by the otherworldliness of fairy tales and their regular adaptation to more immediate concerns of their tellers. Holbek did not even try to relate oral texts to printed tradition. As it is, the stories which he used for his analysis were those collected by Evald Tang Kristensen in late nineteenth-century Jutland and in one way or another most of them ultimately went back to printed versions. The Swedish folklorist Waldemar Liungman found that tales of magic reached Sweden only in the late eighteenth century and Denmark will have fitted this distributional pattern.60 One of the Danish readings of the Three Hairs tale has the princess stolen by

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the Phoenix Bird (as in Marie Hassenpflug’s version in the first KHM edition), who answers the three questions without losing his feathers.61 This last variation can be expected after the tale has been retold several times – the first Danish KHM translation already appeared in 1821 and will have influenced subsequent retellings,62 even though in this particular case the narrator travelled in Germany and spoke German. Another Danish text, collected by Sven Grundtvig, closely followed one of the German versions as published by Johann Wilhelm Wolf in the mid-nineteenth century: both miss the feathers (or hairs) and both feature a rare double replacement: of a soldier and of a ferryman, the latter female on this occasion.63 There are at least twenty-five Danish variants of the story, mostly untranslated, and they cannot all be considered here. What is important in this discussion, however, is that the relationships between texts can be shown and that they are far more complex than a simple reception of French chapbooks. It did not just entail the chance distribution of a volume of Feenmärchen, or of a Perrault translation; there were dozens of titles within particular countries, amounting to tens of thousands of actual copies. It cannot be presumed that these would have had no influence whatsoever.64 In turn the alternative explanation of an indigenous oral dissemination, presumably dating back a couple of centuries, has remained unsubstantiated. No folklorist has ever managed to show how tales were orally passed from one generation on to the next. As far as can be seen, storytellers simply picked up their material wherever they came across it and, even if they did refer to an oral tradition, it did not necessarily have to be a long and uninterrupted one; informants may just have applied a rhetorical device instead. Since stories were collected from at least the mid-nineteenth century up to the middle of the twentieth century, the opportunity to compare texts and repertoires from successive generations of storytellers would surely have presented itself somewhere. Yet, for instance, in 1885 the attempt to interview the grandchildren of Dorothea Viehmann (the main elderly female informant of the Grimms, see Chapter 5), yielded little: not only could they not remember their grandmother, there was also no trace of her stories.65 To compensate for the lack of hard data of oral transmission of tales, experiments were carried out with students, albeit with disastrous results.66 Some folklorists objected that, given the right circumstances, storytellers would remain true to tradition.67 In cases where there are separate recordings of the same teller, however, it turns out that oral stories are adjusted to fit the public, the collector included. Genuine and competent storytellers created their own versions of a story and composed their own repertoire, rather than slavishly following their predecessors.68 The background to these endeavours is the continuous complaint of folklorists that tales were on the brink of extinction, that at least the magical tales were

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in a perpetuous ‘five minutes to midnight’ state. As Donald Ward concluded: ‘Is is apparent that, already in 1808, the Grimms were working with a dying oral tradition.’69 Since the Grimms were also considered as pioneers of fairy tale recording (although there was a huge difference from the sophisticated recordings of the late twentieth century), their work was taken as the pinacle of fairy tale research.70 The folklorists’ mind often turned around in circles: there must have been a tradition, but because it was hardly evident, it must have been in its death throes. It did not occur to them that the evidence could be interpreted differently, namely that the paucity of a tradition can also point to its absence. When folklorists asked around for fairy tales, informants would, sometimes reluctantly, feel compelled to assist them – without caring overmuch about the actual source. Only at a very late stage did folklore collectors become interested in what their informants actually had to tell. The last-minute rescue operation turns somewhat sour when most of the stories appear to be neatly available in print, or when their presence can be explained as the product of a teller’s imagination. The argument in favour of an oral tradition rests on the assumption of an illiterate lower class and that printed material was accessible only to a bourgeois elite. Here one could point to the fairly high levels of literacy throughout Europe, but the presumption is also mistaken in view of the communication prospects open to most Europeans. As Rudolf Schenda observed, ‘since the eighteenth century only very few inhabitants of Europe lived so isolated that they did not somewhere, and usually several times, come under the influence of a public place, be it a place of pilgrimage or a central town’. According to Schenda (who can hardly be accused of wild assertions), almost every village in Europe possessed one or more good tellers with a specific, if limited repertoire.71 As far as it is known what these repertoires consisted of, there were very few tales of magic. Tellers related personal experiences, anecdotes, sensational stories or political news, tall tales, jokes, legends and histories, occasionally in verse. The main providers of story material were the numerous pedlars, distributing pamphlets, broadsides, with news, songs and stories, and eventually also fairy tales. In the course of the nineteenth century, newspapers became important in this respect too.72 The main candidates for possessing a repertoire of traditional magical tales, resembling though not equalling fairy tales, were the local cunning folk – the experts in magical healing, unwitching and fortune-telling. Their stories, however, were primarily practical and functional, and conveyed to their clients how they had obtained their diagnostic capacities, both in the general and specific sense, or about particular activities of witches. The quest to steal three items of bodily growth of an ogre may have been described as an otherworld journey (which then linked it to magical experts, although this was never stated in so many words);73 in the particular forms it was transmitted

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it was of no use to cunning folk.74 The main character was a marriage candidate for the princess instead of a healer and the journey was designed as non-repeatable. If the hero occasionally returned with knowledge of healing or repairing, it was immediately exchanged for hard cash to impress the father of his betrothed. This part of the story was once related to a set of medieval Christian exampla,75 but had meanwhile become entirely decontextualized. A discussion of the oral or printed provenance of fairy tales also needs to take the dynamics of story-collecting into account. It is doubtful whether collectors always tapped into genuine storytelling or were merely told stories their informants vaguely remembered. The evidence from nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections points to narrators (or merely informants) who were both creative and forgetful. This makes it difficult for tales to remain stable without printed support. Wesselski’s comparison of tales with songs is illuminating in this respect: the latter could be remembered easily by their rythm, rhyme and melody, all of which were missing in fairy tales: ‘In the mouth of the folk the fairy tale dissolves, it breaks into pieces.’76 Reconstructing the Urform Around 1900, after many wild theories about the mythological meaning of fairy tales, the Finnish scholars Kaarle Krohn and Antti Aarne developed a more down-to-earth method to research narrative history. Similarities in structure and details of stories from different places, argued Aarne, were sometimes so striking that it was impossible that these stories were unrelated. In this respect he supported the theory of Theodor Benfey, a German Sanskrit specialist who in the mid-nineteenth century had made a case for monogenesis (see Chapter 4). Only Benfey had been wrong in favouring literary traditions. While fairy tales were definitely products of historical times, rather than ‘primitive images of fantasy’, they were, according to Aarne, also primarily orally transmitted and as such they usually preceded literary versions.77 The assumption of a single origin facilitated the construction of tale types and of a catalogue, bringing together all the tales and their variants. Careful comparison of these variants could then lead to a reconstruction of the Urform, the hypothetical first version, the determination of the place where it was produced and from there to a description of a tale’s history and geographical distribution.78 The method provided folklore scholarship with the necessary rigour, as well as with an ordering system that far outlived its original purpose.79 Today it is only sporadically used, as the whole undertaking remained dependent on the assessment of the individual researcher working on a particular tale type: Warren Roberts’s 1950s application of the method in the case of the Kind and

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Unkind Girls (ATU 480) is one of the relatively recent instances (see Chapter 7), an earlier one being Maartje Draak’s 1930s reconstruction of the ‘medieval’ Golden Bird (discussed in Chapter 2). Kurt Ranke, to mention another example, obtained his doctorate in 1933 on the Two Brothers and the Dragon Slayer (ATU 303 and 300), based on over 1100 variants.80 None of their conclusions, nor any of those of folklorists working on other types, have ever been convincing enough to gain the status of orthodoxy. In Holbek’s words, followers of the Finnish School ‘have based their reconstruction [. . .] on debatable opinions instead of restricting themselves to incontrovertable facts’.81 Among Aarne’s own contributions was a study on the Three Hairs from the Devil’s Beard.82 Like the KHM stories, at least the versions contributed by Amalie Henschel and Dorothea Viehmann, most texts combined the journey to the ogre with the Prophecy (ATU 930).83 Aarne decided that he was dealing with two stories, rather than with a conglomerate, and this has become accepted opinion. As a ‘realistic tale’ however, the Prophecy, depicting how a man tries in vain to prevent a boy from marrying his daughter, has a well-documented history (including several medieval narratives),84 whereas the Three Hairs is relatively young. Aarne could find only four European instances of the quest part predating the nineteenth century and these concerned questions posed to a supernatural being, not the collection of trophies from his body. These earlier texts are now typified as ‘vague analogies’.85 Although the feathers occurred in at least thirty-four variants, Aarne somehow considered the devil redaction the more original. In his opinion the bird derived from the Golden Bird, probably because it sometimes went by the name of Phoenix, and its evil characteristics were copied from the devil.86 Neither bird nor devil figured in Aarne’s reconstructed Urform which centred on the three questions posed to the hero by a vegetal, an animal and a human figure – and which incidently bore a close resemblance to the version in Wolf’s Hausmärchen of 1851. In producing a story’s genealogy, the folklorist had to make a number of debatable decisions, which mainly resulted from the attempt to read history from geographical distribution. The idea itself was sound enough: in case of monogenesis a map with variants can only represent the temporary result of migration. But the need for an oral, pre-nineteenth-century history and a preference for eastern origins made the method inprecise; it provided too much room for idiosyncrasies. A considerable number of Finnish variants of the Three Hairs figured the woman Louhi, sometimes corrupted to Luode or Loihra, as the ogre. Her immediate provenance was the Finnish song cycle Kalevala and she was inserted in the fairy tale by a Finnish scholar in 1850 or 1851. Louhi was thus a late literary peculiarity. Another Finnish variant spread through a popular story book and was in all likelihood translated from the Swedish.87 Since the Swedish versions went

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back to printings of KHM adaptions, the Scandinavian route of the story was restricted to the nineteenth century. Had he elaborated on his Finnish experience, Aarne might have achieved similar results for other European areas where the story was also recorded only in the course of the nineteenth century. But for him Finland lay at the receiving end of a fairy tale migration that in most cases started in the Orient, preferably India. Hence both the stories that made up the European type 461 had their roots in the East, although the oldest literary Indian versions already presented distorted readings. Nevertheless, the combination of the stories and the insertion of the devil were distinctively European.88 Folklorists applying the method of the Finnish School displayed ‘a dogmatic belief’ in the dominance of oral tradition; from their perspective stories hardly developed historically. As Röhrich pointed out in his stocktaking overview of this identity-forming phase in fairy tale studies, these presuppositions were highly debatable. In assessing a story’s geographical distribution, one also had to consider the intensity of the collecting and any reconstruction of an Urform remained hypothetical and subject to the personal preference of the researcher.89 On top of this, there is the matter of ethnographic boundaries: particular variants of a story were not necessarily restricted to a specific linguistic area. Yet the geographichistorical method has always been more geographical than historical. Reception In eastern and northern Europe the printed presence of the Quest for the Three Feathers can be attested for the whole of the nineteenth century. The Bohemian poet Jablonský worked the motif into a poem in 1835, and the 1794 chapbook was reprinted in 1804 and in 1876. A related Czech chapbook with a story similar to the one in Wolf’s Deutsche Hausmärchen was first printed in 1863.90 The Russian version, titled Marko the Rich and Vasilii the Unlucky, was based on a 1834 print.91 It was even more a mixture than the Czech original, adding scenes from the Gesta Romanorum and the Pentamerone.92 In Sweden between 1824 and 1857 three different printed chapbook versions of the Three Hairs were put into circulation.93 The Norwegian version, with its double mill episode, was related to the KHM probably through its Danish translation.94 The earliest Hungarian text appeared in the work of Majláth, not particularly known for its adherence to orality (see Chapter 6). Here the magical feather from the Greif writes down everything its owner wants to know. And this feather is granted to the hero because the toad under the pear tree, which is already killed, had been an enemy of Greif – in this concoction there is even room for a rather plain Snow White summary.95 Undoubtedly, some variants of the story were related to collectors in an oral fashion, but many such recordings in their turn

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were also printed, thus contributing to the accumulating mass of fairy tale publications. Sometimes particular versions were derived from one of the three KHM stories, in other cases they immediately drew on the Czech booklet or its German translation. Büsching’s pastrycook was anthologized several times, too,96 apparently without influencing oral retellings. Compared to the Grimm version of 1819, most of the German stories which appeared a generation later were flawed in one way or another. Friedmund von Arnim (scion of a literary family) published his version in 1844, also with the Czech story as his point of departure. His ogre is called Phönus, although the housekeeper once accidentally names him ‘Greif’, and he inserted several religious elements: the letter is falsified in a church and the daughter of the King of Navarra has become ugly because, so Phönus discloses, she had not swallowed a holy wafer.97 These elements were most likely inserted by von Arnim in an attempt at restoration. The scene in the church, for instance, will have been taken from the Gesta Romanorum. A story Müllenhoff published in 1845 seems more original, but is close to the version in the Volksmärchen der Böhmen with birds instead of witches who tell the hero about the problems and their solution simultaniously,98 so that he does not have to tease feathers and answers out of an ogre. Wolf already included a Flemish variant in his 1845 book which, because of the devil, will have been partly inspired by KHM; for the rest the teller had used his imagination to aid a failing memory: the hero only set out to obtain the three feathers which the devil sheds every year to obtain ransom for his captured father and on the way back he is sold as a slave – there is no letter, no love interest, no enigmatic questions.99 The first of the two variants in Wolf’s 1851 collection also lacked the feathers; the second featured them, but now the ferryman was not released of his duty. Interestingly, as the cause for the barrenness of the tree, the burial of an illegitimate child was given. The latter was also the case in Pröhle’s Märchen für die Jugend of 1854, one of the more complete versions in which the hero sets out to obtain three feathers from the bird Fabian, but returns with four – his princess was ugly rather than ill because, as in Arnim’s story, once she had failed to swallow a consacrated wafer. In Meier’s ‘Three Feathers of the Dragon’ a criminal will be pardoned if he finds the cause of the princess’s illness and the whereabouts of the key to the king’s treasure vault. Here the feathers are optional and a marriage is not even remotely hinted at. A second story, in search of a ‘Strauss’ (ostrich) is more complete, but now the hero’s early years are omitted; he is mainly a servant who made a mistake and is sent home by his master the count with a letter (which is altered, after the story runs its course without the tree).100 In a younger Swiss variant the antagonist is also called Strauss (and described as a robber and murderer) and under the tree a child is buried once again.101 In so far as the variants around

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1850 betray any new elements, they can be ascribed either to creative informants or to enterprising collectors or anthologists. Apart from in the KHM versions and subsequent reprints, the devil and his hairs primarily appeared in texts from outside Germany, for instance in Flanders, France, Estonia and the Czech lands.102 Only in the late nineteenth century was a German version with the devil published: it then concerned an obvious KHM derivation.103 In one Felmish version the hero is guided by a voice from heaven to three birds. The first one tells him: Who wants to go to the Bird Veen residing in limbo, has to go straight ahead, till he crosses a stream: there is a castle with a gate, which is closed. That is the castle of the Bird Veen and here, underneath three toadstools at the base of this tree, lies a golden key, which fits the gate.104

The similarity with Marie Hassenpflug’s text, as printed in the first KHM edition, is too striking to be coincidental. And when variations on the Phoenix surfaced elsewhere, they will also have much to thank from this.105 In the context of the German versions of the Three Feathers circulating in the nineteenth century, the devil’s hairs present the exception rather than the rule. At the time of Amalie Henschel’s telling, in September 1812, the brothers Grimm knew the old Danish tale of Utgarta-Loki – Wilhelm’s translation of the Danish heroic songs had been out for over a year – and since they discussed stories with their friends on a regular basis, it is unlikely that they kept this knowledge to themselves. Amalie, like her female friends, wanted to help the brothers gathering stories, but was also aware of their preference for stories that were slightly different from those out of books (see Chapter 3). She therefore obliged by supplanting a detail in the Rübezahl narrative, making it more akin to the passage from Saxo Grammaticus. She also understood that devils had replaced monsters and giants. Marie Hassenpflug, in her turn, found that feathers belonged to a bird and gave it the name of Phoenix. Her doves, unique in relation to other versions, reflected a personal touch. A composite tale A historical development of fairy tales is not just restricted to their content when ogres can change into devils or cats into frogs. Tale types themselves are part of an evolution; when folklorists designated a type, they effectively froze it in time and when they ordered a type thematically, the genetic relations with other types became obscured. When they assigned fairy tales a history going back as far as prehistoric times, they placed them effectively outside time, ignoring their temporal embeddedness. Recently, however, views are changing. In the

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last, completely reworked edition of the tale type index, it is stated: ‘As we now know, many so-called oral narratives have a rich literary history.’106 Part of this history is indicated in annotations to particular types. In this new index, however, the concept of the tale type itself has not been reconsidered, as there were no workable alternatives.107 Combinations of tale types are listed, but historical relations between types are not. An index may be just a research tool, but it is not a tool that always facilitates historical research. Since fairy tales were supposed to belong to an anonymous ‘people’, researchers have hardly paid proper attention to the production of tales. Yet the texts themselves, when put into temporal sequence, show constant meddling. Fragments were forgotten, half remembered, replaced, rewritten and improved. In the process whole new stories and story types came into being. Among them, but not exclusively so, are those marked in the catalogue as ‘documented in the early 19th century’ or occasionally ‘late 18th century’. The wording ‘documented’, of course, leaves open the possibility of an earlier oral origin. Nevertheless, in most cases ‘documented’ means ‘written (by an individual)’ rather than ‘written down (by a collector)’, especially when the oral transmission of magical fairy tales at the time they were collected by the Grimms is in doubt. If classical motifs suddenly appear in nineteenth-century stories, it is more an indication that its author had a classical education than that these stories survived for centuries in oral tradition – provided they are genuine classical motifs and not a figure of later interpretation. One of the newer tales, composed out of older fragments, is the story about the youngest of three brothers who first heals a princess with apples and then still has to accomplish three tasks before he can marry her (KHM 165, first published in the 1837 edition). On their way to the princess the brothers meet an old man who asks what they are carrying. The elder two brothers lie about it and their lies turn into truth; the youngest says he has healing apples and thus succeeds in healing the girl. As the king in this story also does not want to hand over his daughter (and kingdom) right away, the boy now has to fulfil three tasks: to built a ship that can sail over land and over water, to herd hares and to obtain a feather from Greif. This last task gave the story its name. It is reminisent of both Büsching’s toad story and his Popanz tale. But in all likelihood these did not form the basis of KHM 165 but partly drew from the same, published material. The feather fragment in the Greif story also contains the sequence in which the wife of the ogre obtains answers to other problems the hero has been asked to solve. In his discussion of Swedish fairy tales Waldemar Liungman had little to say about this particular story: ‘it seems to have been composed out of known motifs rather late [. . .] its irregularity makes it almost impossible to establish its

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distribution’.108 In the Enzyklopädie it is called a conglomerate or an episode tale. In the type indexes it has been given the number 610.109 In this particular case the story ones its existence to the collecting activities of Jacob Grimm. It was sent to him by Wilhelm Wackernagel, a professor of the University of Basel in the 1830s, who had obtained it from a student, who in his turn had been given it by his room mate, Friedrich Schmid. The main reason for including it in the KHM was that it had been put into one of the Swiss dialects.110 When a story is newly composed out of existing motifs, it is counterproductive to attempt to establish a (rough) date of origin by tracing the history of those motifs, let alone trying to interpret a tale by them. That a magical ship was already invented by the ancient Greeks, as several commentaries have it, reveals precariously little about the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century tales in which it also occurs, also because the Greek ship did not sail on land.111 The ship that could do so carries more similarities to the Ship of Fools and is subsequently found in the stories about Baron Münchhausen, circulating in eighteenth-century Germany. The motif of the lie that became truth has a substantial history in a number of saints’ legends.112 In this particular case, however, it is more relevant that both the passage with the healing fruits and the rabbit herd had appeared in a story in the late eighteenth-century collection Ammenmärchen. This story, by the name of ‘Trüdchen’, was already a compound, combining the numinous with the secular.113 Adding a Münchhausen motif fitted in with the anecdotal and sexual character of the rabbit herd;114 it was also congruent with another of Trüdchen’s motifs: the sack of lies, left out of KHM 165, but echoeing the story’s introduction. Greif figured in a story by Anne Claude Philippe de Caylus, translated into German and published in 1796 in the volume Märchen und Erzählungen für Kinder und Nicht-Kinder,115 although the whole episode in the Swiss tale was probably taken from the same German translation which Amalie H. had used for her story. In the context of KHM 165, moreover, the feathers become anecdotal and are probably related to the occurrence of Greif in contemporary carnival processions in Basel.116 There they will have been pulled out of the representation of a ruling family in a kind of dare (a griffin was an animal of weaponry). If Schmid constructed his story out of oral versions of several other stories, these mostly went back to printed ones. Granting the story a separate slot in the type index without clarifying this relation obscures its history.117 Stories characterized by a quest for the feathers of an ogre turn out to have sprung into existence around 1800, primarily through the appeal of an anonymous Bohemian author. Constructed out of parts and motifs already in printed circulation, they presented themselves as traditional and oral, or were at least taken as such by the brothers Grimm and their successors because they confirmed their romantic sense of the magical. As stories in their own right, however,

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they were new and at least partly the result of their tellers’ interaction with the collectors. Later versions went through similar procedures with most new elements added by compilers of fairy tale volumes. Orality certainly played its part in this, but it was never an exclusive orality stretching back over centuries of faithful retelling; it was much more the orality of reading aloud, reciting and conveying its memory for the purpose of writing down a story. The question is whether similar conclusions can also be reached for other tales of magic. Notes 1 No. 75: ‘Vogel Phönix’; see also: Johannes Bolte and Georg Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, I (Leipzig 1913), 277–278; HansJörg Uther, Handbuch zu den ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’ der Brüder Grimm (Berlin/ New York 2008), 466. 2 Deriving from the remark ‘Male schnipp dich’ which Wilhelm Grimm wrote underneath the story in his own KHM copy; cf. Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 277; Uther, Handbuch, 77–79. 3 Saxo Grammaticus, History of the Danes, translation Peter Fisher, edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson (Cambridge 1979), 269, book eight: visit of Thorkil to UtgarthaLoki. 4 Lutz Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit. Eine volkskundliche Untersuchung (Wiesbaden 1956), 55–56; cf. Röhrich, Folktales and Reality (Bloomington/Indianapolis 1991), 59: ‘Even if it seems like jest’. 5 Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit, 71; on p. 73 of the English translation the verb ‘to survive’ is used. 6 A similar generational tension is visible in the Ranke and Bausinger collaboration, ‘Archaische Züge im Märchen’, EM 1 (1977), 733–743. 7 In the US it was presented as a contribution to the discussion on genre, which by the early 1990s was also past its prime, cf. the introduction by Dan Ben-Amos. In his preface to the third edition (used for the English translation) Röhrich admitted that he had ‘not lightheartedly’ agreed to it, since the field had so much progressed and he could not adapt his text; nevertheless, its empirical basis put the book beyond academic fashion, Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit (Wiesbaden, 3rd edn, 1974), [viii]. A fifth unaltered German reprint appeared in 2001. 8 Lutz Röhrich, ‘Wechselwirkungen zwischen oraler und literaler Tradierung’, in: Charlotte Oberfeld (ed.), Wie alt sind unsere Märchen? (Regensburg 1990/Krummwisch 2005), 51–70, 238–239. 9 Helmut Fischer, ‘Schriftlichkeit’, EM 12 (2005), 207. 10 Lutz Rörich, ‘Der Vogel Gryf. Ein alemanisches Märchen’, in Ingo Schneider (ed.), Europaïsche Ethnologie und Folklore im internationalen Kontext (Festschrift Petzoldt) (Frankfurt am Main 1999), 243–256, reprinted with fewer illustrations in Röhrich, ‘Und weil sie noch nicht gestorben sind . . .’ Anthropologie, Kulturgeschichte und Deutung von Märchen (Köln/Weimar/Wien 2002), 298–309.

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11 Cf. Uther, Handbuch, 77: ‘Das Haar ist seit alters Sitz der Weisheit und der Kraft von Dämonen’. 12 Heinz Rölleke, ‘Grimms Märchen “Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren”. Eine Quelle orientalisch-französischer Herkunft’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken 16 (2005), 58–62. The French text can be traced back to a seventeenth-century Turkish story, see: Antti Aarne, Der reiche Mann und sein Swiegersohn (Hamina 1916) 27, based on: J. Schick, Das Glückskind (Berlin 1912), 309ff. 13 Heinz Rölleke, ‘Das Grimmsche Märchen “Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren”. KHM 29 und seine Spuren’, Märchenspiegel 6 (1995), 74–76; republished in 1998, see: Heinz Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm – Quellen und Studien. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Trier 2000), 149–156. 14 KHM 1812, no. 29; also in Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 278–282. 15 Letter 22 Sept. 1812, quoted by Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 391. 16 Wilhelm Schoof, Jacob Grimm. Aus seinem Leben (Bonn 1961) 111; cf. Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 285. 17 Brüder Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Erster Band, zweite vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage (Berlin 1819; reprint Hildesheim 2004), 148–155. 18 Max Lüthi, So leben sie noch heute. Betrachtungen zum Volksmärchen (Göttingen 1969), 70–84; Ulrich Marzolph, ‘Haare: Drei H. vom Bart des Teufels’, EM 6 (1990), 343–348; Walter Scherf, Märchenlexikon (München 1995), 1181–1186. 19 Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford/New York 1974), 14–15. 20 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, VI (Leipzig 1885), cols 1618–1620. 21 Grätz, Das Märchen, 130; cf. Maren Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition (Heidelberg 1995), 30ff. 22 The translation of the phrase in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses ‘erat in quadam civitate rex et regina’, should be ‘in a certain city lived (were) a king and a queen’. To render it ‘Once upon a time there lived in a certain city . . .’ is adding a fairy tale formula not present in the original. Cf. Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Old Wives’ Tales: Classicism and Anti-Classicism from Apuleius to Chauser’, The Journal of Medieval Latin 12 (2002), 90–113, esp. 92, and Wesselski, Versuch, 67. 23 Cf. Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 33–34, 89. 24 Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Ueber das Wesen der Märchen’, in KHM 1819, xxi; Kleinere Schriften, I (Berlin 1881), 333. 25 Hermann Bausinger, Formen der ‘Volkspoesie’ (Berlin, 2nd edn, 1980), 171. 26 Ulrike Marquardt, ‘Zur Druckgeschichte der ersten Auflage der Kinder- und Hausmärchen 1812/15. Eine Untersuchung des Grimmschen Handexemplars’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken 7 (1987), 217–223; Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘The Publishing History of Grimms’ Tales: Reception at the Cash Register’, in: Donald Haase (ed.), The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Responses, Reactions, Revisions (Detroit 1993), 78–101. 27 Heinz Rölleke, ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’, EM 7 (1993), 1278–1297, esp. 1281: ‘nicht alle Kinder- und Hausmärchen sind Märchen’.

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28 Albert Wesselski, Versuch einer Theorie des Märchens (Reichenberg 1931), 97. 29 Alfred Messerli, ‘“Nicht selten ist der Ausdruck nach des Landes Art, keck frei und unverhüllt”. Der Cunto de li cunti deutsch’, in: Michelangelo Picone and Alfred Messerli (eds), Giovan Battista Basile e l’invenzione della fiaba (Ravenna 2004), 341– 351: 343. 30 Cf. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Bad Girls & Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (New Haven/London 1987), 149. 31 Grätz, Das Märchen, 166; Wesselski, Märchen des Mittelalters, no. 45. 32 And not as a derivation of ATU 675; cf. Schenda, ‘Basiles Pentamerone’, 505–507, about the reception of Pervonto, with, among others, a comic opera in 1802; see also: Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘Luckless, Witless, and Filthy-footed: A Sociocultural Study and Publishing History Analysis of “The Lazy Boy”’, Journal of American Folklore 106 (1993), 259–284. 33 Lüthi, Märchen (Stuttgart 1979), 2–3. 34 Vladimir Propp, Morphologie des Märchens (Frankfurt am Main 1975), 16–18; English: Morphology of the Folktale (Austin 1968), 8–11. Originally published in Russian in 1928. 35 This is even more clearly revealed when Propp himself purports to study the history of fairy tales. See his Die historischen Wurzeln des Zaubermärchens (München/ Wien 1987; orig. Leningrad 1946). 36 The western perspective on Afanas’ev’s volumes is limited because of a selective translation which has left out variants. 37 Stith Thompson, The Folktale (New York 1946), 22. 38 Thompson, The Folktale, 7; but cf. Lauri Honko, ‘Gattungsprobleme’, EM 5 (1987), 744–769. 39 When characterized as ‘arguably the most important study in English of the fairy tale’, as by Steven Swann Jones, The Fairy Tale, 121, this signals primarily the poor state of fairy tale research. 40 Cf. Propp, Morphologie, 18 referring to the Nikiforov collection which he would later edit for publication: only 20 per cent could approximately be reduced to types; cf. Dégh, Folktales and Society, about the troubles of Eberhard and Boratav in compiling the Turkish index. The problem itself was recurrent at every indexing; see the Epilogue of this book. 41 Holbek, Interpretation, 160. 42 Röhrich, Erzählungen des späten Mittelalters. 43 Thompson, The Folktale, 42–45. 44 Harlinda Lox, ‘Schmidt und Teufel’, EM 12 (2005), 111–112. 45 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1035; see also Albert Wesselski, ‘Der Schmied von Jüterbog im Kiffhäuser’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 46 (1937), 198–218: esp. 198: ‘on the borderline between Märchen and legend (Sage)’. 46 Cf. Maurits de Meyer, Vlaamsche sprookjesthema’s in het licht der Romaansche en Germaansche kultuurstroomingen (Leuven 1942), 51–75, who discarded the ‘literary variants’ too easily and, apart from the KHM, did not consider published folk tales as ‘literary’; he left the genre problematics out of consideration.

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47 Ingrid Tomkowiak, ‘Handel mit dem Teufel’, EM 6 (1990), 453–459. 48 Rölleke, ‘Bärenhauter’, EM 1 (1977), 1225–1232. 49 Soili-Maria Olli, ‘The Devil’s Pact: a Male Strategy’, in: Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt (eds), Beyond the Witch Trials. Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester 2004), 100–116; Hans de Waardt, ‘Met bloed ondertekend’, Sociologische Gids 36 (1989), 236–237; Luise Accati, ‘The spirit of fornification; Virtue of the soul and virtue of the body in Friuli, 1600–1800’, in: Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (Baltimore and London 1990), 110–140, esp. 136. 50 See Donald Haase, ‘Tieck, Ludwig’, in: Zipes (ed.) Companion, 523–525. 51 The fifth text, ‘Kiebitz’, is an anecdote, a version of ATU 1535, the Rich and the Poor Farmer (Unibos). 52 Wesselski, Versuch, 132–134. This group of stories is classified as ATU 402, but each ‘subtype’ with a different animal has a different distribution, cf. Sigrid Fährmann, ‘Maus als Braut’, EM 9 (1999), 433–437; Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1378–1380. 53 Reprinted in: Hans-Jörg Uther, Märchen vor Grimm (München 1990), 70–83. 54 Rölleke, ‘Büsching, Johann Gustav Gotlieb’, EM 2 (1979), 1053–1054. 55 Wesselski, Deutsche Märchen vor Grimm (Brünn/Leipzig 1938), 354. It concerns Riebenzahl im Riesengebirge oder der bezauberte und wieder befreyte Prinz. Ein abentheuerliches Mährchen der Vorzeit (Prag 1796). 56 See also: Marzolph, ‘Drei Haare’, EM 6 (1990), 345; Václav Tille, ‘Das Märchen von Schicksalkind’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 29 (1919), 22–40, esp. 36–37. 57 Two of the questions also occur in the story ‘St. Walburgis Nachttraum’ in Wolfgang Adolf Gerle, Volksmärchen der Böhmen (Prag 1819), cf. KHM Anmerkungsband 1822, 429. 58 Holbek, Interpretation, 252–254. 59 Cf. Hermann Bausinger, ‘Literatur und Volkserzählung’, EM 8 (1996), 1119–1137, esp. 1128. 60 Waldemar Liungman, Das wahrscheinliche Alter des Volksmärchen in Schweden (Helsinki 1955) (FFC 156). 61 Holbek, Interpretation, 567–568; ETK 1485 (ATU 461, combined with ATU 531), from Kjeld Rasmussen in Ringkobing, 1890. 62 Karin Pulmer, ‘Zur Rezeption der Grimmschen Märchen in Dänemark’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken 8 (1988), 181–203. 63 Johann Wilhelm Wolf, Deutsche Hausmärchen (Göttingen 1851), 184–197: ‘Die fünf Fragen’; Svend Grundtvig, Dänische Volksmärchen, I (Leipzig 1878), 95–109: ‘Die Träume’ (Danish orig. 1854). 64 Cf. Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 224. 65 Lauer, ‘Dorothea Viehmann und die Brüder Grimm’, Märchenspiegel 9 (1998), 36–42, esp. 41, n. 14. 66 Among other places discussed by Rainer Wehse, ‘Past and Present Folkloristic Narrator Research’ in: Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales and Society, 245–258, esp. 252–257; Elliot Oring, ‘Experimentelle Erzählforschung’, EM 4 (1984), 684–694.

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67 This especially applies to Anderson’s ‘law of self-correction’, see chapter 2, III. 68 Linda Dégh, Folktales and Society. Story-telling in a Hungarian Peasant Community (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2nd edn, 1989), 165–179; see further: Dégh, ‘Biologie des Erzählguts’, EM 2 (1979), 386–406; Lüthi, Märchen (10th edn, 2004), 83–104. 69 Donald Ward, ‘New Misconceptions about Old Folktales: The Brothers Grimm’, in: James M. McGlathery (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana/Chicago 1991), 91–100: 95; cf. Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 151, on the time metaphor. 70 Grätz, Das Märchen, 13–14. 71 Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 63, 87. 72 Cf. in the Finnish case: Satu Apo, The Narrative World of Finnish Fairy Tales (Helsinki 1995), 39–45. 73 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1185, drawing on Aarne. See also Lutz Röhrich, ‘Jenseitswanderungen’, EM 7 (1993), 547–559. 74 Kjeld Rasmussen, who provided Kristensen with a Phoenix versions of the Three Feathers of the Ogre, was a cunning man, but refused to talk about it, see: Holbek, Interpretation, 561. Zsuzsánna Palkó, one of the main storytellers contacted by Linda Dégh, practised as a local healing woman, but was ‘not inclined to relate her own experiences’, see: Dégh, Folktales and Society, 133. Their tales of magic were reserved for special occasions and unrelated to their healing activities. 75 Frederic C. Tubach, Index Exemplorum. A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki 1969) no. 214: Three Questions Asked of St Andrew. 76 Wesselski, Versuch, 126–127: ‘in dem Volksmunde löst sich das Märchen auf: das Märchen zerflattert’. 77 Antti Aarne, Leitfaden der vergleichenden Märchenforschung (Hamina 1913), esp. 9–13. 78 Practical guidelines are given by Walter Anderson, ‘Geographisch-historische Methode’, in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Märchens II (Berlin 1940), 508–522; see also: Thompson, The Folktale, 430–448. 79 Cf. the curious defence by Christine Goldberg, ‘The historic-Geographic Method: Past and Future’, Journal of Folklore Research 21 (1984), 118. 80 Uther, ‘Ranke’, EM 11 (2004), 207. 81 Holbek, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 243. 82 Antti Aarne, Der reiche Mann und sein Schwiegersohn. Vergleichende Märchenforschungen (Hamina 1916) (FFC 23); cf. Holbek, Interpretation, 244–245. 83 Also called the Urias letter, although in the Biblical story, 2 Samuel 11:15, the letter is not switched. 84 Aarne, Der reiche Mann, 34–35; The locus classicus is Gottfried von Viterbo’s Pantheon; see: Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 107, n. 215; 216, including n. 427; 236; brothers Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, no. 486. The precise relation with the Oriental sequence of stories, leading up to Kébal, still needs to be established (cf. note 12). 85 Marzolph, ‘Haare’, EM 6 (1990), 345–346; Aarne, Der reiche Mann, 118; one of their examples is the Pentamerone 4.8, where the questions are only an episode in another quest story.

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86 Der reiche Mann, 123. This bolstered the view of the Grimms and has not been contradicted since; cf. Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 276–293, who do not even mention feathers in their analysis. See also Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit, 55–56; Waldemar Liungman, Schwedische Volksmärchen. Herkunft und Geschichte (Berlin 1961), 151; and Max Lüthi, So leben sie noch heute (Göttingen 1969), 81. 87 Aarne, Der reiche Mann, 123, 191–192. 88 Aarne’s mentor Krohn discussed the two constituent tales, not their combination, let alone a quest for hairs or feathers, cf. Kaarle Krohn, Übersicht über einige Resultate der Märchenforschung (Helsinki 1931), 57–62. 89 Lutz Röhrich, ‘Geographisch-historische Methode’, EM 5 (1987), 1012–1030. 90 Václav Tille, Verzeichnis der böhmische Märchen (Helsinki 1921), 332–333, 338. 91 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 285. 92 Translations of the Russian text in: A.N.A. Afanasjew, Russische Volksmärchen (München 1985), tr. Swetlana Geier, 712–720; Russian Fairy Tales (New York 1945) tr. Norbert Guterman. The childhood upbringing in a monastry was taken from the Gesta, the whale from the Pentamerone. 93 Liungman, Die Schwedischen Volksmärchen, 112. 94 Asbjørnsen and Moe, Norske folke-eventyr (1843); in the 1859 Dasent translation: ‘Rich Peter the Pedlar’, Popular Tales from the Norse (Edinbrugh 1859), 212–229; cf. Klara Stroebe and Reidar Th. Christiansen, Norwegische Volksmärchen (Düsseldorf/ Köln 1967), 40–51. 95 Johann Mailáth, Magyarische Sagen, Märchen und Erzählungen, I (Stuttgart/Tübingen 1837), 167–187; on the author, see: Vilmos Voigt, ‘Mailáth, Johann’, EM 9 (1999), 55–57. 96 Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Erzählungen und Märchen, II (Breslau 1825), 237–257; Märchensaal, II, 235–243. 97 Hundert neue Märchen im Gebirge, I (Charlottenburg 1844), 3ff. Aarne did not include this version and thus missed the source of the wafers, further spread through Pröhle’s Märchen für die Jugend of 1854; cf. Der reiche Mann, 148. 98 Karl Müllenhoff, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzogtümer Schleswig-Holstein und Lauenburg (Kiel 1845), 427–430. 99 Johann Wilhelm Wolf, Deutsche Märchen und Sagen (Leipzig 1845), 141–143. 100 Ernst Meier, Deutsche Volksmärchen aus Schwaben (Stuttgart 1852), 253–256; 273–279. 101 Robert Wildhaber and Leza Uffer, Schweizer Volksmärchen (Düsseldorf/Köln 1971), 61–64, from Johannes Jegerlehner, Sagen und Märchen aus Oberwallis (Basel 1913), 62–65. 102 Also in Danish, Swedish and Finnish unpublished texts, see Aarne, Der reiche Mann, 122. 103 Bollig, ‘Die drei goldenen Haare des Teufels’, Zeitschift für Volkskunde 4 (1892), 249–252. Cf. Charlotte Oberfeld, Volksmärchen aus Hessen, I (Marburg 1962), 13–18.

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104 Victor de Meyere, De Vlaamsche vertelschat, II (Antwerpen 1927), 79, told in 1919 by a widow in Wintham on the river Schelde. 105 See e.g.: Karl Bartsch, Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Mecklenburg, I (Wien 1879), 497–500: ‘Vogel Fenus’; Viktor von Geramb, Kinder- und Hausmärchen aus der Steiermark (Graz, 4th edn, 1967), 161–169: ‘Der Vogel Fendris’; Ingo Reiffenstein, Österreichische Märchen (Düsseldorf/Köln 1979), 109–115: ‘Vom Vogel Fenus’. 106 Uther, The Types of International Folktales, I (2004), 9. 107 Hans-Jörg Uther, ‘Indexing Folktales: A Critical Survey’, Journal of Folklore Reserach 34 (1997), 209–220, esp. 210. 108 Liungman, Die schwedische Volsmärchen, 181. 109 The Land and Water Ship is also a separate tale type: ATU 513B; the Rabbit Herd is classified as ATU 570. 110 Martin Heule, ‘Wilhelm Wackernagel als Vermittler von Grimmbeiträgen’, Schweizeres Archiv für Volkskunde 80 (1984), 88–92; Uther, Handbuch, 342–346. 111 Cf. Siegfried Nuemann, ‘Schiff zu Wasser und zu Lande’, EM 11 (2004), 1421–1427. 112 Wesselski, Versuch, 162–163. 113 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, III (1918), 268 and 268–272 for the European distribution; cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 574–577; Janet Lynn Sutherland, ‘Früchte: Die heilende’, EM 5 (1987), 443–447; see for an Irish version: Bealoideas 17 (1947), 209–211. 114 Cf. Alan Dundes, ‘The Symbolic Equivalents of Allomotifs in the Rabbit-Herd (AT 570)’, ARV. Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 36 (1980), 91–98. 115 See for a summary: Victor Chauvin, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes VI (Louvain 1902), 29–30. 116 Röhrich, ‘Und weil sie nicht gestorben sind . . .’, 303–304. 117 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1280, argues that 610 deserves to remain a type and is worth studying because of the blending of motifs. This would be reasonable only if the text from the Ammenmärchen is taken as the point of departure instead of KHM 165. Furthermore, Scherf’s classification of stories with only the Truth and Lie theme under 610 (Märchenlexikon, 584) is confusing one of the contributing motifs with the whole tale. On the Truth and Lie stories, see: Wesselski, Versuch, 162–163.

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A quest for rejuvenation

A Russian fairy tale The ballet The Firebird, with music by Igor Stravinsky, was first performed in Paris in 1910. At the time the fairy tale components of its scenario were all thought to be truly and typically Russian: the hero Prince Ivan, the firebird herself, the deathless wizard king Koshchay, the garden with the dancing princesses, and the magic feather. While the original idea arose from a poem by Pyotr Potyomkin, and Michel Fokine was responsible for its development into the ballet story,1 the supporting fairy tales were all taken from books compiled by Russian folklorists. In this chapter not just the orality of these Russian roots will be debated; their nationalistic content will also be questioned, especially in the light of claims pertaining to the main story’s Flemish history. The scenario itself was new; the fairy tales had never been combined in this fashion before. The central theme of the quest for the firebird, from a story called Prince Ivan, the Firebird and the Grey Wolf, had appeared in the seventh of the eight-volume collection by Alexander Afanas’ev of 1855–63. The story starts with a king (tsar) who has three sons and an apple tree. At night the firebird steels apples from the tree and only the youngest son, Ivan, succeeds in holding on to a tail feather. The two older sons leave in search for the bird and after some persuasion Ivan sets off, too. At a road juncture he takes the direction in which he loses his horse to a wolf, but the wolf then offers himself as a mount and carries him to the garden where the firebird resides. He warns Ivan not to take the golden cage. The prince decides differently, but the cage is wired and he is trapped. His captor promises him the bird, if he retrieves the horse with the golden manes. This time Ivan takes the bridle against the wolf’s advice, is captured again and is set free only on condition that he brings the fair Helena to the horse’s owner. In this instance the wolf refrains from warning the prince and abducts the princess himself. When it comes to handing her over in exchange for the horse, the wolf takes on her shape and runs back

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to the hero at the first opportunity. Ivan now has both the horse and the princess. At the next stop the wolf becomes the horse and they add the firebird (and the golden cage) to their treasures. The wolf leaves them at the spot where they first met and, a little further along the way, Ivan and the princess take a nap when his brothers pass by. They kill Ivan and take the bird, the horse and the princess to their father. Meanwhile the wolf finds Ivan’s body, just before it is consumed by ravens. The wolf forces the ravens to fetch the water of death and the water of life. With the first he restores the body and with the second he brings it back to life. He takes Ivan back home, where the prince is just in time to prevent the marriage of the princess with one of his brothers. Their crime is now revealed, they are put into prison and Ivan marries Helena.2 In the ballet only the hero Ivan and the firebird were employed, together with the initial garden scene; wolf, horse and envious brothers were left out. The role of the evil antagonist was taken by Koshchay (or Kashchey), the wizard with a hidden life force, whose insertion may have been prompted by the presence of the water of life in the original tale (otherwise it was inspired by one of the tale’s elaborations, see below). As the Firebird is the same magical avian creature as the Phoenix or the Golden Bird that Aarne thought to have lent its feathers to the ogre (rather than Greif), the traditionality of these stories seems beyond question. Afanas’ev, however, mainly worked with existing collections and hardly interviewed any Russian peasants; the story of Prince Ivan was printed rather than oral. The oldest Russian versions of both the Firebird and Koshchay originated from the volume Dedushkiny progulki (Grandfather’s Strolls) of 1786.3 The stories in this booklet were not necessarily of Russian origin. In the story about Koshchay, a prince is shown pictures of potential partners and he falls for a royal Egyptian beauty,4 which points to Oriental influences, presumably circulating in French. Other components inserted into the scenario of The Firebird had non-Russian equivalents, too. The magical property of a feather – on stage it is used to ward off Koshchay’s petrifying spell – is similar to a feather in Büsching’s Popanz story and, perhaps more appropiately, to the disenchanting feather in Straparola’s Ancilotto.5 The dancing princesses featured in a Grimm story contributed by Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff (KHM 133); if it had predecessors, they were Oriental.6 As grande dame of the Moscou literary circles Avdotiia Elagina told her poet uncle Vasilii Zhukovski in 1837 when he asked her to record tales, ‘our folktales are completely the same as those of other peoples in content, but the locality gives a certain color to each’.7 At that time Russian fairy tale collections were hardly different from those elsewhere in Europe. Russian fairy tale research has been more influenced by structuralist than by historical approaches; at least this is the image presented outside Russia, largely

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owing to the work of Vladimir Propp. Structuralism is reinforced in a recent publication purporting to take stock of the whole spectrum of Russian narrative folklore (but omitting the notion of variants), among them the tales of magic, or ‘wonder tales’. According to medievalist Jack Haney, the ‘most ancient layers of the folktale’ have ‘ritual origins’ and Propp’s problem was ‘more in his hesitancy to interpret than in any lack of documentation’.8 This author did not actually research the history of tales and only expressed uncorroborated conjectures. When it comes to balancing history against structure, history should surely not be neglected but be granted priority: a structure is embedded in time rather than steering a story trough time. The structuralist endeavour rests on the premiss of unchanging stories and, since writing and printing are historical, on orality. In a particular twist of this argument Haney considers the stories oral (‘an orally derived traditional verbal art form’), expresses doubts about continuity (‘there is no way of knowing what an ancient oral narrative was like from the extant record’), yet favours an nineteenth-century kind of mental archaeology resulting in mythical and ritual explanations.9 Koshchei (his spelling) is ‘the most archaic of the villains’. The horse, to name another example, represents ‘the association of the mare or the stallion with royal rites of either marriage or coronation’. This theory is not particularly elaborated, nor does it take narrative history into account.10 During most of the twentieth century Russian fairy tale research was never completely free of political directives: structuralism was one of the ways to decontextualize fairy tales and to make their study more politically acceptable. Moreover, theories which seek to find traces of initiation in fairy tales (an ‘initial venture into the frightening adult world’),11 which inadvertedly turn up with ritualism, were particularly en vogue in Nazi Germany and cannot escape contamination with excessive nationalism (cf. Chapter 6). The Russian focus on individual storytellers, part of the curriculum during the early decades of the twentieth century, hardly became known in the West.12 If there is anything Russian about the Firebird, it is merely the name. The moment it is translated as Phoenix, it loses its special appeal. As Isidor Levin argued, apart from the language, there was nothing really indigenous about Russian fairy tales. They were borrowed from the French, from Oriental pastiches or originals, and from the KHM, or simply newly composed by Russian authors, and distributed through a multitude of prints – woodcuts, in the case of the Firebird.13 Russian specialists who dared to suggest this were charged with heresy.14 Nevertheless, the historical development of tales of magic in Russia may well have been similar to Germany: with a huge interest among the elite in the French contes des fées and the accompanying Oriental and pseudoOriental stories; in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, Russians started to compile and write their own volumes.15 Among these were

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the Peresmesnik, ili slavenskie skazki (The Mocker, or Slavic Stories) of 1766–68,16 the Babuskiny skazki (Grandmother’s Tales) of 1778,17 following Grandfather’s Strolls, and the Lekarstvo ot zadumcivosti (Medicine Against Melancholy) of 1786. The main difference was that German publications were also read by Russians and that collecting similar to the Grimms’ took place only a generation later, towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Simply relabelling fairy tales and especially tales of magic as ‘wonder tales’ amounts to denying this history. A medieval tape recording In the 1930s the Dutch celtologist Maartje Draak reconstructed the story of the quest for the marvellous bird as it would have existed at some time during the Middle Ages. Proof of this early presence was provided by both the basic structure and some of the content of the thirteenth-century romance of Walewein, the Dutch name for the Arthurian knight Gawain, famous in French as le chevalier à l’épee. Yet in all likelihood the Walewein was no translation but an original Flemish work and the reconstructed fairy tale was used to support this. A king is walking in his garden when he suddenly notices a wondrous bird he has never seen before. The creature makes such an impression on him that he promises his kingdom to whomever finds it and brings it to him. Three brothers go out to look for the bird, but the first two are soon waylaid. The third brother obtains help from a fox, who is in fact an enchanted man who will profit from the quest. It is he who tells the hero what to do. The boy fails to obtain the bird because he does not follow the fox’s instructions to the letter. He is now set a new task: to obtain a magical sword. This also goes wrong and next he has to find a princess for the owner of the sword. In this the hero finally succeeds because he listens to the fox. He cheats the owners of both the sword and the bird and thus keeps the princess and the treasures. On the way back he meets up with his brothers who throw him into a well and steal everything. The fox saves him and regains his human shape. The hero marries the princess and inherits the kingdom.18

Beyond Draak’s thesis the story never existed in this form, but it was very similar to the story as it had appeared in a number of nineteenth-century texts, the later editions of the KHM in particular, although usually with a horse instead of a sword and with hints of the monarch’s illness. Draak had substituted the sword to account for its presence in the Walewein, even though it appeared only in a small, possibly mutually related group of stories,19 and she obliterated the horse. In her opinion the brothers guarding the apple tree were not important either, since they were absent in the medieval poem (and, like the illness, belonged to another story type anyway). She divulged a preference for northern European texts: the Russian version was ‘excellent’, the Scottish ‘good’, whereas

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variants in the Walloon, Breton, French, Basque and Spanish languages were all ‘deplorable’.20 When confronted with the question of independent substantiation of the medieval historicity of the marvellous bird story, Draak retorted: ‘What kind of evidence would be acceptable? A medieval tape recording?’21 Her reconstruction was also informed by the romance, in which Walewein was dispatched to bring his king a flying chess board. He was granted it only in exchange for the sword with the two rings and in return for the sword he had to get the fair Ysabelle. In this last quest he received some help from a fox, who was an enchanted prince. Although the romance is much more complicated, the tripartite chain of events as well as the helping fox have reminded researchers of the fairy tale. The Dutch thesis had been initiated by a remark of the English medievist W.P. Ker, who regarded a Scottish story, recorded at the end of the 1850s from a labourer at a stone quarry at Knockderry, as in some aspects ‘more original than the medieval romance’.22 Yet this last story stands rather at the end than at the beginning of the chain of tradition and it lacks most of the details that characterize other versions. The bird is hardly marvellous, but a blue falcon; the king merely has a greedy second wife. There are also four assignments rather than three, which appear to follow from the plot as the hero needs a special sword to cut off the five heads of the giant who is in possession of the bird. And the fox changes not only into creatures to be exchanged but also into the vessels which take the hero first to Ireland and then to France.23 This last peculiarity betrays an affinity with the Russian wolf cycle, but was more elaborate and thus later than the eighteenth-century story – the Scottish narrator indulged his creativity within a given frame, granted that the interviewer did not interfere too much in the text. To consider nineteenth-century texts as predecessors of a thirteenth-century romance amounts to putting history on its head; it displays once more the folkloristic preference for an unchanging and inaccessible oral tradition, while granting a continuous existence to story types which is unrelated to any classifying. All this apart from the tiny matter of independent verification. There are, nevertheless, several ways to circumvent this last deficiency. The quest for a time-defying recording device may be doomed from the start; it also distracts from the research that is feasible. Recently several alternatives for the Walewein’s pedigree have been suggested, varying from Welsh influences24 to borrowings from the slightly earlier romance of Floris ende Blancefloer.25 As to the fairy tale: either one can assume its European-wide presence on a lower-class level, to be reconstructed only with the help of nineteenth-century texts and more or less stationary over the centuries, forming the basis of both the early twentieth-century ballet and the thirteenth-century romance. Or an

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attempt could be made to establish a historical connection between the medieval Flemish romance and the late eighteenth-century Russian fairy tale. The two options are obviously incompatible. And there is also the third possibility that, notwithstanding the superficial similarity, the two works are unrelated. This last view was expressed by Albert Wesselski in a long essay, published posthumously in 1940, about the predecessors of the German Golden Bird (KHM 57) – a story with a remarkable resemblance to the Russian Firebird, but with a fox instead of a wolf. According to Wesselski the medieval romance merely showed the structure of a chain tale, also present elsewhere. Its content had not asserted any influence over European medieval literature and could therefore scarcely have been modified into the later fairy tale.26 In the following discussion I will retrace Wesselski’s quest, but also include nineteenth-century texts, starting with Russian ones. Questions of type will become important in this undertaking: the Quest for the Bird, officially known as Bird, Horse and Princess (ATU 550) is generally considered as related to the Water of Life (ATU 551), yet constituting a separate type, ‘autonomous and unambiguously determined’. While the latter is primarily concerned with a remedy for the suffering king, the former is about winning the treble highest good on earth.27 Valid though this distinction may have become, by freezing the tale’s history it also conceals it. This is, among other places, visible in Kurt Ranke’s observation that the motif of the diseased monarch occasionally turns up in number 550, while it actually belongs to 551.28 Typification has taken a slice out of a historical process and, by favouring one story (in this case without the ailment) over another, it becomes ahistorical. As tools of classification types belong to the folklorist’s methodology; they never had an independent historical existence. Albert Wesselski While contemplating the influence of the brothers Grimm on fairy tale research, the American-Hungarian folklorist Linda Dégh remarked that a strict division between oral and literary forms of a story was untenable, as German-speaking authorities such as Hermann Bausinger and Rudolf Schenda had argued. Of course, she added, Wesselski, had already made the point in the early 1930s in his attack on the Finnish School.29 If referred to at all, however, Wesselski’s work was taken more seriously in Germany than in the United States, where shortly after the Second World War Stith Thompson had assigned one of his students to evaluate the writings of the Austrian, enabling him subsequently to dismiss them.30 What remained was the association of Wesselski with a too stringent opinion on the dominance of the literary transmission of fairy tales,

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without taking into account his publications on the matter, or situating them in their contemporary contexts.31 Dégh was an exception; she had read her Wesselski before she moved to the United States.32 In Germany certain residues of his ideas survived the political clean-up of folklore in the 1960s. Even though he had not been completely unsympathetic to the fascist programme, he never exhibited the extreme nationalistic Blut und Boden ideology and he had always been critical of the Grimms, whose work was used in support of it. In the 1930s Wesselski’s publications were valued because of his vast knowledge of medieval and Middle Eastern literature; theoretically he cut a lone figure. Nevertheless somewhat later in Britain, Iona and Peter Opie, in a streak of independent development, stressed the importance of broadsheets and pamphlets in the distribution of fairy tales, without referring to Wesselski’s writings.33 Outside the academic folklore centres of Germany and the United States it was apparently possible to grasp the failures of the orality concept and to provide the most obvious alternative. Wesselski’s reaction to the rising Finish School was that of the literary historian who found it incomprehensible that a mere oral tale, collected in some ‘far-Northern parish’,34 could be balanced against a century-long literary advancement and then prevail. This thought was joined to the critique of mass culture in the 1920s, defending the sublime against the mundane and doubting the creative powers of the collective. In Wesselski’s view the ‘folk’ could only reproduce, not produce, and should be regarded neither as preparing (zubereitend, a culinary metaphor), preserving nor disseminating stories.35 These capacities were granted only to specific, gifted individuals. A Märchen, which he understood as ‘poetical fiction’, a magical story which was not believable, was a form of art. His verdicts on oral tales cannot be properly understood without taking his ideas about the art of literature into consideration; when his critics stressed that he assigned oral tales to the rubbish heap,36 they merely overexposed one element of his thinking and obscured the rest. Wesselski’s fairy tale theory was built on firm opinions about both human progress and the cultural achievement of his own country (which was in essence the Austrio-Hungarian monarchy, even if that had been dissolved after the First World War), and an acknowledgement of the importance of the relativity of belief and taste. It thus attained a level of sophistication that was lost on most of his detractors: his negative statements were usually counteracted by positive ones. Not only was the decomposing oral story set against the literary tale and the passive mass of people against the educated individual, or, as he put it, the ‘priest, visionary and poet’,37 the delusions which could be found in, for instance, legends were opposed by the fantasies of the fairy tales – recognized as such but still treasured. This resulted in a positioning of fairy tales as products of a

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developed culture which had proceeded beyond the beliefs of earlier generations, and, even more importantly, of people farther removed geographically: a ‘Märchen does not always start as a Märchen, but only becomes one when it has overcome space and time’.38 Because mythological and religious stories, as well as legends, were usually believed by their bearers, they preceded fairy tales. And since the latter were strange and exotic, it was only logical that they originated in exotic places, which for Europe was the Orient. Hence the paradox that in India, which Wesselski considered as the country of origin of ‘motifs of wonder’, a fairy tale was not a fairy tale.39 In his opinion a process of distantiation, coupled with a certain alienation, was a distinctive characteristic of fairy tales. This also applied to social differences, even though Wesselski did not proceed beyond distinguishing between the educated, intellectually high-standing mind and the masses. In its essence this theory concerned a further refinement of the observation of the Grimms about the other worldliness of fairy tales, although its author preferred to blame the brothers for spoiling genuine folk texts and wrongly defining Märchen as everything oral. In the early twentieth century Wesselski’s approach had hardly any followers, in contrast to the Finnish School, whose adherents produced one monograph after another. Wesselski’s most vocal critics operated from this latter perspective. Chief among them was Walter Anderson who occupied the chair of folklore in Tartu (Estonia).40 In a lengthy essay, larded with quotations from his college lectures, he emphasized the stability of oral tradition, which Wesselski had depicted as fleeting.41 According to Anderson storytelling was ruled by the law of self-correction, a kind of cybernetic counter-coupling, which ensured that mistakes in story transmission were ruled out by the frequent exposure of storytellers to the right versions. For this it was necessary to have villages where several tellers were active. Of course, stories could also be distributed by prints, or travel vast distances in a relatively short time, but these influences on oral tradition were mostly superseded by the numerous occasions in which indigenous stories were rehearsed locally.42 If Anderson’s observations were facilitated by any field work (which Wesselski eschewed), they were also saturated with notions about orality which in the final analysis turn out to be indefensible. One of his main examples, the Tsar’s Dog, would have been untouched by printed texts – 0 per cent of influence, as Anderson stated.43 Yet its content appears very fabricated and the 45 variants he tabled, dating from roughly the second half of the nineteenth century and spread over the entire Slavonic world, display such a mutual resemblance that it would be unreasonable not to postulate an underlying printed source, rather than an Urform which had disappeared in the mists of time.44 The tale relates the adventures of a man whose wife changes him into a dog (she had taken a lover) and makes himself useful by first guarding

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a shepherd’s flock against wolves and then a tsar’s son against a wizard in the shape of a wolf. The man is rewarded, returns to his wife but is now turned into a sparrow by her and ends up with the same wizard he had previously chased away. There he is disenchanted and taught how to revenge himself: wife and lover are made into horses or donkeys. This tale can be considered as the Russian modification of a text from the Arabian Nights, the Third Shaykh’s Story, which does not carry the bird episode,45 and it was probably published in broadsheet form. That it would be the oral pendant of the related published story of Sidi Numan, as Anderson proclaimed, is extremely unlikely.46 Whereas Wesselski accepted the occurrence of oral transmission and Anderson did not so much deny the presence of printed texts as not look for them when he should have, their difference was primarily a matter of assessment. And because the Austrian’s instruments were more fine-tuned historically, they deserve preference. Anderson needed an ideal story telling situation, prolonged and widespread, as well as a reconstructed first tale to sustain his conclusions. In practice such a situation would have been not only rare but essentially fossilized, with tellers who were capable only of slavishly reproducing stories. Historically such conditions were never met on a large scale, which makes it hard to invoke them when one wants to explain variety and change adequately. As Dégh, who certainly did her share of field work, concluded, Anderson’s argument was ‘not convincing’.47 By stressing the role of both creative individuals and prints and printed texts, as well as applying a more differentiated story concept, Wesselski at least offered a workable direction for historical fairy tale research. Wolf rider Three elements are characteristic for the wolf versions of the Quest for the Bird as they were retold from the text in the Dedushkiny progulki, by Afanas’ev and a number of other copyists: the signpost at the crossroads, the wolf changing into the creatures to be returned, and the resurrection of the hero with the waters of death and life (or similar means). Tales of this kind were communicated to collectors from Karelia in the North to the Caucasus in the South of Russia and even as far as Kazakhstan yet further to the south-east, either with minor deviations or with extra additions.48 These last were either so fantastical as to remain unique, or were linked to fragments of other stories, thereby forming subtypes within a subtype when they survived. Although Russian texts formed the point of departure of this dispersion, its geographical and linguistic reach extended to the Finnish, Estonian, and Lithuanian languages in the north-west, the Galician and Romanian in the west and the Udmurthian in the east. Linguistic

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boundaries were easily crossed in places where people were bilingual. The Finnish, Estonian and Komi languages in which the tale has been recorded all belong to the Finno-Ugric family, but in this case the overlap of their speakers with Russian is more important – and wolf variants were rare in Hungary,49 where they would have been rampant had the linguistic, and with it the oral, aspects been in ascendance. The same applies to a couple of texts from the Turkish languages. The nineteenth-century distribution pattern, basically formed by a dozen, more or less similar texts, and incidentally analogous to Anderson’s Tsar’s Dog, also points to a dependence on prints: oral communication would have taken much longer to traverse the enormous distances involved and have resulted in a far greater variety. Udmurthian and Komi versions illustrate the kind of distortion that can occur in a story with a stable core at the end of a chain of communication. In the Udmurthian tale when the peasant’s son Ivan has grown strong, he sets off to marry the princess Anastasia. On his way he meets a trapped wolf, frees and feeds him. His attempt to abduct the princess falters, and in return for his release from prison he has to fetch the Firebird. Ivan captures it when it is picking apples. This time the bird escapes, the next time it is captured but when Ivan takes the nest, bells start to sound and he is driven out of the garden. Only now he calls for the wolf, who helps him by changing into the bird.50 Apart from lacking the usual reasons to start the quest, the omission of the horse, and of the killing-cum-resurrection sequence (this Ivan has no brothers), the story is still recognizable as an upside-down version of the Bird Quest. In a Komi story the wolf is absent altogether and Ivan is assisted by an old man who has given him a flying carpet and a broom. When Ivan has eloped with the daughter of the Lord of the World, she implores him not to hand her over to the Lord of the Water since her father has told her that she should marry the man who has succeeded in abducting her. Luckily she has brought a substitute for the wolf: a dove that can change into any creature and thus they manage to acquire everything in essentially the same manner as in the other stories. Ivan’s quarrels with his brothers are already resolved at the start of the story, when they are consumed by wild animals because they did not heed the old man.51 Whereas a treatment according to the geographical-historical method demands as many texts as possible, the analysis carried out here rests on those texts which are available.52 Followers of the Finnish School adhering to orality were constantly plagued by their awareness of all the potentially unrecorded variants, since recordings were never carried out systematically or with the intention of reaching some sort of representativeness. A historical approach recognizes the proximity of the recorded oral texts to prints, and therefore aims to establish an, always provisional, picture of textual changes and dispersions, pretending that the

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haphazard collections have been wide spread enough to allow this. The difference rests purely in the perspective of the viewer. The parameters for mapping out the wolf versions of the Quest for the Bird, then, are presented by a handful of texts which are very close to the early prints. This concerns, for instance, a mid-nineteenth-century tale from the Bukowina, in which the hero merely feeds pieces of meat rather than his horse to the wolf and in which the water to revive him is furnished by crows instead of ravens.53 It also concerns a recently published tale from Georgia in which the youngest brother grasps a whole wing of the fruit-stealing bird rather than just a tail feather and is not bothered by his brothers on the way back.54 These texts further distinguish themselves through casual comments, presumably by their narrators, on the wolf and his actions: ‘I was not a wolf, but your luck’, the helper is reported to have remarked in a Czech version.55 Or in a Tartarian variant where the wolf replies to the question whether he is a wizard: ‘I understand a little of it.’56 One of the Russian versions elaborates the wolf’s metamorphosis by imagening the reaction of the fooled horse-owner: ‘no sooner did he lie down in bed, a wolf’s snout stared at him instead of a young woman!’57 These last instances all present the products of narrators with a good memory who have slightly stepped away from the narrative. They primarily remembered the printed version. A further direction in the development of the story was the addition of new elements. Among the few nineteenth-century Russian versions of the story is one where a tsar is typically notified of the Firebird’s existence by a printed sheet of paper. His youngest son needs to perform an extra task by collecting the cat with eight ears and the maiden is walking in a garden which can be folded in a satchel; she is exchanged for the cat, but the hero keeps the garden.58 Another elaboration has the wolf calling his pack as a diversion tactic.59 Here the wolf also furnishes the hero with a violin to play at his brother’s wedding, a detail that surfaces in a few other texts, too. Yet another variant, this time mostly without an animal helper (the hero is assisted by a cat only in one task), and with the sequence bird – violin – horse – maiden, portrays the hero coming upon an old woman living in a hut in the woods (possibly a Baba Yaga), who promises to give the bird, this time a luminous falcon (who is the woman’s son), in exchange for the self-playing violin (probably a gusly).60 Such interventions, whether by inventive narrators or editors, did not contribute to the clarity of the story line. Sometimes they were successful when passed on to next collectors, as is also the case with those versions where the maiden is abducted by having been lured on to a ship with merchandise (borrowed from Basile’s ‘Lo cuorvo’),61 or when a Koshchay episode is pasted on at the end (cf. Chapter 6). The former first appeared in a Romanian volume of tales not particularly known for its adherence to orally recorded texts,62 was copied into

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an Ukrainian version63 and, with the ship transformed to a mere shop, retold in Lithuania and Finland.64 The latter made an early appearance two decades before the ballet in a collection of Ingric texts.65 It was published later in what can only be ascribed as damaged forms, once with a monk replacing the wizard;66 another time with the wizard killed by a magic stick rather than by squeezing his life force out of the egg.67 All these stories can be considered as deviations from the late eighteenth-century original; they provide no indication whatsoever of independence from the print. For the history of the Firebird, one needs to look at older stories. The water of life The oldest known ancestor text of the Quest for the Bird is the Water of Life, as it appeared in the early fourteenth-century Provençal collection of exempla Scala Celi by the dominican Johannes Gobius. In this medieval story a sick king can be healed only by the water of life. His three sons set out to find it and the youngest meets an old man who shows him where to find the well and warns him of dangers, that is to say, of temptations. The first is a dragon which has to be killed; the second a group of maidens who must not be looked at; the third are knights who will offer him weapons that must not be accepted; and the fourth a bell which must not be sounded, otherwise knights will come to kill the stranger. The hero takes his precautions, and reaches the palace of the beautiful maiden who guards the healing water. She gives him not only the remedy but, since he has overcome all the obstacles, also her hand. Thus he wins his father’s kingdom.68 As a motif or a theme within a story, the water of life has been employed many times since.69 In the mid-sixteenth-century Piacevoli notti by Straparola, for instance, it emerged in the stories of Ancilotto and of Livoretto. The former primarily deals with jealous older sisters and a mother-in-law who thinks her son has married beneath his station. The action focuses on the interplay between the youngest sister’s three children and a midwife, who is the instrument of the old queen. The children are prompted to retrieve three magical objects: dancing water, singing apples and a green bird. On the last quest the two brothers are turned into marble, but their sister succeeds and the whole plot is revealed to the king who now recognizes his children, reinstates his wife and punishes all the evil women. This story had its own string of descendants;70 it will also have enhanced the notion of a triple quest and it occasionally lent the green petrifying bird to stories later classified as ATU 550.71 In the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch story about a king of England and the Phoenix Bird, the water of life theme is more directly addressed, even though

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the water itself is replaced by the equally resurrecting Phoenix. The king suffers from podagra (= gout) and is told by fortune tellers that he has to hear the Phoenix sing if he ever wants to recover. His youngest son succeeds in finding the bird, after bracing his urge to ‘quench his rejectable lusts with skittish women’, he withstands a whole palace full of young women and prefers a shabby donkey to beautiful horses. When he finally beholds the princess who is asleep next to the bird, he cannot resist the urge to impregnate her. ‘He fell on to her on the bed and quenched the fire within him.’ He also finds an inexhaustable loaf and a bottle of wine which never empties and a sword which makes him invincible. On his return he uses these treasures to aid the three kings of Morocco, the Morning Land and France. They help him in their stead, when his brothers have stolen the bird; they support the princess who is looking for the hero who has fathered her son. With a special paternity test – only the real father is able to walk over a golden sheet – she exposes the false claim of the brothers.72 The wording of this tale showed every sign of a French translation and it was inserted into the second edition of a volume of anecdotes which were definitely French.73 In 1692 the Dutch ‘Fable’ was translated into Danish and led to a cluster of Scandinavian publications, of which the Icelandic verion of 1788 is closest to the mid-seventeenth-century text.74 The story was very popular in Denmark and went through eighteen printings between 1696 and 1808.75 A Swedish translation of the chapbook was reprinted about a dozen times between 1745 and 1840.76 It is likely that in the course of the eighteenth century the story was translated into German since a German version, now again with the water of life, was included in the KHM and in a number of later German collections.77 Evidently the story was also popular in France and, though the original seventeenthcentury French text has not yet been located, its influence is visible in some of the pseudo-Oriental eighteenth-century narratives. In the Wortley Montague manuscript, compiled around 1763, three stories occur that are all derivations of the quest for the Phoenix. In the King of al-Yaman and His Three Sons there is the search for a magic bird and the bedding scene is repeated twice: after the hero has killed a lion, after he has slaughtered an elephant and after he has overcome seven lions and forty slaves guarding the third princess who possesses the bird – each time he leaves a message. In this tale the bird is also appropriated by his brothers, but the three princesses arrive in the city and reveal the facts of the matter.78 In a story from the 101 Nights, of which the oldest manuscript copy in the French Bibliothèque Nationale dates from 1776, a king has been turned black by a dragon’s vapour. He sends out two sons, one to kill the dragon to revenge him, the other for the remedy. Whereas the eldest son gives up, the youngest hears about the Sun of Purity who sleeps every month

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for seven days in a row. There grows a tree and with a leaf, dipped in water, one can clean the blackest face. The prince finds the girl, so beautiful that he cannot but take her in his arms; he leaves his name on the threshold and plucks some leaves. On his return journey he meets his brother who ties him to a tree and tells lies to their father. The hero is about to be killed when he is saved by the princess.79

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A sequence of stories Straparola used the water of life theme also in his story of the two brothers Lustico and Livoretto. They are the sons of the king of Tunis and are sent away because only a daughter can inherit the throne. Livoretto is given a magic horse by his mother and travels to Cairo where he hires himself out as a swineherd to the sultan. He fulfils his tasks so excellently that he is first promoted to groom and then to cupbearer. For this the other slaves and servants hate him and one of them whispers to the sultan that he can procure the princess Belissandra, daughter of the king of Damascus. Livoretto’s magic horse advises him what to do and on the road to Damascus he rescues a fish and a falcon, who promise to help him in return. In Damascus he captures the princess by pretending to sell his horse; the moment she has mounted it, they run off. Belissandra, however, abhors the sultan of Cairo and first demands that her ring is retrieved and then that the water of life is brought to her. Livoretto succeeds again, now with the help of the animals he saved. Finally the princess demands that Livoretto is killed. The sultan refuses and she does it herself, decapitating him in the process. And not content with this cruel outrage, the bloody-minded girl hewed off his head from his shoulders, and, having chopped his flesh into small pieces, and torn up his nerves, and broken his hard bones and ground them to a fine powder, she took a large bowl of copper, and little by little she threw therein the pounded and cut-up flesh, compounding it with the bones and the nerves as women of a household are wont to do when they make a great pastry with leavened crust thereto. And after all was well kneaded, and the cut-up flesh thoroughly blended with the powdered bones and the nerves, the princess fashioned out of the mixed-up mass the fine and shapely image of a man and this she sprinkled with the water of life out of the phial, and straightaway the young man was restored to life from death more handsome and more graceful than he had ever been before.

The sultan wants the same treatment, but is thrown out of the window and Belissandra marries Livoretto.80 This story, too, produced a number of descendants, among others the d’Aulnoy tale ‘La Belle aux cheveux d’or’.81 It also

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clearly constituted a forerunner of the Quest for the Bird, in particular in the way the magic mount takes off with the princess and the rejuvenation scene; the latter being modelled on Medea’s magic in the Argonauts’ tale – a popular medieval story (cf. Chapter 3).82 Even a rudiment of the string structure is already present: the princess demands other tasks before she consents in mariage to the other man. Another off shoot of the Water of Life, closely related to Livoretto, can be found in the Metamorfosi, written in the late sixteenth century by the Italian Lorenzo Selva: an extra marital son of a king goes to fetch a plant from the garden of the East, of which the leaves and fruits can heal every disease and prolong life by many years. However, his half-brother is waiting to kill him on his return. After a long journey the hero finds himself in a valley, exhausted and starved. He sees a majestic female shape who tells him how to locate a stone with the colour of heaven; it will make him invisible when he enters the garden. The fruit of one of the trees there will nourish him, those of the others will cause his downfall. Yet he cannot resist touching some of the forbidden fruits and alerts the guards who put him in prison. He is set free on condition that he secures the fair Agape, who lives in the Kingdom of the Middle. On this second journey the hero meets an old man who tells him how to answer the questions she will ask him. She will then offer to accompany him, the old man warns, but he should not allow her to take any money or jewellery; she will merely tempt him with it. Everything happens as the man told it, but, when the hero and the princess are about to leave, she persuades him to take a necklace with her portrait cut in stone. He finds it too beautiful to leave behind and she chides him that, since he is capable of falling in love with an image, he does not love her sufficiently and she throws him in a dark cell. After three days the old man releases him, urging him to obey and to obtain a winged horse to take to the lady. For this task he needs to be pure and unafraid. Now Agape comes with him, they collect the remedy and travel to the realm of the hero’s father – from which the hateful brother departs.83 In 1611 the Metamorfosi was rendered into French by the translator Jean Baudoin and entitled La métamorphose du vertueux, livre plein de moralité; he also translated the fables of Aesop into French.84 From this translation stories such as the ‘Aventures d’Abdalla fils d’Hanif’ of Abbé Bignon in 1712 branched off: this quest for fruits, maiden and mount (the latter an Islamic representation of the Antichrist) is divided over three protagonists.85 In another French tale, ‘Le pétite grenouille verte’ published a few years later, the hero searches for the bird that will heal his father and is helped by a frog, for whom he has to steal a horse and a maiden before he can attempt to catch the bird which sits in the tree with the golden trunk and the emerald leaves. Here the quests are not

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linked either and it is the enchanted frog, rather than the abducted girl, who is predestined for the prince.86 This last story, earmarked as an early representative of ATU 550, was hardly rehearsing ‘authentic’ oral material,87 and neither does it prove the existence of a type; it shows only that its author had read the Métamorphose and flattened its metaphorical meanings into a tale meant to entertain a blasé aristocracy. One of the other stories in the Wortley Montagu manuscript was also inspired by the Métamorphose, while repeating parts from the King of al-Yaman by which it was framed. The Sultan of al-Hind is the story of the boy who hunts a green bird (as in Straparola’s Ancilotto) and sees it escape. He now has to choose between three roads: one of luck, another of repentance and a third of no return. He takes the last, helps a jinnI to get rid of an enormous tail,88 is caught by a gardener when attempting to steal the bird, and has to bring him diamond and emerald grapes from the black isles. His helper kills a lion after changing into a bird with pointed beak, but the hero is caught again when stealing the grapes. This time the daughter of the sultan vouches for him and marries him. At the island of the Green Birds, the jinnI beats a vulture by changing into an eagle, his opponent changes into a giant, then into a serpent; finally the jinnI becomes a stone which falls on the serpent. He dies but will be reborn when his grave is cared for for twelve years and his body is given ritual washings.89 The next known texts in this sequence are Russian (see above) and German: ‘Der treue Fuchs’ (the Faithful Fox), from the volume Kindermährchen aus mündlichen Erzählungen gesammelt, which was published in Erfurt in 1787 and contains a total of four stories. Only when the book was reprinted in 1857 was its author revealed as Wilhelm Christoph Günther, former minister in Weimar.90 In the Faithful Fox a king suffers from gout and podagra and dreams that hearing the Phoenix singing will cure him (as in the mid-seventeenth-century story). His three sons depart one by one, but the two elder become preoccupied with a gang of robbers and only the youngest son Nanell continues, aided by a fox. When he reaches the palace of the king who owns the bird, the fox warns him not to take the costly cage. The hero ignores the warning and the bird cries out; he is captured and assigned to fetch the dappled horse, which he will be allowed to exchange for the bird. He fails again, mollifies the royal owner of the horse and is now sent out to save the beautiful princess Trako Meid from a giant. This villain can be killed only by his own sword, which Nanell can handle only once he has rubbed magic ointment on his arms and hand. Back at the palace of the second king, he grabs Trako and runs off with her, the moment he has been given the horse. He repeats this trick with the bird. When they come to a town, the fox has to leave, but warns the boy not to buy flesh from the gallows. But Nanell falls back into his old habit of ignoring the fox and frees

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two men about to be hanged – they are his wayward brothers. By way of thanks they throw him into a abyss, where he perishes. The fox brings him back to life with the giant’s ointment. He now has to disenchant the fox by beheading him. They return to the court, the brothers are banished, and Nanell lives happily ever after with his Trako Meid.91 Here, as in the Métamorphose and the King of al-Hind, the story line is characterized by the prince ignoring his helpers’ council: each time his greed initiates the next scene. The German story furthermore betrays its French affilation by featuring a fairy, denoted as ‘misplaced’ by Grätz,92 who explains to the fox that he has been enchanted by the giant who abducted his sister by order of the king who owned the dappled horse. By now the Quest for the Bird had reached one of his present shapes. On the fox’s trail The text with the title ‘Vom wunderbaren Vogel’ was sent to the Grimms in 1810 from Marburg where an acquaintance of theirs had managed to record it with some difficulty from an elderly woman. Clemens Brentano had pointed her out as a teller of Märchen and a year earlier the brothers had sent their younger sister Lotte for whom the woman had held her tongue.93 The two stories which were thus added to their collection were certainly no paragon of oral tradition. One was a version of Cinderella, already circulating in German translations of Perrault and d’Aulnoy. The Golden Bird itself has been considered as a retelling of the Faithful Fox, chiefly because of several textual anologies in the exchange between the hero and the fox and the description of the hero’s hairs as ‘whistling in the wind’.94 But other details make it difficult to sustain this derivation. In the early nineteenth century Günther’s story was several times recited orally, and thus simplified, for the benefit of the Grimms’ story project and this naturally resulted in different texts, usually with a suffering king who needed the Phoenix.95 In the main text of the KHM this is replaced by the apple-stealing bird, as in the Russian stories. In the first editions, however, gardener’s sons rather than princes guard the tree and only in the third 1837 edition did Wilhelm Grimm edit princes into the story. The two eldest sons aim their gun at a fox and disregard his advice to pass by the inn where there is light and merriment. The youngest son heeds the warning and the fox carries him, this time on his tail, to the castle of the bird. Everything unwinds as in the Faithful Fox and in Prince Ivan, only when the hero has kissed the princess and she has agreed to join him, she wants to say farewell to her father, who agrees to part with her only if a mountain that obstructs his view is removed. The fox manages this

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overnight. On the way back the boy obtains the other treasures and frees his brothers. They throw him into a well but he survives and the fox pulls him out with his tail. Now the evil brothers are executed; the fox is still beheaded and turns into the princess’s brother. In 1824 a selection of the KHM was translated into English for the first time. It started the myth that the stories were ‘obtained for the most part from the mouth of German peasants by the indefatigable exertions of John and William Grimm, brothers in kindred and taste’.96 If this was more the translator’s point of view than a solid observation, it was at least based on the way the Grimms had portrayed Dorothea Viehmann (see Chapter 5). The stories were well-liked anyhow and a copy must have found its way to Ireland, where the Golden Bird was retold to (or by) Patrick Kennedy, a bookseller in Dublin dubbed the ‘Irish Grimm’,97 in his Fireside Stories of 1870. Any other option is unrealistic: the gardener’s sons and the task to win the princess were unique for the earlier KHM editions and their resurfacing on the western island cannot have been due to another source. The Irish text was nevertherless not a straightforward translation; apart from a colouring with Irish expressions, it identified the owner of the bird as the king of Spain. The horse belonged to the king of Morocco and the prince was the daughter of the king of Greece.98 No independent Irish invention, they were almost certainly borrowed from the seventeenth-century Phoenix story. Elsewhere in Europe the KHM’s influence is also evident. In Sweden two broadsides of 1824 and 1826 with about a dozen editions till 1853 contained the Grimm version.99 In the Swedish part of Finland, in Denmark, and in Bohemia authors and publishers milked the KHM, too.100 In Germany it was not so much the KHM which proved textually influential as other compilations. Although in the 1820s the Golden Bird had, next to the KHM, been incorporated in the Buch der Maehrchen für Kindheit und Jugend as well as in the Mährchenkranz für Kinder,101 it was Günther’s booklet, reprinted in 1857, that resulted in a number of stories in which the youngest son sets out to find a healing bird, rather than just a golden bird who has stolen apples. Since Aarne formulated the type description of number 550 after the KHM text and not after Günther’s, confusion arose as to the classification of retellings of the latter. According to Draak, a Flemish text was ‘without any doubt influenced by the Grimm-redaction’.102 In Dutch-speaking Belgium not only the KHM reception can be discerned. A story from Genk (Limburg), recorded at the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, features a ‘Vinus’ Bird and a third son who, helped by a fox, first collects a dappled horse and then the ‘fair Lena’, bails out his brothers and finally kills the fox who subsequently transforms into Lena’s brother.103 This is a fairly exact rendering of Günther’s Faithful Fox

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whose text was available in a Dutch translation.104 The only freedom the teller took was to have Lena scrubbing when the prince arrives. In another Flemish story the editors had fused two ‘incomplete readings’ into one, one from Anvers and the other from Denderleeuw. Here the hero has to collect the apple-stealing ‘Singing Bird’ (whose name is inscripted on his wings with golden letters), a ‘Lightstone’, a donkey and the fair Brigit. He is also helped by a fox, and his brothers appropriate the loot.105 At first sight the quadruple structure seems to be an invention of the editors, the more so as they commented that ‘in Anvers the maiden was not mentioned, in Denderleeuw the Donkey-Step-On and the Lightstone’, if it had not been used before by Wolf in his Deutsche Hausmärchen.106 In the latter text, primarily a Faithful Fox reworking but with a bear, the fourth assignment consists of bringing a stone, too, and the prince is warned that the princess should not be allowed to put on her most precious dress before she joins him (reminiscent of the ‘Petite grenouille’). The two versions thus originated from the KHM (Denderleeuw) and Wolf’s volume (Antwerp) – the latter was famous in Flanders because he was the first to record folk narratives there. In yet another Flemish variant the treasures have been assembled in the same place: Three giants live in a castle and they possess the Venus Bird, the Horse Mousehair and Glooremonde (Glory of the World), respectively the fairest of all birds, horses and women. Three princes have reached the age of marriage and are interested in the woman. The eldest two become trapped in an inn; the youngest listens to a woman who also gives him a little fox: when in need he should take it out of his pouch. He wins back the money his brothers have lost in the inn, and arrives at a castle. Now the bird persuades him to take the beautiful cage. The next day the horse wants him to take the wonderful bridle, and he does not get out in time. He suggests to the giant that he should return the bird and runs away helped by the fox. The next day Glooremonde wants to put on a dress. It takes too long, and he tells the third giant that he will return both bird and horse. Again he escapes with the help of the fox. When his brothers throw him into the well, he is rescued by the fox. Back home all three creatures are happy only when they see him; his brothers are banished to a faraway island.107 The orality of this tale is doubtful, or, like the Genk story, it has been edited to such an extent that it has become literary. As both editor and informant belonged to the Catholic clergy, it was probably based on Catholic teaching material. In a second Anvers version, told in 1910 by the daughter of a carpenter, a boy also takes a golden bird, a silver horse and a beautiful princess all at the same time from the castle of giants.108 The triple sequence, characteristic of the story since the late sixteenth century, has also disappeared from a rare and late Dutch version from the east of Guelders. A prince travels to secure

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the ‘Bird Venus’ and the ‘apple of health’ and, when he arrives at the castle of the bird’s owner, he works so hard and ‘tidies up everything’ so well that he does not have to steal them any more and thus is saved the next quests for the horse and the girl (or a stone). The teller had heard this tale from her father, who had been born in 1860 and was also raised Catholic.109 Stories could easily be badly remembered and deformed, which is to be expected when they are orally transmitted by inexperienced informants. In an earlier phase they will have been read and recited. Distortion implies one or even several master texts, and in the nineteenth century publishers and fairy tale researchers had provided plenty of those. If, six hundred years earlier, the authors of the Walewein had stirred a fairy tale through their romance, one would expect it to have survived in Flanders – at least such a conclusion would be drawn by followers of the Finnish School because of the relative density of Flemish versions. As it is, the texts collected and published there during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all stemmed from printed texts and were all reworkings of translations – as was also the case with the Quest for the Ogre’s Feathers discussed in the previous chapter. Scholars using the fairy tale to underline the Dutchness of the Walewein are applying the wrong evidence for an assumption that is only partly right. A hypothetical text Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts of the Quest for the Bird undoubtedly belong to the progeny of the Dedushkiny progulki tale of Ivan and the Grey Wolf, or the Faithful Fox or the KHM Golden Bird. The ancestry of these texts is also evident: a clear line runs from the Water of Life to the Golden Bird. In the course of time the temptations in the former were transformed into the warnings in the latter, with the Phoenix as an important intermediate stage. Only in the course of this development the story turned from religious texts into a fairy tale. Whereas the Water of Life was originally an example to be used in sermons with the water symbolizing the living spirit of Christ,110 the story from the Metamorfosi was a parabel on belief, prayer and love.111 The seventeenth-cewntury Fable of the Phoenix was also full of biblical references,112 not least because resurrection had always been the Christian theme par excellence. Neither was the development compelling: other story forms were also viable, especially the Water of Life itself. Nevertheless, the general conclusion is inescapable that the story edited and published by the Grimms was a late secularized derivative of the Water of Life sequence, and was therefore unlikely to have been in existence during the thirteenth century, let alone as a type. What remains unclear is the relationship between the Russian and the German texts.

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Since all three feature the sequence bird – horse – princess, the marginal details become decisive. It may be possible that Günther used a French story (as yet unknown) in which the different texts were already combined into a new story; he may also have done it himself. The notion that his stories were oral mainly sprung from his remark that he heard them in his youth, in all probability because they were read to him.113 In his introductory dialogue he wrote that he had ‘zusammengefüget’ (combined) stories, without going into further details. He will have known a version of the Water of Life with the Phoenix, since he also used it in his next story.114 As a symbol of resurrection the Phoenix is synonymous with the Water of Life; both function as means of healing. A trace of it is still visible at the end of the Faithful Fox, when the hero is thrown into a chasm by his brothers and loses his life. The fox then applies the ointment from the giant to bring him back to the living, as Belissandra did to Livoretto. In the KHM redaction this detail was lost, and the prince survived the fall. The Russian story in turn shows remarkable similarities to Günther’s and the main difference is that the wolf, who has taken the place of the fox, changed himself into the princess and the horse when they have to be returned, thus saving the hero an ignonimous flight. In these versions, he does not have to be disenchanted.115 But the Russian text was printed a year before Günther’s book. In comparison to the Faithful Fox the Golden Bird misses several salient opening details: the king’s illness and the bird’s identity as the Phoenix. In the KHM story the hero does not need a means of resurrection either. That would have been too close to Günther’s tale, which the brothers described as dissonant – they found the whole volume rather poor. Wilhelm Grimm’s use of the apple-stealing bird may equally have functioned as a way to distinguish it from the Erfurt tale. It may have been the contribution of the woman in Marburg, who had been pressed for stories and had to compensate for a faulty memory.116 But although the apples must have been a late addition as they are inconsequential in the story’s plot (they are routinely forgotten in the bird scene), they did play a part in the Russian text. And it is extremely unlikely that Günther first borrowed his story from the Russian (because of the resurrection scene) and left out the apples, which the woman in Marburg (or the Grimms) then reinserted. Only in the 1830s did the Grimms become familiar with the Russian text through German translations when Jacob wrote a preface to Dietrich’s Russische Volksmärchen.117 Since they did not know any before, it is safe to assume that earlier translations did not exist.118 The most elegant solution to the question of the relationship between Prince Ivan, the Faithful Fox and the Golden Bird is to assume an as yet unknown text which immediately preceded every one of these three (as well as the Sultan of

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al-Hind). Everything else results in a tangled web of mutual borrowings and analogous additions; a single predecessor, on the other hand, allows for three diverse reactions, resulting in three different strands of the nineteenth-century manifestations of the story. This hypothetical text will have been of an Oriental or pseudo-Oriental nature, published in the French language. It will have been a conglomerate, structured on the La métamorphose story and partly styled on Livoretto (ATU 531), but in the d’Aulnoy rendering rather than in a Straparola translation, because in the former a raven is substituted for one of the helping animals and the magic mount is revealed as an enchanted prince.119 Then the three brothers were interwoven (siblings were already present in earlier versions) and the apple-stealing monster, both from a donor story which is likely to have been an early version of the story of the three stolen princesses (ATU 301), especially since at the end it also had a well from which the hero, abandoned by his two brothers, needed to escape. Such a story was available in the Arabian Nights corpus and also stood at the basis of a story related to Wilhelm Grimm by Ludowine von Haxthausen (KHM 91).120 The presumed missing link will thus have been a fairly full version of what is now categorized as an ATU 550 tale, probably already with the fox. The author of the Dedushkiny progulki, who possibly borrowed the hidden life motif of the Koshschay tale from the same source, merely made the helper into a wolf and kept most of the rest, with the exception of the helper’s disenchantment. A year later Günther mixed in the diseased king and the Phoenix, omitted the apples and the signpost but kept the water of life, now disguised as an ointment. In the KHM text the apples and the fox remained, but the hero survived the attack of his brothers. Here the gardener, who briefly appeared in the garden of the bird, was given more prominence by making his sons into the protagonists. When Wesselski reconstructed the genealogy of the Golden Bird, he leapfrogged backwards from the KHM to Günther, from there to the Scandinavian texts of circa 1700, and then almost directly to the Metamorfosi and the Water of Life. Although there were more relevant texts whose intertextuality turns out to be slightly more complicated, they more likely strenghten rather than undermine Wesselski’s thesis. This appears moreover when the nineteenthcentury tales, Russian as well as western European, are taken into consideration and are shown to be oral derivatives of printed texts rather than underlying traditional oral material. The printed tradition, however, resulted in the same texts only when it involved the copies of one particular publication. From publication to publication the story was constantly adjusted, as far as its history from the late eighteenth century onwards is concerned, with or without oral mediation. Variation and change were not just characteristics of orality, they were also integral to literary tradition.

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Notes 1 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Oxford 1996), 557–570; Regina Bendix, ‘The Firebird. From the Folktale to the Ballet’, Fabula 24 (1983), 72–85; cf. Stephen Benson, ‘Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorovich’, in: Zipes (ed.), Companion, 507–508. 2 A.N. Afanasjew, Russische Volksmärchen (München 1985), transl. Geier, 368–381; Aleksandr Afanas’ev, Russian Fairy Tales (New York 1945), transl. Guterman, 612–624. 3 Johann N. Vogl, Die ältesten Volksmärchen der Russen (Vienna 1841), 21–44, uses the edition of 1819; other editions of the Dedushkiny date from 1791 and 1793, cf. K.E. Korepova, Lekarstvo ot zadumchivosti: Russkaia skazka izdaniiakh (St Petersburg 2001). It is, however, not clear whether every edition contained exactly the same stories; Korepova refrained from a textual comparison (but may have made one elsewhere). The title of the 1791 edition incorporates a table of contents, which is similar to the one published by Korepova. 4 Vogl, Die ältesten Volksmärchen, 1–20. 5 Cf. Helmut Fischer, ‘Feder’, EM 4 (1984), 933–937. 6 Wesselski, Versuch, 120, 156 indicates a literary source without specifying it; ATU 306; EM, Schuhe. 7 Quoted in translation by: Jack Haney, An Introduction to the Russian Folktale (New York/London 1999), 27. 8 Haney, Introduction, 47, 52. 9 Haney, Introduction, 4, 45. 10 Haney, Introduction, 103, 81. 11 Haney, Introduction, 92. 12 Cf. Dégh, Folktales and Society, 50, 55–56, 172–173. 13 See for a Dutch translation of the broadsheet: Draak, Onderzoekingen, 49. 14 Isidor Levin, ‘Märchen in Russland’, in: Diether Roth and Walter Kahn (eds), Märchen und Märchenforschung in Europa. Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt am Main 1993), 203–228. 15 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, V (1932), 147; Kirill V. Cistov, ‘Russland’, EM 11 (2004), 930–954. The contribution on Russia by James Riordan, ‘Russian Fairy Tales and Their Collectors’, in Davidson and Chaudhri (eds), A Companion to the Fairy Tale, 216–225, merely focuses on Afanas’ev; it also suffers from nationalistic ideology; the entry by Maria Nikolajeva in Zipes’s Comnpanion, 468–476, likewise overlooks eighteenth-century publications. 16 Nikolaj V. Novikov, ‘Culkov, Michael Dmitrievic’, EM 3 (1981), 185–186. 17 Erna V. Pomeranceva, ‘Drukovco(e)v, Sergej Vasil’evic’, EM 3 (1981), 901– 902. 18 A.M.E. Draak, Onderzoekingen over de roman van Walewein (Amsterdam/Groningen 1975), 130–131. 19 Draak, Onderzoekingen, 87. 20 Draak, Onderzoekingen, 49, 53.

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21 Draak, Het verloop van het Nederlandse sprookje (Amsterdam 1960), 6. 22 W.P. Ker, Epic and Romance. Essays on Medieval Literature (London 1931; reprint of second, 1908 edition), 53; see also W.P. Ker, ‘The Roman van Walewein (Gawain)’, Folk-lore 5 (1894), 121–127. 23 J.F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, II (fascimile Hounslow 1983 [original 1890]), 344–357. 24 W.P. Gerritsen, ‘Walewein’s Welsh Antecedents’, Dutch Crossing. A Journal of Low Countries Studies 24 (2000), 147–161; Veerle Uyttersprot, ‘Entie hoofsche Walewein, sijn gheselle was daer ne ghein’. Ironie en het Walewein-beeld in de Roman van Walewein en de Europese middeleeuwse Arthurliteratuur (Brussel 2004), esp. 205–219. 25 A.M. Duinhoven, ‘De bron van Walewein’, Nederlandse letterkunde 6 (2001), 33–70; Floris, Gloriant en Walewein. Over Middelnederlandse kringloopliteratuur (Hilversum 2006). 26 Albert Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und die Historie om Kong Edvard af Engelland’, Acta Philologica Scandinavica 13 (1939/1940), 129–200, esp. 190. 27 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 513. 28 Kurt Ranke, Schleswig-holsteinische Volksmärchen, II (Kiel 1958), 191; cf. Dégh, Folktales and Society, 331: ‘The types 550 and 551 differ only in as much as the three princes in one tale are looking for the magic bird and in the other for the Water of Life’. 29 Linda Dégh, ‘What Did the Grimm Brothers Give and Take from the Folk?’, in James M. McGlathery (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana/Chicago 1991), 66–90, esp. 71. Dégh’s essay is reprinted in: Linda Dégh, Narratives in Society: A Performance-Centered Study of Narration (Helsinki 1995), 263–282. 30 Kiefer, Albert Wesselski and Recent Folklore Theories. 31 Cf. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales, 60: ‘Wesselski presented the most insistent arguments that the fairy tale tradition of Western Europe was thoroughly dependent on the expression and transmission of the tales in written forms.’ Ziolkowski, who disagrees, could have profited from reading Wesselski’s ‘Die Vermittlung des Volkes zwischen den Literaturen’, Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 34 (1936), 177–197. 32 Dégh’s book Folktales and Society was already published in East Germany in 1962; cf. Vilmos Voigt. ‘Dégh, Linda’, EM 3 (1981), 375–377. 33 Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford 1974); see also Bruford, Gaelic Folktales on the earlier importance of written manuscripts. 34 Albert Wesselski, Märchen des Mittelalters (Berlin 1925), xi. 35 Wesselski, Versuch, 178. 36 Jan de Vries, Betrachtungen zum Märchen (Helsinki 1954) (FFC 150), 14, following Anderson. 37 In a later essay he called them the ‘leaders and teachers of the people’ (Führer und Lehrer des Volkes); Albert Wesselski. ‘Goethe und der Volksmund’, Hessiche Blätter für Volkskunde 36 (1937), 32–83: 65.

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43 44

45 46 47

48

49

50 51 52

53

54 55 56 57

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Wesselski, Versuch, 84. Wesselski, Versuch, 87. Kurt Ranke, ‘Anderson, Walter’, EM 1 (1977), 493–494. Wesselski’s metaphor for this was zerflattern, which evokes the image of leaves blown to pieces in the Autumn wind, cf. Versuch, 144. Walter Anderson, Zu Albert Wesselski’s Angriffen auf die finnische folkloristische Forschungsmethode (Tartu 1935). Anderson, Zu Albert Wesselski’s Angriffen, 26. Sources for these texts can be found in Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1918), 7–8. One of the Afanas’ev versions is published in German translation, cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1416–1417; for others see: Karel Horálek, ‘Märchen aus Tausend und einer Nacht bei den Sklaven’, Fabula 10 (1969), 155–195, esp. 174–178. ANE, 378; Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 423–429. ATU 449, cf. Harlinda Lox, ‘Sidi Numan’, EM 12 (2006), 642–645. Dégh, Folktales and Society, 176. See for a thorough refutal of Anderson’s theory and experiments: Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi, ‘The Hypothesis of MultiConduit Transmission in Folklore’, in: Dan Ben-Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein (eds), Folklore: Performance and Communication (The Hague/Paris 1975), 207–252, reprinted in Dégh, Narratives in Society, 173–212. An overview of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts in: Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 508. Also: Richard Wossidlo and Gottfried Henssen, Mecklenburger erzählen (Berlin 1957), 110–112. Cf. Evelyne Sorlin, ‘La verte jeunesse et la vieillesse melancholique dans les contes AaTh 550 et 551’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 38 (1993), 227–269; the only wolf variant in: Elli Zenker-Starzacher, ‘Ein ungarländisches deutsches Märchen vom Goldenen Vogel und sein Erzähler’, Deutsche Volkskunde 4 (1942), 185–190. Nadezda Petrovna Kralina, Sto skazok udmurtskogo naroda (Izevsk 1961), 148–149, translation in archive EM. D.R. Fokos-Fuchs, Volksdichtung der Komi (Syrjänen) (Budapest 1951), 120–128. Of the 156 Lithuanian variants, cf. Jochem D. Range, Litauische Volksmärchen (Düsseldorf/Köln 1981), 274, only two have been taken into consideration; the 55 Finnish variants have been largely left alone. L.A. Staufe [= Ludwig Adolf Simiginowicz Staufe], ‘Der närrische Prinz’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythology und Sittenkunde 2 (1855), 389–400; cf. the summary in Draak, Onderzoekingen, 33–34. Heinz Fähnrich, Märchen aus Georgien (München 1995), 56–59. Mieczyslaw Dowojna-Sylwestrowic, Podania zmujdzkie, I (Warsawa 1894), 267–271, translation EM. Heikki Paasonen and E. Karahka, Mischätartarische Volksdichtung (Helsinki 1953), 11–18. A. Versinin, Skazki narodov nasej rodiny (Gor’kij 1962), 154–160, translation EM.

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58 V.G. Bazanov and O.B. Alekseeva, Velikorusskie skazki v zapisjach I.A. Chudjakova (Moscou/Leningrad 1964), 273–274, translation EM; Chudjakov’s work was originally published in 1860. 59 E.R. Romanov, Belorusskij Sbornik (Mogilev 1901), summary in Draak, Onderzoekingen, 39–40. 60 Ivan Rudchenko, Narodnyja juznorusskija Skazki (Kiev 1870). I have pieced this story together from the fragments provided by Draak, Onderzoekingen, 67 no. 2, 82, 86. 61 Pentamerone, IV, 9. 62 Arthur and Albert Schott, Rumänische Volkserzählungen aus dem Banat. Märchen, Schwänke, Sagen, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich and Ion Talos (Bukarest 1975), 194–204, original printed in 1845. 63 Oskar Kolberg, Pokucie, IV (Kraków 1889) 122; German translation in: P.V. Lintur, Ukrainische Volksmärchen (Berlin 1981), 256–263. 64 Robert Klein, Das weisse, das schwarze und das feuerrote Meer. Finnische Volksmärchen (Kassel 1966), 83–94; Lauri Simonsuuri and Pirkko-Liisa Rausmaa, Finnische Volkserzählungen (Berlin 1968), 84–88; Bronislava Kerbelyte, Litauische Volksmärchen (Berlin 1978), 204–209. 65 Volmari Porkka, Ueber den ingrischen Dialekt (Helsingfors 1885), 1340 ff., summary in Draak, Onderzoekingen, 37–38. 66 Ivan M. Cendej, Skazki verchoviny: Zarkarpatskie ukrainskie narodnye skazki (Uzgorod 1959), 325–330, translation EM. 67 Aleksandr Izaakovic Nikiforov, Severnorusskie Skazkie, ed. Vladimir Propp (Moscou/ Leningrad 1961), 230–236, translation EM; cf. Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambitious Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (New York 2004), 140–141, who mentions two other twentieth-century publications with an added egg episode. 68 Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen’, 163–164. German text in: Albert Wesselski, Märchen des Mittelalters (Berlin 1925), 80–81; cf. Frederic C. Tubach, Index Exemplorum. A Handbook of Medieval Relgious Tales (Helsinki 1969) (FFC 204), no. 5214. 69 Among others in: George Peel’s late sixteenth-century The Old Wives Tale (reprint Manchester 1980); Charlotte-Rose Caumont de la Force, ‘Plus belle que Fée’; recently reprinted in Raymonde Robert (ed.), Bibliothèque des Génies et des Fées, II: Le circle des conteuses (Paris 2005), 309–329. 70 ATU 707: the Three Golden Children; KHM 96. For an English translation of the Straparola text, see Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola to the Brothers Grimm (New York/London 2001), 220–229. On the subsequent tradition see Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 227–229, 397; Grätz, Das Märchen, 60, 283, n. 112. 71 For instance: Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara 2004), 402; Victor Chauvin, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes ou relatifs aux arabes, publiés dans l’Europe chrétienne de 1810 à 1885, VI (Liège/ Leipzig 1902), 8–9.

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72 Cf. Draak, Onderzoekingen, 48; the text was published by G.J. Boekenoogen, ‘Van den vogel Phenix’, in his ‘Nederlandsche sprookjes uit de xviide en het begin der xviiide eeuw’, Volkskunde 20 (1909), 129–157, esp. 136–144, now also in: Theo Meder and Cor Hendriks, Vertelcultuur in Nederland. Volksverhalen uit de collectie Boekenoogen (ca. 1900) (Amsterdam 2005), 735–743. 73 A.M.E. Draak, ‘St. Niklaesgift’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse taal en letteren 62 (1943), 81–105. 74 Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen’, 151–159; cf. Draak, Onderzoekingen, 48. 75 Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 249, n. 495. One of Kristensen’s narrators, Niels Hansen Li(he), who heard most tales from his mother, also related the pamphlet version, cf. Holbek, Interpretation, 531, 541. 76 Liungman, Die schwedische Volksmärchen, 158. His refutation of Wesselski’s findings suffers from a confusion between motifs and stories, as does the whole book. 77 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915) 394–401, esp. 396–397; Ranke, Schleswigholsteinische Volksmärchen, II, 195–211. 78 ANE, 261–262; Chauvin, Bibliographie, VI, 5–6. 79 Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen’, 171–173. 80 The Nights of Straparola, translation W.G. Waters (London 1894) I, 110–125, citation 123 (night 3, second story); not included in Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition. 81 It is classified as ATU 531; cf. Walter Pape, ‘Ferdinand der treue und F. der ungetreue’, EM 4 (1984), 1011–1021. The reference in the ANE, 136–137, concerns a nineteenth-century story from the Mardrus edition of the Arabian Nights, cf. Chapter 4. 82 Cf. Clausen-Stolzenberg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 137. The story has also been traced back to the Arthurian cycle, and its German rendering by Gottfried von Strassburg, see: Reinhold Köhler, ‘Tristan und Isolde und das Märchen von der goldhaarigen Jungfrau und von den Wassern des Todes und des Lebens’, Germania. Vierteljahrschrift für deutsche Alterthumskunde 11 (1866), 389–403. 83 Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen’, 191–195. 84 Anne-Elisabeth Spica, ‘Jean Baudoin et la fable’, XVIIe siècle 54 (2002), 417–432. 85 Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen’, 195, note 2, refering to Le cabinet des Fées 13, 27–47. 86 Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen’, 195–197. 87 Raymonde Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du xviie à la fin du xviiie siècle (Paris 2002), 334; cf. 133. 88 Fr. chevelure, also meaning mane. 89 ANE 401; Chauvin, Bibliographie VI, 108–110. 90 Günter Damman, ‘Conte de(s) fées’, EM 3 (1981), 131–140, esp. 141. 91 Christoph Wilhelm Günther, Kindermährchen aus mündliche Erzählungen gesammelt, ed. Thomas Eicher, Eva Laubrock and Tobias Moersen (Oberhausen 1999), 74–105; Hans-Jörg Uther, Märchen vor Grimm (München 1990), 131–160.

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92 Grätz, Das Märchen, 204. 93 Heinz Rölleke, ‘“Die Marburger Märchenfrau”. Zur Herkunft der KHM 21 und 57’, Fabula 15 (1974), 87–94. 94 Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen’, 132–133; cf. Lothar Bluhm, ‘Wilhelm Christoph Günther, die Brüder Grimm und die Marburger Märchenfrau’, in: Simone Jung (ed.), Märchen in der Literaturwissenschaft (Leipzig 2001), 10–19. 95 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 503. 96 M.M. [= Messrs] Grimm, German Popular Stories (London 1824), v–vi. The translation is by Edgar Taylor; cf. Martin Sutton, The Sin-Complex: A Critical Study of English Versions of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the Nineteenth Century (Kassel 1996). 97 The label was attached by Joseph Jacobs, Celtic Fairy Tales (London 1892), 238. 98 Patrick Kennedy, The Fireside Stories of Ireland (Dublin 1870), 47–56. The story is anthologized in: Joseph Jacobs, More Celtic Fairy Tales (London 1894), 110–124. See also: Patrick Kennedy, Irish Fireside Folktales (Cork 1969), 104–116. 99 Liungman, Die Schwedische Volksmärchen, 159. 100 Danish: Jens Madsen, Folkeminder fra Hanved Sogn ved Flensborg (Københarn 1870), see: Draak, Onderzoekingen, 53, n. 2; 93–94; Bohemian: Jakub Malý, Národnj =eské pohádky a pow7sti (Praha 1838), see: Tille, Verzeichnis, 180. 101 Johann Andreas Christian Löhr, Buch der Maehrchen für Kindheit und Jugend, nebst etzlichen Schnaken und Schnurren, anmuthig und lehrhaftig, II (Leipzig 1820), no. 23; Johann Heinrich Lehnert, Mährchenkranz für Kinder, der erheiternden Unterhaltung besonders im Familienkreise geweiht (Berlin 1829), no. 23; both copied from the KHM. 102 Draak, Onderzoekingen, 53, note 1; 59. The Flemish text concerned: J. Leroy, ‘Stijn Lukket-al of Meer geluk dan verstand’, Biekorf 5 (1894), 161–167, 177–184, 193–197, 209–215. 103 ‘De zage van vogel Vinus’, ’t Daghet in den Oosten 11 (1895), 41–43; reprinted in: F. Roeck, Volksverhalen uit Belgisch Limburg (Utrecht/Antwerpen 1980), 32–34. 104 Günther’s book was translated into Dutch as Nieuwe Moeder de Gans (Amsterdam 1793) and reprinted seven times between 1799 and 1827; cf. Frits Huiskamp, Naar de vatbaarheid der jeugd (Leiden 2000), 313–314, where the author is not properly identified. 105 Pol de Mont and Alfons de Cock, Wondervertelsels uit Vlaanderen uit den volksmond opgetekend (Zutphen, 2nd edn, 1924), 291–300. 106 J.W. Wolf, Deutsche Hausmärchen (Göttingen/Leipzig 1851), 230–242: ‘Der Vogel Phönix’. 107 Gust. Lamerant, Vlaamsche Wondervertellingen uit Fransch Vlaanderen (Brussel 1909), 77–83. 108 Victor de Meyere, De Vlaamse Vertelschat, III (Antwerpen/Santpoort 1929), 103–111. 109 A. Tinneveld, Vertellers uit de Liemers (Wassenaar 1976), 190–192.

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110 Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 198; Claude Lecouteux, ‘Lebenswasser’ EM 8 (1996), 838–841. 111 Wesselski, ‘Ein deutsches Märchen’, 194. 112 Among others: wine, bread, donkey, three kings. The later added well in which the hero is thrown by his brothers has a Biblical equivalent, too. 113 Grätz, Das Märchen, 202–205. 114 ‘Die Königin Willowitte mit ihren zwei Töchtern’, Günther, Kindermährchen, 106–125. 115 The few versions found by Draak, Onderzoekingen, 111, where both the shapeshifting and the disenchantment occur, are all from outside the area influenced by the Russian broadside; cf. a Servian version: A.H. Wratislaw, ‘The Lame Fox’, Folk-Lore Journal 6 (1888), 252–262. 116 A handwritten text of this story has not been preserved; see: Heinz Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm. Synopse der handschriftlichen Urfassung von 1810 und der Erstdrucke von 1812 (Coligny/Genève 1975), 319–329. 117 Dietrich’s book was published in Leipzig in 1831; cf. Jacob’s annotations in his Kleinere Schriften, V, 2 (Berlin 1871), 138–139; cf. the 1856 KHM annotations; Bluhm, Grimm-Philologie (Hildesheim 1995), 108. 118 Cf. the 1822 KHM annotations, 427–428. 119 The raven made its first appearance in a Jewish chapbook, the ‘Ma’assebuch’, published in Basel in 1602, in a story clearly based on Straparola’s text, cf. Köhler, ‘Tristan und Isolde’ (as in note 82), 393. 120 Cf. Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 314; Chauvin, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes, VI (1902), 1–5; ANE, 520 – problem with dating Galland (early eighteenth century), or Chavis ms: Continuation 1788; cf. Walter Puchner, ‘Prinzessinnen: Die drei geraubte’, EM 10 (2002), 1363–1369; Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 273–278.

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The girl in the garden

Magic flight stories The practice of recording stories related orally started with the brothers Grimm. They were also among the first to annotate their texts, pointing to parallels and predecessors of a particular tale. Fairy tale collecting and research owes its very existence to them. In assessing their texts, however, it makes a difference what kind of authenticity is ascribed. Or to use a phrase from Ruth Bottigheimer: ‘whose voice do we actually hear?’1 In as far as stories were not directly copied from the literature, were they primarily invented by girls such as Marie Hassenpflug and Amalie Henschel? Or were they just passing on what they had heard and, as Maria Tatar formulated it, do their stories ‘not by any stretch of the imagination come close to capturing the folkloric narratives the Grimms originally intended to preserve’?2 Were the recorded stories ‘at least at one remove from peasant culture’ and did the brothers, Wilhelm in particular, add yet another layer, so that the ‘values and tastes embodied in individual texts represent nothing more than a reflection of his own personal ethos’?3 Or would it be possible to discern some trace of the intentions of the narrators? It is beyond question that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm edited the texts they collected – from the second, 1819 edition this was primarily Wilhelm Grimm’s task. Their aim was to make the stories more readable and to reconstruct them. When story content was changed, or extended, the Grimms indicated in the annotations the sources of the new elements. In the printed editions the brothers did not mention the names of the authors of their prime texts but ascribed locality instead. But since Wilhelm Grimm annotated his own copies with references to his and Jacob’s oral sources, it has become possible to re-establish the link between text and contributor. This was first done by Johannes Bolte and later, more thoroughly, by Heinz Rölleke. The question still remains as to how the people who provided the Grimms with stories obtained their material. Is the literary lineage of the Three Feathers of the Ogre and of the Golden

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Bird merely incidental, or does it point to a more general process of story acquisition? As will be argued in this chapter, a underlying ‘peasant culture’ of the tales of magic in the KHM is nowhere in sight. Instead the texts can be understood as a product of the interaction between the brothers and their young, female suppliers. In the Kinder- und Hausmärchen the story type of the Magic Flight (ATU 313) is overrepresented and thus serves as an appropriate next case to examine the tension between orality and literacy. Its core consists of a boy and a girl who meet at the abode of a cannibal, run away together and manage to fool or delay the people in pursuit of them. The last, 1857 KHM edition includes six versions of this tale; another version, by the name of Okerlo, had been part of the 1812 edition but was discontinued in 1819. A strong case can be made to view the story of Hansel and Gretel (KHM 15, ATU 327A) within this cluster too – which brings its total number to at least nine. The earliest examples were the Foundling, later rebaptized as ‘Fundevogel’ (Bird Found), sent to the Grimms by Friederike Mannel in 1808 and the ‘Wassernixe’ (Water Nymph) by Marie Hassenpflug, which they notated in Kassel during the first half of 1810. Bird Found (KHM 51) is the story about a boy discovered in a bird’s nest and raised by a forester. His daughter Lenchen (Helen) loves the boy but their kitchen maid hates him. When the maid wants to boil the boy, the girl warns him and they flee together. The maid sends three servants to fetch them back and Helen says to the boy: ‘If you don’t leave me, I won’t leave you.’ The boy replies: ‘Not now and never’ and she changes him into a rosebush and herself into a rose. The servants do not recognize them; whereupon the maid sends her minions out again and now they only find a church with a chandelier. The third time Lenchen changes the boy into a pond and herself into a duck. Now the maid is called a witch and has finally decided to joined the chase. When she tries to drink the water from the pond the duck pulls her in and she drowns.4 Marie Hassenpflug’s version (KHM 79) featured a brother and a sister who fall into a well. They are captured by a water nymph and put to work – the boy has to fell a tree with a blunt axe. They escape when the nymph is attending church and when she chases them they drop a brush which changes into an almost impenetrable brush mountain. Next they drop a comb, which becomes a comb mountain full of teeth and when the nymph has scaled it they drop a mirror, which forms a mirror mountain. By the time she has cut it to pieces, the children are beyond her reach.5 Okerlo, which Jacob Grimm recorded from Marie’s sister Jeanette, bore more resemblance to the Foundling tale. Here a baby girl is washed ashore on an island inhabited by cannibalistic ogres. She is raised by them to be married to one of their sons. When the date nears, a prince arrives at the island. He

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and the girl fall in love. He is captured and marked for the wedding dinner, but the old ogre cannot wait. The girl now puts the crown of one of the ogre’s children on the prince’s head. Thus, in the dark of the night, the ogre is fooled into eating his own child. His foster daughter flees with the prince, taking a magic wand, seven-mile boots and a magic bean that answers questions. The ogress pursues them with another pair of boots. Warned by the bean, the girl changes the prince into a pond and herself into a swan. The next time they both become a cloud of dust and, when the ogress returns, the girl turns herself into a rosebush and the prince into a bee. The ogress now gives up but the girl has lost the wand and she cannot render them human again. Luckily, however, they have ended up in the garden of the girl’s real mother, who employs a fairy to disenchant them.6 The first edition of the KHM also contained a fourth version of the flight tale, Darling Roland (KHM 56) provided by Dortchen Wild in early 1812. It starts with the switching of the boy to be murdered with the murderess’s own daughter. Before the girl then sets off with her beloved Roland and a magic wand, she sprinkles some of her stepsister’s blood around to confuse her persuer; when the ogress calls her daughter, the blood answers instead. The witch discovers the deceit, puts on her magic boots, but finds only a lake with a duck. She tries to lure the duck in vain. The next day the maiden changes herself into a flower, which grows in the middle of a thorn bush. Roland becomes a violin player. The witch is enticed into the bush and forced to dance till she drops dead. The tale continues with a forgotten fiancée episode: Roland goes ahead to prepare the wedding, fails to return and almost marries someone else.7 The story of Hansel and Gretel (KHM 15) easily fits this sequence: a boy and a girl confront a cannibalistic witch, only they do not need to flee since the girl has pushed the witch into the oven. The connection was also made at the time between what are now considered as different tale types.8 For in their later annotations the Grimms refered to another Hansel and Gretel version from Hesse in which the witch is not killed immediately. Instead, the girl leaves her spittle in the oven which replies in her place and gives her extra flight time. The end of this story is similar to the Foundling: the girl changes herself into a pond, her brother into a duck and the witch drowns in an attempt to empty the pond.9 From the earliest known version the story of Hansel and Gretel was a conglomerate and later Wilhelm Grimm also worked the episode with the duck into the published edition of the tale. Because he left the witch in the oven, the water merely became an obstacle across which the duck ferries the children one by one.10 In the second volume of 1815 yet another magic flight variant was printed (KHM 113 in the final edition), sent from Bökendorf in Paderborn by Ludowine

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von Haxthausen, whom Wilhelm Grimm had become acquainted with a few years before. This was the longest text so far; it was also in dialect. Among other details it features impossible tasks, already alluded to in Marie Hassenpflug’s story. Here the hero accomplishes them with the help of the princess who invokes an army of dwarf labourers. Because the king still obstructs their marriage, the couple flee. They have to metamorphose into a thornbush and a rose, a church and a pastor and lastly a pond with a fish. The princess’s mother drinks the pond, but becomes so sick that she gives up and provides the girl with three walnuts. These prove useful when the prince forgets her and she seeks to regain his attention.11 The Grimms certainly had an eye for variation. Towards the end of the KHM’s evolution, in 1843, Wilhelm even included two more stories with similar themes, the Real Bride (KHM 186)12 and the Tambour (KHM 193).13 The former had been published in the journal for German antiquities in 1842; the latter was sent to Jacob by one of his correspondents in 1838. Like Hansel and Gretel both tales lack the flight – in the Tambour the witch is also pushed into a fire – but the tasks and the forgotten bride are present once more. Notwithstanding multiple variation, all these versions can hardly be assigned to an oral tradition. At the most they were oral at the moment they were noted down. Before that, the stories primarily existed in the minds of their tellers, who in the end all drew on published examples. Women storytellers Max Lüthi once observed that the story of the Dragon Slayer with its male champion was the most popular and widespread fairy tale. Why then, he asked, do tales with heroines first come to mind when we think about the KHM? It had an obvious reason, he suggested: the most important informants of the Grimms were women and women prefer to tell stories about female quests, ‘since story-tellers like to identify themselves with their protagonists and chose them accordingly’.14 Yet only forty-four stories in the KHM (presumably the 1857 edition) have a female protagonist, whereas in seventy of them a man plays the main role.15 But did the male stories originate with male informants? Lüthi used his observation as an introduction to his discussion of the Three Hairs tale, which has a male hero. The three early KHM versions, however, were told by women. The Golden Bird was likewise obtained from a woman, but the main characters are male – and the princess is merely an object to be gained. The folklorist Linda Dégh did not immediately notice a gender division in her Hungarian story material either; Hungarian male and female tellers distinguished themselves by style characteristics rather than by the gender of their protagonists.

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Some authors are convinced that the oral fairy tale tradition was carried by women, ‘those sage femmes whose role is to transmit the secret truths of culture itself’, and that the men who recorded and published the tales merely appropriated them.16 Marina Warner applied her notion of elderly lower-class female storytellers not just to the late seventeenth-century French writers of contes des fées, who were merely ‘retelling’ stories they heard from ‘old women, nurses, governesses’ and basically ‘mediated anonymous narratives’. She also suspected them behind the ‘most inspiring and prolific sources’ of the brothers Grimm: women ‘who possessed a rich store of traditional tales’ and related ‘the stories they had heard as children’.17 Warner’s view is the more problematic because she uncritically copied it from fairy tale experts who themselves merely aped others and should have been more critical. When the reading of books is substituted for chatting lower-class women, it is also partly accurate; some stories may very well have been acquired during childhood. And indeed, most tales of magic in the first edition of the KHM came from women. In a still earlier phase in the development of the KHM, of the fifty-three stories the Grimms sent to Brentano, forty were noted down from women (the rest from excerpts from publications).18 Publically, however, men dominated the scene; Karoline Stahl and Benedikte Naubert constituted a minority among the German writers of Märchen,19 and their material was rather heterogeneous, including not only tales of magic. A century before, the most important and influential French writers of fairy tales were again women – even though in the course of the eighteenth century men would ursurp the field and turn it satirical. The assumption, however, that the women involved were linked to an age-old oral tradition, carried by their anonymous elderly lower-class sisters, has become questionable. Whereas men talked to each other in inns, or journeying, women certainly exchanged stories during spinnings, at washing facilities, childbirths, in church, or wherever they met, but their repertoire went beyond the fairy tale genre and only their legends touched upon the magical. Mother Goose was merely a literary alibi and there is no evidence of magical fairy tales being narrated at early modern peasants’ evening gatherings.20 The magic discussed was practical and related to everyday concerns, rather than the detached wonders of royal fairies and nobel wizards. European culture was gendered and this also pervaded to storytelling, orally or written, and to listening to stories. It is even visible in the stories themselves. Folklorists have, however, engaged with this only relatively recently. As Holbek put it: the notion of correspondence between the gender of the narrator and the main protagonist ‘has been observed by several students of folktales, but has not been investigated’. In the Danish stories he researched, this correspondence was ‘unmistakable’. In cases where men and women told tales belonging

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to the same type, they told them ‘in characteristically different ways’.21 A similar conclusion is reached by Ines Köhler-Zülch in her study of the gender dynamics in the folktale material of Wilhelm Wisser, collected in east Holstein in the early twentieth century. Particular stories were told only by women: those which thematized ‘maltreated stepdaughters, substituted brides and women defamed in childbed, that is to say important fragments in women’s biography’. When telling male stories, women choose the most popular.22 Köhler pays particular attention to the Holstein versions of ‘La chatte blanche’ (ATU 402), which she denotes as masculine. But the women tellers mentioned typically feminine details; they also showed a tendency to change the perspective of the narrative from the boy to the enchanted princess. A historical approach would have enhanced these conclusions. Some of Wisser’s informants followed the Aulnoy redaction, others the Grimms and yet others retold Büsching’s toad version. A female perspective can already be found in Madame d’Aulnoy’s story – in this context Köhler ascribes to the narrators ‘a relative freedom’ in relation to their ‘supposed’ printed model, but refrains from establishing the extent of the dependence.23 The respective preferences of male and female storytellers may also have been expressed by the details they chose to keep or to omit. Although only the occasional collection is large enough to allow for conclusions on the role of gender, it is nonetheless evident that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century lower-class women did not always talk freely to folklorists and that they usually became accessible for interviewing at an older age or as widows.24 Moreover, they were not the only female storytellers. ‘Where are the children?’ – and especially the young girls, Schenda asked with good reason.25 The main ‘oral’ informants of the brothers Grimm were not just women but teenage girls. Although their stories may have been told from a female point of view, they were talking to men who were only slightly older than themselves. The notion of a continuous tradition of elderly lower-class fairy-tale-telling women may be largely mythical, but, in the history of the acquisition of fairy tales, gender relations have been grossly neglected. From the Argonauts to Giant’s Wood Most folklorists assume an oral provenance of the Magic Flight cluster. Antti Aarne, whose study of the tale type appeared posthumously in 1930, paid some attention to what were in his view ‘literary reworked displays’. In his opinion Basile’s texts derived undisputedly from oral tradition anyhow (although Aarne acknowledged that in this particular case he used a printed source) and the Countess d’Aulnoy had doubtlessly used folk material, too. As literary deviations her stories were insignificant for comparative research. The classical legend of

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the Argonauts’ quest to Colchis, on the other hand, not only showed the ancient roots of the story; since it lacked clear magic flight elements, it was very probable that these were appended only later. Thus Aarne.26 The concept of a continuous oral tradition was dominant to such an extent that written texts could be either declared genuine or completely deformed – whatever suited the folklorists’ theory. The more recent entry in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens leaves most of the literary history out of consideration and merely states that the Magic Flight is counted among the oldest fairy tales, thus also implying a rich oral tradition.27 Apart from the problem whether fairy tales are recognizable in or behind stories dating from before the establishment of an international genre of fairy tales, it is possible to trace the ancestry of Magic Flight tales. Whether this reverts to stories from antiquity or not is hardly relevant as medieval French and in their wake German authors reworked classical material. The Argonauts’ tale appeared in the twelfth-century Roman de Troie. This text and its successors formed the basis of renaissance Italian stories with a similar topic and tale pattern. In their turn these latter inspired the late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury French writers.28 The German magic flight stories collected by the Grimms were partly based on the French texts and partly on the Italian (or more precisely Neapolitan) Pentamerone, both occasionally mediated by German or French translations. Oral tradition remains outside this history; it is not even necessary to hypothize it in order to explain certain changes in plot or presentation. As to the variants recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: to assume that they were untouched by printed examples would be naive. Magical elements were already present in the medieval renderings of the Argonauts’ quest. To gain the Golden Fleece, Jason had been set tasks. In this he was helped by Medea, the king’s daughter and a sorceress, who gave him a ring that made him invisible, a protective ointment and a written text he has to recite to make the dragon sleepy. Parts of the plot and particulars were used in late fifteenth-century Italian stories, among them the epic Mambriano by Francesco Bello El Cieco, the blind man from Ferrara. In his rendering a prince is captured at sea because his blood is believed to be a remedy for an Egyptian despot. Like Jason he flees with the help of the king’s daughter. But because there is no fleece to acquire, the magic objects Jason needed for his tasks are now applied to support the flight. The ring makes the hero invisible and the text serves to put the princess’s mother to sleep so that the couple have a head start. The flight may only have been made magical in this story, the particular ingredients were already present. A century and a half later Basile based his story Rosella on this tale – he merely switched the enemy court from Egypt to Turkey and left most of the rest intact. Thus the prince is fed abundantly once more because his royal blood has to cure the sultan. The sultan’s daughter

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Rosella falls in love with the hero, she gives him a magic sword and enchants her mother. The latter makes herself invisible and, when she has finally caught up with the fleeing couple, the princess tells her lover to swing around his sword like a madman. In that way he manages to cut off the hands of their pursuer, whereupon she curses him: as soon he sets foot on his own land, he will forget the princess. Even this detail had been taken from the Mambriano.29 In the 1690s d’Aulnoy continued this tradition in her story ‘L’oranger et l’abeille’ (The Orange Tree and the Bee). Since she preferred a less alien ancestry for the princess, now called Aimée, she made her the sole survivor of a shipwreck, adopted by an ogress and betrothed to her man-eating son. Years later, a prince (actually her first cousin) is washed ashore and Aimée hides him from her cannibalistic adoptive family. Although prince and princess do not speak the same language, they communicate their love and affection. When the ogres discover the prince, Aimée manages to overcome their language problems by using the magic wand of her foster mother (who is half fairy). She also twice avoids him being eaten by adorning him with the crown of a little ogre, who is consumed instead. The third time the couple escape on a camel, but not before Aimée has left a bean in a cake that answers the questions of the ogress. The deceit is discovered and the ogress sends her husband to catch them, equipping him with seven-mile boots. At that point d’Aulnoy apologizes to her readers: in principle the princess could have used the wand to outrun the boots but, since she is a novice in the magical arts, she resorts to them only in extreme occasions. Now they see the monster approaching and she changes the camel into a pond, the prince into a boat and herself into an old woman, rowing the boat. This fools the ogre. But his wife sends him back and they become a pillar, a picture of Melusine and a dwarf. Again the ogre is wrongfooted. Then the ogress comes herself and they change into a tub, an orange tree and a bee. The bee stings the ogress till she retreats. Meanwhile, however, some passers-by have taken the wand and Aimée cannot change them back. This introduces d’Aulnoy’s version of the forgotten financée episode. The tree is found by the young and beautiful princess Linda, who carries it to her garden. Even though the tree is incapable of doing anything but being a tree, the bee accuses him of being unfaithful to her. She stings Linda, but one of Linda’s maids advises her ‘to follow Jason’s example when he went to win the golden fleece’ – a clear acknowledgement of the story’s ancestor; thus she arms herself and cuts off a branch. The tree bleeds, Aimée flies to Arabia to fetch a balm and Linda calls for a fairy. Thus the couple are changed back (the camel is forgotten) and everything is resolved. The story ‘Der Riesenwald’ (Giant’s Wood) in the Brunswick volume FeenMährchen of 1801 presented a mere rehash of the d’Aulnoy variant, different

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only in a few details: the princess, this time adorned with the name Aurora, has already learnt some magic from her foster mother, the queen of the giants. The wand has turned into a wishing hat, the bean into a rose pole. They change only once: Aurora wishes herself to become a prune tree and her lover a bee and this hides them from the ogress. The second princess finds the hat and disenchants them. The foster mother is granted asylum in Aurora’s household. This main historical sequence of stories, from the medieval Argonauts to Giant’s Wood had several other offshoots. In one of his other stories, ‘La palomma’, for instance, Basile elaborated the tasks episode. Now the prince is captured by an ogress, after being cursed by another woman he maltreated. He becomes enamoured with the ogress’s daughter Filadoro and wants to run off with her. But she advises against it because they should wait till the stars are in the right position. In the meantime the prince has to plough two acres of land and to sow it and he has to cut wood into pieces as small as bacon. But before he can even consider the next assignment, to clean out a cistern that can hold a thousand barrels of water, they flee and are cursed by the ogress. Filadoro, now in the position of the forgotten fiancée, has to catch the prince’s attention again in which she succeeds with the help of the dove which gave the story its name. Obviously, there is a relationship between this diachrony of stories and the relatively synchronic cluster of Magic Flight tales in the KHM. The question is as to precisely how. Interaction The KHM was composed in stages. In 1806, after they had finished their study in Marburg, the Grimms were put in touch with Clemens von Brentano, whose brother-in-law, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, had been one of their teachers. Brentano was looking for someone who could copy old published songs for the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn he was editing with his other brother-in-law Achim von Arnim, and the Grimms reacted favourably. It is already difficult to establish the precise proportion of the Grimms’ contribution to the Wunderhorn; it may just be feasible to distinguish between copied and recorded songs (although the qualification ‘oral’ was as loosely used as it was later in the KHM);30 it is impossible to deduce from whom the genuine oral songs were recorded, for instance the few children’s songs. It can only be suspected that they came from the same people who later gave the brothers their Märchen. At least some traces of songs remain visible in the stories, for instance in the Singing Bones (KHM 28, ATU 780) from Dortchen Wild, and in King Toad (KHM 1, ATU 440) from Marie Hassenpflug. Brentano originally wanted to follow the song book with a fairy tale one and in the autumn of 1810 the Grimms sent him a bundle of story texts. Because

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his intention was to work the material into his own stories – his ideas about writing tales were diametrically opposed to those of the Grimms – Brentano never quite finished this project and his book was published only posthumously in 1846. But he kept the texts the brothers sent him. This allows some insight into the pre-publication period of the KHM, for the brothers’ own notes were lost.31 The Urfassung comprised fifty-three stories – compared to the eighty-six published tales in the first edition – and about a quarter came from published sources. Most of the other forty the brothers recorded from their acquaintances in Kassel, that is to say the daughters of the families Hassenpflug and Wild, who were friends of their sister Lotte (mother Wild also contributed two tales). The other two ‘oral’ sources consisted of contacts of Brentano: the anonymous woman in Marburg who contributed the Golden Bird and the daughter of the parish priest in Allendorf: Friederike Mannel (born in 1783). It took three years to collect the about thirty tales from the Hassenpflug and Wild families (not every story can with certainty be ascribed to a particular person) and this only concerned the first KHM phase. The sisters did not possess a set repertoire and their stories were not readily available to be written down; they were generated during a lenghty process in which the brothers and the sisters interacted. In 1809 Wilhelm despaired that they had exhausted their supply. When recuperating in Halle for a few months, he wrote to Jacob that he heard a few Kindermärchen, only he already knew them. Runge did not know any more stories either, he had heard. Jacob only partially agreed: the crux was in the detail and that was what they needed to uncover and to write down.32 In 1807, at the start of their collecting, Jacob Grimm was twenty-two years of age (he was born in January 1785) and Wilhelm was a year younger (born in February 1786). Gretchen Wild, one of their first ‘informants’, was again a year younger than Wilhelm and not yet married. After she acquired a husband, Jacob thought she became impossible to handle.33 The brothers found it clearly easier to deal with unmarried women. Gretchen’s older sister Lisette was born in 1782; she contributed only a few stories (among them a Rumpelstilzchen variant) and these were replaced in later editions. Of the Wild sisters, Dortchen was by far the most important teller. Born in May 1793 she was a mere seventeen when she started to contribute and only nineteen when the first KHM volume appeared with at least a dozen of her stories, most of which she related to Wilhelm Grimm between late 1810 and late 1812, that is to say in the second stage of the composition of the KHM when the brothers had begun to record stories for their own publication – in 1825 Dortchen was to marry Wilhelm Grimm.34 Marie, the oldest of the Hassenpflug sisters, was born in December 1788 and thus about twenty years old when she started to tell stories. Jeanette, who would later call herself Hanne, was born in June 1791 and between eighteen

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and twenty at the time of her collaboration with the brothers’ collecting. Amalie was born in Januari 1800; their brother Ludwig would later marry Lotte Grimm (born in 1793). According to Ludwig Hassenpflug the interest of his sisters and their friends in Goethe, ancient poetry and fairy tales had begun as a common subject of conversation in 1808. This happened in all probability a year later when Jacob Grimm made his acquaintance with the Hassenpflug family, but the meetings certainly developed into a regular circle. Its members usually met at the house of the Grimms in Kassel in the Marktstrasse, opposite the apothecary of Rudolf Wild, where Jacob and Wilhelm lived with their other brothers and their sister – their father had died in 1797 before they moved to Kassel and their mother’s death followed in May 1808. These meetings then, described by Ludwig as ‘merry’,35 were likely to have been the laboratory where personal friendship florished and many of the KHM stories germinated. The suggestion that the Hassenpflug and Wild sisters had in their turn heard the stories from their ‘nursemaids, governesses and servants’36 is part of the attempt to associate fairy tales with elderly women from the lower classes. It disregards immediate authorship, simply because it did not fit theoretical assumptions. The Wilds were young and middle-class, the Hassenpflugs belonged to the same generation and were connected to the court of the then French king Jérôme Bonaparte, where Jacob was employed as librarian. At least in the early stages of the KHM, there is no evidence of other suppliers than young, predominantly single, educated women (see Chapter 5 on Frau Viehmann). Next to the Wild and Hassenpflug sisters there were mainly other girls, such as Wilhelmine von Schwertzell, born in 1790; the sisters Engelhard of whom the eldest, Karoline was born in 1786 (they participated in the 1808 meetings), the sisters Julia and Charlotte Ramus, born in 1792 and 1793; Lulu Jordis (a sister of Brentano), born in 1787; and the ‘little’ Johanna and Amalie Henschel, all of whom lived in Kassel. Admittedly, they did not contribute many stories, but they do represent the pool from which the Grimms drew their ‘oral’ material.37 The one elderly candidate, ‘old Marie’,38 a maid in the Wild household, turned out to be Marie, the eldest Hassenpflug sister, as Rölleke convincingly established.39 The Grimms never approached elderly lower class women at their own initiative and it is debatable whether the story teller stereotype was weak or the brothers were shy. When it came to interviewing the woman in Marburg, they initially sent their sixteen-year-old sister Lotte. And Jeanette Hassenpflug recorded a version of the Table, the Ass and the Stick from an old lady she met at the Henschels.40 All that is known about these incidental elderly contributors is that they were old; in all probability they were at least middle class. In the next phase from 1812 to 1815, leading to publication of the second volume of the KHM, the women of the Bökendorf circle, such as Ludowine

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von Haxthausen (born in 1795) and Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff (of the same age), became important contributors (see Chapter 4); they were of minor nobility. Even the very late, exceptional single recording of the story Iron Hans (Eisenhans, KHM 136) in 1846 from Regine Brückner-Ehemant in Frankfurt conformed to the general pattern of educated women from the middle classes of the same age or younger than the Grimms themselves (she was born in 1801).41 Male contributors of tales of magic were rare and played only a minor role in later stages, mostly at a distance, through corresponding with Jacob Grimm.42 Wilhelm, who was mainly responsible for the KHM, kept in touch with the ladies. The reminiscences of Ludwig Hassenpflug are one of two indicators of the existence of a reading group involving the Grimms before 1810. Only slightly more is known about a similar, later group, which, according to Jacob Grimm in September 1812, met every Friday from the winter of 1811/12 onwards.43 Notwithstanding a lack of full reports, it is clear that the participants of the groups were the same people who provided the Grimms with stories. And they did not just discuss existing literature but also contributed their own attempts at prose or poetry. It is, however, unlikely that the Grimms made notes during these sessions. Tales may have been selected or conceived for the occasion, they may have been exchanged, but they were recorded only afterwards. This is evident from the dates Wilhelm Grimm wrote in his own KHM copy and from the place where he met Dortchen: in the garden (on 29 September and 11 October 1811, both days were a Sunday).44 She told Wilhelm ‘Der liebste Roland’ (Darling Roland) on Monday 19 January 1812 in a summerhouse in a garden in Nentershausen (where her sister Hanne lived). Only in these contexts may the stories be considered oral. When young people regularly gathered to discuss literature and poetry and to tell each other stories, they will have done so on a more or less equal basis, allowing for the gender restrictions of the time. To participate in this kind of literary activity was, in fact, one of the few occasions when women could excel.45 It would therefore be presumptious to assume a division between orality and literacy running strictly among gender lines. Contributions by Jacob or Wilhelm Grimm will have consisted of fragments found in books. After all, Jacob spent most of his time in the library reading through volumes of old German poetry when his task allowed it. Wilhelm worked on the translation of Danish epic poetry, which appeared in 1811, before the first KHM volume and he will undoubtedly have recited fragments of it. For a next project he contemplated a translation of the Edda, but von der Hagen beat him to it.46 Why would the girls, each in her own way, also not have told what they had read? As is clear from the records, they did not just reproduce stories but incorporated elements they had found elsewhere, heard from each other and from the brothers. The oral exchanges were cemented by printed texts.

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Contemporary competition In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth hundreds, ‘oral tradition’ was a relative concept. ‘Everything is collected from oral tradition’ wrote the Grimms in their foreword of the first edition of the KHM. Their collection nevertheless included tales from written sources and translations such as The Hand with the Knife from the Scottish (KHM 1812 no. 8), The Nightingale and the Blindworm (no. 6) from the French and The Murder Castle (no. 73), a Bluebeard story told by a Dutch lady.47 Apart from a liberal use of the concept of oral tradition,48 this also indicates the initial lack of a nationalistic ideology. The question of national proclivity changed in the course of the KHM editions. By omitting non-German-language stories from 1819 onwards (though not in the annotations), however, the Grimms made it more nationalistic than they intended at the start. This adaption also reflected the rise of patriotism in the wake of the Napoleonic occupation, even though tales were situated outside the present-day world, where they ‘knew neither name nor place nor origin’ yet were shared by the whole nation.49 As to the orality of the tales: ‘everything’ should not be taken literally, it mainly refered to an idea of orality, not to collecting from oral sources.50 The brothers even contemplated Germanizing the stories of Basile’s Pentamerone. But after a long search for the book and meticulous copying when they finally found it, they left this project largely to Brentano, whose collection appeared only posthumously in 1846 and 1847 under the title Die Märchen des Clemens Brentano.51 The Grimms restricted themselves to referring to the Italian stories in their annotations. Jacob translated some, but he never published any of them in full in their fairy tale collection.52 What the Grimms and their contemporaries searched for in the Märchen was a concise children’s tale which had its roots in mythology of the people. If these roots were not immediately visible, they were unearthed by indicating parallel motifs. The KHM was meant as an pedagogical tool, teaching morality to the household, and Jacob hoped that children could keep themselves happily busy with it and that it would stimulate their creativity.53 Of the already just over a century old French tales only those of Charles Perrault could pass muster, although the brothers deleted too obvious specimens such as Puss in Boots and Bluebeard from subsequent editions of their work. Perrault’s ‘followers’ like ‘Aulnoi’ and ‘Murat’ were thought to have gone astray. A century later, in the fourth volume of the annotations to the KHM, Johannes Bolte was slightly more positive about d’Aulnoy, although some of her stories were ‘totally invented’, ‘no real fairy tale’ or ‘invention without value’. On the whole, he echoed the Grimms’ opinion: the fairy tales of the other French writers had sunk even lower in his esteem, they had all left the stable ground of the people’s tradition.54 Hence folklorists did not need to pay them much attention.

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The Grimms were also critical of the contemporary German volumes. As they explained in a note to the introduction of the first volume from 1812, Musäus and Naubert had mainly elaborated local legends, and Otmar exclusively so.55 The 1787 collection from Erfurt was ‘poor’, one from Leipzig dating from 1799 ‘only half belongs to this, although [the tales] were not too bad’. Another book from Braunschweig of 1801 was rather rich, but its tone was wrong. The newest volume by Büsching was ‘terribly poor’ contained nothing they could use – never mind the considerable overlap when it came to Kindermährchen, nor that they redid most of his work in their two-volume Deutsche Sagen (1816/1818).56 The Wintermärchen by Gevatter (= godfather) Johann, which had just appeared was mainly a reprint. ‘Only the sixth and partly the fifth tale are of value, the others are without a core [ohne Kern] and hollow inventions.’ And a book by another Grimm had nothing in common with their work (it featured versions of Cinderella, Snow White and the Fisherman’s Wife). With these remarks the competition was brushed away, but more importantly they served to detach their work from the very genre it had grown out of. The books the Grimms wrote about so negatively belonged to the immediate predecessors of the KHM. Musäus had been a hack, who was the first to use the term Volksmährchen (folktales) for his five-volume story collection (1782–87), primarily to attract as big a readership as possible, and Benedikte Naubert followed in his footsteps with her anonymously published Neue Volksmährchen der Deutschen (1789–93).57 The Erfurt volume titled Kindermärchen, with its Faithful Fox, was written by the later court minister in Weimar Christoph Günther (see Chapter 2). Behind godfather Johann hid Johann Gottlieb Münch, another minister who was also responsible for the Mährleinbuch, which appeared in Leipzig in 1799.58 The author of the Feen-Mährchen, published in Braunschweig, has remained anonymous – in all probability it was a woman.59 And this was only a selection, omitting among others, the many publications and translations of French stories.60 The intentions of these authors hardly differed from the Grimms’; they wanted to be educational, moralizing and entertaining. Only the Grimms published many more unlocalized stories and their texts were, on average, much shorter than those of the others. The crucial distinction, however, was the presence of the mythological annotations in the KHM, charging the stories with a ponderous history.61 While still showing considerable French influences, they were also developing a particular German twist: the intended public had changed from French court circles to middle-class children. Childhood experiences were also the sources most German authors drew on, as they reworked what they had heard recited, or read themselves in their youth.

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Variation The Grimms’ familiarity with the anonymous Feen-Mährchen from Braunschweig (Brunswick) was equalled by Gretchen and Dortchen Wild whose stories about princes enchanted into swans show some acquaintance with the volume. Dortchen’s Darling Roland may have harked back to Giants’ Wood, although she repeated none of its particulars. In theory she could also have read d’Aulnoy’s ‘L’oranger’, if not in the French original then in one of the several German editions. The last story had appeared in the third volume of Das Cabinet der Feen, published in 1762 and reprinted in 1781, and also in the Blaue Bibliothek aller Nationen from 1790. Most likely, however, Dortchen and her friends used the German intermediary in the form of the story ‘Der Riesenhügel’ (Giants’ Hill) in the Idyllen by Johann Heinrich Voss, of 1801. For here is the witch drinking from the pond, or the lake – a detail missing in d’Aulnoy and in Giant’s Wood.62 In the course of the literary transmission the camel on which the pair escape in the French story disappeared, which is another indication that d’Aulnoy was not used directly. Dortchen will certainly have told her tale to Wilhelm in German. And she doctored the end, showing the witch trapped in a thornbush and having to dance to death. This last motif circulated in print throughout Europe from the fifteenth century, but as part of another story;63 this is the only instance where it became incorporated in a magic flight variant. Of the different magic flight versions, Jeanette Hasenpflug’s Okerlo was the closest to the French example; she simplified the complicated ending of d’Aulnoy. This close similarity is usually given as the reason for the story’s omission in later KHM editions. It is also possible that once Jeanette had started to call herself Hanne, she objected to the presence of her ‘French’ contributions; her Puss in Boots and her versions of Beauty and the Beast and Donkey Skin also disappeared. Bird Found and the Water Nymph present more of a puzzle, as they contain traces of ‘La palomma’ from the Pentamerone. Although Friederike Mannel and Marie Hassenpflug may have heard about this book, they did not possess it, nor could they read it in Neapolitan – although they may have been able to master an Italian translation. It took the Grimms till mid-1812 before they could buy their own copy; previously they had to borrow it from the library in Weimar, which they managed only in June 1811. Clemens Brentano, however, did have an Italian translation but refused to lend it. Friederike Mannel may thus have picked up the ingredients for the Foundling story in several ways, either directly form Brentano when he discussed his plans in Allendorf or, what is more likely, through his estranged young (second) wife Auguste Bussmann. In 1808 and 1809 the latter stayed long periods at the Allendorf rectory with her husband’s Pentamerone, at the same time as Friederike sent her stories to Kassel. In one of

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his letters to his brother, Jacob complained that he could not even have a look at Clemens’s collection of Italian tales (‘I believe Conti degli conti, or mille conti’), because his wife always had them and possibly wanted to translate them.64 Friederike’s writings also contained other tales from the Neapolitan collection.65 She had no active command of her repertoire and had to dig into her memory to retrieve the stories. As she wrote to Jacob: ‘Clemens has already ferreted them all out of my mind.’66 Among Brentano’s papers were also notes of a fuller version of Fundevogel, entitled ‘Wasserhexe’ (Water Witch). Here the boy has to accomplish certain assignments and he forgets the forester’s daughter the moment he reaches his own home – both clear references to ‘La palomma’.67 In Fundevogel these elements are missing and replaced with references to Runge’s ‘Machandelboom’. According to Rölleke, the fuller Brentano version resembled Fundevogel more than any other KHM story. It also bears a close similarity to Marie Hassenpflug’s Water Nymph, both with respect to the title and the allusion to the tasks. Her obstacle flight, however, stands outside the Magical Flight tradition, although there are several instances of the motif in the Pentamerone.68 With its many mountains, it is most reminiscent of a passage in the medieval Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus.69 To explain these similarities there is no need to resort to inaccessible oral traditions, as Marie may have heard about the blunt axe in Allendorf, where she visited in February 1810, shortly before she related her story to Jacob. If the obstacle flight was part of her tale from the start and not added by one of the Grimms, she will – like Amalie Henschel – have been inspired by Wilhelm who during that time was working on his translation of old Danish songs. Her own handling of the material is certainly borne out by her inclusion of the children falling into the well, which she derived from Frau Holle (see Chapter 7). The ancestry of Hansel and Gretel is noted down as ‘unclear’.70 Only the answer the children gave to the witch when knocking on her door can be attributed to Dortchen Wild. She told this to Wilhelm Grimm on 15 January 1813, when the first KHM edition was still fresh.71 This addition constitutes another illustration of the interplay between the brothers and their female helpers. Already in December 1812 von Arnim, who had negotiated a deal with the Berlin publisher of the book, remarked that he missed the story of the ‘Zuckerhäuschen’ (gingerbread house, lit. house of sugar). He briefly summarized the most notable passage where the protagonists licked the house the wolf lived and told that it was the wind. A month later Jacob replied that this was a part of Hansel and Gretel and that in the meantime they had heard it more completely and better; the children had answered: ‘it is the wind, the heavenly child’.72 They had obviously asked Dortchen and Marie about it and had subsequently

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been provided with the detail, which in its turn was a literary quotation, rather than some folkloric rhyme.73 The full Hansel and Gretel story may, however, be primarily ascribed to Marie Hassenpflug. The place of origin ‘Hesse’ can refer to the Wild sisters as well as to stories the Hassenpflugs ‘discovered’ in Kassel where they lived from 1798; as its earliest form was already part of the first KHM phase, to which Dortchen hardly contributed. Marie was also better qualified. Hansel and Gretel was not just a truncated magic flight story, it was composed of different elements, which all had French characteristics. Both in Okerlo and in Darling Roland the switching of the headgear occurred, together with the seven-mile boots. These ultimately derived from d’Aulnoy, but will also have been recognizable as parts of the end of Perrault’s ‘Petit Poucet’ (Tom Thumb, ATU 327B). It must therefore have been relatively simple to take the beginning of Petit Poucet to construct yet another story about a boy and a girl in the house of a cannibal – Marie’s Water Nymph exhibits another instance where the lovers are replaced by a brother and a sister. The next section of Hansel and Gretel, the edible house (with hindsight the magical touch of the story), was borrowed from a Bluebeard narrative, which was probably the one von Arnim referred to.74 The house of bread may have been Dortchen’s contribution, since she had a grasp of such stories as is shown by her Fitcher’s Bird (KHM 46). The fattening of Hans was paralleled in Okerlo, when the prince is designated for dinner. More directly, however, the fattening motif is present in the Pentamerone story Rosella, when the prince is pampered by the sultan to sweeten his blood. Rosella was one of the few Pentamerone tales available to readers of French, as it had been published in September 1777 in the Bibliothèque universelle des Romans. Marie retold another story from the same publication on 13 September 1812,75 and a part of her version of the Three Feathers of the Bird Greif also went back to this publication.76 The oven episode reflects d’Aulnoy’s ‘Finette cendron’, which has a Cinderella ending but started with three sisters left in the wood and spending the night at the house of an ogre. The composite elements in Hansel and Gretel mostly point to the Hassenpflugs and specifically to Marie. In the case of the Wild and Hassenpflug sisters, as well as Friederike Mannel, orality primarily relates to the moment of telling. Oral tradition may be characterized by variation, but the variation in the magic flight stories is too pronounced to be the result of some haphazard oral tradition. While all are composed around a central core, every detail, every motif in one story is different from the others. It is not just that Friederike Mannel’s version alluded to the Juniper Tree (because of the boiling), Dortchen Wild’s to the Dance Among Thorns and Marie Hassenpflug’s to the Spinning Women by the Spring. Every flight is different, in sequence as well as in subject. Even the bean which answers the questions in

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Hanne Hassenpflug’s Okerlo (in ‘L’oranger et l’abeille’ it answers the witch’s questions rather than the girl’s) is replaced by drops of blood in Dortchen’s Darling Roland and by spittle in the flight version of Hansel and Gretel. It is unlikely that these differences resulted from the brothers’ reconstructing and editing; their aim was to collect variants, not to invent them. The girls, on the other hand, knew that the brothers were looking for different details. They also knew each other’s stories. Jacob and Wilhelm asked for variation and their female friends happily served them, with several intervals, one story after another. Repertoires The propensity of the Wild and Hassenpflug sisters to tell several variants of the same story extended beyond the magic flight cluster. In the autumn of 1812, for instance, Jeanette and Marie Hassenpflug related different versions of Little Red Riding Hood (ATU 333). In Marie’s redaction the wolf beleaguers the women, sitting on top of grandma’s abode. He is tempted by a trough of gravy in which sausages have been cooked, leans over too far and drowns. The Grimms knew this story only from the small collection of Perrault and in the stage adaptation by Lebrecht (Tieck); there is no reason to assume different sources of the Hassenpflug versions and dumb and greedy wolves were a stable ingredient of animal legends.77 Marie Hassenpflug recited ‘Brüderchen und Schwesterchen’ (KHM 11; ATU 450), the tale of the little boy who drank from an enchanted stream and changed into a deer, in two forms, notated by Jacob in March 1811 and 1813. It is unlikely that she considered her two tellings as two versions; after two years she merely remembered the story slightly differently. A relationship has been suggested with d’Aulnoy’s ‘La biche au bois’ but if there was any it was through the illustration rather than the text, since in the former a girl is shown with a deer while in the latter she is turned into a hind herself;78 Marie may also have been partially inspired by the illustrated stories about Geneviève and the deer.79 The theme of the substitute bride was presented in de Mailly’s ‘Blanche bella’. Between them the Hassenpflug sisters retold a number of tales from Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’oye or used fragments of them in their own compositions. In this case the stories were probably read in the original French, although by the end of the eighteenth century German translations had become available. The Hassenpflugs spoke French and Perrault’s work was used in teaching French80 Jeanette, however, apparently preferred those Perrault stories which had been turned into German plays by Ludwig Tieck, such as Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Puss in Boots.81 At least two of her other (non-Perrault) stories, ‘Hurleburlebutz’ (a later discarded version of Beauty and the Beast) and

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Snow White, had also been dramatised.82 In the eighteenth century Beauty had been made popular throughout Europe by the publications of Gabrielle Suzanne Barbot, Dame de Villeneuve (1740) and of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1756). Snow White, well known in early nineteenth-century Germany, was a simplification of Musäus’s Richilde.83 As for other French material, Marie spiced her Sleeping Beauty with the prophesying lobster from d’Aulnoy.84 Next to these the Grimms mentioned a version of Cinderella from Hesse, which, given that the Wild sisters generally ignored Perrault, may also have been bestowed by one of the Hassenpflug sisters. Jeanette’s repertoire, in as far as it was not deleted or consigned to the annotations in 1819, further consisted of the King with the Lion (KHM 67), a forgotten fiancée story with a perspective lion as the king’s adviser. In the autumn of 1812 she also acted as an intermediary (see above). On the whole her stories were rather timid, closely sticking to her source and less imaginative than those of her older sister Marie. In Rölleke’s view it is even unlikely that Jeanette contributed any story before 1811; he follows her memories, expressed in 1845 in a letter to her nephew Friederich (Lotte Grimm’s son) in which she wrote that Wilhelm’s book on the Danish heroic epics had already appeared when she got to know the family. Thus, according to Rölleke, Princess Mouse Skin, a story which Wilhelm ascribed to Jeanette but was already included in the manuscripts sent to Brentano in 1810, must have come from someone else, possibly a member of the Wild family.85 This is doubtful and not only because it concerns a Perrault story. Jeanette’s brother Ludwig placed her at the early meetings of the circle; Jacob Grimm wrote about the family in 1809 and it would be strange if he had failed to meet Jeanette then. Should it be believed that joint efforts by the Hassenpflugs excluded her? At that point Amelie was only nine or ten and there is no sign of any tales their brother contributed. Since Wilhelm wrote dates and names of informants only in his own KHM copy, these are less clear in first KHM phase. Notwithstanding the question marks hanging over the scope of Jeanette’s contribution, it is evident, however, that Marie was the most prolific of the Hassenpflug sisters. Her stories betray an obsession with suffering women.86 The brave sister in Little Brother and Little Sister is killed and Bluebeard did not treat his wives any better. In the Girl without Hands (KHM 31, ATU 706) the heroine is promised to the devil, but he has no hold over her because she is too pious and pure. When she is deprived of soap the devil returns and now she weeps her hands clean. The third time her hands are cut off – she still weeps herself beyond his reach. Then she meets a prince and marries him. When her husband has gone to war, she gives birth. The letter announcing this is changed by the devil but her husband still reacts favourably, and the return letter is changed, too: the queen is

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banished, with child and severed hands. In the end the heroine is reunited with both her hands and her husband. Again the story of Geneviève lingers on the background. In the Robber Bridegroom (KHM 40, ATU 955) a princess goes to visit her fiancé, finds him absent and is hidden by the housekeeper. She witnesses his homecoming with his men and an old lady they have captured. When they slaughter the old lady, the princess manages to grasp a cut-off finger and escapes. Next the brigand visits the princess’s palace and asks her why she did not come. She tells him she dreamt of doing so and finally produces the finger, whereupon the man is seized and executed. This last tale is closely paralelled in Brentano’s own notes,87 and possibly presents another transference from Allendorf to Marie’s repertoire. Bluebeard and the Girl without Hands, although hardly tales of magic, had a rich printed history, among other things in the eighteenthcentury Bibliothèque blue.88 Although much is made of the Huguenot ancestry of the Hassenpflug sisters (presuming the French tales were somehow transmitted within the family, which is slightly at odds with the nursemaid thesis), this appears mainly of importance in as much as they could read French texts themselves. The stories of Dortchen Wild, on the other hand, were based on German readings of French narratives, rather than directly derived from them. She started telling them to Wilhelm Grimm in the autumn of 1811 and became particularly adept at substituting stories the brothers had found in the literature in the first instance. The story ‘Der süsse Brei’ (Sweet Porridge, KHM 103, ATU 565), in which a mother cannot control her daughter’s cooking, uses a motif from the Edda as well as from the Land of Cockayne – and is reminiscent of Goethe’s ‘Zauberlehrling’. Her version of the Singing Bones (KHM 28, ATU 780) was adapted from a Scottish song; her Three Men in the Wood, a kind and unkind girl story (see Chapter 7) took elements from Carl Nehrlich’s ‘Allerley-Rauh’ to shorten and replace Villeneuve’s Najaden, the latter being translated into German in 1765.89 Nehrlich’s title was subsequently used for her rendering of Perrault’s ‘Peau d’âne’ (Donkey Skin). The Grimms had included another Villeneuve story under the title ‘Der Drache’ (the Dragon) in their first selection; Dortchen provided them with the singing jingling ‘Löweneckerchen’ (KHM 88), a play on the jingling tree from the Feen-Mährchen, building on one of Münch’s examples.90 Whether Dortchen had read the stories out of her own books, or borrowed them from the Grimms, or just heard them read aloud (Wilhelm is reported to have had a good voice), she did add her own touch by inserting alien elements, also out of existing literature. The same principle applies to the rest of her repertoire. Dortchen’s contributions had very little to do with oral tradition, and everything with her interacting with Wilhelm.91

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Interpretations It is tempting to read the stories of the female KHM contributors as expressions of their inner stirrings and desires. After all, as Jeanine Blackwell writes, female German narrators of the first two decades of the nineteenth century used fairy tales ‘for introspection, life narration, as metaphor for traumatic psychosocial events, social criticism and – above all – entertainment’.92 A story like the Magical Flight, in which a powerful girl flees her parental home together with her lover, overcomes her mother and fights for her man against female competition, raises questions about the amount of autobiographical reflection. But Blackwell still offers a wide range of options and she hesitates to venture into those stories which went through the sieve of Grimm editing; she goes only as far as presenting two text fragments which remained free of interference as they were not included in the KHM. In one Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (see Chapter 4) briefly took Wilhelm Grimm’s pen and added a passage herself – she did not endear herself to him in this way. The second text selected by Blackwell, another retelling of d’Aulnoy’s ‘Finette Cendron’, was among those sent in by Ludowine von Haxthausen, a cousin of Annette. The brothers, who were looking for more traditional material, found Annette’s tale ‘contrived’ and Ludowine’s ‘fabricated’. These were not the only occasions they applied such labels93 and by that time, between 1813 and 1819, they had already declined to incorporate a number of Droste-Hülshoff stories in the KHM. This shows that they had become well aware of the artificial character of some, but not all, of the texts they solicited. All female stories which made it into the KHM were, at least stylistically, subject to male mediating. They were also, including those that were found wanting, supplied by young nubile women to single men. The several levels on which one can search for a possible meaning of fairy tales vary from the individual, via the social and the communal, to the national and the general. That is at least where fairy tale specialists and amateurs have been looking when it concerned narrator and recipients. The general (or universal) level, however, conflicts with the notion of a situated story; from this perspective there can never be a general meaning of a particular tale and indeed those authors who have suggested otherwise usually differ from each other. For a fairy tale to have a social meaning, readers or listeners have to agree that at least some of its content addresses a shared issue. As this can vary from group to group, without information on comments and discussions from the participants in the storytelling event a text-based interpretation can only be speculative. The same argument applies to individual significance, provided that a story exceeds mere amusement. Yet a text is often all there is and its interpreting is then the only option left. Here one could consider a single text, a collection or

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a repertoire. The most intriguing readings of the KHM concentrate on the entire collection, mainly because of its continued editing and its wider appeal, but results can be ‘ambiguous, even contradictory’, as Bottigheimer warns.94 Repertoire analyses have hardly been undertaken, certainly not of the KHM. Any attempt to find meaning in a fairy tale is compounded if not altogether frustrated by its narrative history. Meaning is synchronic, that is to say, attributed to a story at a specific moment in time;95 a story’s genealogy moves it through time and erodes its earlier meaning. Suppliers of stories were, on the whole, not particularly inventive, as they used available historical and printed material instead of providing completely new plots and motifs (or tapping into a presumed oral reservoir). These bits and pieces could carry their own symbols, which could become meaningless in a different context. Together with the other worldliness of fairy tales this restricts any interpretation pretending to be more than gratuitous. Any plausible decoding needs to be based on as many contemporary clues as possible. And even when such could be suggested, in as far as the author made a conscious choice to relate, or even to compose a particular story in a particular situation, the validity of an interpretation is limited to the particular circumstances in which the story is produced and received. Later reworkings in different settings may easily have acquired different connotations. For every one text interpreted there are hundreds more. The most that can be concluded about the magical flight stories is that their various female tellers may have been ever so subtly expressing their romantic interest in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. But they may also merely have told them stories without ulterior motives. Or the telling itself, the contribution to the KHM project, was as important as, or even more important than, the content of the tale. Notes 1 Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Grimms’ Bad Girls & Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (New York/London 1987), 17. 2 Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton/Oxford 2003), 32. The first edition of this book dates from 1987, but, apart from some expansions, the author deemed it unnecessary to adjust her theories. 3 Tatar, Hard Facts, 24, 35. 4 Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 442–443. 5 Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm, 284. 6 Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), no. 70a; Uther, Handbuch, 460–461. An English translation is published by Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 770–771, and in his Brothers Grimm, The Complete Fairy Tales (London 2007), 822–824. Oker = ogre. 7 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 784–786.

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8 See also the Taylor edition of the KHM, first published in London in 1823 as German Popular Stories. In the second volume of 1826 the stories of Hansel and Gretel were combined with Foundling and Roland, Messrs Grimm, German Popular Stories (London 1826), 253–254; Martin Sutton, The Sin-Complex: A Critical Study of English Versions of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the Nineteenth Century (Kassel 1996), 86–87; cf. Sutton, ‘Englischsprachige Rezeption der Grimmschen Märchen im 19. Jahrhundert’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken 12 (1997), 59–73; Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, 224. 9 See the annotations to the 1856 KHM edition, 96; Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 498–499. 10 This was already observed by Wesselski, Versuch einer Theorie des Märchens (Reichenberg 1931), 144. Aarne thought that the Hansel and Gretel story had moved into the Magic Flight story, see his Die magische Flucht. Eine Märchenstudie (Helsinki 1930) (FFC 92), 18; cf. Christine Goldberg, ‘Gretel’s Duck: The Escape from the Ogre in AaTh 327’, Fabula 41 (2000), 42–51. G. Ronald Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales (Oxford 2000), 61, 63, is unaware of the narrative history of the duck and equates the bird with a spiritual dove. 11 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 62–66; Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 516–527. 12 Rölleke, Grimms Märchen und ihre Quellen (Trier 1998), 440–453; Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1351–1352; Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, III (1918), 338–339. 13 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1234–1237; Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, III (1918), 406–417. 14 Max Lüthi, So leben sie noch heute. Betrachtungen zum Volksmärchen (Göttingen 1969), 70; cf. Lüthi, Märchen (Stuttgart/Weimar, 10th edn, 2004), 90: ‘Frauen erzählen gerne von unschuldig leidenden Heldinnen oder von bösen Stiefmüttern’. 15 Linda Dégh, ‘Frauenmärchen’, EM 5 (1987), 211–220, esp. 215, based on Stone, English version in: Linda Dégh, Narratives in Society, 62–69; cf. Rainer Wehse, ‘Männermärchen’, EM 9 (1999), 222–230; Heinz Rölleke, ‘Die Frau in den Märchen der Brüder Grimm’, in: Sigrid Früh & Rainer Wehse (eds), Die Frau im Märchen (Kassel 1985/Krummwisch 2005), 72–88. 16 Karen E. Rowe, ‘To Spin a Tale’, in: Bottigheimer (ed.), Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm, 57. 17 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 18–20, 24. 18 Figures based on: Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung. 19 Cf. Jeannine Blackwell, ‘German Fairy Tales: A User’s Manual. Translations of Six Frames and Fragments by Romantic Women’, in: Donald Haase (ed.), Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (Detroit 2004), 73–98. 20 Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 113–122, 162–171. 21 Holbek, Interpretation, 167–168, 618 n. 118. 22 Ines Köhler-Zülch, ‘Ostholsteins Erzählerinnen in der Sammlung Wilhelm Wisser: ihre Texte – seine Berichte’, Fabula 32 (1991), 94–118: 107. 23 Köhler, ‘Ostholsteins Erzählerinnen’, 114–115; Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1379–1380. In the eighteenth century several German translations of ‘La chatte blanche’ were

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available, among others in Bierling’s Cabinet der Feen (volume 5), cf. Grätz, Das Märchen, 62; cf. Friedmar Apel & Norbert Miller, Feenmärchen (Düsseldorf 2005), 408–441. Köhler discusses the literature in: ‘Ostholsteins Erzählerinnen’, 103–104. Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 155–161. On the last pages he refers to a teacher asking schoolchildren. Within a European context this was far more widespread. Aarne, Die magische Flucht, 147–153; Christine Goldberg, ‘The Forgotten Bride (AaTh 313C)’, Fabula 33 (1992), 39–54: 52, likewise considers the magical elements in the flight an ‘addition to the tradition’. Walter Puchner, ‘Magische Flucht’, EM 9 (1999), 13–19. Cf. Uther’s annotations to Fundevogel: reminiscent of Greek mythology, Handbuch, 123. Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 239–262. Summaries of the Pentamerone are from the German translation: Giambattista Basile, Das Märchen der Märchen, ed. Rudolf Schenda (München 2000). For a summary of the Mambriano see: Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literarturtradition, 256, following Bolte & Polívka. Rölleke, ‘Die Beiträge der Brüder Grimm zu “Des Knaben Wunderhorn”, in Nebeninschriften (Bonn 1980), 50–63. Heinz Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, esp. 390–397. This may have happened in the process of sending the stories to their publisher in Berlin; when he wanted the last texts, Wilhelm wrote that he ‘did not possess’ a particular story any more, see: Reinhold Steig, Achim von Arnim und Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (Stuttgart/ Berlin 1904), 244–246. Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit, ed. Schoof (Weimar 1963), 119, 122. Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit, 161: ‘die hat es mit nichts zu tun als ihrem Mann und scheut sich wie die meisten Weiber über die Schreibfehler’. The conclusion by Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, 114, that Jacob contributed seventeen and Wilhelm nine ‘folktales’ to the 1812 KHM edition, confuses handwriting with contributorship. Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 391. Zipes, When Dreams Came True (New York/London 1999), 69–70; in the second edition of Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, 28, he added: ‘or tales they may have read’. See also Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, 117, 119, who maintained that the Grimms’ female informants ‘had a great perception for oral tradition’ and ‘had absorbed it from the German environment’. Lulu Jordis contributed the second piece of ‘Frau Füchsin’, Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 362; one of the Henschel sisters told a version of ‘Der junge Riese’, Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 146. According to Rölleke the ‘Min’, who on 20 October 1811 contributed ‘Gevatter Tod’ should be read ‘Mie’, and is thus one of the Wild sisters, rather than Wilhelmine Schwertzell, cf. Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 377; see Chapter 5 for the Ramus sisters.

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38 Still accepted as such by Wesselski, see his Versuch, 122, 179. 39 Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 395–396; also in 1975 as a separate publication in Germanisch-romanische Monatschrift 25, English translation ‘The “Utterly Hessian” Fairy Tales by “Old Marie”: the End of a Myth’, in Bottigheimer (ed.), Fairy Tales and Society, 287–300. Later he slightly retracted this and suggested that Marie Müller, who helped in the Wild household, could have told some tales to the girls and at least have been a possible indirect contributor to the KHM, see: Heinz Rölleke, ‘Neue Erkentnisse zum Beiträgerkreis der Grimmschen Märchen’, in Lutz Röhrich & Erika Lindig (eds), Volksdichtung zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (Tübingen 1989), 83–91, esp. 87–88. 40 Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 346; ATU 563, with literary history. 41 Heinz Rölleke, ‘Eine bisher unbekannte Beiträgerin zun den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm’, Fabula 24 (1983), 264–268. 42 Cf. Gunthier-Louis Fink, ‘The Fairy Tales of the Grimms’ Sergeant of Dragoons J.F. Krause as Reflecting the Needs and Wishes of the Common People’, in: James M. McGlahery (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana/Chicago 1991), 146–163. The tales of this informant, primarily anecdotal, are preserved in manuscript, see: Rolf Breslau, Der Nachlass der Brüder Grimm, I (Wiesbaden 1997), 636, C 1, 3. 43 Letter to Achim von Arnim 26 Sept 1812, Steig, Achim von Arnim, 221; cf. Wilhelm Schoof, Jacob Grimm. Aus seinem Leben (Bonn 1961), 129. 44 Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 345; Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 207: Frau Holle; I 335: Hansens Trine. 45 Elke Feustel, Rätselprinzessinnen und schlafende Schönheiten. Typologie und Funktionen der weiblichen Figuren in der Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (Hildesheim/Zürich/ New York 2004), 93; this author is interesting for her collage of data on the position of women during the lifetime of the brothers Grimm, but her command of fairy tale (and witchcraft) literature leaves much to be desired. 46 Steig, Achim von Arnim, 125, 133, 141–142, 218. Von der Hagen’s editions appeared in 1812 and 1814. 47 On these stories, see: Uther, Handbuch, 421–424, 463–465. 48 Schenda calls it a ‘unhistorical wish category’, Von Mund zu Ohr, 250. 49 Wilhelm Grimm, Kleinere Schriften I, 333. 50 Cf. Ward, ‘New Misconceptions’, 99: ‘I have noted that the Grimms had a proclivity for labelling a legend mündlich (oral) in cases in which they had clearly acquired the texts from a written source.’ 51 The Grimms abandoned the Pentamerone project around 1814, see the 1815 KHM preface. The first complete German translation of Basile by Felix Liebrecht appeared in 1846, see Rudolf Schenda, ‘Basiles Pentamerone (1934) neu übersetzen?’, Fabula 39 (1998), 219–242; cf. Schenda, ‘Basile, Giambattista’, EM 1 (1977), 1296–1308, as well as Schenda’s afterword in Das Märchen der Märchen (München 2000), esp. 507–509. On the copying: Uther, Handbuch, 491–493. 52 Jacob Grimm’s translation of ‘Lo serpe’ appeared separately in 1816. It was not free from misunderstandings, see Schenda in Das Märchen der Märchen, 589. See further: Breslau, Nachlass, 636, C1, 5.

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53 Steig, Achim von Arnim, 237: ‘das die Kinder dadurch zu einer freudigen Selbstbeschäftigung geführt und zu Weitererfindung gebracht würden’. 54 Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, IV (1930), 272–273, referring to ‘Volksüberlieferung’, which is not necessarily ‘popular tradition’. 55 Otmar was the pseudonym of Johann Carl Christoph Nachtigal, theologist and educationalist, see Köhler-Zülch, ‘Nachtigal(l), Johann Carl (Conrad) Christoph’, EM 9 (1999), 1125–1128. On Naubert see Gonthier-Louis Fink, ‘Naubert, Christiane Benedikte Eugenie’, EM 9 (1999), 1287–1291. 56 For the verdict on Büsching see: Steig, Achim von Arnim, 219; Jacob Grimm also reviewed the volume: Kleinere Schriften 6, 3. Theil 1882: 130. 57 Extensively discussed by Grätz, Das Märchen, 188–206; see also: Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 371–380: his stories root essentially in literary tradition. 58 Grätz, Das Märchen, 248–251. 59 See: Jeanine Blackwell, ‘Vorwort zu einem Vorwort. Rahmen um ein Rätsel’, in the Marzolph edition of the Feen-Mährchen (Hildesheim 2000), vii–xiii. 60 Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 254. 61 Cf. Grätz, Das Märchen, 115, who points to the work of Johann Joachim Eschenburg, who already in 1810 provided notes to a collection of fables, referring to variants and deviations. 62 See Grätz, Das Märchen, 218, 319: in the 1801 edition of Idyllen the story appeared on pp. 171–192, annotations 381–386. An earlier version in the Hamburger Musenalmanach for 1781, 41–51. 63 ATU 592: the Dance among Thorns, often told about Jews. Included in the second volume of the KHM (1815 no. 24, final edition KHM 110) ‘der Jud im Dorn’, from an early seventeenth-century poem and from a carnival play. An oral version from Hesse, possibly from the Wild family, see Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 490. 64 Letter of 16 September 1809, Jugendzeit, 144. Brentano bought another copy, in the original Neapolitan dialect, some time around 1812 in Prague. 65 Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 392–392: KHM 3 Marienkind and KHM 85 Die Goldkinder. See also: Ulrike Marquardt, ‘Neu aufgefundene Bildnisse Grimmscher Märcherbeiträgerinnen’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken 4 (1984), 120–125. 66 Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, IV (1930), 434. 67 Heinz Rölleke, ‘Neun Volksmärchenskizzen Clemens Brentanos’, Fabula 18 (1977), 105–116, esp. 112–113. 68 The motif also featured in Hamilton’s Fleur d’Epine, of which German translations appeared in 1744 and in 1777. Here a thrown pebble becomes a wall and a drop of water a stream; cf. Grätz, Das Märchen, 46 and 78. 69 Book V, chapter 13. English translation (ed. Davidson): The History of the Danes (Cambridge 1979), 153; Aarne, Die magische Flucht, 9–10. 70 Scherf, Märchenlexikon 548; Uther, Handbuch, 33.

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71 Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 74–75, 355. 72 Steig, Achim von Arnim, 263–264, 271. In German it rhymes: ‘es ist der Wind, das himmlische Kind’. 73 Cf. Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 355, mentions the medieval Spielmannsepos. 74 Cf. Grätz, Das Märchen, 201, who cites Fülleborn’s Schlesische Märchen of 1797 in which the opening rhyme refers to ‘Herr Blaubart und sein Pfefferkuchen-Haus’. Albert Ludwig Grimm also mentioned a story about a ‘Lebkuchenhäuschen’ in the preface of his Kindermärchen (1808); cf. Rölleke, ‘Grimm, Albert Ludwig’, EM 6 (1990), 167–169. 75 Schenda, ‘Kommentare’ in Schenda (ed.), Das Märchen der Märchen, 601–602; ‘Basiles Pentamerone. Mediterrane Lebenswirklichkeit und Europäische Literaturtradition’, 505 about Pervonto, retold by Marie Hassenpflug as ‘Hans Dumm’ (KHM 1812: 54), later discarded. Scherf, Märchenlexikon 565, assumes an oral tradition because of deviations from the literary texts – merely retelling already accounts for this. 76 Rölleke, ‘Grimms Märchen “Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren”’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken 16 (2005), 58–62. 77 Cf. KHM 73, possibly told by one of the Hassenpflug sisters. 78 Cf. the engraving in: Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire en France, opposite p. 152. 79 In 1558 a Latin poem, ‘Metamorphoses puella et parvuli liber’, appeared in Poland which can be considered as a forerunner of KHM 11 (the boy is turned into a lamb instead of a deer), see: Julian Kryzanowski, ‘Two Old-Polish Folktales’, Fabula 2 (1959), 83–93. Intermediate printed versions have not been located yet. 80 Grätz, Das Märchen, 25. 81 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 491, remarks that Wilhelm Grimm’s version of Puss in Boots follows Tieck rather than Perrault. Since editing was also done on the basis of other variants, it may have been Hanne (Jeanette)’s version rather than Wilhelm’s. 82 Between 1773 and 1790 there had been at least six versions of a Beauty and the Beast play, Grätz, Das Märchen, 50; Albert Ludwig Grimm’s version of Snow White, published in 1809, was also written for the stage. 83 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1056–1059; 1127–1133; ‘Christine Shojaei Kawan, Schneewittchen’, EM 12 (2005), 129–140; ‘A Brief Literary History of Snow White’, Fabula 49 (2008), 324–342. See on the sources of Richilde: ClausenStolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 379–380. 84 Heinz Rölleke, ‘Die Stellung des Dornröschenmärchen zum Mythos zur Heldensage’, in: Wolfdietrich Sigmund (ed.), Antiker Mythos in unseren Märchen (Kassel 1984), 125–137, esp. 131; cf. Harold Neemann, ‘Schlafende Schönheit’, EM 12 (2005), 13–19. 85 Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 391–392 on the letter, 373 on the story. 86 Valerie Paradiz, in her Clever Maids, 90, notes the correspondence, but only links it to ‘The Maiden with No Hands’. 87 Rölleke, ‘Neun Volksmärchenskizzen’, 108–109, 115. 88 Catherine Velay-Vallantin, L’histoire des contes (Paris 1992).

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89 Cf. Heinz Rölleke, ‘Allerleirauh. Eine bisher unbekannte Fassung vor Grimm’, Fabula 13 (1972), 153–159; Grätz, Des Märchen, 50–54. 90 Wesselski, Deutsche Märchen vor Grimm, 76–79. 91 Dortchen related her youth memories to her daughter Auguste Grimm, who noted them down several decades later. Unfortunately these do not contain anything about Dortchen’s relationship with Wilhelm; see Heinz Rölleke, ‘Erinnerungen Dortchen Grimms in der Aufzeichnung ihrer Tochter Auguste’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken 15 (2003), 1–15. An Eckerchen is a little squirrel. 92 Blackwell, ‘German Fairy Tales’, 74. 93 Cf. the annotation at Julia Ramus’s ‘Die Froschprinzessin’, Rölleke, Märchen aus dem Nachlass der Brüder Grimm, 23: ‘Ist gewaltig zu Grund gangen’. 94 Bottigheimer, Grimms’ Bad Girls & Bold Boys, 168. 95 Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove, writes about a ‘transhistorical’, ‘diachronic’ meaning of the stories, but this is nothing more than the situated opinion of a Jesuit.

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Magic and metamorphosis

Out of India Both Albert Wesselski and Antti Aarne were inspired by the theories of the German Sanskrit scholar Theodor Benfey, who in the years 1856 to 1858 gave a number of lectures and published several articles, and edited the Panchatantra, while proclaiming the Indian origin of fairy tales (Märchen). As the Austrian scholar wrote, comparative research really started only with Benfey.1 According to Benfey all European and Asian tales (those of India excepted) could be reduced to a small number of basic models, most of which originated in India, more precisely in the epic Panchatantra.2 Where the genealogy was unclear, it related to either an as yet unknown Indian source or a story which was constructed on the basis of an Indian pattern. The stories had reached Europe only during the Middle Ages and most of the time demonstrably through written channels.3 To illustrate his theory Benfey used several examples, such as the stories which later became typified as the Magic Bird-Heart (ATU 567), the Four Skilful Brothers (ATU 653) and the Clever Farmgirl (ATU 875). In fairy tale historiography, however, it was the Magician and His Pupil (ATU 325) which came to represent the thesis of Asian ancestry, both because by its Mongolian and Russian intermediates Benfey had suggested a different route of influence on the western corpus,4 and because this very particular geographical connection had been contested in the early 1900s by one of Benfey’s French followers, Emmanuel Cosquin. As Stith Thompson presented it a century after Benfey’s initial publicity campaign, fairy tale scholars had come to the conclusion that Benfey had ‘overstated his case’ and that India was ‘only one of the several great centers of invention and dissemination’.5 The Magician and this Pupil had nevertheless escaped an alternative treatment because Cosquin had left Benfey’s main thesis intact; the tale’s Indian origin ‘seems never to have been disputed’;6 it would be subjected to different theories of origin only later in the twentieth century (see below). Benfey’s legacy became entangled in the discussion between oralists and adherents of the literary thesis when Finnish folklorists adapted his insight on

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how stories were communicated and modified it to fit orality. Aarne’s stress on monogenesis (see Chapter 1) was directly copied from Benfey’s writings.7 But as he had to accommodate Finnish nationalism, to negotiate the overbearing presence of the KHM in nineteenth-century European fairy tale research and to account for a multitude of recordings from Finnish oral sources, Aarne simply switched to oral transmission, although still supporting the notion of an Indian cradle. This made Benfey’s argument incoherent and subsequently led to the idiosyncratic results of the Finnish School. Aarne’s mentor Kaarle Krohn, who initiated the catalogue project, likewise situated the origin of fairy tales in India.8 From his equally marginal position in Lorraine, their contemporary Cosquin concurred: Indian stories, oral as well as written, were the more or less direct basis of the European tradition.9 For Cosquin oral tradition was as sacrosanct as it was for Aarne; the former wrote about ‘une transmission orale de tant de siècles n’a fait subir aucune altération’.10 Cosquin’s stance negated historical change, which is particularly apparent in his failure to distinguish between a main story and later additions as well as between nineteenth-century recordings and a presumed earlier story. On top of this, he denied the value of the European printed sources. Yet his critique of Benfey seems to have been accurate: for the projected transmission of the Magician’s Pupil via Mongalia the Mongolian collection Siddhi-Kür was needed and its influence on European tradition is extremely dubious. The same verdict may apply, however, to the thesis of a general Indian origin of fairy tales. The Finnish School provided folklore scholarship with its historical-geographical method, with the Tale Type Catalogue and, above all, with respectability. That made its main tenets sacrosanct and the possibility that European material could have been received in Asia hardly entered anyone’s mind. In the meantime Indian tradition has been reconsidered, both in its own right and in the light of British colonial influences. The popularity of the Finnish School has dwindled and folklore classification has acquired a life of its own. In other words, a re-examination of the Magician and His Pupil becomes opportune. A tour through its tradition necessarily starts in Straparola’s Venice and proceeds to the Middle East and India. Returning to Europe, I discuss the tale’s appearance in the KHM and some nineteenth-century folklore notations. Then the story’s wanderings through the Islamic world are examined before a final return to the theory of Indian origin. Maestro Lattantio In mid-sixteenth-century Venice, the commercial capital of Europe, it was told that in Sicily there lived a tailor who practised a secret trade on the side, namely the art of necromancy.11 This man is called Maestro Lattantio and one day he

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takes an apprentice by the name of Dionigi. The boy soon discovers his master’s other occupation and learns everything by spying on him, while pretending to be too dumb to even comprehend tailoring. When his father notices this, he takes him away. But Dionigi tells him that he has actually learned a lot and convinces his father to sell him on the market in the form of a beautiful horse and to keep the bridle. Thereupon the boy changes into a horse. The tailor, however, having seen them at the market, disguises himself as a merchant and buys the horse, with the bridle. He then takes the animal home and beats it every day. His two daughters – who only now make their appearance in the story – take pity on the horse and lead it to a river to drink. There he dives into the water, changes into a fish and disappears, leaving the girls in tears. Lattantio finds out what has happened. In turn he becomes a big tunafish and chases the little fish. The boy now changes himself into a ruby ring and jumps into a basket carried by a serving maid of the king’s daughter. She is called Violante and when she sees the ring she appropriates it. And when night had come Violante retired to rest, wearing the ring still upon her finger, when suddenly the ring transformed itself into a handsome young man, who, embracing tenderly the snowy bosom of Violante, felt the two firm round little breasts, and the damsel, who was not yet asleep, was greatly alarmed thereat, and would have screamed aloud.12

The boy explains his predicament and Violante, moved by his charms, promises to take care of him. Now the king becames ill and Lattantio dresses up as a doctor and promises to cure him in return for the ruby. On Dionigi’s advice Violante throws the stone against the wall. It turnes into a pomegranate, ‘which scattered its seeds on all sides when it burst’. The doctor changes himself into a chicken and starts to peck at the seeds. One of the seeds becomes a fox and eats the chicken. The fox resumes his human form and they live happily ever after. Since the followers of the Finnish School regularly presented the history of fairy tales upside down, and had the ‘earliest’ story emerge only at the end in the form of a reconstructed hypothetical text, it should be illuminating to trace this history along its proper temporal sequence. According to the latest expert opinion, Maestro Lattantio is the ‘first complete version’.13 The story was written by Gian Francesco Straparola and published in the second volume of his Le piacevoli notti of 1553.14 Because there cannot have been earlier incomplete versions, as that would be a contradiction in terms, it is safe to assume that Straparola’s story is the first known version of this story. Straparola may very well have been its author. In his typical ‘cut and paste’ method he used existing elements to compose it and in combination these elements acquired a specific meaning.15 The main acts in this story are: (1) a boy takes up service and learns an occult

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skill; (2) he returns home and applies this skill to earn money: he lets himself be sold in the shape of an animal; (3) his master discovers him, but he manages to escape, using a series of metamorphoses; (4) he finds refuge with a princess and manages to overcome the master.16 These acts break up the story in logical movements, each forming its own scene, with a particular set of protagonists; at the same time they are defined by their place in the whole story. This becomes particularly evident when one looks at the elements that made up the story, as they partly cut through the scenes. In medieval Europe the proverb circulated ‘Der Zaum geht mit dem Pferde’ (the bridle goes with the horse). The bridle defined ownership and signified submission. This motif was worked into the story of a man who forfeited his soul to the devil and was taken to hell, because body and soul belonged together.17 A magical contest is present in the prose version of the Carolingian epic Malegijs, dating from 1556, without, however, any metamorphosis.18 The latter did appear in a text of the Welsh story cycle Mabinogion.19 In this particular tale a witch by the name of Ceridwen brews a potion that will give ultimate knowledge. She keeps a blind man to stir the cauldron. But the boy, Gwion, who is leading the man, tastes a few drops; he is then chased by the witch. He changes into a hare and she became a hound, the hare changes into a fish and the hound into an otter, the fish turns into a bird and the otter into a hawk. Finally the bird flies into a barn and becomes grain, the hawk becomes a cock and picks it up. Nine months later Ceridwen gives birth to a son. This story is related to a popular song text in which the positions are reversed: a boy pursues a girl through a series of metamorphoses. The earliest manuscript containing this story dates from the middle of the sixteenth century.20 The existing song texts are from a later date,21 but may have been earlier – apart from being printed on sheets, songs with their rhyme and melody are always preserved much better than mere stories. Moreover, in the medieval stories about Gerbert of Aurillac, the later Pope Sylvester II, it was told how he had gone to Spain to learn magic. He seduces the daughter of his master and runs off with his book of magic.22 The different elements of tale of Lattantio and Dionigi (Gidion inverted?) were all available in European tradition; they needed a master story teller to mould them together into a coherent whole. In the course of this process unnecessary details, such as the school of magic and the character of the devil, were discarded. Specific to Straparola’s magician tale is not only the combination of existing elements but also his play on the gender of the main characters and his display of a certain sexual ambiguity. When he used an existing example of the transformation fight, he deliberately changed the gender of one of the protagonists from female to male. The sexual symbolism is already present in the figure of the tailor himself: the movement of the needle is a metaphor for the male sexual

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act. The secret trade the boy learns from Maestro Lattantio, however, is submissive homosexuality: after he has spied on his master’s doings he knows how to be ridden. Even Lattantio’s name: ‘giver of milk’, refers to a female attribute, perhaps implying that the Maestro is bisexual with an interest in children but at any rate emphasizing the theme of inversion. After his experience with the tailor Dionigi can only be guided until the tailor’s daughters help him to escape; they show him how to be a fish in the water. The name of the princess who rescued the boy, Violante, was recognizable by contemporaries as belonging to a famous Venetian courtisan, painted by Titian in 1515.23 As she was also known as la bella gatta, the beautiful cat, and thus also capable of assuming an animal guise, it shows once more Straparola’s play between story and setting. But in this part of the story Dionigi can still only manage to be a ring on the girl’s finger, that is to assume the female role. Only when she throws him away, he becomes seed. Lattantio picks it up in the form of a female hen, but is now beset by the (apparently male) fox; their positions are finally reversed. The story obviously denotes a sexual learning process, as envisioned by a mid-sixteenthcentury Venetian author.24 It must also have been funny. Straparola did not write fairy tales in the current meaning of the word.25 As the title itself indicates, the notti was rather a collection of scabrous and sometimes scatological (or pleasurable, depending on the point of view) jests. As such they were meant for a mixed, urban public, to be recited by certain ladies at the Venetian Carnival.26 His few other Tales of Magic were equally pieced together. And especially those that Bottigheimer has designated as ‘rise tales’ also abound with sexual connotations: in Pietro the Fool (ATU 675) a mere wish made a princess pregnant; Prince Pig (ATU 441) is about sleeping with a seemingly ugly man; Fortunio (ATU 314), with a similar bedchamber scene as in Maestro Lattantio, contains ‘implicit references to sexuality’ and a ‘heavy reliance on bowel functions’; and the Magic Doll (ATU 571C) is all about arses.27 At the end of the sixteenth century Straparola’s book was placed on the Inquisitorial index several times, resulting in a regular reshaping of the texts. In the Italian editions the references to clergy disappeared and in the 1597 edition Maestro Lattantio was sacrificed.28 The book was part of a tradition of erotically charged publications for an adult audience that lasted well into the eighteenth century.29 For most of its stories, especially those in the second volume, a literary source can be indicated. The so-called ‘restoration tales’ among his tales of magic, in which members of royal families temporarily undergo a phase of servitude, went back to medieval romances. Neither the few rise, or the equally sparse restoration tales, however, can be seen as constituing a new, special genre of ‘fairy tales’ as they were hardly distiguishable from the existing anecdotes and novellas.30

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Eastern equivalents Theories of the Magician and His Pupil’s Eastern origin are usually built on younger, even nineteenth-century texts that also show a number of discrepancies with the story of the Venetian author. The older Persian and Indian collections do not seem to contain this particular tale.31 In order to trace Maestro Lattantio’s historical distribution, it is still useful to consider the Eastern texts carefully, if only to see how they could be related. In the History of the Forty Vezirs, for instance, the following story is presented. A mother has a son who is good for nothing. This boy takes an apprenticeship with a sooth sayer (geomancer). After a few days the master changes himself into a ram and tells the boy to sell him, but to keep the lease. They repeat the trick with the master in the shape of a horse. Now the boy takes the money to his mother, instead of to his master and changes himself into a pigeon to be sold. He is recognized by the master, who chases him as a sparrowhawk. The boy becomes a red rose, which falls in front of the king. The master changes into a musician and asks for the flower. It falls to the ground, turning into millet. The musician becomes a cock; the grain becomes a man who catches the cock and strangles him.32 According to Cosquin the oldest version of the collection this story featured in was from 1430; the editions in which this particular story can be found, however, are no earlier than the seventeenth century.33 It is hard to see how a story like this could have inspired Straparola; the opposite is more likely: even in abbreviated form the text reads like a not very well remembered version of Maestro Lattantio. The selling scene is confused (at first the master is sold instead of pupil). The bird metamorphosis is part of it, which makes the chase truncated. The fox is missing; there is no girl (or another sexual partner, unless one considers the king as such). During the second half of the sixteenth century Straparola’s volumes had been reprinted and translated many times.34 Perhaps the Near Eastern sellers of manuscripts thought it would pay to have a version of a popular European tale in their wares, or alternatively the tale had become popular in the Orient, too. In different forms the story also features in the Arabian Nights.35 The most complete version can be found in the tale of the Twelfth Captain, but this appeared only in the Mardrus edition of around 1900 (nights 952–954).36 Here the magician is a Moor who helps a royal couple to have children, in return for one child. After first being given the wrong, stupid child he takes the right, clever one, Mohammed, to his own place, where he has to master a book of magic in thirty days. On the last day the prince still has not succeeded and decides to walk the garden instead. Here he finds a girl, hanging on a tree by

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her hair. He sets her free, she kisses him abundantly and teaches him the contents of the book. When the Moor returns, Mohammed pretends that he does not know anything yet and his arm is chopped off as punishment. The girl restores the boy’s arm and conjures up two camels on which they flee, each to their respective country, but not before they agree that the boy would later visit the girl (who is a princess) to ask for her hand in marriage. Back in his home town the prince orders the camel to be sold, without the rope. This is forgotten, but the camel dives into a drinking trough anyway. In the following confusion the Moor turns up and buys the rope from the merchant. He now has power over the prince, changes him into a camel and rides him to the palace where the princess lives. The camel manages to chew through the rope, changes into a pomegranate and hangs himself on a blossoming pomegranate tree. The Moor asks the king for the apple and when it is handed to him it bursts into seeds. The magician collects them one by one but the last seed sprouts a dagger and kills him. Mohammed appears in his own shape and the princess walks in, telling her father that this is the man who liberated her. The different editors of the Arabian Nights were always at pains to gather the right number of stories. To complete his edition, Mardrus had taken this, and the other Captains’ stories from Spitta Bey, Contes arabes modernes, published in 1883. This whole section is distinctly European, derived from or with parallels in the Piacevoli notti, the Pentamerone, Gesta Romanorum and King Lear.37 In the Twelfth Captain’s tale attempts were made to enhance the exotic appearance and to veil the donor story: in Spitta Bey’s ‘Histoire de Mohammed l’Avisé’ the couple flee on horses and a sheep, made by Mohammed, is sold on the market. Only the second time does a camel figure in the story. The animal is bought by the magician, who is primarily interested in the bridle. He puts it in his saddlebag, but when he dismounts he takes his leg off the bag and Mohammed escapes in the form of a raven. The magician turns himself into a kite and they fly for two days and two nights, until Mohammed finds refuge in the garden of the sultan who is the father of his beloved.38 This story bears a far bigger affinity to Maestro Lattantio than does the Mardrus version, where the market scene is corrupted and the transformation flight deleted. Because the girl is introduced at an early stage, however, Straparola’s homosexual references are downgraded. As the sultan tells Mohammed: ‘you have untied (loosened) my daughter’s hair, now you will have to marry her’. Still, the secret acquisition of ‘magical’ knowledge in the European story rings more true than the forced reading in the Arabic one, in which the magician seems both to want and not to want a clever boy. In the tale of the Second Qalandar, which belongs to the core section of the Arabian Nights, only a mixture of elements from the Straparola story surfaces: there is a wise prince who studied all sciences (and by implication the occult

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ones). Through circumstances he becomes a woodcutter, lodges with a tailor and discovers the abode of an jinnI (demon) where a lovely woman awaits him to shower him with her favours. They are found out. The jinnî hacks the woman into pieces and changes the prince into an animal; a monkey, although he is given the choice of becoming a donkey, a dog, a mule, or a raven. The monkey ends up at the court of a king where a princess appears to be cognizant in the black arts (without her father being aware of it). She immediately recognizes the prince and sets out to disenchant him, calls forth the jinnI and engages him in a transformation fight. Towards the end the demon becomes a pomegranate bursting into seeds. Now the princess is the cock but she cannot find the last seed and has to resort to fire, whereupon both combatants perish. With her last breath the woman can just restore the monkey to a prince. This story offers no resolution, only an explanation as to why the teller (the prince) has only one eye: he was struck by a spark from the transformation fight.39 Although in the Near Eastern context metamorphoses are the proper provenance of demons (and women, apparently),40 the story’s plot is not very strong and has to rely on a number of sudden turns. It enhances the likelihood of a derivation. Straparola in India Straparola’s popularity certainly shows in the first story of the Dravidian Nights Entertainments, the nineteenth-century translation of a collection of Taliban stories, which runs as follows. A former king by the name of Dharmananda offers his two sons to a Brahman for education; the teacher may keep one of the boys for his efforts. Among other things this man teaches ‘the magic art of infusing ones own into different bodies’, but only to the younger son; the elder is made only to do ‘low work’. Warned by the youngest son, the father chooses him when the time for collection has come. The Brahman (who wanted to keep this boy) swears revenge. To earn the former king some money, the prince lets himself to be sold as a hen and escapes in the form of a bandicoot. When he repeats the trick in horse form, the Braman master notices it and buys the horse from the merchant who bought it first. He whips the horse and takes it to a dirty pool to kill it. The boy escapes in the form of a fish and when the master orders his pupils to empty the pool, the boy transfers his soul to a dead buffalo and then to a dead parrot. The Brahman now changes himself into a hawk, but the parrot finds refuge with a princess. At about midnight the parrot left its cage, and assuming its own form of a prince sat beside the sleeping princess, smeared sandal over her body, ate all the sweetmeats that she had left on her table, and converting himself into a parrot, was quietly dozing away the night in its cage.

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The master enters the palace as the head of a troupe of cord dancers, but the prince has instructed the princess to break the bird’s neck while he escapes into her pearl necklace. When the master wants this, the pearls become worms, the master turns into a cock, and the worms change into a cat that catches the cock (but does not kill it).41 This story exhibits the same sequence as Maestro Lattantio: all the four acts are present and there are even similarities in the metamorphoses. The main difference is the mode of transformation: in order to become an animal, the magician needs a dead specimen to transfer his soul to. The parrot sketch which is built on this motif occured in the Peregrinaggio di tre giovani del re Serendippo, published in Venice in 1557. Here it concerns the story of an emperor who learns the art of body swapping and is tricked by his minister so that the latter can take the emperor’s body and become emperor himself. In the end one of the emperor’s wives persuades the minister to transfer his soul into the body of a chicken. The ursuper is then killed and the emperor can leave the parrot and take his own body again.42 The Peregrinaggio (voyage) had both an eastern pedigree and a western popularity. It was an adaption of the thirteenth-century Persian Hasht Behst (Eight Paradises). It saw several Italian editions in the late sixteenth century, as well as German and French ones. At the end of seventeenth century it was translated into French by Jean, chevalier de Mailly, and published in 1719 as part of the then Oriental craze. In its turn the de Mailly edition was translated into German, English and Dutch.43 In the Middle East the story circulated in a chapbook.44 This tradition paralleled Straparola but was also separate from it; the parrot story relevant here was essentially distinct from the Straparola’s transformation sequence.45 In the first story of the Dravidian Nights Entertainments both traditions are clearly visible. As soon as this tale adapts Italian ingredients it becomes unnecessary for there to be a dead body to move into. Since this is a crucial plot element in the Peregrinaggio story, the Taliban version can only have been constructed out of it instead of the other way around. (Serendip was a former name of Sri Lanka.) It can never have been the source of the Magician and His Pupil tale.46 Apart from all being younger,47 none of the Asian stories can even remotely justify the claim of having formed the basis of the Venetian tale. Straparola may have incorporated eastern elements in his work; in this case his influence went in the eastern direction where it was subjected to a series of metamorphoses and subsequently reinserted into the western market. The frame story of the Mongolian Siddhi-Kür, a collection of twenty-six stories, fits in this perspective, too. Although it resembles Maestro Lattantio, it has seven magicians instead of one. This multiplication reveals its dependence, since one magician (or even demon) is surely more original. It has also omitted the princess at the end and,

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in a veritable tour de force, replaced her with a hermit, who tells the prince that he may have saved his life but at the cost of seven others. The prince now has to repent and to fetch a supernatural corpse to make things right again. This corpse tells him the stories.48 Particular elements in the Siddhi-Kür frame story can also be found in the Indian tales discussed earlier. The boy has to see an animal in order to change into it; there is the preoccupation with death; and a dumber brother also occurs. The Mongolian story thus had some Indian roots – it had, in fact, reached Mongolia via Tibet. On this point the theories agree: already Benfey postulated such a derivation.49 What he did not recognize was the enormous reach of the (adapted) Straparola story. The specific relation between corpus and frame story was exposed to changes; while the Sanskrit corpus was in existence in the eleventh century, teaching basic morality, fundamental virtues and political doctrine, the frame was formed by the so-called ‘bewitched corpse’ story. This concerned the exploits of a king who promised an ascetic to fetch a corpse inhabited by a vetala, while keeping a vow of silence. Only after the collection had reached Tibet, the fight between the magicians was annexed as part of the frame’s beginning and this happened only in some of the later cases. Other Tibetan frames figure a bird’s nest, situated somewhere in southern India, instead of a corpse.50 The precise dating of the various manuscripts involved seems still to be established.51 The current state of research nevertheless favours the unlikely primacy of the younger frame with the magicians, the only one to have ‘migrated outside Tibet’. In its turn it would have reached Tibet from India.52 The above analysis of the Dravidian Nights tale contradicts this. Whereas it is still undecided when and how the addition to the frame exactly took place, it will have been aimed at the European market and was therefore embedded in a European narrative. Stories collected in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India can scarcely make up for the lack of older oral evidence. The text published by Swinnerton, for instance, can be considered as an ill-fitted construct which switches half-way through from the conflict between master and pupil to the bewitched corpse (the boy has escaped the fakir by hiding in the corpse in the form of a mosquito) and in the end they both perish.53 The slightly earlier tales collected by Chaube in Mirzapur and Ghazipur are too close to the Dravidian Nights story to be coincidence.54 In a story recorded by the Norse missionary Bodding among the Santals, the boy escapes from his master because he is not taught enough and in the ensuing transformation fight he leaves the woman behind to return to his parents.55 And of the three texts collected in Sri Lanka one is restricted to the selling scene and the other two are retellings of Straparola and the Dravidian Nights.56 They are all dilapidated versions of published material.

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The Bökendorf circle An English translation of Maestro Lattatio, called The Italian Taylor and His Boy, was published as a chapbook in the early seventeenth century.57 Even though reprinted in 1810 it left few traces in the folklore of the British Isles.58 Because of the problems with Roman Catholic censors the printing of the Piacevoli notti in Italy, France and Spain came to a stop in the early seventeenth century, though this did not mean that there were no longer any copies available. Straparola’s work was especially popular among the French writers of fairy tales and at the beginning of the eighteenth century Eustace le Noble retold the story in his Le gage touché. He changed the names and a few minor details: while he made the tailor ugly, the princess became anonymous and the boy appeared to her only in his own shape while a lady-in-waiting was present; he stayed away from the princess’s breasts.59 This redaction was translated into German and published in the journal Abendstunden in 1767.60 When fifty years later Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff sent Wilhelm Grimm her version of the story to be included in the KHM, would it by then have become part of an oral tradition? At first sight there are enough indications to conclude this. The story is rendered in dialect and its contents are sufficiently removed from the printed versions to evoke orality. On the other hand, it has recently been argued that Straparola’s work was well known to the Bökendorf circle of which the Von Droste-Hülshoff family was a part and that the ‘Gaudief’ was composed out of Maestro Lattantio.61 To obtain some clarity in this matter, it is necessary to scrutinize both the Von Droste-Hülshoff repertoire and the circumstances in which it was produced. Wilhelm Grimm visited Bökendorf for the first time in the summer of 1811, when he spent an evening listening to the recitals by the sisters of his host, Fritz von Haxthausen. His second visit took place two years later, when he and Jacob were collecting the material for the second KHM volume. At that time the meeting included two nieces of the family, Maria Anna (Jenny) and Anna Elisabeth (Annette) von Droste-Hülshoff, born in respectively 1795 and 1797 (Wilhelm was ten years older). ‘I spent my time in a pleasant way’, wrote Wilhelm to his brother, ‘they know a lot of fairy tales, songs, legends and sayings’. He would need about a month and a half to write everything down. ‘The girls from Münsterland,’ he continued about the two sisters, ‘know the most, especially the younger one. It is a pity that she is pushing herself forward so much which is a bit unpleasant’. But she promised she would send him everything she knew; her older sister Jenny would see to it that she kept that promise.62 In the end, it was Jenny, charmed as she was by Wilhelm’s expressive brown eyes,63 who took up the correspondence and sent a number of texts to Kassel, although it took her a year and a little prodding from Wilhelm to do

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this.64 Among her contributions was ‘Jan un sien Sohn’, as the ‘Gaudief’ was originally titled, written in the dialect of Münsterland. Jenny may just have been an intermediary, since Annette was the storyteller of the two. While still a child, she told her friends self-invented fairy tales and as an adult she became a famous poet and novelist. The texts from Münsterland came to the Grimms in several instalments.65 The first bundle included at least six stories, published in the 1815 volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, between the stories from Zwehrn and those excerpted from literary sources. Several of them, such as ‘Der Soldat und der Schreiner’ and ‘De drei schwatten Princessinnen’, were without any parallel among the then current fairy tales and have remained so. The first featured a soldier and a woodworker who end up in a castle, which is empty apart from a black dog, a red swan and a grey cat. Only the next day do they find an old woman, a boy and a girl in the cellars. They learn that these people are trapped there until the animals are killed, but, when they accomplish this with the help of a dove who has turned into a young man, they are attacked by the three prisoners and have to kill them too. It then turns out that the old woman was a witch who had enchanted the castle. The second story is equally vague and deals with both a prodigal son who is not immediately recognized by his socially risen father and three cursed princesses whom this son is unable to rescue. These two texts were in all likelihood products of Annette’s fantasy.66 Others were based on existing literature: ‘De wilde Mann’, with its male Cinderella and partly situated in ‘Engelland’ could trace its ancestry to Straparola’s Guerrino; ‘Simeliberg’, which struck the Grimms as curiously corresponding to the Arabian Nights story of Ali Baba, was in fact based on it.67 Providing foreign stories with a German location had become fashionable since Musäus’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen. A next von Droste-Hülshoff story, ‘Die zertanzten Schuhe’ (The Shoes that Were Danced to Tatters) probably stems from a similar, as yet unidentified pseudo-Oriental source.68 ‘Fuchs und Pferd’ is a fable built on traditional elements, about how a decrepit horse fetches a lion with the help of a fox.69 The contributions of the von Droste-Hülshoff sisters consisted of stories which were either peculiar versions of familiar material or fairly new. They show that there were hardly any genuine oral fairy tales circulating. The dialect in which some were written mainly resulted in their being hard to edit; it reveals very little about a possible ‘popular’ prevalence since stories could be, and were, easily translated into something resembling local speech. These conclusions nevertheless hardly seem to apply to Jenny’s later submission, probably from early 1819,70 which contained among others ‘Jan un sien Sohn’. Jan wants his son to learn a trade and goes to the church for guidance. He hears the parson saying: ‘dat gaudeifen, dat gaudeifen’ (such thieving) and finds

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someone to teach it. If, after a year, he still recognizes his son, he does not have to pay any fee. A little man he meets on the way tells him to stand under the chimney with some bread: when a bird looks out of a basket, that will be his son. He follows the advice and collects his son. On the way home the son changes into a hound, is sold to a gentleman and escapes. The next day he turns himself into a horse and tells his father to sell him at the market, but without the bridle. The master, however, buys horse and bridle. The boy is released by a serving maid and changes into a sparrow. The master also becomes a sparrow and they fight; the master loses, dives into the water and becomes a fish. The boy also becomes a fish and defeats the master again. When the master changes into a cock, the boy becomes a fox and bites off his head.71 In this variant the master’s two daughters have become a single serving maid and the princess has completely disappeared. The little man may have been the devil (although the latter is supposed to support the teacher). While the structure of Maestro Lattantio is partly kept intact, ‘Jan un sien Sohn’ is a composite tale, newly put together out of available elements, among them the recognition scene (see below). The story was accompanied by two anecdotes also written in dialect, ‘De Sohn up Reisen’ (The Son who Went on a Journey) and ‘Hans Lustig’.72 It is itself also anecdotal, because of the misunderstood Latin phrases (the parson will have mumbled something like Gaudete, gaudete – rejoice)73 and the enlarged selling scene. The money for metamorphosis scheme, however, is given a moralistic undertone by equating it with stealing, which was underlined by Wilhelm Grimm when he put the cunning thief in the story’s title. In theory its anecdotal nature could imply the story’s dependence on a popular level, even when, as is the case with most of the other Van Droste-Hülshoff texts, very little of it survived in the region.74 But anecdotes do not automatically have to imply lower classes, they merely indicate traditional material, often written down or printed. If Jenny had carried out any ‘field work’ herself, she would surely have mentioned it to Wilhelm. Instead, in a later letter she apologized that other tales and legends she was promised (by family or acquaintances) had not materialized.75 The morality inherent in ‘Jan un sien Sohn’ may point to a religious informant and Jenny was certainly in touch with Catholic clergy; she also sent in legends related to her by a Capuchin monk. European dissemination From the nineteenth century onwards the number of texts containing variants of the Magician and His Pupil proliferated, not least because folklorists started to collect them. In the middle of the twentieth century Kurt Ranke counted 44 German texts, dating from the previous two hundred years.76 Danish research

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unearthed at least 27 versions.77 In southern Bohemia at least 13 versions were recorded.78 The French-language fairy tale catalogue listed 28.79 Arabic countries yielded a total of 48 versions,80 India 15.81 In the Netherlands, by contrast, only one variant of the story was found in the province of Frisia, recorded in the late nineteenth-century.82 And these are merely examples. There are many more similar texts from eastern Europe, or from Ireland. Adherents of the Finnish School used to undertake the labourious work of sifting through all the available versions of a story (after having secured proper translations) in order to establish geographical centres and peripheries. Because they postulated an a priori and largely unchanging oral tradition, they had paid little attention to printed versions and historical development, nor to the possibility that the collecting activities themselves could have facilitated the production of texts. The decline of their approach was also related to its sheer impracticality. Moreover, fairy tale texts can be untrustworthy; nineteenth-century collectors especially had little compunction about adapting texts and combining several versions in order to reconstruct a perceived ‘oral’ original – hence the notion of a story’s existence before it was documented. An alternative method recognizes that historical distribution can take place only within a concrete space, but it assigns priority to the temporal sequence of texts. It also takes account of the stories’ crossing of language boundaries, either because of printed translations or because folklorists (and perhaps even their informants) were multilingual. In this perspective orality is primarily considered as a probable but not necessarily indispensable part of the story collecting situation. The only thing that can be taken for granted is that folklorists were told stories during the course of their research, if they did not find them in books. Basically a story type is nothing more than the designation of a collection of stories that all derive from the same source. The type the Magician and His Pupil is relatively easy to research because of its stability and virtual lack of interference from other types.83 Only in a few instances did a story’s author combine it with another story or insert extraneous motifs. The theme from the rabbit herd was occasionally interpolated to underline the sexual ramifications;84 and the magical, food-producing table served to emphasize the story’s magical dimension.85 In what superficially seems to be a rare case there is an anecdotal infusion.86 During the nineteenth century, the theme of magic and especially the magic book was prevalent, not only because of the prevailing tendency to subdue the sexual connotations of fairy tales but also because Straparola’s sexual allusions may not have been understood by every teller or collector. From the early nineteenth century onwards, texts hold references to books of the dark arts, although without the usual warnings about forfeiting any hope of Christian salvation.87 It is thus more the book and the learning it represents which are

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emphasized than the specific nature of the knowledge acquired. In that sense magical books can be read as metaphors for literary dominance. The recognition motif, inserted in the Von Droste-Hülshoff version, occurs also in several other stories from the first half of the nineteenth century. In the Ancient Scottish Tales, for instance, the father meets an old man who sends him to a Dr Brazen-nose in Cambridge, who in his turn sends him to the black King of Morocco. ‘Here he asked for his son, when seven doves were set before him, and he was desired to make his choice, he did so, and made choice of one with a broken wing, which changed to be his son in the likeness of a dove.’ Then follows the market scene and the transformation flight, in which the boy is chased by seven sharks and seven eagles until he finds his princess. As it is expressed: ‘When night came, he became a man, which put the lady in great fear.’ The Ancient Scottish Tales were compiled between 1827 and 1829 but never published during its author’s lifetime (he died in 1854); only in 1908 was a very limited edition printed in his home town.88 This collection is actually very unScottish: it is partly based on foreign material and partly fabricated.89 The motif itself will have been borrowed from stories about a school of magic, which had been circulating in Europe since medieval times. It belongs there more than in the tale of a single apprentice, since the choice of the parent is naturally to be made from among a number of students, in whatever shape.90 It typically turns up in those post-Grimm collections, especially from eastern Europe, which have been strongly reworked by their editors. The earliest of these was the book of Polish folktales by K.W. Woycicki of 1837, of which contemporary commentators already doubted its Polishness. In this story the Straparola structure is more closely followed than in the Münsterland version. When mother (rather than father) and son meet a man in the wood, he even tells them he is a tailor. ‘But that was a lie, since he was a great wizard.’91 Next the motif appeared in one of the stories in a severely edited collection of Romanian folk narratives. Here the boy enlists in a school run by the devil and agrees with his father on a secret sign to distinguish him from his fellow students when recognition time has arrived.92 In 1858 the recognition motif emerged in an otherwise rather colourless version of the story from Slovakia; its authors were also accused of editing and reconstructing their material.93 By then there were enough printed examples of the recognition motif around for further dissemination,94 its effect on the story notwithstanding. For the addition altered the relations between the scenes: knowledge is deliberately sought instead of secretly acquired and the master is tricked from the start. That in this context he sometimes has become the devil follows more from the tale’s adaption to the particular theme than from the devil’s perceived relation to magic; on the level of everyday concepts the notion of killing a devil will have been strange

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too.95 Mixing together the two different plots of the escape from the school of magic and the escape from an evil teacher can easily result in fractures. When they included the recognition passage in their reconstruction, authors followed the authorative example of the KHM, in defiance of the actual story. During the nineteenth century the retelling of Maestro Lattantio evolved around a limited set of elements, mostly taken from other tales concerned with the acquisition of magical learning. One of those, expressing the apprentice feigning stupidity once he has become aware of the more interesting subject to seize, took the form of a passage from the popular versions of the Faust in which the teacher enquires about the boy’s literacy. Again the Grimms were the first to record this: it was contained in a half-remembered version Jacob was sent from Vienna at around 1817 (in the end the master is consumed as grain by a rooster boy).96 In the course of the nineteenth century versions of the story with the question ‘can you read?’ spread slowly over Europe, usually leaving only one or two traces in a country’s narrative repertoire.97 Sometimes storytellers elaborated it into an extra scene where the boy is first refused service because he admits his skill, then changes his clothing and gives the right answer.98 The template for the nineteenth-century stories, however, was provided by the publications of Ludwig Bechstein and Heinrich Pröhle. In his Deutsches Märchenbuch (1845) Bechstein introduced a journeyman bookbinder, looking for work.99 He finds a master who requires him only to dust books. Only one little book he must not touch. After two years the boy has read all the other books and finally starts on the little one: he discovers that it is full of magic formulas. He changes into a swallow and flies off with the booklet. Back home he tells his father to sell him, first in the form of an ox, than as a black horse; in the last shape he is bought by the master bookbinder, who was in reality a mighty wizard. When put in a stable, the horse persuades a boy to cut the rope on his left hind leg and changes into straw out of which a swallow flies. The master takes up the chase in the form of a vulture (‘Geier’, also meaning miser), the swallow becomes a ring, falling into the lap of a princess. The raptor now becomes a dashing squire and asks for the ring but when she hands it over it turns into millet whereupon the squire becomes a cockerel and is decapitated by the fox. The princess, who is young and unexperienced, then marries the boy on condition that he stops changing and remains unfalteringly faithful to her. Bechstein played around with his metaphors, turning the tale’s plot into a competition between the master and the pupil, each vying for the favours of the girl. In the end he deplored that the little book had to be destroyed and not bequeathed to the reader or to him, for none would be so stupid to change into an ox (moron). Bechstein’s pythonesque swallow did not make it into subsequent versions, but the detail of the boy having to dust the books proved a great success.100

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Pröhle’s main contribution to the tradition consisted of a strengthening the hound metamorphosis of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, both in the market and the princess scenes, and in stressing the passage of the horse taken to a smith after being bought by the master.101 In 1845 a new German translation of the Straparola story surfaced in the first volume of Hermann Kletke’s Märchensaal,102 but hardly anyone considered it genuine enough to copy it directly.103

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The trade that no one knows As long as the song about the metamorphosing lover was circulating, the sexual connotations of the chase must have been evident at least for some of the story’s audience and readership.104 For in the story a boy was hunted by an adult man the same way the girl was in the song; only the boy succeeded in escaping his pursuer whereas the girl failed. In the sixteenth century magic had been used as a metaphor for deviant sexuality; in the nineteenth century it largely replaced the sexual allusions. In a rare instance the master was portrayed as a sexual predator: in (or about) 1853 a student from Graz named him a ‘Hahnreiter’ (cock rider = dominant homosexual) and stressed that, when the bird (rather than the ring) changed into a boy at night, the girl loved him. That was as close as it could get.105 In the Near Eastern and North African region the sexual problem was partly solved in a similar way. The halter which had been a sign of sexual submission was reinterpreted as a vital part of the self.106 Mostly, however, the heterosexual aspects of the story were brought into the limelight. The role of the demon’s daughter was enhanced and in a number of cases the boy’s intention to marry the princess was mentioned from the start. One strand of this tradition started with a ramshackle Greek story from the island of Syra, published by the diplomat Johann Georg von Hahn in 1864. A king promises his oldest son to a devil in return for a fertility treatment, but when the boys are born he locks them in a glass tower instead of handing one over. One escapes and is taken by the devil to a subterranean place with one room he is advised not to enter. There he finds a beautiful maiden, suspended by her hair.107 These were primarily female elements, taken from popular stories such as Petrosinella and Bluebeard, but at least the pretence of a male protagonist was upheld and when the couple flee the devil’s abode the girl is conveniently changed into a horse who carries the boy back to his homeland. The mixture of elements demonstrates the story’s novelty – Von Hahn hardly recorded any of his material himself but obtained it mainly from friends and from his pupils; he also taught at the Gymnasium in Ioannina, near the Albanian border.108 Until then, in the European stories when the boy ended up in a sort of hell in the first scene the only woman he encountered

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there was an old hag.109 From 1864 onwards beautiful maidens with figures resembling the curves of the moon turn up in the eastern reaches of the Mediterrenean, at first to advise the boy to pretend stupidity, later also to teach him. The second strand originated, as far as I have been able to ascertain, in the late 1860s in Italy and entered Arabic tradition through the Balkans.110 In a strongly reworked Serbian story a boy sends his mother to the palace to ask for the princess’s hand and when the girl finally hears of it, she says: ‘Why not? If only he learns first the trade that no one knows!’ Instead of entering service with a magician or a devil, the boy finds a castle with magical objects (one from a girl dressed all in gold and silver, combing her hair and otherwise being ornamental) which later enable him to change shape.111 In that way he qualifies for marriage. In subsequent versions, predominantly Arabic, the nature of the assignment was further developed but also reduced. In a text from Dagestan it is called the ‘greater skill’.112 In a story from Morocco, however, the teller forgot to mention it at the beginning and only when he had reached the killing of the cock and remarked on the astonishment of the king, he interpolated the boy’s answer: ‘You once said you would give your daughter to the one who showed you remarkable magic.’113 In a Greek story the boy has to learn ‘every skill there is’.114 In a story from a Bedouin tribe in Algeria, the boy has to provide ‘ladjíb jarbE’ as dowry, ‘but no one knew what it was or how to get it’.115 In a Turkish story the princess is forgotten and the padishah merely asks if anyone understands the ‘Ali-Dschengiz’ game.116 In a story from southern Iraq the circumstance that the boy is just laughed at provides enough incentive for him to learn magic and wisdom.117 In another Moroccan story the boy simply has to master ‘magic and sorcery’ to obtain the girl in marriage.118 The way to win the princess, however, was not just through magic in general and shape changing in particular. A version of the story from a small Turkish island in the estuary of the Danube is most revealing in this respect. The padishah tells the boy’s mother that he will gladly give his daughter, but only when the boy has learnt the ‘Allem-Kallem’ game in forty days, otherwise he will lose his head. The boy and his mother now decide to flee from the town, but on the road they meet a Dev who offers to teach the boy and the mother goes back home again.119 In the master’s palace, the boy finds a girl, as beautiful as the full moon, who tells him that many have tried before and the tower opposite them was built with their skulls. She also tells him how to trick the Dev when wrestling and to come back to her at night when she will teach him how to play the game. After forty days he still permits the master toss him around, the latter thinks he will never learn the game and sends him off. The story continues with a triple market scene, followed by a transformation flight and, when the cock is disposed off, the boy asks for the padishah’s daughter. The father refuses, but

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the boy ‘did Allem’ and he ‘did Kallem’ and finally got his permission, whereupon they celebrated the marriage for forty days and nights. After that the boy returns to the palace of the Dev and also marries the girl there.120 The connection between the game and the wedding nights leaves little doubt about the story’s meaning: even a poor boy can marry a princess as long as he shows sexual prowess (and has withstood male advances). The episode with the demon’s daughter, or magician’s captive, had sneaked into the story through the Von Hahn pastiche. It proved useful to elaborate on the nature of the particular skill the boy needed to acquire, once it was decided that marrying the king’s daughter was his aim from the start and not just his rescue from the master’s clutches. As was the case with the European stories where the recognition scene could be reinserted because of its link with the school of magic, which had been one of the blocks Straparola built his story with, the girl at the magician’s place was not completely alien to the story since she already figured in (the beginning of) the flight scene, both in Maestro Lattantio and in one of its medieval constituents. In addition, the episode may have profited from the similar scene in the Arabian Nights’ Second Qalandar where the love-making is more explicit, although the woman does not survive the demon’s wrath. But where the enlargement of the daughter’s role contributed to the amelioration of her father’s unintended teachings, it left the story with two female protagonists. Only in the Turkish version discussed above is it more or less suggested that the boy took both as wife. Elsewhere storytellers found ad hoc solutions, such as marrying off the magician’s daughter, or saying that she was already betrothed. They could also make the king’s daughter the captive of the magician, but then another excuse was needed for the boy to enter apprenticeship. Altering one element in the story always affected its coherence and therefore its meaning. Mutual borrowing The theories of the Far Eastern origin of the Magician and His Pupil were also countered by classical claims. The main example given in such arguments is an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which a daughter provides for her father by selling herself in a number of animal shapes.121 At the most this may be a forerunner of the market scene: Hypermestra had obtained her powers from Poseidon and she did not have to flee from him and fight him. Straparola was familiar with Ovid, either directly in Latin or through an Italian intermediary. Conflicts between wizards, sorcerers or magicians in general can of course be found in the histories, myths and legends of the societies in which these persons operated, and sometimes they even battled in animal shape. That nevertheless does not allow one to deduce that therefore this particular story must have been

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present too.122 Its different elements may have been known for some time; the story itself was only constructed in the sixteenth century. The classical counter-example has been brought into play to show the fallacy of Benfey’s verification. Another, more essential issue of criticism, suggested by British armchair anthropologists in the late nineteenth century, was the doctrine of polygenesis. This postulated that in different places human conditions were sufficiently similar to produce the same stories. Since polygenesis was connected to the concept of a monolinear social evolution, which put the Western nations, and particularly Britain, at the top, it was also contaminated by a certain bias. Its theorists moreover forgot to take colonial power relations into account, which ensured that local informants dutifully reproduced the stories they had been told before in schools led by Western missionaries (see also Chapter 7). More to the point was that Benfey was not capable of properly assessing the influence of Buddhism, which had been much less dominant than he assumed.123 In the final analysis, all these arguments centred on the reluctance of scholars to accept the idea of the literary transmission of stories, tales of magic in particular. When the focus is adjusted to the actual stories which Benfey thought to have come out of India, agreement rather than disagreement governs. The Magic Bird-Heart is still considered of Indian origin and so is the Four Skilful Brothers. The Panchatantra is still taken as the source of story types such as The Prince’s Wings (ATU 575) and the Three Snake Leaves (ATU 612) – the common demoninator of these stories is the occurrence of magical objects. Whether this is entirely justified or not,124 at least those Indian stories that found a breeding ground in the Occident did so through late medieval Italian authors. Commercial contacts certainly went beyond fabrics and spices and included stories too.125 But borrowing in the opposite direction also occurred: the Magican and His Pupil and the Water of Life126 show a certain amount of penetration by western stories in eastern material. As the English folklorist Joseph Jacobs expressed it already more than a century ago: ‘Borrowing tales is a mutual process, and when Indian meets European, European meets Indian; which borrowed from which, is a question which we have very few criteria to decide’.127 This implies that in each case the direction of the derivation has to be established carefully, and to be guided by the historical presence of donor and receiver texts. The jumping of gaps a century or more wide in whatever geographical direction can only be considered as irresponsible scholarship. Notes 1 Wesselski, Versuch, 124. On Benfey, see: Georg von Simson, ‘Benfey, Theodor’, EM 2 (1979), 102–109.

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2 Cf. Harry Falk, ‘Pancatantra(m)’, EM 10 (2002), 497–505. 3 Theodor Benfey, Kleinere Schriften zur Märchenforschung (ed. Bezzenberger) (Berlin 1894), 161. 4 Theodor Benfey, Pantschatantra. Fünf Bücher indischer Fabeln, Märchen und Erzählungen (Leipzig 1859/Hildesheim 1966), 410–413. 5 Thompson, The Folktale, 379. A similar observation in: Wesselski, Versuch, 74. 6 Thompson, The Folktale, 69. 7 Compare Aarne’s argument in his Leitfaden, with Benfey, Kleinere Schriften zur Märchenforschung, 160–161. 8 Kaarle Krohn, Übersicht über einige Resultate der Märchenforschung (Helsinki 1931) (FFC 96); after almost half a century Krohn’s Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode (Oslo 1926) was still considered relevant enough to be translated into English as Folklore Methodology (Austin 1971); cf. Juha Pentikaïnen, ‘Krohn, Kaarle’, EM 8 (1996), 484–486. 9 A similar theory was propagated by W.A. Clouston, ‘Magical Transformations’ in his Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformations of 1887, see the reprint, edited by Christine Goldberg (Santa Barbara 2002), 210–237. 10 Emmanuel Cosquin, Études folkloriques. Recherches sur les migrations des contes populaires et leur point de départ (Paris 1922), 507. On the author: Marie-Louise Tenèze, ‘Cosquin, Emmanuel’, EM 3 (1981), 157–160. 11 See for a recent translation of the Italian: ‘Maestro Lattantio and His Apprentice Dionigi’, in: Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 347–353. Another summary in Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 869–870. 12 The Nights of Straparola, transl. W.G. Waters (London 1894) II, 106; cf. Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 350. 13 Uther, The Types of International Folktales, 208; Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1438–1439. 14 Doris Senn, ‘Le piacevoli notti (1550/53) von Giovan Francesco Straparola, ihre italenische Editionen und die spanische Übersetzung, Honesto y agradable entretenimiento de damas y galanes (1569–81) von Francisco Truchado’, Fabula 34 (1993), 45–65; cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 868. 15 This is my rendering of the concept ‘filetieren und kontaminieren’, as used by Clausen-Stolzenburg to describe Straparola’s method, see her Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 176, 204. 16 Cf. Thompson, The Types of the Folktale, 113, where the second and third acts are confused. This is based on Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 61 with four acts in the right sequence. Here, however, the motif of recognition in animal shape is included in the first; the metamorphosis flight is divided in three acts: escape from the master, the chase and the princess. Cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 870, who recognizes only three acts. 17 See: Albert Wesselski, Märchen des Mittelalters, 152, 245–246 (no. 55); cf. Rainer Alsheimer, Das Magnum Speculum (Frankfurt am Main 1971), 154; cf. Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 67.

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18 The poetic Madelgijs is several centuries older, but does not have a contest between magicians; the craft is learned from another sorcerer, Baldarijs and at the Academy in Paris Maldegijs shows his art, see: B.W.Th. Duijvestijn, Madelgijs. De middelnederlandse fragmenten en de overeenkomstige hoogduitse verzen (Brussels 1989), 24, 102. Cf. the brief summary of the fight in the prose edition: Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 67–68. 19 Cosquin considered this a fake, ‘une pretendue tradition celtique’, Études folkloriques, 598. 20 The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales, translated and edited by Patrick K. Ford (Berkely/Los Angeles 1977), 159–164. 21 Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, I (I have consulted the New York 1962 reprint), 399–403; Patrice Coirault, Formation de nos chansons folkloriques, IV (Paris 1963), 487–517; cf. Wesselski, Versuch, 30–31, where he mentions a Greek saint’s legend, published in 1645. 22 Christa Tuczay, Magie und Magier im Mittelalter (München 2003), 84, based on William of Malmesbury; cf. A. Jacoby, ‘Hochschulen der Zauberei’, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, IV (Berlin 1932), 140–148, esp. 141. 23 Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 50. 24 The Danish folklorist Holbek reached a similar, although less far-reaching conlusion on the basis of a nineteenth-century Danish version of the story, pointing out the ‘dependent position’ of the horse and the boy’s relation to the tailor’s daughter. He sees the pomegranate seeds as ‘a symbol of fertility and perhaps also as an indication that there are too many consequences of his [= the boy’s] relation with the girl for the tailor to cope with’, Holbek, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 563–564. Cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 870, who interprets Lattantio as a demonised father figure from which the boy needs to break away. 25 Cf. Jack Zipes, ‘Piacevoli Notti, Le’, in: Zipes (ed.), Companion, 382: ‘Of the 75 tales there are 14 fairy tales’. Although one could argue that, of those fourteen stories, only nine are poper tales of magic, Zipes’s observation is presentist nevertheless. 26 Cf. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, especially 91–103; I have inferred that the frame tale in which a gathering of people is described reflected intended public, whereas Straparola’s insistence on female authorship indicates possible users. Bottigheimer also makes plausible (e.g. on p. 116) that both volumes appeared at the beginning of the Carnival period. 27 Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 18–24. With the exception of the Biting Doll tale, English texts can be found in: Jack Zipes (ed.), The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 101–106, 51–56, 138–145. 28 Senn, ‘Le piacevoli Notti’, 53–54, note 40. 29 See Grätz, Das Märchen, 71–75. 30 Here I differ slightly from Ruth Bottigheimer, see her Fairy Godfather and her Fairy Tales, 91–96. The concept of ‘fairy tale’ was invented only in the late seventeenth century.

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31 Cf. N.M. Penzer (ed.) and C.H. Tawney (tr.), The Ocean of Story, III (Delhi 1923), 195, 203–205, where the transformation fight is discussed on the basis of a fight between two sorceresses in horse form. 32 E.J.W. Gibb (tr.), ‘The Lady’s Twenty-third Story’, in The History of the Forty Vezirs or the Story of the Forty Morns and Eves (London 1886), 253–256; cf. Chauvin, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes, VIII (1904), 148–149. According to Gibb this story is not in the Pétis de la Croix edition of the Histoire de la Sultane de Perse et des Vesirs (Amsterdam 1707). 33 See the preface of Gibb. The collection itself is the Turkish version of yet older Persian story cycles, see Christensen, Persische Märchen, 278. That is no guarantee of the age and origin of this particular story. 34 The first French translation of Straparola’s Piacevoli notti was published in 1560, its twelfth edition in 1615, see Ruth Bottigheimer, ‘France’s First Fairy Tales. The Restoration and Rise Narratives of Les facetieuses nuictz du Seigneur François Straparole’, Marvels & Tales 19 (2005), 17–31, esp. 28–29. Spanish editions appeared around the same time, see Senn, ‘Le piacevoli notti’. 35 There is a selling sequence in Mercury, ANE 301 (no. 225). 36 ANE 142 (no 479). 37 This becomes already evident when the ATU numbers of the captains’ stories (as given in the ANE) are related to their published sources (as given in ATU). 38 Guillaume Spitta Bey, Contes arabes modernes (Leiden/Paris 1883), 1–11. 39 ANE, 338–340; Chauvin, Bibliographie, V (1901), 197–200, no. 116; in the Mardrus edition it relates to the twelfth to fourteenth nights. 40 ANE, 723. 41 Pandit S.M. Natesa Sastri, The Dravidian Nights Entertainments: Being a Translation of Madankamarajankadai (Madras 1886), 1–18. 42 I have used the translation of the Peregrinaggio by Theodor Benfey, Die Reise der drei Söhne des Königs von Serendippo (Helsinki 1932) (FFC 98), 72–82. 43 Ulrich Marzolph, ‘Oriental Fairy Tales’, in Zipes (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford 2000), 371; cf. Marzolph, ‘Orientalisches Erzählgut in Europa’, EM 10 (2002), 362–373. De Mailly had used the motif in his earlier Les illustres Fées, see Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire en France, 59–72. The story was also incorpated in Pétis de la Croix’s Thousand and One Days. 44 Ulrich Marzolph, Typologie des Persischen Volksmärchens (Beirut/Wiesbaden 1984), 132, no. 678. 45 ATU 678; ANE, I 260; Tuczay, ‘Seelentier’, EM 12 (2006), 489–493. 46 Sastri managed only to date the manuscript he translated as seventeenth-century, but only because names of rulers from that period feature in the stories; their domains are imaginary – Dravidian Nights, v. The actuality of Italian influences in India is illustrated by the case of the early eighteenth-century Italian Jesuit Constatino Giuseppe Beschi, whose Adventures of the Guru Paramarta combined Indian, Italian and classical stories; Kamil Veith Zvelebil, ‘Dravidisches Erzählgut’, EM 3 (1981), 841–851, esp. 850.

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47 Galland received a copy of the Arabian Nights manuscript in 1701; this had been dated on the basis of its content as from the beginning of the fourteenth century, and later from the middle of the fifteenth century or later, cf. ANE 558, 632. Individual stories may thus be of different date. 48 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1096–1098; Cosquin, Études folkloriques, 592–593. 49 Benfey, Pantschatantra, I, 410–413. On the Tibet connection cf. Helmut Hoffmann, Märchen aus Tibet (Düsseldorf 1965), 50–54. 50 Raffaella Riva, ‘The Tales of the Bewitched Corpse. A Literary Journey from India to China’, in Alfredo Cadonna (ed.), India, Tibet, China. Genesis and Aspects of Traditional Narrative (Firenze 1999), 229–256. 51 Cf. Rudolf Kaschewsky, ‘Siddhi Kür’, EM 12 (2006), 638–642. 52 In this Riva, ‘Tales of the Bewitched Corpse’, 242–243, note 12, uncritically follows Cosquin. But Cosquin, Études folkloriques, 610, suggests that the combination of the two frame-stories is ‘tout arbitraire’, and then points out a late nineteenth-century North Indian oral version where the combination does occur, see: Charles Swynnerton, Romantic Tales from the Panjâb with Indian Nights Entertainment (London 1908), 365–381. This argument hinges on how trustworthy the Swynnerton text is. 53 Charles Swynnerton, Romantic Tales from the Panjâb with Indian Nights Entertainment (London 1908), 365–381. 54 Originally published in the North-Indian Notes and Queries 1892–1895; William Crooke and Pandit Ram Charib Chaube, Folktales from Northern India (Santa Barbara [etc.] 2002), 32–35, 191–193. 55 First published by Cecil Henry Bompas, Folklore of the Santal Parganas (London 1909), 134–138. Also in: P.O. Bodding, Santal Folk Tales, III (Oslo 1929), 17–37. 56 Henry Parker, Village Folk-Tales of Ceylon, III (London 1914), 400–407. 57 A free translation in verse by Robert Armin, see Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather 124, 133: London 1609, reissued in 1810. 58 Unless in nineteenth-century Scottish versions, see Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales AI (London 1970), 162–164; 347–350. 59 Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 353–359. 60 ‘Der Lehrling in der Zauberkunst. Ein Mährchen’, Abendstunden in lehrreichen und anmuthigen Erzählungen 7 (1767), 342–352. The story was not included in the 1791 Vienna translation of the Piacevoli notti. 61 Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 393–400, esp. n. 787. 62 Schoof (ed.), Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit, 221; cf. the superficial introduction by Günter Tiggesbäumer, ‘Haus Bökerhof und die Brüder Grimm’, Märchenspiegel 10 (1999), 10–11. 63 Walter Gödden, ‘Wilhelm Grimms Freundschaft mit Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken 6 (1986), 13–24, esp. 14. 64 [Schulte-Kemmighausen], Briefwechsel zwischen Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff und Wilhelm Grimm (Münster 1978; reprint of the 1929 edition), 22–24.

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65 Cf. Breslau, Nachlass, nos 1757.5 and 1800, C1, 1. 66 Annette’s contribution to the KHM has never been properly assessed. While Johannes Bolte in his Anmerkungen, IV (1930), 441, ascribed too many stories to her; Uther, Handbuch, disregards her since her stories did not make it into any of the published editions. 67 This story is usually ascribed to Ludowine von Haxthausen although Münsterland is given as place of origin; cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1112–1113. 68 ATU 306. Cf. Liungman, Die schwedische Volksmärchen, 55. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1441–1444, cannot reveal much about the story’s origin. 69 It remained without any influence, too: see: Christine Shojaei Kawan, ‘Fuchs (Bär) am Pferdeschwanz’, EM 5 (1987), 511–522, esp. 516. 70 See Wilhelm’s letter in Briefwechsel, 28. 71 KHM 68. The text is also transcribed in: Karl Schulte Kemminghausen, Die niederdeutschen Märchen der Brüder Grimm (Münster 1932), 47–49. 72 Respectively published as KHM 143 under the title ‘Up Reisen gohn’ (ATU 1696) and in the annotations of ‘De Spielhansel’, KHM 82 (ATU 330). 73 ATU 1831A*, see Viera Gasparíková, ‘Pfarrer und Küster beim Messelesen’, EM 10 (2002), 877–884. 74 Cf. Gottfried Henssen, Volk erzählt. Münsterländische Sagen, Märchen und Schwänke (Münster 1954). 75 In a letter from 17 December 1819, Briefwechsel (ed. Schoof), 32–33. 76 Kurt Ranke, Schleswig-holsteinische Volksmärchen, I (Kiel 1955), 200–201. There are no other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts than the ones already discussed. 77 Reidar Th. Christiansen, Studies in Irish and Scandinavian Folktales (Copenhagen 1959), 165; cf. Holbek, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 163: catalogue of 18 versions in the Kristensen collection from Jutland. 78 Tille, Verzeichnis der böhmischen Märchen, 299–306. 79 Paul Delarue, Le conte populaire français (Paris 1957), 279–292. 80 Hasan M. El-Shamy, Types of the Folktale in the Arab World (Bloomington/Indianapolis 2004), 151–155; cf. Ulrich Marzolph, Typologie des Persischen Volksmärchen (Beirut/ Wiesbaden 1984), 72–74. 81 Stith Thompson and Warren E. Roberts, Types of Indian Oral Tales (Helsinki 1960) (FFC 180), 53–54. 82 Waling Dykstra, Uit Friesland’s volksleven van vroeger en later, II (Leeuwarden 1896), 17–18. Two later texts, recorded in the 1970s and published in 1976 and 1980 are individual fabrications; cf. Jurjen van der Kooi, Volksverhalen in Friesland. Lectuur en mondelinge overlevering: een typencatalogus (Groningen 1984), 315–316. 83 The Irish versions are exceptional in this respect, cf. Kevin O’Sullivan and Reidar Christiansen, The Types of the Irish Folktale (Helsinki 1963) (FFC 188), no. 325. The Irish stories were also relatively young; the oldest published version appeared in: Jeremiah Curtin, Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland (Boston 1890) 139–156. In general, combined stories point to a last flickering of storytelling.

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84 ATU 570: in a 1846 North German text, see Jurjen van der Kooi and Theo Schuster, Der Grossherzog und die Marktfrau. Märchen und Schänke aus dem Oldenburger Land (Leer 1994), no. 19, and in a Persian story, recorded more than a century later, see Ulrich Marzolph, Wenn der Esel singt, tanzt das Kamel. Persische Märchen und Schwänke (München 1994), 40–55. 85 ATU 563. See: Paul Zaunert, Deutsche Märchen aus dem Donaulande (Jena 1926), 97; Jakov S. Chacatrjanc, Armenian Folk Tales (Philadelphia 1946), 20; Karl Haiding, Märchen und Schwänke aus dem Burgenlande (Graz 1977), 65. 86 In a story collected by Wisser in the early twentieth century the boy finds a priest in a cauldron in his master’s abode, see: Ranke, Schleswig-holsteinische Volksmärchen, II (1958), 201–203 (ATU 475). 87 Cf. a Danish version of the story, recorded in 1886, in Laurits Bodker, Dänische Volksmärchen (Düsseldorf/Köln 1964), 20–26, where a Cyprianus is mentioned, and Karl Müllenhoff, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzogtumer Schleswig-Holstein und Lauenburg (Kiel 1845), no. 301; Gustav Henningsen, ‘Witchcraft in Denmark’, Folklore 93 (1982), 131–137. 88 Peter Buchan, Ancient Scottish Tales (Peterhead 1908), 59–60. The first print was a limited edition of only 50 copies; it was reprinted in the US (Darby 1973). 89 Buchan’s texts are also reprinted in Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language A, I, 159, 162–163, 197–200, 296–297, 448–451, 452–454, 569–572, 573–574. These stories still have to be properly put into a European perspective, but, to restrict the argument to only one example, a demon with the name of Grimaldin, as in ‘The Princess of the Blue Mountains’, does not convince as traditionally Gaelic. 90 Cf. Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends (Helsinki 1958) (FFC 175), 18–20, no. 3000: Escape from the Black School of Wittenberg. In a separate story about the Black School in Leipzig, a mother has to recognize her son among a number of ravens; Michael Hornig, Serbske nowiny (Bautzen 1858), 22 – cited in: Marie-Luise Ehrhardt, Die Krabat-Sage. Quellenkundige Untersuchung zu Überlieferung und Wirkung eines literarischen Stoffes aus der Lausitz (Marburg 1982), 84–85; this text is not connected to ATU 325. 91 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, V (1932), 137; I have consulted the German edition of Woycicki: Polnische Volkssagen und Mährchen translated by F.H. Lewestam (Berlin 1839), 110–114. A next collection from 1853 by A.J. Glinski, seemingly from Minsk but according to Polívka ‘mistakenly labelled as Polish’, Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, V (1932), 155, was also published in German: Polnische VolksMärchen translated by Amélie Godin (Leipzig 1888, orig. 1877), 151–164. It has an elaboration of the Woycicki version, now with three tests: in the third the apprentices are all changed into white-clad maidens with rose-coloured belts. 92 Arthur and Albert Schott, Rumänische Volkserzählungen aus dem Banat, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich and Ion Talos (Bukarest 1971), 140–146; the original book, Walachische Märchen appeared in 1845 (193, no. 18).

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93 It concerns Skultety and Dobsinský, see: Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, V (1932), 131. See for a German translation of the story: Robert Michel, and Cäcilie Tandler, Slowakische Märchen (Wien 1944 [second edition]), 84–90. 94 See, for instance, Maja Boskovic-Stulli, Kroatische Volksmärchen (Düsseldorf/Köln 1975), 41–45, which displays elements of the Woycicki version. 95 The French solution for this was to refer to the saying: ‘il a le diable au corps’, cf. Caliste de Langle, Le Grillon. Légendes bretonnes (Paris/St Petersburg 1860), 112. 96 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 60. 97 Cf. Cosquin, Études folkloriques, 544–545, who mentions a German, a Bohemian, a Danish, an Islandic, two French (Breton) and two Portuguese examples. It is also be found in the Netherlands. 98 For example: Paul Delarue, The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales (New York 1956), 135–139, told by a thirty-year-old French farmer in 1887 = Delarue, Le conte populaire français I: no. 325, no. 5. The theme was introduced in: Laisnel de la Salle, Croyances et légendes du centre de la France (Paris 1875), 141. 99 Ludwig Bechstein, Deutsches Märchenbuch (Leipzig 1845), 149–152; cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1436–1441. 100 The latter was taken from a Czech fairy-tale book by Jakub B. Malý of 1838, see the summary in Tille, Verzeichnis der böhmischen Märchen, 299; cf. Werner Bellmann, ‘Bechstein, Ludwig’, EM 2 (1979), 15–19. 101 Heinrich Pröhle, Märchen für die Jugend (Halle 1854), 102–105. The smith came from Müllenhoff, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder, 466–467, told by a schoolteacher. Cf. Ines Köhler-Zülch, ‘Pröhle, Heinrich’, EM 10 (2002) 1390–1395, who has fewer suspicions about the ethnographic value of Pröhle’s work. 102 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, IV (1930), 182. 103 A Danish version summarized by Holbek, Interpretation 562, is extremely close to the Straparola original; its teller, Kjeld Rasmussen, spoke German. 104 The song’s influence is shown in a version of the story from Northern Germany in which the princess is replaced by a nun, see: Müllenhoff, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder, 466–467. 105 K. Weinhold ‘Märchen vom Hahnreiter’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde 6 (1896), 320–322. About the ‘Hahnreiter’, cf. Werner Wunderlich, ‘Hahnrei, Hahnreiter’, EM 6 (1990) 378–383, who refers to the heterosexual meaning of ‘Hahnrei’ = ‘cuckold’, but does not reach a conclusive explanation. 106 About the halter, cf. the historically chaotic argument by Cosquin, Études, 512–516. 107 J.G. von Hahn, Griechische und albanische Märchen (Leipzig 1864) ‘Der Lehrer und sein Schüler’. In all probability this was the story later used by Spitta Bey which ended up in Mardrus Arabian Nights. In its turn the Spitta Bey version inspired the story in Hasan M. El-Shamy, Folktales of Egypt (Chicago 1980), 38–46. 108 Gerhard Grimm, ‘Hahn, Johann Georg von’, EM 6 (1990) 376–378. Von Hahn’s texts have long remained unquestioned out of reverence for Jacob Grimm; they

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110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122

123 124

125

126 127

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were among the last he read on his deathbed, Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, V (1932), 94. For instance in Vuk Stephanovic Karadzic, Volksmärchen der Serben (1854) no. 6, text also in Joseph Schütz, Volksmärchen aus Jugoslavien (Düsseldorf/Köln 1960). His stories were written down from memory and provided only a semblance of what was presumably told by assorted people, Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, V (1932), 106–107. Reinhold Köhler, Kleinere Schriften zur Märchenforschung (ed. Johannes Bolte) I (Weimar 1898), 557, referring to De Gubernatis, Santo Stefano (1869), no. 26. Csedomille Mijatovies [sic!], Serbian Folk-Lore. Popular Tales (London 1874), originally published in the Bosanske narodne propovjedke, I (1870), 97. Schiefner, Awarische Texte (1873), cited in: Robert Bleichsteiner, Georgische und Mingrelische Texte (Wien 1919), cxxv. Albert Socin and Hans Stumme, Der arabische Dialekt der Houwara des Wadi Sus in Marokko (Leipzig 1894), 118. Richard MacGillivray Dawkins, Modern Greek Folktales (Oxford 1953), 133; story recorded in 1914. Leo Frobenius, Volksmärchen der Kabylen, III (Jena 1921), 111. Theodor Menzel, Billur Köschk: 14 Türkische Märchen, I (Hannover 1923), 172. Charles Grimshaw Campbell, From Town and Tribe (London 1952), 82. Victorien Loubignac, Textes arabes des Zaër (Paris 1952), 253. A dev is a kind of ogre, see: Msia Cacava, ‘Dev’, EM 3 (1981), 569–573. Ignaz Kúnos, Türkische Volksmärchen aus Adakale (Halle 1907), 18–25. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1438; Graham Anderson, Fairytale in the Ancient World (London/New York 2000), 110. Anderson’s study is severely hampered by the insertion of modern examples, postulating a continuous oral tradition lasting more than two thousand years; his suggestion that a passage from Aristophanes’ Clouds was informed by the Magician and Pupil story is too outrageous to take seriously. In his Folktales of Egypt (Chicago 1980), 248, Hasan El-Shamy wrote: ‘Type 325 appears in an ancient Egyptian account . . . dating back to A.D. 46–47.’ This is wishful thinking; it concerns a conflict between magicians without metamorphoses and there is no trace of the other ingredients of the story. Martin Pfeiffer, ‘Indische Theorie’, EM 7 (1993), 151–157, esp. 156. At least the Arabian Night appearances of the story types 567, 653 and 875 are of doubtful origin, added by Mardrus or one of Galland’s ‘orphan stories’, see: ANE 80–81, 139–140, 143–144. Cf. Christa Tuczay, ‘Motifs in The Arabian Nights and in Ancient and Medieval European Literature: a Comparison’, Folklore 116 (2005), 272–291; Marzolph, ‘Orientalisches Erzählgut in Europa’, EM 10 (2002), 362–373. Wesselski was also convinced of the Indian origin of the Tree Men in the Wood (KHM 13, ATU 403), see: Versuch, 78, 151. Joseph Jacobs, Indian Fairy Tales (London 1892), 233.

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The substitute storyteller

An exceptional informant In the preface to the second, 1815 volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm took the opportunity to introduce one of their main storytellers. It had been a happy coincidence, they wrote, ‘to make the acquaintance of a farmer’s wife from the village of Zwehrn, near Kassel’. She had been the source of a considerable number of the stories here reported, which were therefore ‘real Hessian’; she had also provided many additions to the first volume. And they continued: This woman, still fit and not much over fifty, is called Frau Viehmann [Viehmännin]. She has firm and pleasant features, regards you with bright and sharp eyes, and was probably beautiful when young. She retains these old legends firmly in her mind, a gift that, as she says, is not bestowed on everyone, and some may not remember anything. She also tells in a thoughtful, secure and extraordinarily lively manner, and obviously enjoys doing so, at first completely freely and then, when asked, again slowly, so that one can, with some practice, write down what she says.

To those who presumed that an oral tradition would involve slight deviancies and that it was impossible to be preserved over a long period, the Grimms replied that they should hear ‘how precisely she always sticks to the same narrative and how passionate [eifrig] she is about its accuracy; she never changes something when repeating and corrects a mistake as soon as she notices it’.1 This was the only informant they portrayed in this fashion and she was exceptional in several other ways, too.2 Since then identified as Dorothea Viehmann, née Pierson, she was fifty-seven when she told stories to the Grimms. She was the daughter of an innkeeper, married to a tailor and grew her own vegetables which she sold in Kassel, but she was no farmer’s wife.3 The brothers came to know her through the Ramus family, especially the sisters Julia and Lotte, daughters of the minister of the French church in Kassel, who were born

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in 1792 and 1793 and both participated in the weekly reading group.4 The Grimms did not visit the little village of Zwehrn to hear the woman out, although it was within walking distance of Kassel. They were thus never capable of judging whether she was venerated as a storyteller there. During the summer of 1813 she dropped by the Grimms regularly, mostly on Saturdays after she had been to the market in Kassel, and her stories were recorded there. They gave her a cup of coffee, a glass of wine and some small change for the effort (there is also mention of a silver spoon). She died two years later, at the end of 1815. In Grimm studies, Zwehrn has become synonymous with Viehmann and she figures as the prototype of the bearer of oral tradition. As Rölleke phrased it, she is feted as the ‘ideal type of a teller of tales’.5 Assessing Viehmann as a storyteller has become pertinent in the light of the alternative history suggested above. When the main providers of the stories to the first KHM volume were young, educated women who had mostly read what they retold to the brothers, and were also capable of composing a new story such as Hansel and Gretel out of existing material; when the Grimms themselves had copied their own contributions out of books, then a ‘genuine’ older and lowerclass storyteller stands out, the more so since the other suppliers of the second volume were the young and profoundly literate women of the Bökendorf circle, the von Haxthausens and their cousins Jenny and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Viehmann’s exceptionality is undercut, however, by several incongruencies. These concern among other thing her earliest and last stories, as well as the serious possibility of more than one teller ‘from Zwehrn’. In a letter of 17 June 1813 to their brother Ferdinand, Wilhelm and Jacob described their sessions with Viehmann, implying that this was something recent: ‘almost every week she comes once and unloads [lädet ab], then we take turns in noting down her [stories] for three to four hours’.6 Yet it is generally accepted that the tale of Twelve Brothers who turned into swans (KHM 9) also originated in Zwehrn. It had already appeared in the first edition of late 1812 and belonged, in fact, to the first phase in the production of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1810 and earlier). In the annotations of 1822 this story is indeed marked with ‘Zwehrn’, though not so in the 1812 edition. Rölleke nevertheless ascribes it to the Ramus sisters, asserting that they already knew Viehmann in 1810 and introduced her to the brothers only some three years later.7 It certainly seems that Wilhelm Grimm considered the 1819 version of the Twelve Brothers to be a Viehmann story, not the previous one which likewise originated in Hesse and was more ‘dürftig’ (poor). She thus only knew a version of it, and it remains arguable how she had acquired it. Another story, the Learned Hunter (KHM 111), was, according to the Grimms, composed of ‘two narratives from Zwehrn’, though not from the same informant since the second one came ‘from another

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mouth’.8 Learning to Fear (KHM 4) is likewise represented by two Zwehrnian variants, one elaborate and the other much shorter; even if these were told by the same person, there is still a considerable correspondence with the Zwehrn version of the Young Giant (KHM 90), which has a passage where the hero is attacked by ghostly cats.9 In this case there may therefore also have been another narrator. In Grimm scholarship the possibility of multi-authorship of the Zwehrn texts has not been acknowledged. Another issue pertains to the dating of the stories. Wilhelm put the dates when a story was acquired in the margins of the table of contents of his own copy of the 1815 volume,10 and when these are correlated to the place of origin it is possible to see which story was told when and by whom, at least for a number of tales published in that volume. The stories of the Goose Girl (KHM 89) and the Golden Mountain (KHM 92) are not dated, although the Zwehrn edition of the first features in the main text (the second is mentioned only in the 1822 annotations, as it shares some sections with other stories).11 This suggests that these last two stories were not told during the 1813 sessions, while the position of the Goose Girl as number 3 of the 1815 volume indicates that it was among the first stories to emerge out of Zwehrn. Finally, the story of Faithful John (KHM 6), again ‘from Zwehrn’, was included only in the second KHM edition of 1819 and not in the 1815 volume, yet it was sufficiently valued to be also selected for the 1825 special KHM edition of fifty stories. Was it therefore obtained only after 1815, that is after Viehmann’s demise? The same question can be asked about Clever Else (KHM 34), which was also published only in 1819 and included in the 1825 edition. At the very least, these are additional indications of the existence of more than one teller of stories from ‘Zwehrn’, before and after 1813 – the Grimms’ way of denoting the geographical origin of a story does not necessarily imply that the informant lived there when telling it. Indeed, on 28 January 1817, a ‘Zwehrner Mädchen’ provided them with a legend about hidden treasure.12 But it is unlikely that this girl presents the sole solution to the Zwehrn puzzle. If nothing was known about Viehmann, it would have been very plausible that the informant with stories from ‘Zwehrn’ was another young educated woman. There is a considerable overlap between the Zwehrn stories and the Wild and Hassenpflug repertoires: for instance a version of the Three Feathers of the Ogre had also been told by Marie Hassenpflug (and even when Amalie Henschel rather than Amalie Hassenpflug had told the devil version, it still concerned a young woman), while Marie had related the Girl without Hands and the Carnation too. The brothers had already heard Three Men in the Wood from Dortchen Wild and a story similar to the Iron Stove from her elder sister Gretchen Wild. Some of the stories they later received from members of the

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Bökendorf circle also cover corresponding narrative themes as those from Zwehrn, such as the widely published Bremer Musicians, the Two Brothers, the White Cat and How Six Made Their Way in the World. But the Zwehrn stories display an even wider range of material, including a number of anecdotes. Since there is little other evidence than the stories themselves, only the Zwehrn repertoire may cast some light on the matter.13 Fortunately, it can be put in temporal order. The process of relating stories A lack of dates of some stories in the first two KHM volumes is usually explained as the result of Wilhelm Grimm’s negligence. In the case of what is ostensibly Viehmann’s first story, the Journeymen (Handwerksburschen), he wrote down the date of the version he received from his acquaintance G.F.A. Goldmann, 7 April, and not that of the Zwehrn version.14 As this relatively early date was taken as the one of the brother’s first session with Viehmann, it needs to be amended: they started to record her stories only a few months later – both Journeymen texts actually relate to abbreviated versions of a story published in Fülleborn’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen of 1789.15 The other dates are equally accurate and the misunderstanding lies primarily in the interpretation, rather than in the notation. Some stories told in 1813 were published only in the revised editions of the KHM and thus not dated; they were for the most part versions of already known stories. If that is taken into account, the dates of the stories that were new in relation to the 1812 volume still present a picture of the pattern of the storytelling events in which the brothers and Frau Viehmann were involved. These events were preceded as well as precipated by actions of Julia Ramus, for on 6 May 1813 she gave Jacob the text of a story called the Frog Princess, which may have set the whole process in motion. Jacob did not like the story; he found it corrupted ( gewaltig verdorben) and full of grammatical peculiarities.16 As a result Julia refrained from further direct assistance and brought the brothers into contact with Viehmann.17 Their first session will have taken place on 29 May, a Saturday, when the Lazy Spinning Woman was notated, a simple anecdote about a woman who did not live up to expectations and found a ruse to get away with it (KHM 128). If Viehmann told any stories the next week (6 June is missing from the marginalia), these were too insignificant to make it into volume two. The next date Wilhelm wrote down was 13 June, which may have been erroneous since that was a Sunday, when Viehmann had little other business in Kassel. On this occasion she related Doctor Know All (KHM 98). It may have been accompanied by ‘Das Bürle’ (KHM 61), which the brothers were

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already familiar with: rather similar versions of both stories can by found in a book by Georg Christoph Ruckart, which had appeared in 1736 under the title Die lachende Schule (The Laughing School).18 This was a hesitant start at the most, although the brothers were enthusiastic enough about it to report that ‘she knows an incredible amount and tells very well’ and to start contemplating a second volume full of her narratives.19 A certain discrepancy with the actual state of the stories compiled so far can be explained only by the difference in approach between Jacob and Wilhelm; while it was Wilhelm who expressed his excitement, Jacob was still sufficiently involved to have his say in the selection and he was more concerned about literary origin while his brother cared more about a potentially good story.20 How Six Made Their Way in the World, with strong Pentamerone reminiscences, for instance, was not included in the 1815 volume (and thus not dated). It had already appeared in the second volume of Johann Gotlieb Schummel’s Kinderspiele und Gespräche (1777), in the Vade Mecum für lustige Leute (1783) and it was reprinted in 1800 in a collection of anecdotes, Das blaue Buch zum Todtlachen, before it was dished out again by the woman from Zwehrn.21 The way Viehmann told a story, correcting it where she thought it necessary, and then slowly dictating it again, she cannot have managed more than three or, at the most four stories at a time. And a more or less faithful recording did not mean that stories appeared unaltered in subsequent print. The Zwehrn text of the King of the Golden Mountain (KHM 92), for instance, was only included in the 1822 annotations volume and thus hardly polished: A fisherman must deliver fish he owes and cannot catch any. Enters the devil: he promises his son in exchange for a rich catch. The next day he takes him to a field, where the devil will collect him, but the youth brings the Bible along, draws a circle and sits in it, so that the Evil One cannot approach him. The devil demands he throws away the Bible, but he does not do it; thereupon he throws the chair over, which breaks the circle and drags him along for a bit, but the youth does not drop the Bible and the Evil one finally has to retreat. The youth walks on and arrives at a big house . . .22

On the whole, such unedited (or hardly edited) views on Frau Viehmann’s narration are rare but nevertheless show that either the brothers’ recording was still in outline mode or that Viehmann’s storytelling was less smooth than has been presumed. On Saturday 19 June she recited the Devil’s Sooty Brother (KHM 100), the published text of which was decorated with what was probably mostly Wilhelm’s dialogue. This time Satan takes a soldier into his service and keeps his bargain, so that the soldier ends up a rich man after seven years (and accidently wins the hand of a princess). The Wren and the Bear (KHM 102)

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recounts the battle between the flying and the walking animals. Both stories signalled a change as they had not been told in this form before. The devil story, also known as Hell’s Heater, only gained some popularity in the course of the nineteenth century supposedly through the KHM and its translations, notwithstanding the hundreds of devil stories that had been circulating for centuries.23 And although the plot of the Wren and the Bear was traditional, its particular incarnation ‘marks the beginning of modern tradition’.24 Neither is a genuine tale of magic – Hell’s Heater is anecdotal (cf. Chapter 1) with the princess added for good measure and the other is a fable. Something similar happened at the next session with Viehmann, already on the following Wednesday, 23 June. Like the previous stories, the Clever Farmer’s Daughter (KHM 94),25 the Three Field Surgeons (KHM 118)26 and the Barrow were all more or less traditional.27 The ghost story about the boy who wanted to learn how to fear (KHM 4) was probably told around the same time. In its final redaction it was composed by Wilhelm Grimm, but the constitutive elements, among them those from Zwehrn, fit the anecdotal legendary genre of the stories Viehmann told to this date; it may have added the dead body the hero was warming; the bowling game with the skull and bones was also reported by others.28 This new take on old material – the triple organ transplant in the Field Surgeons was exceptional in comparison to the earlier single ones – can be interpreted in several ways. It reveals the vitality of tradition, in whatever manner it was carried along: creatively or on the brink of oblivion. It may also mean that Frau Viehmann was desperately trying to come up with something that would catch the brother’s interest, especially after Jacob’s initial reservations. There are moreover indications that she was rapidly approaching the depletion of her repertoire. On 23 June she switched genres and also related a reduced version of d’Aulnoy’s White Cat with a miller’s hand doubling for the king’s son (KHM 106). This was more a popular than a traditional story and (although often translated) French rather than German. The next Tuesday (29 June) the Grimms recorded Hans My Hedgehog (KHM 108) and the Learned Hunter (KHM 111) which were also tales of magic. A week later, on Wednesday 7 July, it was the turn of the Iron Stove (KHM 127) and the Clear Sun (KHM 115). The former was again a story with some magic, bordering on the novelle; it was also very much an occasional story, composed out of available KHM fragments (see below). The latter, about the relevation of a crime, was based on a biblical proverb.29 At the end of July and the beginning of August, Wilhelm stayed in Bökendorf, where he met the von Droste-Hülshoff sisters for the first time. Frau Viehmann returned to the brothers at a couple of occasions between the end of August and the end of October, but her reservoir of stories was now practically

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exhausted; she did not know anything original any more. Her stories from those months which carry a date, and were thus for the brothers most enticing, were versions of the Girl without Hands and Fortunatus, both popular in published form.30 The Devil and His Grandmother (recorded on 4 September 1814) was merely an abbreviated Three Hairs, spiced with three enigmatic riddles.31 When the sequence of the story sessions with Viehmann is considered as exactly as possible, Wilhelm’s enthusiasm is put in perspective and a different picture emerges. The woman from Zwehrn may have been a smooth talker, but her storytelling seems to have been an ongoing struggle. An infallible gun A more detailed treatment of some of the Zwehrnian stories, in particular of their composition and reception, may offer some more conclusions about the degree of Viehmann’s originality. If later stories of the same type show a clear independence from the KHM, then this may indicate a more widespread early nineteenth-century distribution and would therefore contradict the thesis of the specific production of the Zwehrn stories in the second decade of the nineteenth century. This naturally applies primarily to the stories of which the ancestry is unclear and which seem newly composed, regardless whether their author resided in Zwehrn or not. When it concerns stories already published, the Zwehrn versions are merely another retelling. In this and the following two sections, I will therefore dissect the Learned Hunter, the Carnation and the Iron Stove. The Learned Hunter consists of a curious combination of story elements; it hardly presents a balanced tale, tried and retried before an attentive audience. It opens with a boy who has trained as a locksmith, but cannot find employment. He then apprentices himself to a hunter and after several years is rewarded with an infallible gun. On his next journey he comes across three giants and shoots the meat they are eating out of their hands. They are impressed and invite him to join them: they have set their eyes on a princess and could he please shoot her guard dog? The following scene finds the hero at the castle where he discovers an infallible sword. He calls the giants and cuts off their heads, one by one. Now he proceeds to the room where the princess sleeps. In his main text Wilhelm Grimm adjusted the hunter’s next exploits, stating that the princess ‘was so beautiful that he could only stop and stare at her, forgetting how to breathe’; in the annotations it is made apparent that soon afterwards he becomes very active indeed and rapes her. Then he collects trophies, from both the giants and the princess, and leaves. When in the morning the castle’s inhabitants stumble over the giants’ bodies, one of them pretends to be the killer, claiming the hand of the girl. She refuses, whereupon her father the king sends her out

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into the world, dressed in peasant garb, to sell earthenware and to learn humility and obedience, but she still does not want the pretender. Now she is sent off into the wood, where she builds a little shack and offers free food to every visitor. The hunter hears about this, turns up, shows his tokens and together they persuade the king that he is the right man. The would-be killer is asked about the giants’ tongues (which the hunter has cut out), suggests his own punishment and is torn into pieces. Marriage ensues. The three main elements, killing the robber-giants, impregnating the princess and the inn in the wood, were taken from different existing stories: the killing of the robbers from a novelle (ATU 956), the rape scene from the Water of Life (cf. Chapter 2) and the inn from Magelone, a then popular romance of chivalry.32 Particular details came from yet other stories, such as the gun from the Skilful Brothers or the tongues from the Dragon Slayer. Taken together these disparate elements combined into a more or less coherent story, had the infallible gun had not been added (it plays no part later on), or the market scene in which the king has the earthen pots and bowls smashed in order to persuade his daughter to marry the wrong man. This last episode was normally an indispensable part of King Thrushbeard, which the Hassenpflug sisters and Dortchen Wild had already been collaborating on (KHM 52; ATU 900) – in the Pentamerone this story was told of Cintiella (IV.10).33 This part signals the transition from a male story (since one can hardly see the casual rape from another point of view) to one with the focus on the girl’s experiences. As Christine Shojaei Kawan argues, both the Thrushbeard motif and the opening details, which characterize the hero as a hunter, have all remained unique within the KHM edition of the story. Moreover, the sign on the inn, ‘free today, payment tomorrow’, was much better rendered in other versions where it read: ‘free lodging for everyone who tells his life story’.34 The story thus contains random details and a convoluted story line. It is also odd that the hunter did not kill the giants immediately with his marvellous gun, or that he had to leave the princess at first, when he later does not hesitate to reveal himself. The incongruities may partly have been due to Wilhelm’s merging of two texts, but it is more likely that they were already present in both the originals. More recent versions of the story avoid these problems by, among other things, sticking to the male perspective. The first versions published after the story’s appearance in the KHM display two main differences: they feature three brothers instead of a boy and some of them are set in the frame of the brother’s pilgrimage to Rome.35 As the three brothers are often irrelevant to the story’s plot, they may betray traces of an older printed version which could have formed the basis of the various oral ones. Such a printed source was postulated by the Czech folklorist Horálek, especially because of the pilgrimage part, but has remained obscure.36 A story

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published in 1826 by the German scholar Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen nevertheless supports the brothers part of this theory.37 It is titled ‘The Three Brothers’, and carries the reminiscence of precisely a lost printed version because its author did not record any stories himself and relied on easily available material such as the Decamerone, The Arabian Nights and The Arabian Days. His German stories, among them the adventures of the pastrycook in search of feathers, were borrowed from Büsching (with whom the author had collaborated). The hunter text is slightly truncated, however: after he has decapitated the robbers, the boy wakes the family of the house and is rewarded for his effort: ‘I don’t know whether there was a beautiful daughter he was given as a reward, since such a trait would be sorely missed in a Märchen’, the author remarked.38 Von der Hagen’s comment reads as a wry remark on the KHM, but also shows that the main theme of Viehmann’s tale circulated in print. It can only be concluded that the Zwehrn version of the Learned Hunter was probably based on a broadsheet, and in any case spiced up with extraneous and confusing details. If Viehmann was not solely responsible for this, it still does not make her original contribution coherent. The Learned Hunter was recorded in a phase of her storytelling when she had moved from her trusted anecdotes to other narrative genres. She must also have been impressed with the notion of variation. The prince’s wishes A previous version of the Carnation (KHM 76) had been provided by Marie Hassenpflug at the end of September 1812, just in time to be incorporated in the manuscript of the first KHM volume. It can be summarized as follows. A king observes a beautiful maiden. He marries her and she bears a son. For godparent the king randomly choses an old man, who asks to be left alone with the child in the church, where he grants him the gift to make all his wishes come true. They are spied upon by a gardener who steals the child and accuses the queen of having eaten him. The boy grows up at a forester’s, where he falls in love with the daughter Lise and finds out about his gift. When the gardener comes to collect him, he changes the man into a poodle. The prince returns to his father’s court as a hunter, taking along his love in the shape of a carnation. This flower is seen by the king, who wants it. Finally the boy explains to the king that he is his son. The queen is released from prison and the prince marries his Lise. The gardener has to remain a dog. This story defeats the internal logic of a tale of magic: if the prince is so powerful, why does he not release his mother straight away? Why the whole charade with the flower? Obviously, the range of the prince’s wishes is limited

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and Marie Hassenpflug had not given it enough attention. In the Zwehrn variant, published only in 1819, the baby is stolen by a cook, who does try to prosper from the boy’s gift, but at the same time fears him. Now the girl is only the substantiation of the boy’s imagination without a previously independent existence, and, when they have returned to his father, he does visit his mother and promises to set her free (she dies soon afterwards). This version is obviously better composed and executed, also because the poodle is doomed to eat glowing coals, but this may have partly been the result of Wilhelm’s editing. The initial flaw, describing the wishes as omnipotent, is still present. This makes it plausible that the two texts are related. The Dutch folklorist Theo Meder has promoted the theory that the Carnation belongs to the same tale type as the story that gave rise to the Dutch medieval play of Esmoreit. In the latter the magical elements are missing, but they would have been difficult to stage (no matter that late medieval actors constantly displayed the marvellous). The prince’s wishing capacities, although not performed, would nevertheless explain why his powerful enemies did not kill him at the outset.39 The hypothetical earlier story, that is a combination of the Viehmann version with the Hassenpflug fostering and including the magical parts, would therefore have remained unaltered in oral tradition from before the end of the fourteenth century when the Esmoreit was performed, till the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Grimms suddenly managed to find several versions of it. Meder does not offer any explanation for this remarkable survival; he does not even see it as a problem. But if a story was around unaltered for almost five hundred years, one would expect it to have surfaced at least somewhere. If only in oral tradition, it would have changed beyond recognition. Instead, its nineteenth-century level of distribution is very low and primarily results from the reception of the KHM.40 It was also contained, however, in a Strasbourg manuscript of the Arabian Nights, compiled in the early 1830s. Here the sultan’s daughter is involved and she is turned into a mule for no other reason than finding out the source of her bridegroom’s (the slave who has stolen the boy) wealth, the boy’s wishing potency.41 This points to an eighteenth-century Oriental or pseudoOriental published story, like Kébal (see Chapter 1) presumably in French.42 The inconsistencies in the KHM tale become more transparent when its possible production is considered (without, for the time being, taking an earlier publication into consideration). Marie Hassenpflug was always willing to come up with a last story to fill gaps, first in the KHM manuscript and then in the proof stage. Her two final contributions of 1812, Snow White and the Smith and the Devil,43 were based on material that was easily obtainable in print; the Carnation was her last composed story, for it can hardly be seen as anything else. Earlier she had supplied the brothers with ‘Hanns Dumm’, her version of

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Basile’s Pervonto, which by the early nineteenth century had become very popular in German reworkings.44 This may have provided the notion of the wishes which seem slightly out of place in the rest of the story (in what presumably is a variant by another Kassel contributor, the wishes are activated only when the boy has turned eighteen).45 Marie had also previously used the motif of a boy growing up in a foster home and falling in love with the daughter (Bird Found, see Chapter 3) and the part in which the young queen is accused of having eaten her offspring was also at hand, for instance in the Feen-Mährchen.46 The particular metamorphoses will have been taken from Goethe’s work (which the Hassenpflugs discussed with the Grimms): the flower from his poem ‘Ich ging im Walde’ and the poodle from Faust.47 As the Grimms noticed, the carnation itself was referred to in the saying: ‘If my darling was a carnation [stock], I would put her in front of the window for everyone to see.’ By the end of September 1812 Marie already had some practice with making variations on a story theme, even if this last attempt did not turn out particularly well. Any superficial similarities with the Esmoreit (where it mainly concerned a stolen prince who was raised at another court) were purely coincidental. A more active and creative role for Marie Hassenpflug in the story’s formation than has previously been assumed, however, leaves the next, Zwehrnian version as a derivative; this would even be the case if Marie’s text was largely based on an pseudo-Oriental example.48 The history of other Zwehrnian stories will show that it is not the only one that can be considered as such. The heat of love In the eponymous story a prince has incurred the wrath of a witch and finds himself inside an Iron Stove as a result (KHM 127). After many years a princess gets lost in the wood and when she has wandered for nine days she stumbles upon the stove. The prince promises to help her out, if she will mary him in return. It gives her a shock. ‘Oh my God,’ she thinks, ‘what would I do with an iron stove?’ But her predicament prevails and she consents. The prince tells her to return with a knife to scrape a hole in the stove. He gives her a guide, who takes her home in two hours. The princess’s father is even more taken aback than his daughter; he first dispatches the daughter of a miller and then the daughter of a swineherd to the wood. Although the girls are beautiful, they do not manage to make even a dent in the iron and in the morning they betray themselves. When the princess finally undertakes the task herself, she manages a small hole within only two hours. She looks through it and all her doubts disappear. The prisoner is very beautiful: he glows so that he pleases her to the bottom of her soul. They declare their love for each other but, before they go

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to his place, she wants to see her father once more. The prince consents: if she does not speak more than three words. She is bound to fail, the stove disappears beyond the glass mountains and the cutting swords and for nine days she wanders around looking for it. When she feels very hungry, she climbs into a tree to spend the night. At midnight she notices a light and finds a small house where toads live. The fat toad speaks in verse, invoking Hutzelbein (Shrivelled Leg) and his dog. She is provided with needles to traverse the mountain, with a ploughwheel to cross the swords (but nothing for the water that is now between her and her prince, too). She is also given three nuts. When she finally arrives at the prince’s castle she hires herself out as a kitchen maid. He has, in the meantime, found another bride, ‘because he thought she had long since died’. Now the nuts prove convenient; they each contain a splendid dress, which she exchanges for a night in the prince’s bedroom. There she cries her heart out, telling how she saved him and crossed the glass mountain, the three cutting swords and the big water to be with him. But he has been given a sleep potion and cannot hear her. The third night, however, his servants have warned him, so that he forgoes drinking the potion and acknowledges his real bride. The couple take away the false bride’s clothes, ‘so that she cannot get up’ and take the same route back to the little house of the toads, which has become a castle full of princes and princesses. There they stay. This tale of magic is usually subsumed under the label Animal Bridegroom (ATU 425) and has hardly ever been given proper attention – nor were interpretations attempted. The Grimms themselves primarily referred to earlier parallels such as ‘King’ Swan by Gretchen Wild (KHM 1812: 59),49 which the Iron Stove had replaced since the former was too similar to the Three Belts in the Feen-Mährchen. Researching the Stove’s reception has to take this into account. The tale was told with some wit, although that does not conceal the slight slips, such as intially forgetting the water the princess has to cross.50 The second bride is portrayed as the villain, without any indicating any bad intentions (let alone by her absent mother).51 She may have been greedy, but had the prince not chosen her himself, without waiting for his true love? The story as a whole, like others before, was clearly freshly compiled for the occasion, out of episodes of earlier stories. The stove has remained unique and has been described as ‘bizarre’,52 although the Grimms were convinced that it symbolized the underworld. It may have derived from the Goose Girl (KHM 89), where the only way the wronged girl can air her story without betraying her oath is to get into a stove and talk. Its appearance here looks like an accident, and instead of the princess one can hear the narrator asking herself what to do with it. The replacement maids were taken from Hurleburlebutz, a story in the first KHM volume (1812, no. 66) and before that from the Feen-Mährchen.53 The house with the frogs was mirrored

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in the Three Feathers, the frog version of d’Aulnoy’s ‘la chatte blanche’, but the ‘Zwehrn’ rather than the Hassenpflug variant.54 The mountain, swords and water present a reversed obstacle flight and the objects that buy the princess a night with her prince were previously applied in Prince Swan, which also provided the overel structure. In this last story a mere maiden has to journey, following a thread, to release the prince from his swan shape. The thread breaks in a thorn bush. The girl finds herself in the house of an ogre, from whom she is saved by his wife, who gives her a golden spinning wheel. This also happens in the next two houses, where she procures a golden spindle and a golden spool. The last woman tells her that her prince lives on the glass mountain and has already married. The girl strikes a bargain with the new queen: her golden objects buy her three nights at the prince’s side. On the third night she manages to get through to him, whereupon they send the other girl back to her father. If it is accepted that Viehmann had not read the first KHM volume and that she was not familiar with the Feen-Mährchen either, then she must have had other sources – the notion that the story was circulating orally in this form is contradicted by its haphazard construction, although ironically that was precisely why the Grimms preferred it over the Wild reading. What is more, additional details point to the Pentamerone. The cursed prince was present in ‘La palomma’ (II.7), where a reason for the curse is given, too (he had deprived her of her livelihood). The obstacle flight with the shaving knives was part of ‘Lo polece’, the story of Porziella (I.5); the motif of buying three nights featured in ‘Pinto Smalto’ (V.3). Naturpoesie The Grimms refrained from indicating a clear date, or even a particular period of origin, for their stories. The witch in Hansel and Gretel (KHM 15) belonged to the same class as Circe. The witch in Darling Roland (KHM 56) was actually an old giantess ‘who has caught a pair of divine children and wants to ruin them’. The Dragon Slayer not only had its parallel in Sigurd slaying Fafnir, but also in Thor’s battle with the Midgard Worm. In its turn the epic of Sigurd was clearly grafted on the Greek myth of Perseus.55 In the minds of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, however, the relatively few references to Egyptian, Greek and above all Nordic mythology did not imply an absense of similar connections in other cases. As they wrote in the preface to the first edition of the KHM: ‘It is certain that over time the tales have been constantly regenerated and precisely for this reason their basis must be very old.’ Only a lack of evidence made it impossible to prove this every time: origins lay so far in the past that they ‘retreated into the distance and stayed in the dark as something unresearchable and thus full of

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secrets’.56 Forty-four years later, in the annotations to their last KHM edition, Wilhelm mentioned that all tales (Märchen) were relics of a ‘belief reaching back into the oldest time’. These mythical elements ‘resembled little pieces of a broken gem, lying shattered on a ground overgrown with grass and flowers, only to be discovered by a sharp eye’.57 Earlier, in the introduction to the 1819 volumes, in an essay which is most elucidating on his view on fairy tales, he had compared a story’s form to a plant, ‘whose shoots and twigs emerge in a different direction every spring and whose form, blossoms and fruits yet never change.’58 After introducing Viehmann in the preface of the 1815 volume,59 Wilhelm Grimm dwelt on the stability of her reciting,60 connected it to an unchanging lifestyle and then, again seamlessly, to the powers of nature: ‘The epic base of folk literature is similar to the colour green, found throughout nature in a variety of gradations, which satisfies and soothes without ever becoming tiresome’. Several of the Zwehrn stories had equivalents in Nordic poetry. About the Devil and His Grandmother (KHM 125) he wrote: ‘the entire tale has something of the Nordic, the devil as a clumsy giant, especialy Nordic is the riddle, also the hiding of the human arrival by the giant woman, the daughter, has an old fashioned ring to it.’ Likewise the Three Field Surgeons reminded him of another Nordic tale, as did the Goose Girl and the Clever Farmer’s Daughter. Wilhelm’s frame of reference was shaped by his earlier work and part of the attractiveness of the Zwehrn stories was their presumed link to northern European mythology and its ‘heathen beliefs’. According to Bausinger, the metaphorical language of vegetative growth used by the Grimms revealed their dependence on Herder’s concept of Naturpoesie (nature poetry).61 It situated the brothers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury romanticism, stirred with a touch of nationalism. Naturpoesie with its adherents in Great Britain was also a reaction against industrialisation. It was not just poetry about nature, but any narrative that grew naturally; such by assessment of those who adhered to the concept. Rölleke, however, questioned its relevance in Grimm studies: Herder’s considerations never made up a coherent theory, they had only appeared in an obscure publication, and the Grimms never quoted them. In so far as the brothers applied theoretical premises, they had acquired them by collaborating with Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, before they even started to work on the KHM. Especially Goethe’s review of their joint song project Des Knaben Wunderhorn would have insprired the Grimms’ subsequent publications. The poet’s challenge to collect oral material, national and international, to restore it where necessary and to build up an archive as a basis for a poetic history was exactly what the brothers did with their Märchen.62 Compared to Bausinger, Rölleke stressed the practical and the empirical rather than philosophical theory. Bausinger in his turn pointed out that Herder’s stance

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on Naturpoesie was complex and not entirely without contradictions (which was inherent in the concept) and that one could also perceive nuances in Jacob’s and Wilhelm’s dealing with it. In general, Naturpoesie supported collection for the sake of collection; it also dissolved authorship because of its focus on a ‘natural’, living and growing tradition.63 If Goethe had put the brothers on their particular track,64 the ideas of Herder certainly influenced how they went about it, directly or indirectly. And Wilhelm did indeed quote Goethe on how to write educatively without being pedantic.65 The concept of Naturpoesie is crucial for the understanding of the attitude of the brothers Grimm to Märchen. Although Jacob expressed himself more eloquently on the issue than Wilhelm, his opinion certainly mattered, especially since it was formed during the period when both brothers were working on the KHM. Kunstpoesie (lit.: art poetry), Jacob wrote in 1811 in one of his letters to Achim von Arnim, was produced by the individual poet; the older Volkspoesie emerged out of the soul (Gemüth) of the whole (das Ganze), it had no author and how it was put together was inexplicable, but no less a mystery than how different streams flowed together to form one river. During the months which followed he thought about it some more and put it in religious terms. When religion had sprung from divine revelation, and language had a similar miraculous origin rather than being a human invention, then the old poetry was likewise generated by ‘the whole’ and not in the workshop of a single poet. Had there been a first inventor, it could only have been a superhuman, because he would have touched so deep into the mysterious, that it had remained for thousands of years as right and exclusively good, while all later inventions had only lasted a short while.66 The matter went straight to his basic beliefs: the old poetry was like paradise, forever inaccessible, but everyone still carried a small paradise in his heart. The old myths, originating from one truly devine image, were scattered over the earth and only its fragments could be recovered.67 When he published these ideas, he had balanced them out: the opposition between the devine myth and historical poetry was untenable and in the last instance alienating. The epic was neither purely mythical nor completely historical, but both myth and history were an intrinsic part of it. Again Jacob referred to a religious truism: all humans resemble God, but they can become God’s image only by their deeds.68 This line of thought provided the parameters determining the difference between fairy tales and legends. For the brother’s appreciation of the tales it did not matter very much. They remained fragments of the old myths: ancient and decrepit. Contemporary authorship was therefore insignificant and the typical Grimm style was the inspired use of fragments from other stories, preferably stemming from medieval poetry but also from other contemporary tales,69 to reconstruct something of the lost whole.

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Fragments of Basile In her thesis on the medieval literary roots of fairy tales Maren ClausenStolzenburg concluded that Viehman was certainly not the ‘perfect example of a simple farmer’s woman, who ideally kept everything in her memory and transmitted it purely orally’.70 At least some of her stories had already appeared in print before she related them to the Grimms. Previous explanations encompassing her literacy as well as her creativity point to Viehman’s education and even suggest a remote family relation with Goethe.71 As to the orality of her stories: she certainly had a good memory, but there is no indication that this was the long-term memory of an adept and creative storyteller. As Linda Dégh remarked while delineating the latter from the passive bearers of tradition: ‘Today, it would be difficult to discover whether the old narrators who were famous for the faithfulness of their renditions, such as Frau Viehmann of the brothers Grimm, really were outstanding storytellers.’72 However, when Christa Kamenetsky summarizes the speculation about Viehmann’s sources, she fails to question the extent of her skill and still presumes an oral pedigree, because of ‘her Huguenot father, her German mother, the county travellers at her father’s inn, or the village community of Zwehrn in which she had been raised’.73 By implication the already existing published versions were mere parallels and would have emerged out of the same general oral reservoir. As I have already shown, printed sources at hand were actually more important than any putative (oral) family tradition. And if there were any French influences,74 then they were rather mediated by German translations (and Viehmann did not recount any Perrault tales). This issue was already raised at the time: in his 1815 preface Wilhelm Grimm countered the criticism aired against the first volume that stories were taken from Italian, French and Oriental books.75 These, he tried to persuade his readers, were not read in the countryside, and moreover the details which would point to this belonged to the natural changes stories underwent in the course of time. It sounds a weak defence, if only because his very own ‘farmer’s wife’ was crossing the town – countryside divide on a regular basis and there were no rural collaborators to the first volume. Apart from collections of anecdotes and cheap printed texts, how was the Zwehrn repertoire composed? An Oriental touch was certainly present in the Riddle (KHM 22) with its Turandot plot.76 The specific form of the riddle, however, seems to have been restricted to northern Europe.77 In as far as Wilhelm’s remark is restricted to the second volume and concerned eastern influences, it referred mainly to some of the von Haxthausen contributions. French material surfaced in the Zwehrn repertoire in the form of the stories about the miller’s son and the little cat (KHM 106) and the three feathers (KHM 63).78 These were both retellings of

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d’Aulnoy’s very popular ‘la chatte blanche’, already obtained from the Hassenpflug sisters in, or before 1810.79 This may also point to several tellers, because, if Viehmann had been as faithful to her texts as the Grimms said she was, she would not have related two versions of what was basically the same story. In any case this was a literary, rather than oral, tradition and the same can be deduced of Hans My Hedgehog (KHM 108), a story by Straparola full of unrecognized sexual references which had reached Germany through d’Aulnoy and de Murat80 – since d’Aulnoy tales circulated in several translations they can hardly be called ‘French’. The Goose Girl (also known as the Speaking Horsehead) is usually linked to the Carolingian legend of Berta with the goose feet, who suffered a comparable replacement at the hand of her companion. In this context it may nevertheless be more relevant to consider contemporary versions. The story was, for instance, the subject of several eighteenth-century French plays; it was also distributed in novel form – among Jacob Grimm’s notes are summaries and excerpts of the Roman de Berthe au grand pied.81 Specific for the story of the Goose Girl are the speaking horse head and the girl’s command of the wind.82 Again one should ask whether Viehmann could have been familiar with the Berthe legend and whether she was capable of adding a speaking head (which Wilhelm naturally loved, since it corresponded with Nordic mythology). Answering these questions becomes the more urgent because of the diffusion of the KHM version.83 At the same time, the theme of the substitute bride could be found in the Pentamerone tale Two Cakes (IV.7),84 where the king is not really fooled by the ugly replacement, but where, more importantly, the proper girl looks after the geese her brother is supposed to herd. In the Zwehrn repertoire Italian traces appear to be more prominent than French remains – strangely enough no one has ever attempted to discover any possible Italian ancestry of Frau Viehmann. In the main KHM text the Two Brothers appeared in the von Haxthausen variant, as the Zwehrn tale lacked one twin. The latter also had an unparalelled opening in which a brother exchanges the goats he should be herding for his sisters for dogs with the peculiar names Haltan, Greifan and Bricheisenundstahl (Stop, Attack, Breakironandsteel).85 The hunter gives the boy the rest of his equipment and disappears from the story (saddled with three goats and three women). The boy goes into the world and somewhere picks up a hare, a doe and a bear. He conquers some robbers with the help of his animals and then arrives in a city where the princess is just about to be served up to a dragon. The boy overcomes this beast, too, and then disappears for a year and three days. Upon his return he marries the princess and beheads his animal companions (not the dogs), who turn out to be a princess, a queen and a king.86 This story was rightly buried in the notes as it had little coherence and hardly displays the

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experienced storyteller Viehmann was supposed to be. Moreover, the final beheadings betray a French touch. As a whole, this story resembles a stripped version of the Pentamerone tale about Cienzo (I.7) which, apart from the dragon killing, has at least a reference to a goat and a fairy who is released from the hands of robbers.87 The tale of the Twelve Brothers has been traced to the story of the Seven Swans in Feen-Mährchen of 1801.88 Yet it shows more similarity with another Pentamerone story, namely ‘Li sette palommielle’ in which Cianna searches for her brothers turned into doves. Basile’s opening contains a threat of the brothers to leave their parental house if their mother does not give birth to a sister.89 In the KHM version this has become the unprovoked and rather odd promise of the king to kill his sons if the new child turns out to be a girl,90 but that is still closer to Cianna than the evil stepmother who enchants the brothers in the Braunschweig Feen-Mährchen, even though it involves pigeons rather than swans. It therefore has the characteristics of the way Marie Hassenpflug mangled the Pentamerone stories she heard in Allendorf (see Chapter 3). It is incomprehensible why Rölleke did not ascribe the 1810 version to her, the more so because it includes the trait (originally added in pencil) of the sister becoming aware of her brothers because their shirts are being washed, which in the commentary is explicitly earmarked as not belonging to the Zwehrn version. If, however, the earlier Hessian version of the Twelve Brothers was a Pentamerone derivation related by Marie Hassenpflug, then the question arises how Viehmann could have learned a variant of it. How Six Made Their Way in the World and the Girl without Hands likewise have Pentamerone equivalents: ‘Lo ’ngnorante’ (III.8) is a direct forebear of the first,91 and the latter is parallelled by Penta (III.2). The other Pentamerone story in the Zwehrn repertoire, Faithful John (‘Lo cuorvo’, IV.9) with its missing opponent, can be traced through Schummel’s ‘Das Kranke Kind’, which contained an edition of the 1778 play ‘Der Rabe’ by Carlo Gozzi, which Schummel knew through stage versions by Friedrich Clemens Werthes.92 The specific detail of the child sacrifice had also appeared in a number of broadsheets.93 Whether this was the exact route the story took to end up with the ‘Zwehrn’ label is unclear, because it emerged only in the 1819 edition which was heavily edited by Wilhelm Grimm. The fragmentary similarities to the Pentamerone in the Zwehrn repertoire are in any case too frequent to be just the result of the influence of those few stories already circulating in German. It becomes not so much a question whether Viehmann knew the Pentamerone, as rather how she knew elements from the Neapolitan collection. The plain answer can only be: through the brothers Grimm themselves. By the beginning of 1813 they had made numerous excerpts as well as translations of the Neapolitan volume. They will

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have recited them during the Friday meetings, where the Ramus sisters were present. Julia Ramus certainly incorporated Italian elements in her own, rejected contribution, where a man is granted the power to change himself into a lion, a parrot and an ant.94 In their turn Julia and Lotte retold these stories to the Grimms, in some cases directly, but mostly via Frau Viehmann. The same process can be suspected in the case of the Three Hairs of the Devil (discussed in Chapter 1) and the Carnation. In the Pentamerone version of the former (Cianna again), the questions were asked of the Mother of Time. She had changed into a gold-feathered youth by the end of the eighteenth century. When in her turn Amalie Henschel first replaced the Bird with a devil and then, following Wilhelm’s Nordic example, changed the feathers into hairs, she put a very visible mark on the story. The Zwehrn version, printed in the 1819 edition, follows Amalie’s in this respect.95 There is no reason to assume that Wilhelm simply transplanted the devil, as he remarked that in the earlier tale ‘out of the area of the Main’ (meaning Marie’s) the devil was called Greif and he did not make a similar observation on the Zwehrn monster. If not from the Grimms themselves, the devil in the Zwehrn story can only have come out of the Grimm environment, either from the first KHM volume or from the sessions of the circle. Narrative brokerage In theory a male or female perspective of a story indicates the gender of the narrator, and the same mechanism applies to class and age. Thus when the Zwehrnian stories contain a poor farmer, or an old miller, a soldier or a smith, it should reveal the teller’s modest social background. The few princesses in the stories do not contradict this, as they also act as kitchen maid or herd geese. A combination of class and gender nevertheless causes problems. Notwithstanding the royal females, the ‘stories with almost exclusively male heroes dominate’,96 and the repertoire under scrutiny is thus predominately male. Hence it has been suggested that, since the Zwehrn stories were told by Frau Viehmann, she heard them as a young girl in her father’s inn from passing wagoners or soldiers.97 This still presumes orality, as well as a reasonably experienced storyteller. If, however, not every story with the label ‘Zwehrn’ was actually told by Frau Viehmann, and if she herself also used printed sources, then a male point of view may become better understandable, for it was simply copied. At least a woman relating a male story would explain the gender shift in the Learned Hunter. This still does not resolve the age issue. The proposition that the Iron Stove was told ‘from the point of view of a young woman’,98 can be justified only in the context of oral transmission when it is assumed that Viehmann heard the story in her youth and retained it more or less unaltered for about forty

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years. Given the composition and the origin of the various parts of the story, this is extremely improbable. It is more reasonable to assume that she heard it told by a young woman, just before 7 July 1813 and subsequently dictated it to the brothers Grimm. There will always remain a lack of evidence, and the scenario suggested here is therefore open to debate and at the very least to adjustments. Since the Zwehrn repertoire is complex, there also has to be a complex solution to the identification of its tellers. It does not make much sense to suppose a mystery teller in Zwehrn; the 1817 ‘girl’ was probably only an incidental informant, also because the stories she could hypothetically have delivered were told from a male point of view.99 The Grimms became disillusioned with recording stories, although one would expect the opposite, since after the completion of the second KHM volume they turned their attention to German legends, of which the first volume appeared in 1816 and a second one in 1818. However, in spite of being potentially closer to oral tradition, these legends were also largely based on printed sources.100 Rather than continuing or even intensifying their efforts to record stories, the Grimms began to cultivate a looser approach to the fairy tales. Wilhelm undertook more and more editing and reconstructing and Jacob, who had both insisted on the importance of variants and emphasized precision when it came to noting down oral stories, acknowledged that this could not be achieved with Märchen and subsequently left them to his younger brother. Jacob probably felt uncomfortable dealing with young women, preferring the intellectual challenge of corresponding with his many male contacts. Because of the prominence they had bestowed on Viehmann, the Grimms’ experience with her, and especially with her material, will have played a significant part in the development of their attitude towards orality. Viehmann was introduced to the Grimms several months after the first KHM volume had been published and when they were envisioning a second one, primarily consisting of translations of the Gesta Romanorum and the Pentamerone. At that point they still received a few stories from their original contributors, the Wild and the Hassenpflug sisters, but this source was now reduced to a mere trickle. They also still held regular meetings of their reading circle in Kassel,101 but its participants hardly knew any original tales, or were like Julia Ramus, frustrated in their attempt to provide the brothers with any. Viehmann’s arrival on the scene was thus particularly fortuitous, perhaps even too much so. She could probably tell the Grimms a handful of stories, but was then caught between the enthusiasm of her public, her own ‘honour’ and her need for payment. After all, she came to Kassel primarily to sell things and from her perspective selling stories and vegetables may not have been dissimilar. When Frau Viehmann had exhausted her own repertoire Julia and Lotte Ramus and

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other regular members of the circle, for instance Balthasar Bauer, then a medical student in Kassel (who lodged with the Ramus family and married Lotte in 1818), helped Viehmann to help the brothers – Viehmann’s route in and out of Kassel always passed by the Ramus residence. Wilhelm was still so enthralled by romantic naturalism that he accepted Viehmann’s versions as genuine, just as he did with the concoctions of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and the retellings of Ludowine von Haxthausen. This would explain the double stories, the more magical of the literary stories, the relatively new stories, the different male and female perspectives and the variation in quality. It certainly provides a neat answer to all the traces of the Pentamerone in the Zwehrn repertoire, because there can hardly be any doubt that the Ramus sisters had heard Jacob and Wilhelm reading them aloud. If it was indeed the case that Frau Viehmann drew on the information provided by Julia and Charlotte, she was in large part a mediator. In a sense she was also an editor, since Wilhelm used many of the versions she told them in his reshaping of the second, 1819 edition of the KHM. An original storyteller she was not. In the new 1819 preface Wilhelm wrote: ‘we got to know a farmer’s wife, who told us the greatest amount and the most beautiful stories of the second volume. This woman, by the name of Viehmännin was still fit.’ He dropped the expression ‘real Hessian’.102 The part about the corrections was left unaltered. It was, in fact, the way of telling by someone who had read texts aloud and learned them by heart, then a usual way of processing printed material. In the early nineteenth century reading was still ‘associated with memorisation of authoritative texts. [. . .] Emphasis was on rote learning and recitations of words and passages.’ This was how Protestants read the Bible and once in place the mechanism could be applied to other stories.103 Both Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm judged the tales they collected according to the standards derived from written medieval poetry, which in their minds presented something of a lost paradise – and, one could speculate, also of a lost childhood. With a religious fervour they not only hunted down tale after tale, they also made it abundantly clear to their collaborators what sort of tale they were looking for. Their first volume was partly guided by the examples of Runge, partly by the tales of Perrault which appealed much more to their Protestant sense of simplicity and moral education than the frills of his female contemporaries.104 The paradigm for the second volume was presented by the Pentamerone, although primarily by its Protestant guise provided by Jacob. In all likelihood they were unaware of the way their enthusiasm was received by their female acquaintances and assistants and of the bias their Naturpoesie perspective entailed. Yet their drive not only pervaded their selection and subsequent editing, again and again it seduced the young women to produce stories they would

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never have formulated without the Grimms. Frau Viehmann was ensnared in this maelstrom of erotic sublimation and after several sessions her stories had to be prompted before she could perform them. Her tales of magic still bear the signs of it with their strange twists and peculiar details, but they also betray their Pentamerone descent. As Jacob expressed it: ‘it is impossible to tell something entirely properly, just like it is impossible to break an egg without some white sticking to the eggshell’. He was satisfied as long as the yolk kept intact.105 In other words: the soul of a story was hidden in the egg and manipulating the external language was justified to retrieve it. The metaphor applied to both their recordings and his brother’s editing, but also had a narrative equivalent. Notes 1 Cf. the English translation in: Tatar, The Hard Facts, 260; and the part translation by McGlaherty in Heinz Rölleke, ‘New Results of Research on Grimm’s Fairy Tales’, in: James M. McGlaherty (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana/Chicago 1991), 101–111, 103. 2 The members of the von Haxthausen family were publicly acknowledged as contributors only in the third KHM edition of 1837. 3 Cf. Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, 117, who argues that ‘the concept of Bäuerin . . . was understood . . . in symbolic terms’; cf. Walter Scherf, ‘Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: a Few Small Corrections to a Commonly Held Image’, in McGlaherty (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, 178–191, esp. 186. 4 The contention by Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 191, that Viehmann was discovered by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, is wide off the mark. 5 Rölleke, ‘New Results’, in: McGlaherty (ed.), The Brothers Grimm, 103, see also: Rölleke, ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’, EM 7 (1993), 1278–1297, esp. 1283. 6 Cited in: Heinz Rölleke, ‘Der früheste Beitrag Dorothea Viehmanns zu den Grimmschen Märchen’, Fabula 37 (1996), 113–115: 113; Robert Friderici, ‘Wer entdeckte die Märchenfrau?’, Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde 60 (1969), 166–167. 7 Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 394; ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’, EM 7 (1993), 1278–1297, esp. 1282: ‘Auf Vermittlung der Familie Ramus’; Uther, Handbuch, 20. 8 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 503: ‘übrigens aus einem andern Munde’. 9 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 286–287. 10 This copy is reprinted in enlarged format (Göttingen 1986). The dates in the second volume are of a different nature than in the first, as Wilhelm did not put them against individual stories, but copied them from what must have been a list. 11 See the text in the 1822 KHM annotations, 171–172; also in Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 318–320. 12 Ludwig Denecke, ‘Der Schatz im verwunschenen Schloss. Eine Sage aus Zwehrn’, Fabula 13 (1972), 150–152; cf. Breslau, Der Nachlass der Brüder Grimm, 593: no. 1756, 187r.

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13 Recently recompiled by Bernard Lauer, ‘Dorothea Viehmann und die Brüder Grimm. Märchen und Wirklichkeit’, Märchenspiegel 9 (1998), 36–42. It is not clear why the Golden Bird (KHM 57) figures on Lauer’s list, since it is nowhere marked as Zwehrnian, only as Hessian; cf. Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 503 and above, Chapter 2. 14 Rölleke, ‘Der früheste Beitrag’, 114. According to Lauer, ‘Dorothea Viehmann’, 41, April would have been too early to sell vegetables. 15 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 562; Grätz, Das Märchen, 199. 16 Rölleke, Nachlass, 23–24, 98. 17 Though not immediately, cf. letter to Wigand, 28 May, where Bauer is mentioned, but not Viehmann, see: Robert Frederici, ‘Wer entdeckte die Märchenfrau?’, Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde 60 (1969), 166–167. 18 Rölleke, ‘Neue Erkenntnisse’, 86. Printed versions of Doctor Know-All (ATU 1641) have been around since the early sixteenth century, also in French and Italian, see Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 413; Ákos Dömötör, ‘Doktor Allwissend’, EM 3 (1981), 734–742. 19 See the letter refered to in note 6. 20 Von Arnim was certainly aware of this, but according to Rölleke contemporary observations such as his were invalid because of a much later remark by Jacob that he had done as much work on the KHM then as his brother; cf. Rölleke, ‘Zur Biographie der Grimmschen Märchen’, in: Brüder Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen II (Köln 1982), 521–582, esp. 543–544. 21 Grätz, Das Märchen, 172, 220; Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 80–83. Another redaction had appeared in Chavis and Cazotte’s Continuation of the Arabian Nights of 1788–1798, see ANE 520, 577. 22 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 318. 23 Hans-Jörg Uther, ‘Hollenheizer’, EM 6 (1990), 1191–1196: 1192–1193. 24 Cf. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, ‘Krieg der Tiere’, EM 8 (1996), 430–436. 25 ATU 875. The story was made into a play in early seventeenth-century Sweden and performed all over northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 356; Ákos Dömötör, ‘Bauerntochter: Die kluge’, EM 1 (1977), 1353–1365. 26 ATU 660. The story already appeared in the Gesta Romanorum, cf. Uther, Märchen vor Grimm, 221–223, no. 49; Lawrence S. Thompson, ‘Doktoren: Die drei’, EM 3 (1981), 742–747. 27 The last was not included in the KHM, see Ludwig Denecke, ‘“Der Grabhügel” (KHM 195) aus dem Munde der Viehmännin’, Fabula 12 (1971), 218–228. 28 Heinz Rölleke, ‘Märchen von einem, der auszog, das Fürchten zu lernen. Zu Überlieferung und Bedeutung des KHM 4’, Fabula 20 (1979), 193–204; Rölleke, ‘Fürchten lernen’, EM 5 (1987), 584–593. Philippine Engelhard, an acquaintance of the Grimms in Kassel, had published her own version in 1782. The Straparola reference by Rölleke (see also the annotation to ATU 326) is mistaken; the Venetian story concerns the migratory legend of the witch removing and reinstalling heads.

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29 ATU 960; cf. Uther, Märchen vor Grimm, 220–221 (no. 48). 30 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 295–296. Of course, according to Wilhelm Grimm, Viehmann’s tale about the demanated girl had nothing to do with the broadsheet since it was simpler and therefore much older. For the Fortunatus version see: Günther, Kindermährchen, 18–31. If Frau Viehmann ever related a version of the Golden Bird (cf. note 13) it will have been in this late period. 31 ATU 812, see Lutz Röhrich, ‘Rätsel des Teufels’, EM 11 (2004), 275–280. 32 Hans-Hugo Steinhoff, ‘Magelone’, EM 8 (1996), 1414–1418. At the time the poem ‘Liebesgeschichte der schönen Magelone’ by Lebrecht (Tieck) also enjoyed popularity: here the lovers reunite at a shepherd’s where he does not recognize her at first and tells her his life story. 33 Separately published in Uther, Vor Grimm, 111–119 (no. 23); cf. Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 258, n. 512. In general: Ines KöhlerZülch, ‘König Drosselbart’, EM 8 (1996), 148–156. 34 Christine Shojaei Kawan, ‘Jäger, Der gelernte’, EM 7 (1993), 411–420, esp. 412, 416. 35 The story ‘Der Jäger’ in Johann Andreas Christian Löhr’s Buch der Maehrchen für Kindheit und Jugend, II (1820), no. 36 was directly taken from the KHM. 36 Horálek, ‘Märchen aus Tausend und einer Nacht bei den Sklaven’, Fabula 10 (1969), 155–195, esp. 181. 37 The pilgrimage first turns up in Matej Miksicek, Sbirka powestj morawskych a slezskych (1845), see: Tille, Verzeichnis der Böhmischen Märchen, 60. 38 Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Erzählungen und Märchen (Preslau 1825, 1826). ‘Die drei Brüder’ is the last story of the second volume, 344–346. The author refers to his mother; if this is a genuine reference, it reads primarily as a comment on something she read aloud, rather than retold. On von der Hagen, see: Otfrid Ehrismann, ‘Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der’, EM 6 (1990), 352–355. 39 Theo Meder, ‘“Esmoreit”: de dramatisering van een onttoverd sprookje’, Queeste. Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde in de Nederlanden 3 (1996), 18–24; cf. Meder, ‘Prinz, dessen Wünsche in Erfüllung gingen’, EM 10 (2002), 1327–1331. 40 A Dutch dialect text, written down at the end of the nineteenth centure, is taken practically verbatim from the KHM, see: de Blécourt, Volksverhalen uit Noord-Brabant (Utrecht/Antwerpen 1980), 96–99; cf. Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 123; Delarue and Tenèze, Le conte populaire française, II, 549–553, with a mere two versions derived from the KHM. 41 ANE, 215–216. 42 Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 188, claims that the direct precursor is Brentano’s ‘Fanferlieschen Schönefüsschen’; although the latter does have the theme of the queen in the tower in common with the KHM text, together with a number of animal metamorphoses, the wishes and the flower girl are missing, see: Clemens Brentano, Märchen (München 1978), 386–438. 43 Delivered in October and December 1812, see Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 345.

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44 Schenda, ‘Mediterrane Lebenswirklichkeit’, 505–506; cf. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘Junge: Der faule’, EM 7 (1993), 763–769; ‘Luckless, Wittles, and Filthy-footed: a Sociocultural Study and Publishing History Analysis of “The Lazy Boy”’, Journal of American Folklore 106 (1993), 259–284. 45 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 123. 46 ‘Die sieben Schwäne’, p. 286 of the Marzolph edition. The motif itself was medieval and had survived in print. 47 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 127. 48 The Carnation can also be considered as a combination of Basile’s ‘La Mortella’ (I.2) and ‘Peruonto’ (I.3); the notion of a bride who at first only exists in the imagination occurs in ‘Lo cuorvo’ (IV.9). 49 Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, no. 45. 50 Cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 259: ‘Hier ist die Überlieferung unsicher geworden.’ 51 Cf. Ranke, ‘Braut, Bräutigam’, EM 2 (1979), 700–726, esp. 717–719. 52 Jan-Öjvind Swahn, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche (Lund 1955), 231. 53 Feen-Mährchen, ed. Marzolph, 261–262; Uther, Handbuch, 456–457. 54 Cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 258–259: ‘Vermutlich hat sich die Viehmännin geirrt.’ 55 KHM III; intro KHM 1819, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin 1881), 338–339. 56 Wilhelm Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, 338. 57 KHM III, 409. 58 Kleinere Schriften I, 336. 59 Dated 30 September 1814. 60 According to Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, 153–154: ‘His expression “sich an die Sache halten” means “to stick to the subject” or “to hold the main line of the story,” but it does not mean to cling pedantically to each word of the tale.’ It would relate to substance rather than precise form. Yet in the 1815 preface it is stated: ‘Manches ist auf diese Weise wörtlich beibehalten, und wird in seiner Wahrheit nicht zu verkennen seyn’ (1815, p. v; also 1819, p. xii, my italics); cf. Rölleke, ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’, EM 7 (1993), 1278–1297, esp. 1280. 61 Bausinger, Formen der ‘Volkspoesie’ (Berlin, 2nd edn, 1980), 22–26; see also: Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, 55–68. 62 Heinz Rölleke, ‘Märchentheorien der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm’, Märchenspiegel 9 (1998), 67–69. Jacob Grimm had actually read Herder’s Stimmen der Völker, see one of his letters to von Arnim of July 1811, Steig, Achim von Arnim, 140. 63 Bausinger, ‘Naturpoesie’, EM 9 (1999), 1273–1280. 64 In December 1809 Wilhelm Grimm visited Goethe in Weimar. See: Dieter Hennig and Bernhard Lauer (eds), Die Brüder Grimm. Dokumente ihres Lebens und Wirkens (Kassel 1985), 188–189. 65 ‘Die wahre Darstellung hat keinen didactische Zweck. Sie billigt nicht, sie tadelt nicht, sondern sie entwickelt die Gesinnungen und Handlungen in ihrer Folge, und dadurch erleuchtert u. belehrt sie’, Leben III, 350, cited in: ‘Ueber das Wesen der Märchen’, xxiv.

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66 Steig, Achim von Arnim, 116, 139. See for a partial English translation of the first letter, Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, 11–12, who turns ‘das Ganze’ into ‘the whole community’, thus adding a social aspect not present in the original. 67 Steig, Achim von Arnim, 234–236. 68 Jacob Grimm, ‘Gedanken über Mythos, Epos und Geschichte, mit altdeutsche Beispielen’, Kleinere Schriften, IV (Berlin 1869/Hildesheim 1965) 74–85, esp. 74–75, originally published in 1813. 69 Cf. Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 328–331. 70 Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 400, note 786. 71 For the rather preposterous Goethe connection (the common ancestor is five generations distant) see Heinz Rölleke, ‘Von Menschen denen wir Grimms Märchen verdanken’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken Sonderband 1987, 47–59, esp. 52. 72 Dégh, Folktales and Society, 166. 73 Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, 270. 74 Cf. Ward, ‘New Misconceptions about Old Folktales’, 92, who remarks ‘the French connection was somewhat tenuous’, although this is related to family descent. 75 In an anynymous review, ascribed to Johann Gustav Büsching, cf. Tatar, Hard Facts, 15 and 284, n. 12. 76 Cf. Grätz, Das Märchen, 308 n. 108. 77 Christine Goldberg, ‘Rätselprinzessin’, EM 11 (2004) 286–294, esp. 288. 78 The suggestion that Viehmann knew her Perrault, recently quoted by David Blamires, ‘A Workshop of Editorial Practice. The Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmärchen’, in Davidson and Chaudhri (eds), A Companion to the Fairy Tale, 71–83, esp. 74, is without any ground. 79 Published several times in German translation and German versions in Vulpius, Ammenmärchen; the Feen-Mährchen (Durandu) and in Büsching; the Hassenpflug version in: Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 96–101. 80 ATU 441, see: Ines Köhler, ‘Hans mein Igel’, EM 6 (1990), 494–498. 81 Breslau, Nachlass, 591, no. 1755 – probably dating from before 1810. 82 The Grimms wanted to see the horse’s name Falada as a corruption of the Carolingian horse Valantin (or similar forms), but it is merely a compound of ‘Föhlen da’, the ‘da’ being consistent with the rest of the rhyme in which the name figures; cf. Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 274. 83 See Bottigheimer, ‘Pferdekopf: Der sprechende’, EM 10 (2002), 937–941. 84 Cf. Marianne Rumpf, ‘Braut: Die schwarze und die weisse’, EM 2 (1979), 730–738. 85 Cf. Rölleke, Märchen aus dem Nachlass, no. 13 ‘Greif an, Brech Eisen und Stahl, Geschwind wie der Wind’, notated by an unknown contributor, processed by Jacob Grimm. 86 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 533–534. 87 Albert Ludewig Grimm included the story in Lina’s Mährchenbuch of late 1816. His grandfather had always told it to him, together with the most common stories from

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88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97

98 99

100

101

102 103

TALES OF MAGIC, TALES IN PRINT the Arabian Nights. He later discovered that this was not an Arabian Nights story but did not find the right source; the version published by his ‘learned namesakes’ was ‘an imperfect outline, or mutilated fragment, very much distorted by popoular narration’ – cited from the introduction of the English translation, A.L. Grimm, Fairy Tales (London 1827) v–vi. Albert Wesselski, Märchen vor Grimm. Giambattista Basile, Das Märchen der Märchen (Schenda ed.), 366–367 (IV.8). Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 64–69; cf. Christine Shojaei Kawan, ‘Mädchen sucht seine Brüder’, EM 8 (1996), 1354–1366. Harlinda Lox, ‘Sechse kommen durch die Welt’, EM 12 (2005), 470–476, esp. 473; Wesselski, Märchen vor Grimm, 309–314. Grätz, Das Märchen, 172, 308 notes 105, 107. Erich Rosch, Der getreue Johannes. Ein vergleichende Märchenstudie (Helsinki 1928) (FFC 77), 166–167. This is reminiscent of the Old-Testamental story of Abraham, which should explain Faithful John’s attraction up into the twentieth century, cf. Christine Shojaei Kawan, ‘Johannes: Der treue’, EM 7 (1993), 601–610, and ‘Li sette palommielle, Lo corvo, Le tre cetra. Drei Märchen von Basile und ihr Verhältnis zur mündlichen überlieferung’, in: Michelangelo Picone and Alfred Messerli (eds), Giovan Battista Basile e l’invenzione della fiaba (Ravenna 2004), 223–246, esp. 230–233. Rölleke, Märchen aus dem Nachlass, 23–25. Wilhelm Grimm wrote in his comments about the older version: ‘stimmt im Ganzen überein’. Rölleke, ‘New Results’, 105; ‘Von Menschen’, 54. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1083; Rölleke, ‘New Results of Research on Grimms’ Fairy Tales’, in: James M. McGlathery (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana/ Chicago 1991), 101–111, esp. 105. Uther, Handbuch, 278; his view that the story was ‘well-told’ is contradicted by my analysis above. Denecke suggested that she could have been one of Dorothea Viehmann’s grandchildren, Marie Strohberg, cf. Denecke, ‘Der Schatz’, Fabula 13 (1972), 150. This is rather speculative. Cf. Hermann Bausinger, ‘Literatur und Volkserzählung’, EM 8 (1996), 1119–1137, esp. 1122–1123; Hans-Jörg Uther, ‘Die Brüder Grimm als Sammler von Märchen und Sagen’, in: Bernd Heidenreich and Ewald Grothe (eds), Kultur und Politik – Die Grimms (Frankfurt am Main 2003), 67–107. Jugendzeit, 223, where Jacob reports to Wilhelm that several people have gone away, among them the Ramus sisters, ‘so dass das Kränzchen notwendig stillstehen muss’ (letter 28 July 1813). xi–xii. Jonathan Barry, ‘Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture: Reading and Writing in Historical Perspective’, in: Tim Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke 1995), 69–94: 84.

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104 Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove, 38, misses the markings in Wilhelm Grimm’s Bible copy ‘reflecting a moralism, neither Pauline structures that might support the Protestant work ethic nor any on sin and judgement’, although this would be expected in the light of current readings of the KHM. Although Murphy is to be praised for bringing religion back to the foreground of Grimm studies, his conclusion is unfounded here. Morality was such a crucial part of Protestantism that it did not have to be emphasized in marginalia to be incorporated in Wilhelm’s editing. 105 Steig, Achim von Arnim, 225.

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Journeys to the other world

The power of the dragon Somewhere at the vast ‘Paradise Sea’ grows a tree whose top reaches into the sky.1 Underneath the tree lives a princess and one day she is swept away by a whirlwind. A swineherd, who is a ninth son and a táltos and can therefore understand the language of animals, tells a prince to look in the tree for the princess. The prince rides up the tree on his horse, they stumble on a box, out of which a hare jumps and disappears. Presently a black cloud descends on the prince. It is a dragon and the prince is killed. Two other princes try their luck, but they likewise meet an untimely demise, for the hare is the dragon’s messenger. Then more princes take up the challenge and after them the lesser nobility: none of them returns. Now the swineherd takes an old sword and a decrepit horse; he feeds it glowing coals and it turns into a magic horse which carries him up in the tree. When the hare jumps out of the box, they overtake and kill it. The dragon now has only three strengths left: a copper, silver, and golden swine. When the last swine is done with, the dragon loses the sight of his fourteen eyes. Horse and boy now fight seven fights with the dragon and finally overcome him. The hero takes the girl and the dragon’s castle back down and they marry. This Hungarian tale was told in the 1960s in a secluded vale in the south-east of the country, now part of Romania. It is counted among the relatively new tales which at first sight have not found a place in the KHM.2 According to its editor, the folklorist and compiler of the Hungarian tale index Ágnes Kovács, the man who had collected and first published this story had certainly read folkloric publications, but the story itself was without literary influences.3 This, however, is debatable. The story was dug out of the memory of two local story experts, who, judging from their product, do not impress as very active narrators. Most variants of this particular story, moreover, are derivates of a tale from the late nineteenth-century printed collection of Elek Benedek, aimed at children,4

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and this raises the question whether the above version is different enough to be an exception. Thus another text, recorded in Sopron in 1954 and published in German in 1966, has the young swineherd, now by the name János, climbing the enormous tree. When he finds the princess, the dragon employs him to look after his horses. A fragile horse (who later turns out to have five legs) takes him to a wood and tells him: ‘In this wood lives a wild swine. In the head of this swine is a hare, in the head of the hare are seven horseflies. When we destroy the seven horseflies, the dragon is gone too.’ With this information they are able to overcome the dragon; they cut off every one of his nine heads, and release the princess. According to Kovács, this was definitely a Benedek story.5 But if that is the case, why would the first one not have originated from the same source? After all, the hare and the boars are still linked to the dragon’s life force; compared to the earlier notation, the narrators of the 1960s version merely seem to have forgotten the particular details of the relationship. A story told in 1948 in Kakasd, a newly settled village in the south-west of Hungary, by Zsuzsanna Palkó to the folklorist Linda Dégh confirms this. Although the teller had heard it from her father, its origin was beyond doubt; it was retold from Benedek’s storybook: Beyond the seven seas lives a king with a beautiful daughter. One day while she is walking in the flower garden where the sky-high tree grows, a gust of wind snatches her and lifts her to the top of the tree. The king dreams that she now resides in the castle of the dragon with twenty-four heads and proclaims that whoever brings her back may marry her and inherit his kingdom. After all the candidates have fallen off the tree, a swineherd takes up the challenge; he is advised by one of his wards to take the proper gear and he finds a branch ‘so long that it stretches one and a half times around the world’ with leaves so large ‘that each one holds an entire country’. He comes upon a city, which is deserted apart from the princess. She presents him to the dragon as her servant and employs him to look after a scrawny colt. This animal advises him to find out where the dragon keeps his strength. After some female persuasion by the princess, the dragon confides: Well, I’ll tell you where my strength is. There, in the forest, is a silver bear, and there is a stream, and every noon the bear goes to that stream to drink. If someone shot the bear and split its head in two, a boar would jump out. If someone shot that boar and split its head in two, a hare would jump out. And if someone shot the hare and split its head in two, a box would jump out. If someone smashed that box with two stones, they would find nine wasps. They are my strength. If the wasps were destroyed, I would have no more strenght than a sick fly. That’s why this is such a big secret and no one must know where I keep my strength.6

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János feeds the colt glowing embers so that it turns into a five-legged goldenhaired steed. Together they vanquish all the relevant animals in turn and render the dragon powerless. Then the horse takes them home. Dégh considered Benedek’s tale a fabrication since the proper story would not have this particular ending.7 In her opinion the ‘oldest form’ depicted the hero who sets out for the fruit growing far away in the top of the tree, having been promised half the kingdom and the hand of the king’s daughter. He enters the service of the fairy Helen and tends her magical horses. These provide him with copper, silver and gold attire, in which he shows himself to the fairy, whereupon she falls in love with him. When she finds out that her hero is in reality her stable boy, they marry. In the end, the hero secures the fruit and sends it to the king.8 The episode with the hidden life force was, according to Dégh, attached to the story only later (it was the defining element of another story type, ATU 302). Dégh’s conclusion was not based on historical research but on a thorough comparison of the available variants of the tree tale, and on discussion and subsequent discarding of its deviations. The resulting reconstruction is essentially the same as the story outline presented by Dégh’s teacher János Berze Nagy and it comprises at least two quandaries: because of the horses and the three precious metals it shows a striking similarity to the story of the Princess on the Glass Mountain (ATU 530), out of which it appears to have been fabricated; and an eighteenth-century English chapbook version of Jack and the Beanstalk (ATU 328) also tells about a boy climbing up a big vegetable and finding a lovely woman. It seems a foregone conclusion that this ostensibly Hungarian story (now classified as ATU 317) is merely a combination of the (not specifically Hungarian) Glass Mountain and Jack and the Beanstalk stories. Nevertheless, apart from the question how Jack ended up in eastern Europe, there are several complications, among them the anomaly of the two romantic leads: the princess and the fairy.9 Even more important: in as far as Dégh’s reconstructed story had any historical existence its earliest version was recorded only in 1912, more than fifteen years after the publication of Benedek’s volume and, as far as the type description is accurate, with a princess instead of a fairy.10 The story which is closest to Dégh’s reconstruction can thus also be considered as a simplified form of the printed tale. Palkó, an elderly lower-class woman who came to be known as ‘Aunt Zsuzsa’, was the kind of storyteller Frau Viehmann was imagined to have been. As such she was rather exceptional within her community where male narrators dominated. She had not only a large repertoire of some sixty-three stories, she also told them regularly.11 Yet a number of her tales had a printed ancestry; at least sixteen were ultimately based on Benedek’s book in one way or another. Her tales of magic in particular were very close to the versions by this author, who

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had been working with the same Hungarian ethnic group as she belonged to. Palkó heard the Iron Laci (a quest for three vanished princesses) from what ‘must have been a popular adaption of Majláth’s version by Benedek’. Her Three Princes comprised the Hungarian variant of the Learned Hunter, complete with a ‘borrowing’ of the Water of Life (cf. Chapter 5). The story entitled I Don’t Know, apart from also being a retelling of another of Benedek’s stories, had its equivalent in Gaál’s collection, as did Ej Haj, the Hungarian Magician and His Pupil with Turkish influences (cf. Chapter 4). Pihári, internationally known as the Youth Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is, again came from an ‘old book’.12 In her postscript to the second American edition of her Habilitation, written thirty-four years after the original Hungarian, Dégh confessed that the stories she had collected seemed ‘even more influenced by literary fairy tales than I suggested or could document in this book’. The Kakasd corpus as a whole, although part of an oral practice, could only have ‘persisted because of printed materials’.13 ‘Aunt Zsuzsa’ was nevertheless an accomplished (and later acclaimed) oral storyteller, who knew her material by heart and who could entertain her audience for hours, if not nights. In the case of the Sky High Tree, Benedek’s version also wandered abroad: it was recorded in neighbouring Slovakia around 1900 and in the Ukraine half a century later.14 At particular moments it had become oral, but was it exclusively so before it was published? In Kovács’s opinion Benedek had collected this story, rather than written it himself, implying that he sometimes made up stories, but not in this particular case. As evidence for this, however, she cited two texts which have been recorded only in the 1970s, one from an informant who would have been unfamiliar with Benedek’s storybook.15 At the most, this is a very weak argument. A magic horse According to Kovács, the tree story exists in two basic forms (or subtypes).16 The simpler of the two is the one outlined above, featuring a princess, with the theme of her captor’s external life force included. In the more extensive form a fairy functions as the romantic lead; the story continues beyond the marriage of the hero and the fairy and tells about the fairy’s abduction by a dragon. The hero regains her (ATU 400) with the magic horse he wins by herding horses in the service of a witch (ATU 556F*, cf. ATU 302C*), with the help of grateful animals (ATU 554) or animal brothers-in-law (ATU 552). It is, among others, represented by a 1962 version from the Hungarian province of Szabolcs-Szatmár, narrated by an experienced storyteller, who elaborated on the details (which cannot all be reproduced in the following summary) without losing sight of the structure.

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The tree climber is now the youngest of the king’s three sons, persevering where his brothers gave up. On his way to the top of the tree he dreams about the fairy Elisabeth and, when he finally reaches fairy land, he meets only women, ‘because among the fairies there are no men’. The fairy queen promises to marry him, but they have to wait a year. He is free to go wherever he wants, but he is not allowed to approach the seventy-seventh room upstairs. On the last Sunday of that year, when Elisabeth has gone to church, the prince can no longer contain his curiosity. He finds a dragon with twenty-four heads, tied to the wall; he repeatedly gives him water to drink and at the third time the dragon bursts free of his bounds and escapes, picking up the fairy queen on his way out. Only now the prince discovers the stables and in a corner he finds an ill, skinny horse with three legs, who eats only glowing coals. It takes him to the dragon’s castle, on top of the glass mountain. They retrieve the girl and flee, but the dragon has a magic horse with five legs and overtakes them. This happens again and then the prince has no favours left with the dragon (gained upon releasing him) and his horse sends him to work for a witch with a face so ugly and furrows so big ‘that a carriage with four horses could turn around in one’. As a reward he should ask for a particular foal. The witch employs him to look after her horses for a year which lasts three days. Afterwards he leaves, carrying the six-legged foal on his back. Soon, however, the foal takes over and carries the hero into the air to the castle on the glass mountain. The new horse now tells the dragon’s horse to drop his rider and the dragon falls to his death.17 Notwithstanding the narrator’s skill, he had forgotten several essential elements in the prince’s service with the witch. Yet his was a variant of the most popular Sky High Tree story, twelve times represented in the Hungarian catalogue. Linda Dégh heard one in 1949 (not included) and the ‘captured dragon’ and ‘service at the witch’ (ATU 556F*) sequence also occurred in another eight tree tales, bringing the total up to twenty-one.18 It was also the elder of the two main story forms, not necessarily because of the appearance of the fairy, but because it was first recorded in the middle of the nineteenth century, and published several times before its cognate. The version collected by Dégh starts with the king wondering about the fruit on his great tree, and, after several nobles have damaged a limb, János, a swineherd, clambers up. After ten days he comes upon a cottage on one of the tree’s two branches. The old woman who lives there sends him to her aunt in the next cottage. This first old woman tells him that, when he has looked after her aunt’s three horses, he should ask for her five-legged horse together with a dirty saddle and bridle. This horse takes him to a beautiful palace, where he also starts working in the stables. With the help of the horses there he shows himself in church to the princess successively dressed in silver, gold and diamond. Then

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she tells János that she had been suffering from a spell which is now lifted; they fall in love and marry. When his wife goes to church one Sunday, she gives him the eleven keys to the palace; there is no key for the twelfth room. In it the dragon with twelve heads is kept prisoner. The hero frees him by thrice giving him wine to drink and the dragon snatches the princess when she comes out of the church. The princess’s three horses attempt to bring her back, but none succeeds. Then the hero’s own horse swallows ‘five bushels of oats and five bushels of embers and also five buckets of water’, begins to blow blue, red and green flames and fetches the princess. When the dragon overtakes him, the hero’s horse suggests to the dragon’s horse to kill him. János and his wife now pick the fruits and take them down to the king. The latter offers his daughter, but János declines since he already has a wife.19 This story’s beginning may have inspired Dégh with the construction of her ideal type with fairy and fruit. Its particularities, however, are related to the circumstance of its narrator, József Fejes from Sára, who was ‘in constant rivalry with his fellow narrator J[ános] Nagy’. Since they often told their tales ‘to the same audience in turn’,20 each gave them his own stamp, which pertained not only to the colouring but also to the sequence. Although the story of József Fejes is even more elaborate than the 1962 one, the ‘service with the witch’ episode again figures only in abbreviated form and even before the hero has lost his newly wed wife. The full episode can be found in a story recorded in 1942. Now the hero, Jancsi, tries to reabduct his wife Etella a fourth time and is cut to pieces by the dragon. His magic horse repairs him with a ‘herb of life’ and he visits his wife again, but this time asks her to discover where the dragon’s horse comes from. On his way to the witch with the iron nose Jancsi helps a goldfish, a duck and a fox and in turn they help him to round up the witch’s horses.21 That is a more original version, also present in publications from the early twentieth century, in which the hero is aided by a sparrow, a fox, and a squirrel, who find the horses in the most difficult hiding places.22 Which animals give assistance to the hero can obviously be subject to change. The variation in the releasing the dragon subtype seems very slight (as far as can be judged from the texts available in translation).23 As Dégh wrote, ‘storytellers even of the creative type accept it without greater modification’. In her view the episode was ‘a later addition’, which needed to be studied separately;24 issues about its orality, as well as the relation between the two subtypes still stand out. Yet Dégh also concluded that all the Sky High Tree variants found outside Hungary were ‘all adaptions from the Hungarian’.25 This complicated tale, with its eight different type assignments defying international classification,26 is thus considered as specifically Hungarian – both characteristics enforce each

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other. Accordingly the story is interpreted as harbouring old Hungarian survivals: ‘today it is generally accepted’ that the story echoes shamanistic ascension, as one writer has it.27 If there is any discussion,28 it is about the precise relation of these ‘archaic elements’ within the stories and popular concepts. But it is debatable whether the story’s intricacy allows a reading in terms of shamanism.

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The lure of shamanism During the course of the twentieth century, the shamanistic characteristics of the Sky High Tree were put forward by a number of Hungarian scholars, among them Sándor Solymossy.29 In an article of 1928, based on his earlier book, he argued that three stories, including the Sky High Tree, were found only in Hungary. Since the motifs they depicted, however, were found far away in eastern lands, the Hungarian people must have kept these stories during their migration for at least a thousand years.30 The two main recent Hungarian folktale experts, Dégh and Kovács, seem nevertheless rather cautious, or at least ambivalent. The latter pointed out that story motifs which could be interpreted as shamanistic did not prove the survival of a ‘pagan Hungarian religion’ – the geographical and temporal gaps in the evidence were too large and the tale material too scanty. Furthermore, the specific ways to become a táltos, the signs at his birth, his illness and initiation, were not mentioned in the tales of magic.31 Dégh was even more outspoken: the story was an ‘artistic composition without mythical references and as such has no connection whatsoever with those more sporadic parallel concepts of the sky-high tree in contemporary folk belief’. Yet she made an exception for the ‘chopping into pieces’ episode in the abducted wife subtype, which was ‘definitely a shamanistic survival’;32 this was of no consequence to the Tree story, since in her opinion the whole episode was an alien element anyhow. Even though these comments were cautious, they left the notion of Hungarian shamanism intact. Dégh called the climbing of the tree a development ‘out of the shamanistic heritage of the Hungarian people’ and called the horses táltos steeds – a táltos being a Hungarian cunning man who was considered to have shaman ancestry. As a matter of fact, she ascribed táltos characteristics to the hero in the story and she suspected that these infected the horses.33 In the 1980s notions of the enormous age and orality of fairy tales not only resurfaced in certain feminst circles, they were also given a new life by connecting them to shamanism, primarily a male preserve. This was partly due to the emergence of a popular form of shamanism in western spirituality. In a typical article of 1986, Heino Gehrts argued that fairy tales expressed the experienced reality of shamanistic initiation, trance and healing. It was certainly necessary and important to pursue the formal study of tales, he declared, yet content and

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meaning should not be neglected. Utilizing some of the critique against the geographical-historical method, he discarded its rigorous and time-consuming procedure, replacing it with deep psychological ‘insights’ about the correspondence between the development of the individual and mankind and between myth and ritual. In his handling texts became fragments of an overarching reality and represented ‘events which on the basis of shamanistic concepts are totally “real”, experiences which in no way originate out of pure fantasy’. Thus the journey to obtain the devil’s hairs was an initiation, taking the hero to the oracle and deity beyond the river of death and the three hairs were a token of his succes. The beheading of the fox in the Golden Bird (the way in which the helper becomes human again) was an example of a shamanistic sacrifice.34 It was an idealized shamanism and the fairy tales were often demonstrably nineteenthcentury constructions – and of course Gehrts refrained from comparing different versions of a tale type. Initially Gehrts’s ideas were received with some scepticism. One reviewer commented on the lack of a careful and differentiated analysis.35 Röhrich, who in 1956 had indicated connections between fairy tale motifs and shamanistic characteristics such as dismembering and resurrection, still recognized journeys to another world as central in shamanistic experience. In fairy tales, however, the other world appeared normal, without any sense of otherness.36 A recent entry in the Enzyklopädie nevertheless maintains that although tales such as the Golden Bird and the Three Hairs of the Devil’s Beard (which during the inter war period had also been characterized as shamanistic narratives)37 were not concordant with a shamanistic culture, they enclosed at least a deeper layer of shamanistic migratory material. According to this author the Three Hairs was probably of Buddist and the Golden Bird of Iranian origin (he echoed the disputed findings of the Finnish School). The cooking and reassembling of limbs, the magic flight (see Chapter 3), as well as the variety of trees connecting heaven and earth, on the other hand, could certainly be traced back to shamanism. But it would be an exaggeration to ascribe every otherworld journey or animal helper to it.38 The difference between this approach and Gehrts’s is mainly one of degree.39 Where the latter finds shamanism in almost every tale, the contributor to the Enzyklopädie still leaves room for doubt and suggests including Finnish and Hungarian material for comparison (presuming that Finno-Ugric stories show a closer link to shamanism). On the surface, these theories mainly dressed the familiar notion of the age-old orality of tales, as shown by the presence of certain motifs, in a new shamanistic garb. In Gehrts’s view shamanism was rooted in primeval hunter cultures and the same applied to fairy tales.40 What is even more problematic is these authors’ denial of academic expertise without much counter-argument

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– the opinions of Dégh and Röhrich on the relation between motifs and fairy tale were not even mentioned. How worthwhile would it be to link motifs to beliefs or practices if they had become autonomous pieces of literature? Gehrts still adhered to an older school of thought. He was a contemporary of Kurt Ranke, though without the necessary academic background of the latter.41 Originally he had studied chemistry, but in the 1960s he reinvented himself as a fairy tale specialist, and in 1967 he published Das Märchen und das Opfer (The Fairy Tale and the Sacrifice). This book, with its direct links between story and ritual and its focus on brotherhood contained distinct remnants of National Socialist folklore. Ranke compaired it to the nefarious work of Otto Höfler,42 an Austrian member of the SS who had risen to a professorship under the Nazis. Shamanism has more often been hijacked to disguise political purposes.43 In his essay on shamanistic elements in tales of magic, Gehrts explicitly left aside the the initiation of adolescents in ritual societies which he regarded as an essential element; elsewhere he alluded to houses of men in which boys were initiated by their leaders – in fairy tales these abodes were represented by every kind of building from huts to castles.44 Shamanistic theory is interested in actual story texts only as long as they fit a preconceived framework; the notion of stories as synchronic and diachronic series or clusters is alien here. To shamanistic theorists fairy tale texts are decontextualized; they do not represent a nineteenth- or twentieth-century storytelling reality. Instead, they are seen as timeless representatives of a prehistorical, unwritten tradition. As such they are placed not only outside history but also beyond criticism. Such ideas are comparable to the method psychologists apply when interpreting fairy tales, only they move straight to so-called human ‘universals’ or ‘archetypes’ and safeguard themselves against critical counterarguments by referring to a subconsciousness, collective or not, that only they can access.45 The folklore answer to this is the concept of archaic traits: the insight that loose motifs can be much older than the stories they have become part of and that within a story such an element has its own function and meaning. Within fairy tale studies this admittedly took some time to materialize: the corresponding entry in the first volume of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens is still ambivalent – only at the end of the article is the reader warned that sometimes seemingly archaic elements could also be a later distortion.46 As the Swedish folklorist Jan-Öjvind Swan elaborated a few years later, the medieval cachet in many nineteenth-century Swedish tales was inserted by their editors and not original.47 Coupled to the recognition of fairy tales, and especially tales of magic, as the result of a process of distantiation, ancient ‘clues’ become nothing more (or less) than narrative devices, evoking the magical within the context of storytelling, but without any direct relation to the world as it is experienced beyond. This

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is the main reason why it has proved impossible to convincingly reconstruct a magical, or even shamanistic, worldview on the basis of fairy tale material. The concept of shamanism carries too much luggage to be of much help in discovering the history of the story complex of the Sky High Tree. That can be accomplished only by carefully examining the different stories that have contributed to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century shapes. In the following sections I will focus on the Princess on the Glass Mountain, the Shepherd in the Service of a Witch, the Ogre’s Heart in the Egg and finally the Sky High Tree. Only after such an exercise can their interrelation be established and a further verdict on the shamanism theory will become possible. Slippery slopes In the last, 1857 edition of the KHM the theme of the glass mountain appeared in six stories, mostly in the form of an obstacle the hero had to overcome when loking for a lost spouse, or lost relatives.48 Thus in Viehman’s Iron Stove (KHM 127) the princess needs needles to traverse the glass mountain on her way to the prince. In Marie Hassenpflug’s Seven Ravens (KHM 25) the girl typically cuts off her finger to gain entrance to the glass mountain where her enchanted brothers stay. In another raven metamorphosis (KHM 93), this time a male contribution by Goldmann, a princess is cursed by her mother, changes into a raven and flies off. Years later a man has the opportunity to release her: he needs to wait for her three times at the place of an old woman and be awake. Each time, however, he takes a drink from the old woman and falls asleep. The raven first comes in a carriage with white, then brown horses and finally black horses, but all in vain. At last she leaves the man a note where to find her. This turns out to be on the glass mountain. The man obtains three magic objects from robbers, among them a horse which takes him up the mountain where he can release and win the princess.49 In the Drummer (KHM 193), a story sent to Jacob Grimm in 1838, a similar scene occurs as the hero, just having tricked his way past a wood full of giants, steals a magic saddle which takes him straight to the glass mountain, only to find that he has to perform tasks for a witch (cf. Chapter 3).50 In ‘Oll Rinkrank’ (KHM 196), a dialect text from the mid-nineteenth century, a princess falls through a crack in the glass mountain and has to play housekeeper for the creature who lives inside (this is somewhat strange, since the king had ordered the mountain to be made as a bridal test).51 This last tale was in all likelihood influenced by the then current complete Glass Mountain stories. As a mystical geographical feature the glass mountain has been interpreted as the ‘almost inscalable obstacle between the here and now and the hereafter’, manifesting itself among other places as the ‘mythical island’ of Glastonbury, as

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well as in the reports of shamanistic experiences.52 However, the value of such observations for the history of stories with a glass mountain is debatable; even if it concerned more than superficial decontextualized traits, these reveal very little about the reception of the tale and nothing about how the motif ended up in, for instance, the KHM. By now the answer to this last question is simple: the glass mountain is originally Nordic and merely a part of the epic of the Strong Woman (ATU 519); a sixteenth-century Danish ballad relates how Sivard takes Brynild down from its slippery slopes with the help of his horse Grani.53 The Grimms will have discussed it among their friends who subsequently inserted the image into their stories. The whole story about the princess on the glass mountain was more recent than the mere motif. By the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, it had become one of the most popular tales of magic in Hungary. A version published in 1890 starts in the same way as the Golden Bird, when three princes guard the agrarian produce (now sheaves instead of apples) which disappear from the field. The youngest feeds a mouse who helps him to catch three horses (his older siblings have fallen asleep) with golden, silver and copper manes. Then the amazingly beautiful daughter of a neighbouring king places herself on top of a glass mountain, with a golden apple, a golden ring and a golden tissue on a twig of a spruce. The youngest prince succeeds in reaching the top and collecting the trophies by riding his horses. The last time he tells the princess: ‘If you really love me, then you will find me’, and she takes three full years before she does so.54 In the nineteenth-century European tale corpus, the Glass Mountain (ATU 530) also had become a tale in its own right, mainly with a princess who has chosen to sit on top of it, promising her hand to the hero who managed to scale it and retrieve the objects she had placed there, or even steal an occasional kiss. The youngest of three brothers who achieves this always has at his disposal three magic horses in different colours resembling precious metals, with the corresponding outfits. He has acquired the horses either by guarding crops, by guarding his father’s grave or, more rarely, by slaying giants. Stories of this kind were recorded in eastern Europe, Germany and Scandinavia, with minimal differences in content.55 In France the tale was only rarely encountered.56 When story texts exhibit the kind of correspondence as, in this case, the Glass Mountain, it can only have sprung from a common source. In this respect there is no difference between the geographical-historical method and the approach followed in this book.57 However, as argued in earlier chapters, when similar texts are found in a large geographical area and transcend language boundaries, a printed source has to be surmised. When an oral distribution would have had to traverse the vast distances involved, the generations of storytellers this would take would have incurred natural changes made by either skilled

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narrators or forgetful informants. In other words, a genuine oral transmission would render many stories unrecognizable during the length of time it would take to arrive at the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century distribution pattern. It may not always be possible to find out how similar texts (often pigeonholed as the same type) are related to each other. In theory once similarity has been established, one text can have any genealogical relationship with another, whether as sibling, cognate, parent, or more remote. Generally, such texts appear in parallel positions. When one wants to be more precise, the time of production becomes an important factor. With nineteenth-century collections the publication date provides a clue, as it is usually only a few years after the collection date and most of the time the older collections thus predate the younger. Later, when previously unpublished texts are gathered in printed volumes, the collection date is, as a rule, mentioned in the annotations. But the text in the oldest fairy tale book does not have to be the first printed version of the story; cheap printed texts in which stories were distributed did not always survive. As the standard texts of the Princess on the Glass Mountain, Scandinavian stories figure, either the Norwegian ‘Jomfruen paa Glasberget’, collected in the early 1840s, or the Swedish ‘Prinsessan uppå glasberget’, published in the same decade.58 Although they were soon translated into German, which will undoubtedly have resulted in retellings, these texts were only one source of the nineteenthcentury mid-European stories. Polish and Slovakian versions were older, or at least contemporaneous. The Polish story stemmed from the 1837 Woyciki book (which also contains a doctored version of the Magician and His Pupil, see Chapter 4), and was newly composed: a student climbs the glass mountain on which a falcon guards a tree with golden apples. He overcomes the bird, cuts off its talons, and thereby incidently revives all the other candidates who did not make it, and finally marries the princess. The three horses were deleted.59 The Slovakian story was included in the Codex Revúci, compiled during the early 1840s by the evangelical minister Samuel Renz in Revúca in mid-Slovakia, in collaboration with his sons and their fellow pupils at the lyceum in Pressburg (a.k.a. Bratislava).60 It has the crop guarding opening, now of oats, and the oldest two brothers eat and drink too much and fall asleep, while the youngest has been given only a piece of bread and stays awake to catch one of the horses. The second and the third night pass in the same way. The boy releases the horses but keeps their bit. The competition for the princess now takes place without a mountain; candidates have to jump high enough to grasp a golden ring, then a golden apple and last a golden handkerchief.61 As far as can be ascertained, the ancestor text of the Glass Mountain was published in Russian in 1786 as the Tale of Ivan the Fool in the storybook Lekarstvo ot zadumcivosti (Medicine against Melancholy) and a year later under

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the same title in a slightly adapted fashion in the Skaski russkie, written by a certain Pjotr Timofeev. It features the staying awake all night, but instead of the mountain the princess merely sits in a high window of the palace in the first story and in a specially erected tall tower in the next.62 The specific mountain seems to have been added only some time during the following fifty years, possibly through familiarity with the Strong Woman epic. The other opening sequence in which the brothers have to stay awake to catch a thief was probably modelled on a similar passage in the Firebird (see Chapter 2). Because in both the late eighteenth-century texts the wooing is followed by a jealous courtiers episode (here brothers) it becomes clear that the Russian writers have adapted Straparola stories. In ‘Fortunio’ the hero ‘raised his eyes to the sky and caught sight of Princess Doralie, who was leaning out of one of the large windows of the palace’. The princess then finances three outfits in white, green and crimson, so that he can enter the tournament and win her hand.63 The golden apples, which in the nineteenth century end up in the hand of the princess, are part of Fortunio’s next adventure in the Piacevoli notti and one of the three treasures to obtain in the next episode of the eighteenth-century Russian tales. This last episode disappeared from the nineteenth-century text (it remained only when the story was directly copied),64 but originated in another Straparola story, the one of Livoretto. In service of the witch One of the favourite stories of another inhabitant of Kakasd, György Andrásfalvi, ran as follows. Before he dies, a king tells his son to give his sisters in marriage to whooever asks for them. A seven-headed dragon comes for the oldest sister, a fifteen-headed dragon for the second and what turns out to be a dragon with twenty heads for the youngest. The prince decides to visit his sisters and acquaint himself with his brothers-in-law and leaves home too. On his way he meets a crow, a quail and a fish who promise help in return for not being shot and each gives him a feather or a scale. When he arrives at his first sister, who lives in a black city in a castle adorned with red flags, she hides him, afraid that her husband will hurt him. But the dragon assuages her fears and swallows the boy seven times; when he has spit him out the seventh time, the hero has become so beautiful and strong that his sister no longer recognizes him. The same happens at the second and the third sister’s. At the last place the prince sees a portrait of a woman and immediately falls in love with her, so much so that he becomes paralysed. The twenty-headed dragon revives him by swallowing him seven times; he tells the prince that the woman in the picture is Ilona the Fair and admits that he wanted to marry her once, but failed (and the boy’s sister resembles her in figure and looks). Ilona was captured by the red knight and,

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each time the dragon tried to take her away, the knight overtook them on his three-legged horse. The prince nevertheless wants to try himself. He finds his beloved at a well and they kiss ‘like they had been lovers for three years’. They flee, but the red knight recaptures her. Then his brother-in-law tells the prince of Ilona’s aunt, whose service he should enter: he merely has to herd three mares. But his wards put him to sleep and hide, first at the bottom of a lake in the shape of a fossil, then in the shape of three young birds in a quail’s nest and lastly as three midges underneath a crow’s nest. Each time the creatures whom the prince granted their life at the beginning of his journey help him to recover the mares. Then the oldest mare tells him how he can overcome their mother; the mare will shortly give birth to a foal and the prince should ask for it as a reward for his services, as well as filthy clothes and a rusty sword. He should also demand four sheep to be tied to the legs of the foal. When the lions at the gate attack him, they bite the sheep instead of the foal’s legs. And since the foal has the same mother as the horse of the red knight, he can now free Ilona.65 Andrásfalvi was an avid reader, but had heard this story from his father.66 It was essentially the extended version of the Sky High Tree, only without the tree, and it is therefore understandable that in Dégh’s opinion it could easily stand alone. That it was of no importance to the tree story and merely an ‘addition’ was nevertheless a mistake. It was more widespread, with versions in the Czech lands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Romania, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia, and demonstrably older. This story is hardly studied, however, and even its type number (ATU 556F*) is often not recognized.67 A mid-nineteenthcentury Hungarian variant is regarded as the ‘prototype’,68 and it was issued as a broadsheet many times since 1861.69 The texts are close enough to the story recorded by Dégh to be its direct forebears. The oldest Hungarian story collections, however, were older than the mid-nineteenth century and both published in German; Georg von Gaal’s book in 1822 and Count János Majláth’s in 1825.70 The latter includes six fairy tales, of which the one about ‘Zauberhelene’ (magic Helen) clearly stood at the basis of the Hungarian versions of the Service at the Witch tale. It runs as follows: A king and his queen want their son to marry his three sisters to keep the realm intact, but he disagrees and gives the princesses to the kings of the sun, the winds and the moon. He tells his parents that he has set his eyes on the magical Helen and goes to find her; they give him the waters of life and death for the journey. He comes upon a vale full of death warriors and interrogates them after having briefly revived them. They direct him to Helen. He conquers her with her own sword and they marry. One morning she leaves on an errand and tells him not to enter the last room of the palace. There he finds the entrapped fire king Holofernus and frees him by offering him two glasses of wine and one of water. This creature then sets off

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with Helen (who has lost her strength upon marrying the prince). To regain his beloved, the hero has to obtain a faster horse than his opponent. He succeeds with the help of his brothers-in-law, who direct him to the witch with the horses, Iron Nose, who lives in a palace of skulls. They also give him a magic wand, half of gold and half of silver, to control the horses.71 Helen, later magyarized as Ilona, was a scantly disguised Brunhilde and in that context it was fitting to have a bound man, named after Judith’s victim Holofernes in the apocryphal Book of Judith (and often depicted). In a later Hungarian version the name of the captive was misunderstood and turned into Hollófernyjges which contained the word hóllo, raven. Thus in a late nineteenthcentury version from Pomerania, clearly imported from Hungary, a captured raven occurs.72 But Majláth was not original. Already Wilhelm Grimm remarked that, in contrast with Majláth’s insistence on the oral character of his stories, they were each compiled out of several others. This accumulation of the miraculous disturbed the nature of the stories.73 According to its author ‘Zauberhelene’ was indeed a combination of three tales, but it had in fact been mostly copied out of the Skaski russkie of 1787. Here Ivan’s brothers-in-law are animals again, an eagle, a raven and a falcon, the warrior queen is called Marya Marevna, queen of Cyprus, and the captured dragon is the king of Iraq who loses his powers when Marya gives Ivan his shield and his scarf. The author had partly based his tale on Basile (see below) and woven in threads from the Argonauts in which Medea played another strong woman74 – the borrowing is betrayed when Marya leaves to fight the king of ‘Kolchida’, Colchis. The rejuvenation theme, also connected to Medea, was present in the Tale of Ivan Tsarevitch, too. Like Egypt in the 1777 Koshchay story (cf. Chapter 2), the geography in Ivan was mainly meant to appeal to the Oriental fashion; the words used for the royal protagonists, korol and koroleva, pointed to foreign monarchs. Only the Baba Yaga from which Ivan obtained the foal may have been remotely Russian, had he not been helped by grateful animals: a bee, a bear and a falcon, which points to Straparola. With the story of Guerrino the Italian’s book also furnished the freeing-of-the-captured-man theme, a fairy’s gift of a magic horse, and the submission of wild horses.75 The historical route of the Service at the Witch is practically the same as the Glass Mountain. Next to Majláth’s volume the story appeared in different versions in Afanas’ev’s collection;76 both constituted different receptions of Timofeev’s Skaski russkie story, each in his way ironing out what he perceived as irregularities in the donor tale. From both the Russian and the Hungarian printed material the story percolated into eastern European tradition; Majláth’s book was reprinted in German in 1837 and translated into Hungarian in 1864. Later recordings persuaded at least some folklorists to contemplate literary influences.77

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The hidden life force Outside Hungary the story about the wizard who had hidden his heart in an egg (ATU 302) was primarily connected with the tale of the three animal brothersin-law (ATU 552). As Wilhelm Grimm told it in the last KHM edition, a sorceress has three sons but fears that they will rob her of her power. She therefore changes the first into an eagle and the second into a whale. The third escapes in time. He hears about an enchanted princess in the Castle of the Golden Sun, meets two giants fighting over a teleporting hat, purloins it and wishes himself at the castle, on the top of a mountain. But when he encounters the princess, she is hideous: an ashen face full of wrinkles, ugly eyes and red hair. The boy needs to find a crystal ball and show it to the evil wizard who has enchanted her. To this end, the princess tells him, he has to kill an ox. Out of the ox a fiery bird will rise, in the bird is a glowing egg and in the egg is the ball. The egg should not fall on the earth, for then it will melt. With the help of his brothers the hero obtains the crystal ball, the wizard grants him the castle and the princess is beautiful again. This story, known as the Crystal Ball (KHM 197), has a well-known history: Wilhelm Grimm reworked a text by Friedmund von Arnim (Achim’s son to whom the first volume of the KHM had been dedicated), who in his turn had modified the Three Sisters, a story from Musäus’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen of 1782.78 Earlier, in the 1812 KHM edition, the brothers had included an adaptation of the Musäus story but deleted it in the next edition because Jacob found it the worst tale in Musäus’s collection, although, as he wrote to Achim von Arnim, it had certainly not been made up.79 In his turn, Musäus had based his story on ‘Li tre re animale’ from the Pentamerone (IV.3). In the earlier German redactions the egg contained a key, which fitted the door to the castle. There were also brothers-in-law instead of brothers. The Basile original contained the animal brothers-in-law, but no egg. The version of Musäus was very popular and this could explain the brothers-in-law in similar eastern European stories. The concept of the hidden life force, however, was only weakly present in Musäus and must have had a different literary history. Like wizards, animal helpers had featured in narratives long before fairy tales were established as a genre.80 The accompanying animals in Straparola’s Cesarino are an example. Livoretto freed a fish and a falcon, who in their turn helped him find the princess’s ring and the water of life (see Chapter 2). In what purports to be a parallel development, Fortunio, also from the Piacevoli notti, after having delivered justice to animals by showing how to divide a carcass, is granted the power to change himself into them, using their hair, feather or scale.81 It seems that Basile was the first to make these helping animals into helping brothers-in-law, as the

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latter still presented the protagonist with pieces of their bodies. It often concerns three animals, although this figure may vary. The combination of animals with the antagonist’s separable soul is probably even younger. In the first half of the nineteenth century, there were basically two story types expressing this. One with animal (or cosmic) brothers-in-law and without a clear notion of an external life force – only with some outside power source as in the KHM. And one with helping animals and the antagonist’s hidden soul, preferably in an egg. The first with the brothers-in-law owed its existence to the enormous popularity of Musäus’s Three Sisters, which had already appeared as a separate German print in the late eighteenth century.82 It was, moreover, printed as a Swedish broadside in 1838 and in a Bohemian translation in 1845, 1865 and 1876.83 The second story, adding the separate soul to the Fortunio fragment, by then also available in de Mailly’s French rendering, was a northern European invention. It merely replaced the search for the abducted man with that for an abducted wife: in an early eighteenth-century Swedish manuscript, starting with the division of the carcass judgement, a troll is disenchanted by throwing a little stone against a mountain which then changes back into a palace. This stone was located in a dove, in a hare, in a dragon.84 As a motif it had appeared in late medieval Icelandic romances, in the Elder Edda and in seventeenth-century Danish epic poetry.85 Presumably the story in which the motif was linked to the animals was printed; it was still recorded by folklorists in nineteenth-century Scandinavia (and in Scotland) and fed into western and central European tradition through German and English translations.86 It thus relates to two separate developments, and Musäus had borrowed the external power part from an Oriental story, one of the Sayf al-Muluk versions,87 rather than from the Scandinavian tradition. This last will also have been the basis of the particular motif in the Benedek derivations of the Sky High Tree, once more by way of the late eighteenth-century Russian stories. In the Dedushkyni progulki tale where the prince has to obtain the magic lyre from Koshchay the deathless, the latter reveals: My death is far from here, and is hard to discover. It is to be found in the earth sea. In this sea is an island, called Bujan, and on this island stands a strong green oak, under this oak an iron chest has been buried, in this chest is a box and in it a hare is locked in. In this hare is a duck and the duck contains an egg, and when this egg is squeezed by someone, I will die in the very same minute.88

Majláth used a similar image in his story ‘Pengö’: far away in the wood, there flows a golden stream, to this will come, when I am asleep, a golden roebuck, in which my strenght is; when it is slain, a lamb will jump out of it; when this can escape, then I keep my strength, when the lamb is

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slain, a golden duck will fly from it; when the duck escapes, my strength remains; when the duck is slain, then a golden beetle will fly from its stomach; when it escapes, then my strenght remains; but when the beetle is killed, my strength is gone.89

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Hyperbolic trees What about the Great Tree? Is it a reminiscence, however remote, of the World Tree, or of an inspiring intoxicant, or is it something completely different? In finding answers to these questions, a very close connection has to be presumed between the beanstalk which Jack climbed and the tree that grows into heaven – certainly in woodcuts it is hard to tell the difference between the two.90 The American folklorist Christine Goldberg noticed similarities between the Sky High Tree and the English Bean Stalk tale, but then remarked that the common features occurred in many tales and therefore did not imply a close relationship. The beanstalk story is nevertheless more than a century older than the earliest Hungarian tree stories.91 What is now considered as the first full version of Jack and the Beanstalk was published in the early nineteenth century. But an earlier version, from a 1736 skit, omits the giant. In 1736 Jack merely climbed up the stalk to find a sort of princess (first disguised as an innkeeper), whom he married. The giant made his appearance only in 1807 and Jack started to steal treasures from him only in 1809.92 In the late nineteenth century Joseph Jacobs published a similar and influential text in his English Fairy Tales. According to Goldberg, later oral versions ‘remain close to the 1809 chapbook and Jacobs’ text’.93 Thus in most cases Jack sells the family cow for magic beans. When the beans have grown into a gigantic stalk overnight, he climbs up to the place of the giant, is helped by the giant’s wife, and steals his treasures: bags of gold, a chicken that lays golden eggs and a golden harp. When in the end the giant pursues him, Jack cuts down the beanstalk and his adversary becomes the victim of gravity.94 Since she held the opinion that ‘as far as their origin is concerned’ the beanstalk stories ‘definitely’ did not belong to the same type as the sky tree, Linda Dégh concluded that the magical tale about the boy who climed a tree to find a princess must ‘have originated on Hungarian soil and have reached the folk literature of other peoples through oral transmission alone’. The latter is highly unlikely, given that both Majláth’s and Benedek’s books substantially contributed to the story distribution.95 The tree motif may have been added in Transylvania, but there is no pertinent reason to call this element Hungarian either. Elsewhere in Europe, the beanstalk easily lent itself as an attachment to other stories, too. In England Jack appropriated Corvetto.96 In the French versions of both the

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Fisherman’s Wife (ATU 555) and the Table, the Ass and the Stick (ATU 563), the wishes were fulfilled and the magical objects were obtained after the man had climbed to heaven.97 Hungary was no exception here. Since in the earliest English Jack and the Beanstalk version a wife was also found in the sky, there are enough reasons for doubting the Hungarian uniqueness. This weakens the shamanistic connection, unless it is assumed that in the nineteenth-century shamanistic remnants were still scattered all over Europe (which is certainly not what nationalist Hungarians had in mind).98 Climbing into heaven or into a land in the sky was never a separate or even a frame tale, but primarily a way for storytellers to explain how their hero had reached a certain place. As such it bears a curious resemblance to ATU 1960G, the Great Tree, which is essentially a ‘tall tale’ rather than a tale of magic. The same applies to the beanstalk. As Goldberg observed: ‘A bean vine cannot even support itself, so that the notion of climbing one, especially one without a stake or string to support is, is especially absurd.’ In KHM 112, the Flail from Heaven, a turnip seed grows to heaven and a farmer who has climbed all the way up watches angels threshing oats. In a somewhat similar tale the Grimms obtained from Münsterland (that is to say, from Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff ), the motif of the fast-growing cabbage is incorporated in a lying contest (ATU 852). It wins a poor peasant boy the princess’s hand, but her father refuses, and the boy accepts this; the girl’s eyes were dull and she was ugly anyhow.99 Climbing to heaven on a plant was part of the particular genre of lying stories; it occurred also in the Münchhausen cycle.100 This genre was well established in literature.101 In the telling of fairy tales ordinary credibility is dispensed with and the participants are led into a distant land with its own laws. Introductionary formulae are meant to bridge the gap with daily life and ‘to dissolve the listeners’ doubt’.102 In the case of the Tree that Grows into the Sky, however, there are several examples of narrators stressing the tale’s extraordinary characteristics and thereby they underline disbelief rather than alleviate it. An early twentiethcentury version starts with a hyperbole: ‘beyond the glass mountain, also beyond the Paradise sea, where the pig with the short tail roots, there was tapering a tree whose foot was as wide as a blowpipe and further up as wide as my thumb and still further up as wide as my lower arm’. The teller had read the story in a little book hidden in the seventy-seventh pleat of a red overgarment and those who wanted to believe it could believe it and those who did not could sit on the ‘tail of true belief’.103 An earlier example can be found in a mid-nineteenthcentury Hungarian version of the Blood-Brothers (ATU 303): Where it was, where it wasn’t – I don’t know; a cock’s crow away over seven times seven countries, there stood a tall foliated trembling poplar, with seven

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times seventy-seven branches and on each branch were seven times seventy-seven crows’ nests, in each nest seven times seventy-seven young crows. He who does not listen to my tale properly or who falls asleep, will have his eyes picked out by all the young crows; he who pays attention will look at God’s land forever.104

Another story, a late version of the Service at the Witch, starts with sketching an impossible situation, whereupon the narrator concludes: ‘Now I am going to compose a lie, to make this house full of lies!’105 As Ortutay remarked: ‘In the Hungarian the sky-high tree appears often as an important introductory part, to which several other fairy tales of other well-known types attach themselves.’106 Yet Dégh was not alone in separating the hyperbolic lie tale from the tales of magic.107 The Enzyklopädie author writing about ATU 1960 held the same opinion and Kovács also separated the genres; she even went as far as assuming that as a belief element the motif was older then in the various kinds of fairy tales.108 This presumes that magical tales and jocular tales always existed side by side. If, on the other hand, fairy tales emerged as a genre only in the course of the eighteenth century, then it is more than plausible that motifs were borrowed from other genres. And the Great Tree was certainly known in nineteenthcentury Hungary.109 Opening trees A story’s genealogy is like a tree and the notion of subtypes and variants implies that younger stories have branched off from the original. In the case of the Sky High Tree, however, a different process occurred. Its subtypes were related to each other only in as far as they contained a tree, but the ‘frame story’, as Dégh designated it,110 never was a type whereas the stories within the ‘frame’, that is to say, following the introduction featuring the tree, more or less were. Her conclusion about the tale’s distribution from Hungary was largely accurate, but restricted to the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. In the mid-nineteenth century the Sky High Tree was used in conjunction with the Glass Mountain. A Romanian version, included in the collection of Transylvanian tales by Joseph Haltrich, starts with a shepherd’s boy who finds a big tree. He climbs for nine days and reaches a copper place with field, wood and palace, and a well where he dips his feet so that they become coated in copper. After another nine days he arrives at the silver place, where he washes his hands, and another nine days take him to the golden place, where his hair is treated. He climbs back down and finds himself in a different place. He hires himself out as a kitchen boy to the local king. Some time later the king’s daughter sits down on the glass mountain to select a husband. Many have tried to climb up and have fallen down, some of them have died; the boy with his copper feet

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melts the glass like wax and when he gets to the princess, he gives her first a copper, the next day a silver, and the third a golden twig which he had taken from the places in the tree and each time he hides in the kitchen afterwards. In the end the king finds him; the boy marries the princess and soon after inherits the kingdom. But when he wants to show his wife the tree, it has disappeared.111 In later versions the mountain disappeared while the tree remained.112 In the same decade another Transylvanian text surfaced with a tree reaching into the clouds and it contained a princess below as well as a lady above.113 The image was also used in a unique combination of the Sky High Tree with the motif of the loose eyes and a stay in the land of immortality.114 At that time, several attempts were made to graft the tree introduction on to stories. During the next phase of this development the tree was transplanted from a hyperbolic introduction to the main story. In the words of the Czech folklorist Karel Horálek, the tree was ‘a wholly formal addition’, in no way related to the stories’ plot and its resolution.115 The longer ‘subtype’ with the captured dragon and the service at the witch episode was the first in which the grafting proved successful. The shorter redaction was younger, not only published but in all probability also composed by Benedek, and merely a simplification of the story as it had evolved towards 1900. The motif of the external soul, already present in the Russian redaction of the Marya Morevna tale, replaced the ‘service at the witch’ episode, supposedly because Benedek found it more suitable for children.116 In view both of these manipulations and of the story’s alternative history, the material on which to build shamanistic theories becomes extremely scanty. If the World Tree mainly derived from a lie, it can hardly refer to trance experiences. If the different stories’ main ancestry was Russian, and before that Italian, then elements deemed to be typical Ugric evaporate. In the context of particular Hungarian scholarship such a conclusion is hardly surprising. Mihály Hoppál may have remarked that it was anything but a ‘futile endeavour’ to link the tree of the ‘folk tale’ to the tree of ‘shamanistic initiation’,117 as an anthropologist he had little experience with both folklore and history. From the folklore perspective, fairy tales and ‘folk belief’ were usually separated: ‘the properties and functions of the characters in fairy tales and their authenticity do not tally exactly with the characters figuring in folk beliefs’. The fairy tales were always understood to be fiction.118 Moreover, the traits ascribed to the táltos are different from those to be identified from the fairy tale. It is not just that tree climbing does not figure in táltos accounts; fighting in animal shape, or performing other functions as a magical expert, is not part of the stories.119 From a historical perspective the association between the figure of the táltos and the Ugric shaman is rather fragile too. As the Hungarian historian Gábor Klaniczay concluded on the basis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trial accounts, cunning folk already then

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‘represented a version of shamanism disintegrated into various elements without real cohesion’.120 In the 1920s Solymossy had failed to take literary derivations into account; his examples were far from uniquely Hungarian. The first came straight from the Piacevoli notti, the third from the Arabian Nights. Ascribing shamanistic characteristics to the Sky High Tree, his second example, is as much a construction as the story itself.

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Notes 1 Paradise Sea = ‘Operenzmeer’; this is a corruption of ‘ob der Enss’, lit. upon the river Enss, where it is supposed to be as beautiful as in Paradise – with thanks to Christa Tuczay. Cf. a similar corruption of ‘Ozean’ into ‘Ochsen zahn’, i.e.: ‘ocean’ into ‘oxen tooth’. 2 A version was included in the volume of fairy tales after the Grimms, see: Paul Zaunert, Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm (Jena 1912), 1–14. 3 Ágnes Kovács, Der Grüne Recke. Ungarische Volksmärchen (Kassel 1986), 77–86, 206–207. 4 Ágnes Kovács, ‘Benedek, Elek’, EM 2 (1979), 99–100. 5 Ágnes Kovács, Ungarische Volksmärchen (Düsseldorf/Köln 1966), 264–268, 343–344. 6 Linda Dégh, Hungarian Folktales. The Art of Zsuzsanna Palkó (New York/London, 1995), 121–129, quotation 127. 7 According to Dégh, a tree story with this ending had been ‘only five times’ recorded, Hungarian Folktales, 121; however, the Hungarian catalogue lists nine variants, excluding Benedek, see: Ágnes Kovács, Magyar Népmesekatalógus, VIII (Budapest 1988), 123. 8 Linda Dégh, ‘The Tree that Reached Up to the Sky (Type 468)’, in Dégh (ed.), Studies in East European Folk Narrative (Bloomington 1978), 268–316, esp. 310. This essay was originally written in 1963. 9 Dégh noticed ‘a certain kind of conflict’ between the two women and referred to an early twentieth-century storyteller who inserted a rival hero to solve the problem, ‘Tree’, 285, 277. 10 See the Hungarian catalogue, Kovács, Magyar Népmesekatalógus, VIII, 123. The type description in the umbrella catalogue, The Types of International Folktales, 204 (no. 317), does include the episode with the dragon. 11 In Hungarian Folktales: The Art of Zsuzsanna Palkó only thirty-five stories are included, apparently her repertoire consisted of ‘seventy-four themes’, see: Dégh, Folktales and Society. Story-telling in a Hungarian Peasant Community (Bloomington/Indianapolis 1989; expanded edition), 192, but only sixty-three of them are listed. 12 Dégh, Folktales and Society, 153–154, 312–316. 13 Dégh, Folktales and Society, 303. 14 Dégh, ‘Tree’, 301; P.V. Lintur, Ukrainische Volksmärchen (Berlin, 2nd edn, 1981), 420–429.

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15 Ágnes Kovács, ‘Das Märchen vom himmelhohen Baum’ in: Jürgen Janning and Heino Gehrts (eds), Die Welt im Märchen (Kassel 1984), 74–84, 176–180, esp. 179 no. 14. Here mention is also made of Benedek’s ‘self-composed’ stories. 16 Kovács, ‘Baum, Der himmelhohe’, EM 1 (1977), 1381–1386; cf. Kovács, ‘The Literary Genres of Folktales and the Hungarian Folktale Catalogue’, Studia Fennica 26 (1981), 105–129, esp. 116–117. 17 Sándor Erdész and Christian Jenssen, Begegnung der Völker in Märchen, IV: Ungarn, Deutschland (Münster 1971), 42–57. 18 Gottfried Henssen, Ungardeutsche Volksüberlieferungen Erzählungen und Lieder (Marburg 1959), 316–318, recorded in Godisa/Baranya, c. 1935, belongs here too; the story is cut short because all the three main players in the triangle commit suicide. 19 Linda Dégh, Folktales of Hungary (London 1965), 77–99. 20 Dégh, Folktales of Hungary, 314. 21 Gyula Ortutay, Ungarische Volksmärchen (Berlin, 4th edn, 1967), 190–219, originally published in Hungarian in 1955 and in German in 1957 – an illegal selection appeared in Stuttgart in 1962; cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 597–601. 22 E. Róna-Sklarek, Ungarische Volksmärchen (Leipzig 1909), no. 2: ‘Der wipfellose Baum’, published in Hungarian in 1907, recorded in 1903. 23 Cf. Lajos Géczi, Ungi népmesék és mondák (Budapest 1989), 73–80, with yet another mix of the same story elements, in which Jesus and St Peter secure the hero’s resurrection. 24 Dégh, ‘Tree’, 291, 311. 25 Dégh, ‘Tree’, 312. 26 In the Thompson catalogues the story even had two different numbers, 317 and 468; in Thompson’s The Folktale it is not mentioned. 27 Sándor Erdész, Zigeunermärchen aus Ungarn: die Volkserzählungen des Lajos Ami (München 1996), 318. 28 At the presentation of the French version of Kovács’s paper, the anthropologist Jacques Dournes expressed the minority view that ‘shamanism’ was a French (i.e. western) and not a Hungarian concept, Le conte pourquoi? comment? (Paris 1984), 415 – a reference to the debate about cultural universals versus academic constructs. 29 Another example is Vilmos Diószegi, A pogány magyarok hitvilága (Budapest 1973), 46–51, who attributed shamanistic features to the Magician and His Pupil, see: Kovács, ‘Literary Genres’, 113. 30 Sándor Solymossy, ‘Éléments orientaux dans les contes populaires Hongrois’, Revue des études hongroises 6 (1928), 311–336. 31 Ágnes Kovács, ‘Schamanistisches im Ungarischen Volksmärchen’, in: Heino Gehrts and Gabriele Lademann-Priemer (eds), Schamanentum und Zaubermärchen (Kassel 1986/ Krummwisch 2005), 110–121, 206–209. 32 Dégh, ‘Tree’, 271, 291. 33 Cf. Dégh, Folktales of Hungary, 313, where she states that the story had its roots in the táltos myth.

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34 Heino Gehrts, ‘Schamanistische Elemente im Zaubermärchen. Ein Überblick’, in: Heino Gehrts and Gabriele Lademann-Priemer (eds), Schamanentum und Zaubermärchen (Kassel 1986/Krummwisch 2005), 48–89, esp. 74, 77 and 64. 35 Andreas Hartmann, in Fabula 27 (1986), 338–390. 36 Röhrich, ‘Jenseitswanderungen’, EM 7 (1993), 547–559. 37 Karl Meuli, Gesammelte Schriften, 872, from ‘Scythia’, orig. published in 1935. Cf. Ilona Nagy, ‘Die Gestalt des Charon in den Ungarischen Volksmärchen’, in: Wolfdietrich Siegmund (ed.), Antiker Mythos in unseren Märchen (Kassel 1984), 102–112. 38 Jörg Bäcker, ‘Schamanismus’, EM 11 (2005), 1200–1230, esp. 1214. 39 In a recent book by three American classicists and an anthropologist, shamanism is read into fairy tales such as Snow White and Rose Red, Beauty and the Beast and others. Since they ascribe Snow White to the Grimms’ ‘oral informants’ and Beauty to Straparola, the authors make it more than clear that their knowledge of fairy tales is completely lacking, see: Carl A.P. Ruck, Blaise Daniel Staples, José Alfredo González Celdrán and Mark Alwin Hoffman, The Hidden World: Survival of Pagan Shamanic Themes in European Fairytales (Durham, NC 2007). 40 Gehrts, ‘Schamanistische Elemente’, 55, 84. 41 Cf. the rather dubious obituary by Diether Röth in: Märchenspiegel 10 (1999), 12. 42 Ranke, ‘Brüder: Die zwei’, EM 2 (1979), 912–919, esp. 917–918 on ritual interpretations; cf. Lüthi, Märchen (1979) 67. 43 Cf. Willem de Blécourt, ‘The Return of the Sabbat’, in: Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds), Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke 2007), 125–145. 44 Heino Gehrts, ‘Das Zaubermärchen und die prähistorische Thematik. Siuts – Saintyves – Propp’, in: Charlotte Oberfeld (ed.), Wie alt sind unsere Märchen (Regensburg 1990/Krummwich 2005), 27–36. 45 It is no coincidence that Von Franz counts Gehrts’s Das Märchen und das Opfer among the ‘important non-Jungian contributors to comparative research in mythology’, Marie-Louise von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales (Boston/London 1996; revised edition), 21. 46 Kurt Ranke and Hermann Bausinger, ‘Archaische Züge’, EM 1 (1977), 733–743. The ambivalence seems to be due to the unwillingness of Bausinger to antagonize Ranke, then leader of the EM project. 47 Jan-Öjvind Swan, ‘Tradierungskonstanten. Wie weit reicht unsere mündliche Tradition zurück’, in: Charlotte Oberfeld (ed.), Wie alt sind unsere Märchen? (Krummwisch 2005/Regensburg 1990), 36–50, esp. 47. 48 Cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1115, who states that the story of the glass mountain does not feature in the KHM. 49 The Raven is usually classified as ATU 400 + ATU 518. The former is a collective number that includes all stories about men seeking lost women; the latter is not an actual type but an episode in other tales. The first attempt at disenchanting the raven is not incorporated in the type description – it is taken from the story of Gundibert in the Feen-Mährchen (1801) (ed. Marzolph), 179–183.

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50 Send in by Karl Goedeke; his original text in Rölleke, Nachlass, 54–59: ‘Von gläsernen Berge’. 51 The KHM text plus the original from the Friesisches Archiv (1849) are reprinted in Rölleke, Grimms Märchen und ihre Quellen (Trier 1998), 76–95. 52 Donald Ward, ‘Glasberg’, EM 5 (1987), 1265–1270. 53 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 233; II (1915), 340; cf. Wilhelm Grimm, Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (Heidelberg 1811), 31–34, 496–498. 54 Kovács, Ungarische Volksmärchen (Düsseldorf/Köln 1966), 55–62, 336. 55 Bolte & Polívka, Anmerkungen, III (1918), 111–112; Ines Köhler-Zülch, ‘Prinzessin auf dem Glasberg’, EM 10 (2002), 1343–1351. 56 Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze, Le conte populaire français, II (Paris 1964), 309–315; cf. Cosquin, Les contes populaire Lorraine, II (Paris 1886), 89–93 and his notes on 93–97. 57 Cf. Dégh, Folktales and Society, 49: ‘it has been proven beyond any doubt that there is no one work which cannot be traced back to a single individual, even though during the course of time many others have added to and continued the work’. 58 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 738–739; the Norwegian tale was translated as ‘Princess on the Glass Hill’ in Dasent’s Popular Tales from the North (Edinburgh, 2nd edn, 1859), 89–93. 59 R.W. Woycicki, Polnische Volkssagen und Märchen (Berlin 1839), transl. Lewestam, part II, 115–119. 60 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, V (1932), 131. 61 Polívka, Súpis slovenskYch rozprávok (Verzeichnis der Slowakische Märchen), II (1924), 233–236, transl. EM. 62 Korepova, Lekarstvo, nos 6 and 23. 63 Zipes, Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 138–145: 141. 64 Afanas’ev, Russian Fairy Tales, 533–541: ‘The Golden-Bristled Pig’. 65 Linda Dégh, Märchen, Erzähler und Erzählgemeinschaft. Dargestellt an der Ungarischen Volksüberlieferung (Berlin 1962), 383–403; not incorporated in the American edition. 66 Cf. Dégh, Folktales and Society, 236–241, 352–353. 67 It has no separate entry in the EM; Johns, Baba Yaga, displays the type as a combination of 552A + 554 + 400 + 302; cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 885–886. 68 Kovács, ‘The Literary Genres’, 118; Erdélyi, transl. Stier. 69 Kovács, ‘The Literary Genres’, 118, 127 n. 18. 70 Wilhelm Grimm, KHM III (1856) 345–347, Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, IV (1930), 176–186; on von Gaal see also Vilmos Voigt, ‘Aus Deutschland über Österreich nach Ungarn. Der Grimmsche Einfluss auf das ungarische Volksmärchen’, in Ingo Schneider (ed.), Europäische Ethnologie und Folklore im internationalen Kontext (Frankfurt am Main 1999), 309–320. 71 Johann Mailáth, Magyarische Sagen und Maerchen (Brünn 1825), 257–272. In the second edition (Stuttgart/Tübingen 1837) the story can be found on pp. 23–37 of the second section.

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72 Dégh, ‘Tree’, 287; 314, n. 18. Ulrich Jahn, Volksmärchen aus Pommern und Rügen (Norden/Leipzig 1891), 19–29, recorded in Quatzow. Cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 731–734. 73 KHM III (1856), 393. 74 On ATU 519, see: Dagmar Burkhart, ‘Heldenjungfrau’, EM 6 (1990), 745–753. 75 English translation in Zipes, Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 307–316. 76 Afanas’ev, Maria Morewna, cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 853–856. 77 Karel Horálek, ‘Der Märchentypus AaTh 302 (302C*) in Mittel- und Osteuropa’, Deutsches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde, 13 (1967), 260–287, esp. 267–268, 270; cf. Dégh, ‘Tree’, 301; Václav Tille, Verzeichnis der böhmische Märchen (Helsinki 1921), 103–105. 78 For a comparison of the Grimm and Von Arnim texts, see: Rölleke, Grimms Märchen und ihre Quellen (Trier 1998), 518–523. 79 Steig, Achim von Arnim. Cf. Uther, Handbuch, 469. 80 Wesselski, Versuch, 71, suggests an Indian origin of the theme. 81 Zipes, Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 140. 82 Grätz, Das Märchen, 311 n. 180. 83 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, III (1918), 426; Tille, Verzeichnis, 110; see for a Hungarian version with only one sister: Kovács, Ungarische Volksmärchen, 80–87. 84 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, III (1918), 435. 85 Liungman, Die Schwedische Volksmärchen, 48–49; Inger M. Boberg, Motif-index of Early Icelandic Literature (Copenhagen 1966), E711.1. 86 Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1325–1328: Asbjørnsen and Moe; Dasent, Popular Tales, 47–58. See for a Scottish version: Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, I, 3–11: ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’, recited by a blind fiddler of Islay to the local schoolmaster. In his turn the fiddler had heard it from an old man, who could also recite Ossian’s poems – the last were printed. Campbell noticed the similarity with Norse stories and Fortunio, but did not draw conclusions from it. 87 ANE, 363; Chauvin, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes, VII (1903) 64–73, esp. 67–68: ‘il a placé son âme dans le gésier d’un passereau, mis dans une série de boîtes et caché dans un cercueil au fond de la mer’; cf. Wesselski, Versuch, 165–166. 88 Vogl, Die ältesten Volksmärchen der Russen (Wien 1841), 17. 89 Mailáth, Magyarische Sagen (Stuttgart/Tübingen, 2nd edn, 1837), 145–146. 90 Cf. Opie and Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales, 162. 91 Kovács, ‘Baum: Der himmelhohe’, EM 1 (1977), 1382: documented for the first time only shortly before 1850. 92 Opie and Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales, 162–163. 93 Goldberg, ‘The Composition of “Jack and the Beanstalk”’, Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 15 (2001), 11–26, echoing the Opies. Cf. the judgement of Neil Philip, The Penguin Book of English Folktales (1992), 7–8. 94 Opie and Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales, 162–174; Philip, English Folktales, 1–10. See also: Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 620–627.

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95 Dégh, 1978: 266, where she quotes Köhler; also Dégh, Folktale and Society, 326–327; cf. Kovács, ‘l’arbre qui pousse jusqu’au ciel’, 402–403. 96 Pentamerone 3.7; cf. Ranke, ‘Corvetto’, EM 3 (1981), 149–156. 97 Delarue and Tenèze, Le conte populaire, II (1964), 378 element IC3; 419 element IB7. 98 In case someone takes this suggestion seriously: in the nineteenth century the ‘remnants’ were part of literary traditions not of any practice and whether they once would have been part of living culture is impossible to validate, the more so because the ordening principles for such a reconstruction would be taken from a present construction of ‘shamanism’. Apart from this: projecting ‘shamanism’ on a European past does not contribute to understanding European magical practices and can certainly not replace any genuine research. 99 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 506. 100 In the English edition of 1785 with a beanstalk in the 15th tale, see: Gerald Thomas, ‘Münchhausiden’, EM 9 (1999), 1008–1015, esp. 1013; Uther, Märchen vor Grimm, 218–220, 314–315. 101 Uther, Handbuch, 252. 102 Dégh, Folktales and Society, 85. 103 Róna-Sklarek, Ungarische Volksmärchen (Leipzig 1909), no. 2 (cf. note 22). 104 Janos Erdély, tr. G. Stier, Ungarische Sagen und Märchen (Berlin 1850), 1. 105 Kovács, Ungarische Volksmärchen (1966), 173. 106 Ortutay, Ungarische Volksmärchen (Berlin, 4th edn, 1967), 531. 107 A fast growing oak tree does figure in d’Aulnoy’s story ‘Finette Cendron’, but mainly as a look-out post; it is more similar to the tree Tom Thumb climbs in ATU 327 than to a piece of vegetation reaching into the sky. See the text in Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 454–467, and an English gypsy version in: The Folk-Tales of the Magyars, issued by the Folklore Society in 1886, 144–149. 108 Pirkko-Liisa Rausmaa, ‘Grösse; Die ungewöhnliche’, EM 6 (1990), 245. Kovács, ‘Baum, himmelhohe’, EM 1 (1977), 1382. 109 Ágnes Kovács and Katalin Benedek, Magyar Népmesekatalógus, VIII (Budapest 1989), 128. 110 Dégh, ‘Tree’, 293: ‘The frame story does not seem to be just an incidental frame’. According to Goldberg, however, Dégh refined ‘the definition of this tale type’, ‘The Historic-Geographic Method’, 10. 111 Joseph Haltrich, Deutsche Volksmärchen aus dem Sachsenlande in Siebenbürgen (Berlin 1856), no. 16: ‘Der Wunderbaum’. 112 Cf. Erdély, Ungarische Sagen und Märchen, 91–95. 113 Published in 1857, see: Köhler/Bolte, Kleinere Schriften, I (1898), 437–438; summarized by Horálek, ‘Der Märchentypus AaTh 302’, 277; cf. Dégh, ‘Tree’, 302, where she discusses a Romanian story published in the 1890s. 114 This oldest recorded Hungarian tale of magic with a hero climbing a tree is from Szeged, c. 1856, but published only in 1914, see: Magyar Népmesekalógus AaTh 317, no. 38; Dégh, ‘Tree’, 272, no. 1. The loose eye motif was available from the brothers Scott’s Walachische Märchen of 1845.

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115 Horálek, ‘Der Märchentypus AaTh 302’, 272. 116 For an earlier Ukrainian variant of Benedek’s story without a tree, see: Horálek, ‘Der Märchentypus AaTh 302’, 278. 117 Mihály Hoppál, ‘Traces of Shamanism in Hungarian Folk Belief’, in: Hoppál (ed.), Shamanism in Eurasia (Göttingen 1984), 430–449: 435. The prime value of this contribution is its description of a visit to a Hungarian cunning man. 118 Tekla Dömötör, Hungarian Folk Beliefs (Bloomington 1982), 84. 119 See also: Géza Róheim, ‘Hungarian shamanism’, Psychoanalyis and the Social Sciences 3 (1951), 131–169, which comprises a summary of his 1925 Hungarian book. 120 Gábor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge 1990), 145.

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The vanishing godmother

Reasons for re-examination The story cycle of the Kind and Unkind Girls (ATU 480), in which the modest and obedient girl is rewarded and her selfish negative gets her comeuppance, was among the last to be subjected to a rigorous geographical-historical treatment. As its researcher Warren Roberts subtly remarked: ‘Type 480 gives little comfort to those who maintain that written versions of a tale are of primary importance in distributing and keeping alive fairy tales’.1 It thus presents the perfect case for this concluding chapter to test the opposite approach and to once more reiterate the argument of the dominance of the printed word. Roberts’s study has been praised as one of the ‘classics’ in folklore and was reprinted as such in 1994, thirty-six years after its first appearance. In his preface to the new, unaltered edition, Alan Dundes played upon the fear of every folklorist ‘brave or foolhardy enough to undertake a full fledged historic-geographic study of a folktale or ballad’, namely to have missed a significant number of tales. Roberts had overlooked 109 Latvian variants and it remained an open question whether or not his conclusions, based on nine times that number of stories from all over the world, would have been affected by this.2 This was, of course, highly unlikely. The careful delineation of subtypes and their geographical distribution would perhaps have to be adjusted for a small part of the Baltic area, but Roberts had already included twelve Latvian texts (and another one had become available only when he was writing his thesis). A critique of two hundred years of fairy tale research does not need to be based on additional evidence, even though it helps occasionally,3 for that would leave the basic premisses of that research intact. It is much more the coherence of the internal argument which should determine its validity. In that respect Roberts’s gigantic effort falters: at crucial places it is his reasoning that is questionable, rather than the weight of his material. Sometimes a failing sense of European geography mars the presentation: southern Germany is hardly adjacent

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to Spain and neither is Romania close to Denmark.4 These may seem minor incidents, were it not for the fact that Roberts presumes a distribution through largely oral channels for which proximity is vital. Moreover, the dynamics of the story’s movement through space appear confused. In the case of the ‘Follow the River’ subgroup, characterized by the story element in which the good girl is told to wash animal intestines (or other objects) which she then loses in the stream, the oldest variants would have been those in the margin of its Spanish ‘tradition area’, one on Majorca and one collected among Hispanic Jews. Especially the latter ‘must represent a relatively unchanged survival of the fifteenth century Spanish form of the tale’, since their presumed tellers had been expelled from Spain at that early date and survived only in the Balkans.5 As there is no fifteenthcentury example of the subtype (it surfaced only in the nineteenth), the conclusion is conjectural – and a fixed text would need printed or at least written support. The Jewish story published in 1947 is somewhat truncated as – according to Roberts’s encoding – the tasks are missing for which the girls are rewarded. This contradicts the survival theory, for if such an omission could occur at one point in the chain of tradition (even if it was late), there is no reason to uphold the notion of a stringent continuity. As it is, the earliest manifestation of the subtype occurs in a mid-nineteenth-century chapbook,6 and one expects at least some sort of discussion as to its influence; in vain. In the early 1950s Anna Birgitta Rooth had published her thesis on a partly overlapping group of stories in which she traced the washing of the intestines motif to the particular combination of the Kind and Unkind Girls with a text from the tale type One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three Eyes (ATU 511). Because the entrails appear much more natural here, coming from a dead animal the girl has herded and producing a magical object to guide her, Rooth’s derivation is convincing – even though her geographical-historical argument is not. But she regarded the ‘Iberian variant’ of the two girls tale as ‘artificial’ and as a ‘corrupt tradition’ and the entire conglomerate had ‘probably been the work of an individual bearer of tradition’ and an ‘intentional alteration’.7 In this view the Spanish story is nothing more than a soiled, secondary sample. Making it one of the cornerstones in a historical argument which places the entire type in the late Middle Ages,8 without restoring it to the status of an unassailable tradition capable of defying the centuries of wear and tear, betrays narrowmindedness, even within the confines of the Finnish School. As a champion of oral transmission, Roberts was particularly dismissive of the possibility of printed influences, if he discussed them at all. His story had, among others, been included in Perrault’s booklet, first issued in the late seventeenth century. A Swedish chapbook still represented a ‘direct translation’. Such cases were anathema: ‘They would distort the picture if they were used,

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so they must be omitted.’9 The KHM, however, was exempted from purgation. Although it carried an important variant of the so-called ‘Encounters en Route’ subtype, Roberts refrained from dealing with its potential impact (let alone of the mid-nineteenth-century German collections). Yet when briefly dwelling on the related story types the House in the Wood (ATU 431) and the Black and the White Brides (ATU 403), he followed his supervisor Stith Thompson by suggesting that most of the variants of the first could have derived from the Grimms and he repeated this for the second.10 In a later article about ATU 403 in the Nordic countries (minus Finnish-speaking Finland) he again paid some attention to ‘literary versions’ deriving from the work of d’Aulnoy and the KHM. One Swedish chapbook of 1828, however, had no noticeable literary equivalent, but, as it had some elements in common with later Swedish variants, Roberts typically concluded that it drew on oral tradition rather than the other way round.11 There is thus room for an alternative treatment of stories grouped under ATU 480, the more so because Roberts only considered texts as such which were so close to a ‘literary’ source that the link was inescapable. Previous printed editions of orally recorded fairy stories did not count as ‘literary’. A diachronic approach to the Kind and Unkind Girls not only emphasizes the failure of the Finnish School by recognizing the crucial role of print in fairy tale transmission, it also illustrates the rise and demise of a fairy tale as a story about supernatural beings in an alternative fantasy world. While these last characteristics cannot be taken as a strict definition of the fairy tale – it would, among other things, sideline most of the 480 variants – they nevertheless formed a defining part of eighteenth-century fairy tale development. But in this particular case fairy and fairy tale world were caught in a moralistic endeavour that for many pedagogues clashed with the reality they wanted to imprint on young children, girls in particular. In that sense the story carried its own contradiction and its popularity was at the same time the sign of its deficiency as a fairy tale. The story cluster of the Kind and Unkind Girls also offers the opportunity to investigate the fairy in the fairy story. A German genealogy Although the Grimms heard the German version of the Kind and Unkind Girls at least six times, it appeared only once in the main KHM volumes: as the story of Frau Holle, in English known as ‘Mother’ Holle. The KHM text was based on the story Dortchen Wild told Wilhelm Grimm on 13 October 1811 in the garden, presumably during a private tête à tête. It was expanded with fragments the brothers were probably told by their friend and contemporary Goldmann, usually portrayed as minister but at the time (1812) a young teacher at the gymnasium

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in Kassel (he was born in 1785).12 Dortchen’s story, as it featured in the last edition, introduced a widow with two daughters, the one fair and industrious, the other ugly and lazy. The woman prefers the last since it was her own daughter; the fair girl has to spin so much that her fingers bleed. When she wants to clean the blood of the spindle in a well, she drops it accidentally. Her stepmother becomes furious and the girl jumps into the well out of desperation. She regains consciousness in a beautiful meadow and finds an oven full of bread. The oven asks her to remove the loaves because they have been ready for some time. Next she relieves an apple tree of its apples and finally she comes at a little house with an old lady who has very large teeth. This is Frau Holle, who asks girl to work in her household and shake the bedclothes, ‘to make it snow in the world’. After a while the girl gets homesick, is taken to the gate and showered with gold. Frau Holle also returns her spindle. When she comes back home again, the girl is announced by the cock. She tells her relatives what happened to her. The stepmother now sends her own daughter, who ignores oven and apple tree and does her work for Frau Holle only the first day and lazes away the others. Instead of gold she is rewarded with pitch which stays on her for the rest of her life. The earlier versions were slightly simpler: in 1812 the girl just fell into the well, without having been spinning.13 The bloody spindle was added in the second, 1819 edition, on the basis of Goldmann’s text. A third variant was provided by another male friend, Ferdinand Siebert (born 1791), and partly inspired by the first KHM volume: it has the fair and obnoxious girl spinning at the well; the one who loses her distaff has to go in.14 She finds herself in a meadow and tells the pear tree to shake itself, the calf to kneel so that it can drink and the oven how to bake. She then arrives at a pancake house (recites the wind rhyme, see Chapter 3), needs to delouse the resident old lady till she sleeps and then runs off, taking a golden dress. When passing the oven, tree and calf she asks them not to betray her. The other girl does the same but, since she does not give any help, she is betrayed on way back and her golden dress gets dirty. In the Von Haxthausen variant this was much more elaborated: the good girl shakes the tree, milks the cow, takes the bread out of the oven, delouses the witch, an ape and a bear, and takes many dresses. Her pursuers are sent in the wrong direction. The evil girl is set upon by the tree and the cow.15 A last version, ‘from Hesse’ (1812) and therefore in all probability supplied by one of the Grimms’ female Kassel acquaintances, is more similar to the Wild variant. Here the girl is thrown into the well by her stepmother and regains consciousness in a garden where no one is home. She looks after the meal. The ‘Nixe’ arrives with terrible hair that has not been combed for a year; the maiden grooms the lady and gets presents. The other daughter does everything wrong and ends up with useless presents.16

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Not surprisingly the story had both male and female mediators, since, notwithstanding the all-female cast, a story about how a girl had to behave properly was a male provenance. As Holbek phrased it, the story was ‘directed at girls and one might have expected that it would be told mostly by women, but the Danish material at least shows that male and female informants are almost equally represented’.17 The tasks were ‘socially defined as feminine’ and, as everywhere in Europe, society was dominated by men. Particular female virtues such as endurance, compassion and domestic competence were framed by masculinity.18 Yet some of the male versions also digress from this pattern as stealing was never a virtue – the so-called ‘pursuit form’ was merely a kind of magic flight (cf. Chapter 3) and seemingly a digression from the main theme.19 In the course of the nineteenth century the last variant nevertheless became especially popular in northern Germany, Denmark and Norway, as well as in the English-speaking world.20 The German story of the good and the bad maiden of which the Grimms collected so many variants had a number of literary predecessors, in German, French and Italian. The first step in proving the orality of the KHM texts should be to show their independence of these earlier printings. Apart from Perrault’s ‘Les fées’ and its German translation, at least four different printed versions existed in the German language, all known to the Grimms. Initially Jacob had included a summary of the lengthy story ‘Les Nayades’ in the proto-KHM. This was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot, dame de Villeneuve and had appeared in German in 1765. Here a king, who together with his daughter Lismene is ousted from his kingdom, ends up with a miserly farmer’s widow, who also has a daughter. These last two women order the princess to perform all kinds of menial tasks such as looking after the sheep, cleaning out the stables and spining a certain amount of yarn. They call her Liron, akin to Cinderella, which is translated in German as Murmelthier, marmot.21 While shepherding Lismene falls into a well and finds herself in a dry space, surrounded by water, as inside a crystal ball. Nymphs give her three presents to facilitate her tasks. Her stepsister fares badly, however, and is rewarded with an ugly headdress from which only Lismene can release her. The tale then continues with the errands Lismene is made to perform: to pick pears from an enchanted tree and to obtain flowers full of gems from the garden of a cursed mill. Where Lismene succeeds with the help of the Nayades (water nymphs), her stepsister Pigriese ignores the warnings and fails to enter into a reciprocal relation with the beings that would help her. In the Grimms’ own published compilation the summary was shortened even further and the errands disappeared.22 They nevertheless stood at the basis of the subtype identified by Roberts as the ‘encounters en route’, as in the next instalment they were worked in the sequence of the descent in the well and the meeting with the supernatural being. Roberts may have claimed that this

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particular subtype presents one of the oldest forms of the story, but it developed only in the course of the eighteenth century and was elaborated in its present shape only in the early nineteenth. The passage with the tasks became more pronounced in the next rendering of the story by Benedikte Naubert in her Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen of 1789.23 One of the frame stories in the first volume, ‘Der kurze Mantel’ (The Short Cloak), deals with female intrigues at the court of King Arthur. When the protagonist is falsely accused of having supported Morgaine, she finds shelter with a certain Mrs Rose, who tells her her life story, which is basically another Kind and Unkind Girls, told in the first person. Most importantly, it introduces Hulla or Hulda as the German version of the French fairies or nayades, a procedure in line with Naubert’s predecessor Johann Carl August Musäus.24 This Hulda is described as a phantom (Gespenst) who ensures that girls do their daily work in a proper manner. Following de Villeneuve, Naubert still gave this creature a mass of hair, which takes four hours to disentangle. When Rose falls into the well, finds herself in realm beyond the well, has wandered around and is finally confronted by Hulda in the spinning room, the following exchange occurs: Did you shake my trees? she asked after a little while in a roaring voice. No, my dear lady, I have supported them. Did you refrain from nibbling? I tried some pears, which lay on the grass. Did you steal the golden bowl from my well? I did not touch it, but I drank frequently and a lot out of the hollow of my hand because I was thirsty. How are things in the kitchen? I marinated the partridges and stirred the stew, since the cooks were not there, I also turned your rolls in the oven, just before they got burned. Did you taste them? No, I just gathered some crumbs to still my hunger. You should have left off, but it is all right and you can serve.25

Naubert’s embedded tale not only is the first place where Frau Holle paid her respects, it also introduced the tasks on the way as integral part of the main story. And it contains the reference to stealing. ‘The Short Cloak’ was one of the most successful of Naubert’s stories; already in 1791 it was separately printed in Vienna under the title Genelas and it circulated in verse form.26 The opening story in the Feen-Mährchen (1801), on the other hand, branched off from the main story genealogy as it had developed until then by featuring nuns as the awarding employers instead of norns (or other supernatural women). It also complicated the plot with enchanted animals and an evil giant Kifri who smashes the nasty sister against the rocks, which she does not survive.27 Its main influence

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will have been the introduction of religious figures as donors. The next publication, of 1802 by Wilhelm Reynitzsch, featured a male donor, a little man. He puts the sisters through several choices, rewards the meek and punishes the greedy one.28 Together these four publications not only provided most of the different elements of the Grimm variants (the cock who comes to announce the homecoming of the girls which Wilhelm inserted in the KHM had its origin in the 1802 tale, for instance), they also supplied the material for the German-language stories published around the middle of the century. These divide into several main groups: one is typified by the Bechstein story of Goldmary and Tarmary (Die Goldmaria und die Pechmaria), originally published in 1845. Its narrator had taken important elements from Reynitzsch, such as the male donor, now the wild Thürschemann and the two gates. In the 1802 tale one of the decisions the girls are confronted with is whether they want to eat with beautiful spinning ladies or with cats and snakes; in the Bechstein variant the latter have turned into cats and dogs.29 The combination of a male donor and the religious element was elaborated in the KHM story St Joseph in the Forest from the Von Haxthausen family (KHM 201). German retellings with Christian and male figures were such that they lately have been summed up as ‘degenerated forms’ of the tale.30 This observation does not extend to the late KHM story about the three little men in the wood where the girls are sent to fetch strawberries in the winter, which is clearly a new composition with an old motif and hardly a separate type.31 The KHM version with Frau Holle became well known through school books,32 but made its influence felt only in the later twentieth-century German stories, twice with Frau Holle and several times without her being named but with the snowing motif.33 Holle For the Grimms Frau Holle represented one of the defining examples of mythological survivals. As Wilhelm wrote in his 1819 introduction: Frau Holle or Hulda has also retained her name from prehistory, but only in the German states of Hesse, Thuringia and Franconia. She is a gracious and kind goddess, but also terrifying and terrible; she lives in the deep and on the heights, in the lakes and in the mountains, delivers misfortune or blessing, according to what she judges people have deserved. She spans the whole earth and when she makes her bed and lets the feathers fly, it snows on earth.34

This opinion, elaborated in Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, has long been accepted orthodoxy,35 but in the course of time severe flaws have been exposed.

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All there is to say is that the name Holda has medieval roots and that there is a devine connection. Further suggestions are either speculative or wrong. The image of the flying feathers was a common saying connected to the daily experience with feather bed covers. Jacob could only refer to parallels since an independent link to Frau Holle failed.36 The earliest mention of Holda in medieval sources does not relate to a proper name but only to an adjective, holden.37 Its meaning has been construed as ‘light’ or ‘shining’ (from hel), although this etymology is contested and it could more easily be read as ‘covered’ or ‘hidden’ (when hul is preferred).38 This epiphet was applied not to a goddess but to women, holden, in the train of a goddess, usually called Diana but also Herodias. The name Friggaholda, which Jacob linked to the Norse pantheon, did not exist as such; it was a misreading of striga holda, refering to the flying night witches following the devine leader. Only in the course of the thirteenth century was the adjective turned into the proper name, Huld or Hulde (and never as Held or Helda),39 in a process of personification in which the followers changed into the main being also called regina celi, the queen of heaven. It remains unclear whether the train consisted of women, spirits, souls, or perhaps even some kind of fairies. It is also impossible to discount the influence of Mary here. Although reports on pagan customs were always filtered through the perception of the Christian scribes, Christianity was more than a simple layer to be discarded to reveal the underlying pre-Christian concepts. At the very least, it played its own role in shaping the concepts before they were even recorded. The link between Frau Holle and the mountain of Venus has been found only in the confessions of a Hessian cunning man in 1630, Diel Bröll or Breull.40 This may have been contamination produced by the tensions of a criminal trial; it hardly functioned as a means to impress upon his clients where he had gained his supernatural knowledge. In mid-Europe the tale of a visit to an alluring woman in a magical place was told about Tannhäuser. It was widespread and echoed in the Scottish poem of the musician Thomas the Rhymer who was captured by the Queen of Faerie. Its connotations were more complex, however; for those who understood the classical connection and had a sense of anatomy, the concept of the Mountain of Venus refered to a man’s submission to female sexual attraction. Others took it literally.41 But Bröll was not seduced and the innards of his mountain resembled purgatory more than anything else. In the early nineteenth century Frau Holle mainly figured as a local variant of a ‘white woman’ and the Grimms found out most about her in seventeenth-century sources.42 If the fairy tale about Frau Holle had been present in medieval times, there would surely have been references to it somewhere – oral stories never stay completely hidden, especially when they concern hidden women. There is, however, no sign of the particular tale in this context and in their turn the

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stories Hulda did figure in were not found in the later recorded fairy tale tradition. It provides yet another indication of the late eighteenth-century joining of figure and plot. Frau Holle may have had some relation to German legendary figures, she was never a proper equivalent of the literary French fairies. By Germanizing Villeneuve’s nayades Naubert caused much confusion, especially among nineteenth-century mythologists who took the Grimm assessment at face value. The image of the snowing bed feathers, visible for everyone who slept under a duvet, will have been Dortchen’s touch. The story of the Kind and Unkind Girls as a whole had another history. Italian and French ancestors George Peele’s late sixteenth-century play The Old Wives Tale is generally considered to contain the oldest reference to the two girls story. Zantippe and Celanta are both sent to the well for the water of life; the idea being that when they behave properly they will find a husband. But the fair maiden is offended by the sexual innuendo in the words of one of the heads in the well: ‘Stroke me smooth, and comb my head / And thou shalt have some cockell bread’, and smashes her pitcher on it.43 The ill-faced Celanta combs a head and is rewarded with gold. At the time English playwrights habitually plundered Italian material and Peele may have been another example of this.44 For a version of the story had already appeared in the first volume of Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti, namely Biancabella. In this case it is less clear whether this story stands at the beginning of a line (as the Magician and this Pupil did for its offspring, see Chapter 4) or whether it was merely inspired by an already circulating parent story. It certainly has all the ingredients: two sisters, a donor who bestows beauty and implores obedience, and a contrasting girl whose hair is full of large lice and emits a stench.45 Only now the donor is a magical twin sister in the shape of a snake who later in the story turns into a forest nymph. And the ugly girl is not the sister or the stepsister but the daughter of the stepmother of the heroine’s husband. There is also the substitute bride theme. By letting the heroine’s mother be impregnated by a snake, Straparola reversed the gender of the well-known story of one the proto-fairies, Melusine (the sister snake turned nymph has all her characteristics too, see below). He borrowed the heroine’s loss of hands from widely circulating saints’ legends. Basile’s ‘Le tre fate’ (III.10) starts with the horrible widow and her ugly daughter. The widow marries a man whose daughter Cicella is flawless and this girl is maltreated by her new stepmother. One day she drops a basket into a ravine. A little monstrous man, to whom she is friendly, tells her to descend, whereupon she finds three fairies. She combs their hair, stays kind and modest

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all along and is rewarded with a beauty treatment, complete with a golden star on her forehead. Her stepsister, in contrast, is adorned with an ass’s testicle. Cicella is then made to herd the swine, where she is discovered by the king who immediately wants to marry her. But the stepmother switches the girls. After a dreadful night the king switches them back and the stepmother kills her own daughter and plunges into a well herself. ‘Le due pizette’ (IV.7) again features two opposed girls, now cousins. Marziella is friendly to an old woman (later called a fairy) at a fountain and in return finds gems falling out of her hair and flowers out of her mouth and in her footsteps. Her cousin scolds the old woman and is given a head full of lice and thistles wherever she treats. It is possible that Basile composed the first story with Biancabella in mind; once a nymph is equated with a fairy, it is no big step to make her into three ‘fates’. His elaborating on the theme also resulted in a third story, ‘Li mise’ (V.2), now with two brothers and the month March as the donor of a box which fulfils the owner’s wishes; the impolite brother is bestowed with a whip. When one compares texts, there is no question that one of the late seventeenthcentury French conteuses, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, read Basile’s Marziella. In Les enchantements de l’éloquence (1695) she even tells this in so many words by letting her characters read novels. The father of the lovely girl remarries, and his new wife has an ugly daughter. The girl is set tasks, sent to a dangerous fountain, attacked by a boar, and by mistake wounded by a prince. A fairy heals her. The next time at the well another fairy grants her jewels and pearls. When the ugly daughter shows up and sees only a woman in peasant attire, she insults her and is bestowed with snakes and insects. A happy marriage follows between good girl and prince and the ugly girl dies. What is noticeable here is the development in the contrast between the girls; where Straparola and Basile sufficed with lice emerging from the nasty girl’s hair, L’Héritier expanded them to appalling creatures in general. Perrault, whose story ‘Les fées’ appeared two years later but may have been recited in the salons at an earlier date, presented either a simplified form of L’Héritier,46 or was directly modelled on the Pentamerone.47 In the middle of the eighteenth century the theme of writing was picked up again by Leprince de Beaumont in her ‘Aurore et Aimée’, a didactic story like Perrault’s only more lengthy, to tell girls that whatever happens to them is for their own good. Aurore is the good sister, abandoned by her mother and taken in by a shepherdess fairy who teaches her how to avoid boredom by working and reading. There is a vague hint of a substitute bride, as the king wants to marry Aurore when he has heard that her brother is smitten by her beauty and she is temporarily disabled by a fall in the bushes. But even that fate turns out for the good. Villeneuve’s story that would have such an impact in Germany had already appeared some fifteen years before.

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These four French tales, as well as Basile’s earlier stories, could hardly fail to leave traces in the recordings of the nineteenth-century French folklorists, from the 1870s onwards.48 But since folklorists refrained from taking notes of what they could identify as obvious printed stories, in this case the Perrault version, the matter of the relation of their texts to prints is slightly more complex.49 What stands out, however, is the relatively simple structure of the later French stories. A female parent figure hates the good girl and sends her away. The girl meets a, usually female, supernatural creature and is rewarded because of her polite and modest behaviour. The bad girl misbehaves and is punished. A kind of other world is hardly present, nor are there any ‘tasks en route’.50 In most cases, however, the stories end with a marriage, which also distinguishes them from the German variants. There is thus very little diversion from the pattern as established by Perrault and the conteuses. The earliest published example is Bladé’s ‘Les deux filles’, dictated to him by one of his main female informants Catherine Sustrac and ‘contrôlé’, checked by his mother-in-law. The greater part of this story is taken up with a Petit Poucet opening until the pretty girl arrives at a castle where she is rewarded for her modesty and adorned with three stars. Afterwards she meets the son of the king of England and they marry. Her ugly and greedy stepsister is showered with cow dung and has to settle for an old man.51 Occasionally one can also discern another Pentamerone element when the girl tells the woman whose hair she combs, that she finds neither lice nor nits but only a clean head.52 Compare this with ‘Le tre fate’, where she says ‘I’m finding nits and lice and pears and rubies’. The story collected in Montiers-sur-Sault, a village in Lorraine, and published in 1886 by Cosquin, on the other hand, is part of what Roberts called the ‘Heaven and Hell group’: stories with a girl and a boy who meet the Holy Virgin and respectively end up in heaven and in hell. Apart from Lorraine, these stories are found in the adjacent areas of Austria and southern Germany (already in the 1850s), and in Belgium. Also because Maria hands out a box with gifts in all but the Dutch-language versions, the similarity can hardly have been the result of oral distribution and was more likely to have been generated by Catholic teaching material. If this was the case, it could explain why the figure of Mary also appeared in the versions with two girls which primarily follow a French plot. In one of the earliest recorded texts, ‘Les deux filles’ from 1870, one of two sisters meets the Holy Virgin when fetching water.53 She delouses the Lady and receives a box in return. Here is also the question and answer game; moreover the story continues with a cursed mill sequence, as in de Villeneuve. And although the box motif has been designated as typically oral,54 it also featured in the Pentamerone and before that in medieval tales such as the Gesta Romanorum and the Decamerone; it was also used by Shakespeare in his Merchant of Venice.55

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In other words, rather than a coincidental manifestation of a long line of oral retellings, this second ‘Les deux filles’, too, primarily comes across as a combination of elements from stories already in print.

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The fairy in the tale Fairies have appeared in literary works since the twelfth century. Whether or not these prose romances and lays harbour any underlying notions of everyday fairies is, depending on whom one consults, either virtually impossible to find out or very unlikely. As Noel Williams concludes: ‘fairy is best regarded as primarily a literary word, and therefore not initially an item in the vocabulary of the illiterate in Medieval England’. The term ‘fairy’ derived from fata, fate or destiny but the oldest written form was not a noun, as with hulden, but indicated a ‘quality of phenomena or events’, best rendered as ‘fatedness’.56 Outside Britain, however, fée or fatum did present itself as a noun, pointing to the goddesses of antiquity, whose stories were being rewritten at the time. Fairies certainly had a literary ancestry and twelfth-century German authors used the terms for fairy and goddess as interchangeable. There are some medieval examples of fairy godmothers, although the theme appears to have become popular only in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Fairy history is complex and can easily take up a separate book,57 and I will only trace the bare outlines here. Next to bestowers of the protagonist’s fate, fairies became the givers of magical objects, Fortuna being the most outstanding example. Morgaine, who can be considered as the proto-fairy (the root of her name is still present in, for instance, ‘nightmare’), exibited elements of both the classical goddess and enchantress, as she was portrayed as being able to fly around the world, changing people into animals, adept in healing and capable to call on dragons. Fairy women also figure as lovers from the other world.58 The story of Melusine is one of the main examples, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century well known throughout Europe in broadsides, but already in rudimentary form present in the twelfth century. Daughter of the fairy Presine in Avalon (the medieval version of the Garden of the Hesperides), she changes every Saturday into a half-human, half-snake-like being because of some family problems. She brings her curse into her marriage – her husband should not see her in her other shape – but he does not keep his promise.59 This kind of prohibition is current in most of the liaison tales: husbands or lovers of fairies should keep silent about it, not look or touch her in particular circumstances, that is, withdraw the use of one of their main senses. In the later fairy tales the enchanted prince or princess has taken the place of the fairy in this respect, which clarifies taboos such as the one in the Iron Stove (see Chapter 5).

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Whatever their origin, both the figures of the fairies and the themes of the tales became a primarily literary tradition the moment they were reworked for an aristocratic audience. In contrast, everyday-life concepts current among the populace (and not just the lower classes) all had their strong negative sides or were malevolent beings per se: like the witches, elves brought illness and death, nightmares made the dreamer lose semen, mermaids lured the sailor to his grave, white women led wanderers astray, werewolves were outlawed criminals. It had very little to do with demonization by an opposing clergy and much more with the dangers of daily existence (popular traditions proved remarkably resistant to any attempt at eradication). To complicate things: in the English language ‘fairy’ became dominant and replaced ‘elf’ in Anglo-Saxon and words for similar concepts in the Irish and Scottish languages. As fairies were just one of the many figures in the European medieval literacy, nobody thought of designating the tales as ‘fairy stories’ and to do so now would be decidedly unhistorical. Romances embodied aristocratic fears and values; in as far as everyday-life concepts were utilized, the very first vestiges of distantiation are visible.60 Italian Renaissance works built on these medieval predecessors, rather than on contemporary notions: gatherings under the leadership of fairy-like figures such as Habundia or Satia which left their traces in the Inquisition records were not included in the entertainment literature. When in the seventeenth century Basile broadly scattered fairies through his Lo cunto de li cunti, portraying them as grateful, helping and beautiful, he primarily referred to the literary Italian tradition.61 He may have been able to do so (and escape censorship) only because his stories were considered as far enough removed from daily concerns to afflict the superstitious. Fairies reached the pinacle of their popularity among the late seventeenthand eighteenth-century French conteuses and conteurs, who not only changed Basile’s ogresses into evil fairies but also very soon were unable to write a conte des fées without any fairy, even though they did not possess a unified concept of the creature. In Germany, however, the popularity of the stories initially clashed with the figure of the fairy as there was no literary equivalent available to provide a proper translation – the medieval practice had become obsolete. First attempts to remedy this involved ‘enchantress’ and ‘witch’ before authors settled on the neologism ‘Fee’, among others in the Märgen vom ersten Aprile (1755) with its four fairy fates: Zoimane, Asaide, Zimzine and Alcimedore.62 After the French occupation, the KHM bears witness of the counter-movement. Most of the stories were kept, but the fairies were either deleted together with overly French versions as Jeanette Hassenpflug’s ‘Okerlo’ and ‘Hurleburlebutz’, or changed into the ‘weise Frauen’ (wise women) as in Sleeping Beauty. Fairies remained only in publications which did not pretend to represent an oral tradition, such

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as Caroline Stahl’s Fabeln, Mährchen und Erzählungen für Kinder (1817) or the 1820s collections by Lehnert and Lohr. Early nineteenth-century Hungarian fairy tales still featured fairies, as for instance the pursuing fairy in a metamorphosis flight in the story of the Glass Axe.63 One of Majláth’s stories contained the trio of the evil fairy Fanferina, the fairy Liliafiamma, and the wizard Zoraduro, which bore more similarity to operas than to any oral tradition.64 In their turn the English readers were so used to fairies in fairy tales that Taylor had to insert a few in his KHM rendering. Developments in the English language In England the ATU 480 subtype Heads in the Well was issued in chapbook form as early as 1764.65 This booklet contained seven stories, purportedly told by ‘scholars of Cockermouth’ with, on the whole an anecdotal, if not downright sexual, ambience.66 Its variant of the kind and the unkind girl related the story of the princess who walks away from home because of a stepmother with an ugly demeanour. She then meets an old man with whom she shares her food and who presents her with a wand which enables her to cross a thorny hedge. Beyond lies a well with three golden heads who ask to be groomed: ‘Wash me, comb me, lay me down softly.’ She consents and is rewarded with beauty, perfume and fortune, whereupon she meets king charming. Her jealous sister then does everything wrong, gets a stink and leprosy instead and has to be content by marrying a cobbler (who cures her of her leprosy). The stepmother hangs herself, ‘in wrath’.67 In its turn this story was inspired by George Peele’s play of 1595, where the motif of the girl grooming watery heads and being rewarded for it also featured. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the story was retold several times. As Roberts remarked: ‘Several of the oral versions have elements which are very much like the chapbook form’, singling out an Irish and an American version. Yet he concluded: There is, however, no oral version which corresponds to the chapbook version in more than a few important details. The similarities noted may well be ascribed to the fact that the author drew upon an oral versions which contained these elements. The chapbook form of the story can have had no great influence on the oral versions.68

Needless to say, none of the ‘oral’ versions predated the chapbook and it seems more reasonable to assume slight flaws in retelling. There is even an intermediate printed version, with an abridged form of the story and the washing rhyme.69 The similarities between printed and oral versions relate to both the structure and most of the details. At the very least the chapbook aided the tradition; more

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probably it carried it. In Britain five related versions can be shown. A Scottish one has a pony that carries the heroine ‘owre the muir o’ hecklepins’ to the well at the world’s end; her counterpart refuses the beast’s help and has to walk through the thorns and again ends up with an old cobbler.70 In 1915 a man named Tommy Smith summarized the last version: ‘A great King’s son married the lovely Princess but her stepsister was turned out of the palace, and an ugly old beggarman married her. The Queen died in despair.’71 Another variant, published in 1896 and told to the author by her nursemaid, also originated from the chapbook, now with fishes in the well, who still implore the girl ‘wash me and comb me and lay me down softly’.72 The chapbook version does not account for all the British 480 texts; another string of variants amplified the stealing motif rather than extolling the behavioural lesson. Here the girls serve in a witch’s house, make away with her money and are assisted in their flight by creatures they have sometimes helped before. This is in essence the North German and Scandinavian variant mentioned above and its showing in the English language had come about through the highly popular 1858 and 1859 translation by George Webbe Dasent of the Norwegean volume of Asbjørnsen and Moe. Patrick Kennedy, the Dublin bookseller who had also been responsible for transferring the KHM Golden Bird story to Ireland (see Chapter 2), copied the Norse tale in his Irish Fireside Stories of 1870. As the Norwegian folklorist Christiansen noticed, the similarity between the two ‘extends to the very words, to the bits of rhyme, and to the general manner of telling’.73 In the Dasent text the man’s daughter goes down the well, happens upon a hedge, a cow, a wether (sheep) and an apple tree before she arrives at the farm house of ‘an old hag of the Trolls’ with her daughter. She has to carry out impossible tasks by which she is helped by little birds (as in Bechstein). For wages she is given a choice between a red, a green and a blue casket and the birds tell her to take the blue. On her way back she hears the witch and her daughter behind her and is hidden by the four creatures. Her sister takes the red casket (which the witch does not want back): it contains toads and snakes which also tumble out of the girl’s mouth when she speaks.74 In the Kennedy version the baskets are gold, silver and lead, the little birds are fed beforehand and the tasks are expanded. This pedigree explains the presence of the chasing witch, once also with a daughter, in the later English versions from which the second girl is sometimes dropped while a third is sometimes added. Once the girl serves with a unique fox who chases her, wereupon both disappear in the wood.75 Soon after its book publication the story will have appeared in a journal or a magazine with the boxes turned to bags of gold and silver,76 because such a detail turns up a number of times. Christiansen, who encountered the last stories in Donegal as well as

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in English Deptford, concluded upon a derivation from the English without taking into account the strong Irish presence at the Kentish dockyard which opens up the possibility of an Irish narrator or source.77 In the story’s transition only a thin layer of orality can be discerned; its main development happened through print, a conclusion that also applies to the story’s manifestations in the United States. The most obvious American instances of printed ancestry turned up in the Schoharie Hills (near Albany, New York) where in 1913 a woman named ‘Aunt’ Jane Buell related a Bechstein variant with male donor and cats and dogs;78 and in Kentucky, where Leonard Roberts discovered a Dasent derivation, with a little bird advising to take the blue box.79 It is also striking that both Campbell in Kentucky and Carter in neighbouring North Carolina recorded almost identical stealing tales: the first with a stingy old woman called old Gally Mandy and the second with an old woman who repeatedly recites the line ‘Gally Mander, Gally Mander, all my gold and silver’s gone and my great long leather purse’. Carter interviewed the folksinger Jane Hicks Gentry, born 1863, who listened to her grandfather in her youth and will have picked up this particular tale in the 1870s when it was still fresh from the press (even though she claimed that her grandfather Council Harman had the story from his mother Sabra Hicks).80 Campbell’s informant Big Nelt was born in the early 1870s and heard his stories from a visiting Irishman.81 Different phases of the story genealogy were found within a relatively small area and the younger managed to survive into the late 1940s, possibly because it had morphed from a moral tale into a female kind of Jack tale, a ‘cante fable’, driven by a rhyming refrain of the wronged witch:82 Horse o mine, horse mine Have you ever seen a maid of mine With a wig and a wag and a long leather bag. Who stold all the money I ever had?

Linda Dégh may have observed that the collectors Campbell and Roberts ‘never raised a question concerning the conspicious closeness of the texts to the Grimm tales’,83 but as in so many other instances their cases only formed the tip of the iceberg which consisted of folklorists obsessed by orality, unsuspecting of the scope of printed influence. Colonial encounters One day in July 1979 in Madurai, South India, a Brahman woman met with some of her female friends and told them a story about two stepsisters. The oldest is driven out of the house and helps a stone, a plant and an elephant

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before she arrives at the abode of an old lady, for whom she does chores. In return she wants only some leftover rice and an ordinary mat to sleep on; she also does not need any new clothes. When she becomes beautiful, a prince passes by and marries her: the elephant carries them, the plant showers them with flowers and the stone paves the way, back to the girl’s stepmother. Now the other girl retraces her stepsister’s steps, refuses to aid the creatures, does not want to work and is greedy. She gets a shepherd and they are chased by the elephant, showered with thorns and have to stumble over a rocky path. The moral: jealousy makes you suffer.84 A century earlier a tale about two girls was published in English which falls into the same category as the 1970s version. These girls are apparently old enough to live alone and one day the ‘most agreeable’ one decides to visit her father. She tidies up a plum tree, a fire, a pîpal tree and a stream. Her father gives her a dowry and on the way back everyone she has helped furnishes presents too. The quarrelsome sister refuses to help anyone, her brother chases her away from her father and the return journey is full of mishaps.85 A few years later a similar story was told with reversed generations: a mother and a mother-in-law are suffering unequal treatment by a wife of a Brahman. The husband’s mother then meets the goddess Kali who gives her a rejuvenating mango. The motherin-law lies to the goddess and the fruit turns her into an ass.86 These last two stories are sufficiently different not to be directly related but also hardly provide any evidence of a widespread Indian tradition. The first has German characteristics and the ass in the second is reminiscent of Basile’s donkey scrotum, even with an Indian replacement of the fairy. The late 1970s story has, in fact, the contrasting husbands from the English stories and the encounters from the KHM which makes an internal Indian evolution improbable. The similarity between Indian and European stories has long been noted and explanations have ranged from ancient Indian influence on European material, either in writing (Benfey) or by word of mouth (Cosquin, see Chapter 4) to coincidence or similarity in human nature. The latter lines of thought were current among the British colonial rulers, whose wives, daughters and clergymen had initiated the collection of folklore in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They were supported by scholarly theories on polygenesis by academics who, when they took account of colonialism, saw it in terms of bringing civilization to the primitives.87 Collecting folklore in India was a western undertaking and the few native inhabitants involved can be considered as westernized, as for example the Christian minister Lal Behari Day and the artist Putlibai Wadia.88 Like so many folklorists, in Europe as well as in the colonies, those in India did not question their own dominant social and cultural position and the impact of their presence on their informants’ performance.89 In some cases they may have

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heard a genuine Hindu or Muslim tale; in this instance the texts alone show that they merely reaped what was sown only slightly earlier, presumably by missionaries. When Flora Steel, the wife of an English magistrate, noted down stories from children – a Jatt boy in Farmana told her the one about the two sisters – she will hardly have tapped into an ancient local tradition, even if the story was ‘common all over the Rohtak district’.90 The children mainly told her what she wanted to hear. The native servants of Georgina Kingscote likewise reflected western imput. Mary Frere’s Hindu Fairy Legends, purportedly ‘collected from oral tradition’ (without a Kind and Unkind tale) stemmed from her ayah Anna De Souza, a ‘very suspicious source’, whose family had been Christian for three generations.91 And although Henry Parker ‘deliberately sought out remote villages untouched by western civilization’ in Sri Lanka,92 his ‘The Roll of Cotton’, with two sisters, featured both the helping sequence and the choosing of boxes as reward and punishment, which once more points to western influence, in this case the Dasent translation. India was vast enough to have had the potential for producing a considerable variety in its versions of the Kind and Unkind Girls. As it is, the main difference is found in the play upon the generations; the request for help on the way occurs in most stories.93 This was originally a German trait and, when it did not originate from the Norse tale, it could easily have been borrowed from the English translation of Frau Holle which had already appeared in 1826 and was at least reprinted in 1864, next to the circulation of an anthology in a penny version with woodcuts.94 Its translator John Edward Taylor’s 1848 English rendering of the Pentamerone was already ‘most carefully expurgated’ and left out ‘Le tre fate’, but this does not preclude other channels through which the latter story could insert its influence. Iraqi examples are even more illuminating here, as they join a ‘tre fate’ ending, complete with the substitute bride passage, to One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes texts.95 The suggestion that this was originally a Middle Eastern story and that the Pentamerone contained the alien elements is unhistorical conjecture; the conglomerate of the 480 and 511 types emerged in Italy only in the 1860s and the only vestige of Cinderella in the Arabian Nights is to be found in the late nineteenth-century Mardrus edition,96 to which ‘Egyptian’ stories with an European stamp were added (cf. chapter 4). In the Dutch Indies, present-day Indonesia, the situation was hardly dissimilar, although texts were collected by male ministers and missionaries rather than by administrators’ wives. Adriani noticed a strong resemblance between the KHM and stories from the Toradja and the Minahassa but postponed an explanation until more research had been done. In the last Sulawesi text a stepdaughter is washing at the river when she loses her dress. In search of it, she ends up with the Old Lady, whom she serves without questioning. Her dress is returned and

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on the way back home she is showered with clothes and jewels. A second girl mocks the Old Lady and returns home dishevelled. The first tale portrays an old man as master, whose testicles fill the entire house.97 In his turn Jan de Vries suspected that the second half of the ‘Twee Zusters’ he published in 1925 had been imported from the Netherlands, since it included a Cinderella continuation, complete with a golden slipper which was rare in the East. The first half consisted of a Perrault adaptation with a crocodile doubling for the fairies: the good girl drops gold from her mouth, the bad one stones and earth.98 Perrault was indeed very popular in the Netherlands, but there were other influences as well. A text recorded in 1907 by a missionary on Java portrayed a girl who loses her doll in the river, takes up service with an old man, cleans his head of snakes, scorpions and centipedes and is offered a choice between boxes.99 In the late nineteenth century the Norse collection had been translated into Dutch too. A paper trail When the Kind and Unkind Girls stories are approached from a historical perspective then the printed priority of their transmission stands out. Whether in Europe or in Asia, orally recorded tales can all be viewed as versions of texts previously in print. Yet Roberts’s presumptions and conclusions have hardly been questioned, although the two are clearly interrelated. They are exemplary of the method of the Finnish School, up to the persistent attempts to locate fairy tale origins in the Near East, as to correspond with the history of Europe’s civilization.100 The presumptions of orality emphasized geography: historical developments were read from geographical occurrence and the widest spatial distribution pointed to the oldest subtype. When two ‘subtypes’ vied for the honour, as in this case the ‘Encounters en Route’ and the ‘Following the River’, a twisted kind of logic took over. The latter subtype was found ‘in a long narrow band extending from Japan through Southern Asia, the Near East, and Southern Europe to the Iberian Peninsula’, the former in ‘Northern Europe, Africa, India, and Japan’, all ‘peripheral areas’. According to Roberts ‘the only logical explanation’ was that the Encounters subtype was the oldest, but that in its core areas it was replaced by the Following the River.101 Earlier he had established that the Near East was the ‘original home’ of the River subtype because it was placed in the centre of the map and had retained its original characteristics.102 Among the rich Near Eastern early modern story collections, the 480 type has still not been identified,103 but the point makes little sense anyhow, as it does not allow for a story to be changed in the environment it was created. In other words: mutation presupposes a distancing movement from the original, but only in space and not in time. Apparently a margin does not

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count as a space far enough removed to allow such movement. What exactly constitutes the boundary between the familiar and the foreign remains the folklorist’s verdict. How the occurrence of different variants within a specific area and of similar variants in different areas is then to be explained is still an enigma, if it does not undermine the whole line of thinking. An alternative genealogy of the story variants amounts to reconstructing a paper trail, sometimes with a few missing links but on the whole more historically accurate. One of the first observations is that the marriage ending was an integral part of the story in all the pre-1800 versions. This answers Holbek’s reservations about the story’s genre; in its nineteenth-century guise it had become a children’s tale, or more precisely a tale deemed fit to educate children, but he would certainly have ranked the earlier texts as proper fairy tales.104 Once again this indicates how the KHM influenced the type description.105 It also stresses the reward and punishment morale in the nineteenth-century versions. Even though the older English stories show that the same could be accomplished by showing different marriages, to end just before the man showed up conveyed a more direct message. A similar process can be discerned with the bestower of reward and punishment: a fairy figure would, so the pedagogues will have thought, only lead girls astray and a religious replacement was more educational. This is already visible in the 1801 Feen-Mährchen with its nuns; the slightly later texts which the Grimms received from the Catholic Von Haxthausens figured Joseph who later gave way to Mary.106 It seems likely that other figures who acted as givers of boxes were in first instance replacements of Joseph or Mary in a non-Catholic context; the alternative thesis that the box was independently appropriated from the Pentamerone story more than once is, although in theory not impossible, hardly plausible. Once an informant of Asbjørnsen had turned Mary into a troll woman and Dasent’s English translation of the Norwegian volume became a commercial success, the boxes could be further disseminated, or be changed into bags of gold. The development of the Following the River subtype during the second half of the nineteenth century fits this educational pattern. It can be interpreted as a rationalized version of the Falling into the Well, Villeneuve’s eighteenth-century elaboration of the mere meeting at the well of the seventeenth-century Italian and French texts and especially the villain’s fall into the well at the end of the ‘Le tre fate’. This is most evident in the stories published around 1860 in which the river carries off intestines, or a spindle, or yarn, or a water container or whatever else floats. These are all different attempts to solve what pedagogues will have conceived as the same problem: a fairy tale world to descend into was incompatible with the demands of how women were to behave. A proper lady does not jump into a well. Incidently this shows that similar demands do not

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have to result in similar solutions; variation is more likely instead, such as with the cotton being blown away by the wind which is a Near Eastern adaptation. So-called ‘allo-motifs’ work only as replacements of an established original.107 The most widespread 480 subtype therefore does not have to point at an old age; it is better to comprehend it as a result of western missionary zeal and the response to it by members of local populations. At least that leaves non-European nineteenth-century texts what they obviously are: witnesses of colonial encounters fraught with inequality and attempts to please the collector. European texts may have been produced in different situations, they stemmed from a similar kind of disparity between notator and narrator. Rather than being the paragon of orality, the Kind and Unkind Girls theme positions fairy tales in at least one of their proper slots: education. Their dissemination by teachers, the inner missionairies of western society and often belonging to the clergy themselves, has so far been underestimated in folklore research and deserves urgent attention. Tales of magic became part of a feeble oral tradition only at a very late stage in Europe’s history; instead of being traditional they formed part of the movement to combat genuine oral traditions as ‘superstitious’. Notes 1 Warren E. Roberts, ‘The Special Forms of Aarne-Thompson Type 480 and Their Distribution’, Fabula 1 (1958), 85–102: 92. 2 Alan Dundes, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in: Warren E. Robberts, The Tale of the Kind and the Unkind Girls. Aa-Th 480 and Related Titles (Detroit 1994), ix–xiv. 3 See for extra German and French variants: Ranke, Schleswig-Holsteinische Volksmärchen, II (1958), 90–92; Delarue and Tenèze, Le conte populaire français, II (1964), 197; and further the references in: Barbara Gobrecht, ‘Mädchen: Das gute und das schlechte (AaTh 480)’, EM 8 (1996), 1366–1375, esp. 1373 notes 21 and 22. 4 Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 104, 121 – on the latter page the Danish influence on a text collected in Transylvania is discussed; cf. 115 where he mentioned the ‘GermanItalian border’ where it relates to Austrian texts. 5 Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 104; cf. Reginetta Haboucha, Types and Motifs of the Judeo-Spanish Folktales (New York/London 1992), 131–134, where only the more common 480 versions, objects en route and spindle in the well, are listed. See also: A.E. Elbaz, Folktales of the Canadian Sephardim (Montreal 1982), no. 33. 6 Coded by Roberts as RS 8, referring to ‘Las dos ninas’, in: Manuel Milá y Fontanals, Observaciones sobre la poesía popular con muestras de Romances Catalanes inéditos of 1853. It was presented to Habsburg academics in 1856, which may account for its surfacing in an Austrian collection (GG 25) ten years later. 7 Anna Birgitta Rooth, The Cinderella Cycle (Lund 1951), 85, 89, 170. 8 Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 161–162.

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9 Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 116. 10 Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 148–150. 11 Warren E. Roberts, ‘“The Black and the White Bride”, Aa-Th 403, in Scandinavia’, Fabula 8 (1966) 64–92, esp. 77–79. 12 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 207. The annotation just has ‘Westfalen’. 13 Cf. Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton/Oxford, 2nd edn, 2003), 28. 14 Zipes mistakenly translated ‘skirt’ instead of spindle, Complete, 894. 15 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 208–209, Paderborn = Bökendorf, Von Haxthausen. 16 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 209. 17 Holbek, Interpretation, 522. 18 Cf. Bottigheimer, Grimms’ Bad Girls & Bold Boys, 32, 119, 162; Tatar, The Hard Facts, 118. 19 Cf. Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 345; Liungman, Die Schwedischen Volksmärchen, 117: ‘Das Märchen wurde hier selbstverständlich missverstanden’. 20 Müllenhoff, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder, book IV no. 647, especially the annotations; cf. Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 127. Also in one of the stories of Ane Dorotea Jensdatter, Holbek, Interpretation, 521, 122 = ETK 1343; see for the English translation of another story recorded by Kristensen in 1889: Reimund Kvideland and H.K. Sehmsdorf, All the World’s Reward: Folktales Told by Five Scandinavian Storytellers (Seattle 1999), 158–162 = ETK 1398, Holbek, Interpretation, 124–125. For English language texts see below. 21 Brentano used Jacob’s summary for his ‘Das Märchen vom Murmeltier’; when commentators recognize the basic pattern of Frau Holle in it, it is merely because both Murmeltier and Frau Holle had their roots in de Villeneuve’s story, cf. Wolfgang Frühwald, in: Clemens Brentano, Märchen (München 1978), 648. 22 Rölleke, Die älteste Märchensammlung, 208–220; Grätz, Das Märchen, 51–54. 23 Naubert’s story is ignored by Roberts, although it was mentioned by the Grimms who found it an elaboration of one of the Kassel stories, ‘aber recht angenehm’, but very pleasant, instead of the other way around, see KHM 1856, 43; Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, I (1913), 210. 24 Grätz, Das Märchen, 233–237; see also: Gonthier-Louis Fink, ‘Naubert, Christiane Benedikte Eugenie’, EM 9 (1999), 1287–1291. 25 Naubert, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen, I (Leipzig 1789), 110–275; reprint (Göttingen 2001) 69–161: 97. 26 Laura Martin, Benedikte Nauberts Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen: Strukturen des Wandels (Würzburg 2006), 83. 27 ‘Die belohnte Freigebigkeit, oder das Glück der schönen Klara’, Feen-Mährchen (Marzolph ed.), 8–40. 28 Wilhelm Reynitzsch, Uiber Truhten und Truhtensteine. Barden und Bardenlieder, Feste, Schmäuse und Gerichte der Teutschen (Gotha 1802), 128–131.

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29 Ludwig Bechstein, Sämtliche Märchen (München 1965), 75–78, 790; for a Bechstein derivation see the text in Ranke, Schleswig-Holstainische Volksmärchen, II (1958), 95–96. 30 Barbara Gobrecht, ‘Basiles Feen, italienische Katzen und Grimms “Frau Holle”. Italienisch-deutsche Märchenbeziehungen’, Märchenspiegel 7 (1996), 3–5: 4. 31 The type no. 431 was initially constructed on the basis of KHM 169 and later catalogue additions are problematic since they have hardly any common denominator, see: Ingrid Tomkowiak, ‘Haus im Walde’, EM 6 (1990), 594–599. 32 Ingrid Tomkowiak, Lesebuchgeschichten. Erzählstoffe in Schullesebüchern 1770–1920 (Berlin/New York 1993), 248. 33 S. Neumann, Mecklenburgische Volksmärchen (Berlin 1971), 169–172, recorded in 1969 from a woman in Warin born 1892; Ranke, Schleswig-Holsteinische Volksmärchen, II (1958), 94–95 (both with Holle); A. Merkelbach-Pinck, Lothringer Volksmärchen (Düsseldorf 1961), 14–20; and Ulrich Tolksdorf, Eine ostpreussische Volkserzählerin. Geschichten – Geschichte – Lebensgeschichte (Marburg 1980), 88–93 (without Holle). 34 ‘Ueber das Wesen der Märchen’, xl–xli; Kleinere Schriften von Wilhelm Grimm, I (Berlin 1881), 347. 35 Cf. Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics, 74–75, who merely summarizes the Grimms’ view on the mythological associations of Frau Holle without questioning it; Ashliman, Folk and Fairy Tales, 132; see also Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonisation of Christians in Medieval Europe (London 2005), 169. 36 Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie (Göttingen 1835), 164–169; II (Göttingen 1854), 885–888. 37 The following is primarily based on: Wolfgang Schild, ‘Holda zwischen und jenseits von Göttin und Hexengestalt. Eine christliche Geschichte’, in: Markus Steppan (ed.), Zur Geschichte des Rechts (Graz 2006), 393–406. In its turn this essay is tributary to: Beate Kellner, Grimms Mythen. Studien zum Mythosbegriff und seiner Anwendung in Jacob Grimms Deutsche Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main 1994), esp. 319–357. 38 Cf. Marianne Rumpf, ‘Frau Holle’, EM 5 (1987), 159–168, esp. 164. 39 The interpretation of the name as ‘hidden’ is strenghtened by the equivalent figure of Perchta/Berchta, whose name can be understood as ‘she who is hidden’, cf. Rumpf, Perchten (Würzburg 1991), 18. 40 Text in: Walter Niess, Hexenprozesse in der Grafschaft Büdingen. Protokolle, Ursachen, Hintergründe (Büdingen, 2nd edn, 1984), 159–162. 41 Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, Die Tannhäuser-Legende. Eine Studie über Intentionalität und Rezeption katechetischer Volkserzählungen zum Buss-Sakrament (Berlin/New York 1977), esp. 107–114. 42 Brüder Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, nos 5–8, based on Prätorius’s Weinachtsfratzen and his Weltbeschreibung. 43 Opie and Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales, 156–157; Philip, English Folktales, 55. 44 Peele knew the Orlando Furioso either first or second hand, see: Patricia Binnie’s edition of The Old Wives Tale (Manchester 1980), 5. See also: A.S. Mottett, ‘Process

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47

48 49

50

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52 53 54 55 56

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and Structure Shared: Similarities Between Commedia dell’arte and The Old Wives Tale of George Peele’, New England Theatre Journal 4 (1993), 97–105. Cf. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 131 where the genealogy is noticed but only for the ‘good sisters’ wealth-producing bodies’; see also Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 69 where he links Marziella’s golden necklace to Biancabella. Delarue examined the manuscript version of the Perrault tale and found phrases similar to those in L’Héritier which were edited out in the printed version, see his notes in: Paul Delarue, The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales (Austin E. Fife transl.) (New York 1956), 373. This volume contains a translation of the stories numbered 9 and 22 in the French catalogue; Roberts RF7 and RF10. Cf. Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen, 359–360. On the reception of Basile in France see: Suzanne Magnanini, ‘Postulated Routes from Naples to Paris: the Printer Antonio Bulifon and Giambattista Basile’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth Century France’, Marvels and Tales 21 (2007), 78–92. Cf. on the Italian reception: Schenda, ‘Kommentare’, 602. Delarue identified one 480 type text as ‘reproduit la vers. de Perrault’ (no. 20) and another one as having elements ‘empruntés à la version de Grimm’ (no. 4), Le conte populaire français, II, 193, 191. The one story where these elements do occur typically stems from the Elzas and was influenced by the KHM, see: Auguste Stöber, Elsässisches Volksbüchlein (Strassburg 1842), 113, in the French catalogue as no. 7 since also incorporated by Paul Sébillot, in his Contes des Provinces de France (Paris 1884), 91–94. Jean-François Bladé, Contes populaires de la Cascogne, III (Paris 1886), 41–51; earlier in: Contes populaires recueillis en Agenais (Paris 1874). The authenticity of Bladé’s texts has been questioned; already shortly after his death in 1900 his friend and biographer Adrien Lavergne remarked that he had doctored his tales and combined them. The stories of Sustrac are suspect because he had known her as ‘jeune, simple, naive’, but collected her best stories only after her narrative capacities had declined, see Maria Anna Steinbauer, Das Märchen vom Volksmärchen. Jean-François Bladé und die Contes populaires de la Cascogne. Problematik einer Märchensammlung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main [etc.] 1988), 128, 157, 163. Achille Millien, ‘La veillée dans le puits. Conte du Nivernais’, Revue de traditions populaires 1 (1887), 24–26. Ms. Victor Smith, story collected in 1870 at Retournaguet, Haute-Loire, partly published in: Delarue and Tenèze, Le conte populaire, II, 188–189. Among others by Liungman, Die schwedischen Volksmärchen, 117. Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 196–199. Noel Williams, ‘The Semantics of the Word Fairy: Making Meaning Out of Thin Air’, in: Peter Narváez (ed.), The Good People: New Fairylore Essays (Lexington 1997), 457–478: 468. Cf. Harf-Lancner, Le monde des fées dans l’Occident médiéval and her previous Les fées au Moyen Âge, Morgane et Mélusine ou la naissance de fées (Paris 1991). Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (London 2000), suffers from

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59 60 61 62 63

64 65

66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

TALES OF MAGIC, TALES IN PRINT a popular tone and primarily deals with the British Isles. Unless otherwise indicated, the section in this chapter is based on Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 262–308. The idea of the fairy as ‘double’, launched by Lecouteux, seems to be mistaken. Although the concept of a ‘second body’ is indigenous, it is not applicable to literary fairies (nor to werewolves); cf. Claude Lecouteux, Fées, sorcières et loups-garous au Moyen Age. Histoire du double (Paris 2001). Claude Lecouteux, ‘Melusine’, EM 9 (1999), 556–561. Cf. Wesselski, Versuch, 188–191. Cf. Friedrich Wolfzettel, ‘Fee, Feenland’, EM 4 (1984), 945–964; esp. 960–961. Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition, 184; Grätz, Das Märchen, 155–157. Georg von Gaal, Märchen der Magyaren (Wien 1822), 53–71, earlier published in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode 79 and 80 (1817), see: Breslau, Nachlass, 637. Johann Mailáth, ‘Die Königstöchter’, Magyarische Sagen, Mährchen und Erzählungen (Stuttgart/Tübingen 1837), 47–73. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, part A, volume I (London 1970), 517–520; Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 31 and 121, dates the chapbook at 1823 and 1835. Reprinted in: Philip, English Folktales, 43–54. Philip, English Folktales, 48–52; also in: Briggs, A Dictionary AI, 517–520; the History of the Four Kings was first published in Glasgow. Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 121. Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales, 157. Robert Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland (Edinbrugh 1890; London 1870), 105–107 (not in the original edition of 1826); Briggs, Dictionary AI, 551–553; also in: David Buchan (ed.), Scottish Tradition: A Collection of Scottish Folk Literature (London [etc.] 1984), 23–24; Roberts CS 3. Briggs, Dictionary, AI, 167–168. Alice Bertha Gomme, ‘The Green Lady’, Folk-Lore 7 (1896), 411–414; Philip, English Folktales, 58–61; Briggs, Dictionary AI, 286–289; Roberts GE 5. Reidar Th. Christiansen, ‘A Norwegian Fairytale in Ireland?’, Béaloideas 2 (1930), 235–245: 237. Dasent, Popular Tales from the North (2nd edn, 1859), 129–141. Sidney Oldall Addy, Household Tales with Other Traditional Remains (London/Sheffield 1895), 18–22. Cf. Ó Súilleabháin and Christiansen, The Types of the Irish Folktale, 98, where journal publications are mentioned from 1883 onwards, without a story location. Christiansen, ‘A Norwegian Fairytale’, 238; Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales (London 1894), 94–98, 230 – told by a nine-year-old girl; Seumas MacManus, Donegal Fairy Stories (London 1902), 231–256 – edited for a juvenile public.

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78 Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner, Folklore from the Schoharie Hills (Ann Arbor 1937), 123–126. Randolph picked up an abbreviated version in 1941, see: Vance Randolph, The Devil’s Pretty Daughter and Other Ozark Folk Tales (New York 1955), 94–95, 198–200. Bechstein was unknown to American folklorists, but his tales had been translated into English in 1854, 1872 and 1906. 79 Leonard W. Roberts, Up Cutshin a Down Greasy: Folkways of a Kentucky Mountain Family (Lexington 1959), 104–108. 80 Isabel Gordon Carter, ‘Mountain White Folk-Lore: Tales from the Southern Blue Ridge’, Journal of American Folklore 38 (1925), 340–374, esp. 368–370; the version in Richard Chase, Grandfather Tales (Boston 1948) 18–28, 234 was put together from stories current in the same family. 81 Marie Campbell, Tales from the Cloud Walking Country (Bloomington 1958), 83–85. Among American folklorists the stories collected by Campbell are rumoured to be very close to the KHM and therefore excluded from analysis, see Carl Lindahl, Perspectives on the Jack Tales (Bloomington 2001), 93, no 1. While this assessment is accurate, the ‘print-derived oral tradition’ is also noticable in other collections. 82 Leonard Roberts, Old Greasybeard: Tales from the Cumberland Gap (Detroit 1969), earlier published in 1956; also in: Richard M. Dorson, Buying the Wind (Chicago/ London 1964), 206–209; told in 1948 by a sixteen-year-old boy in Perry County, Kentucky; cf. Philip, English Folktales, 63–68. 83 Dégh, ‘What Did the Grimm Brothers Give to and Take from the Folk?’, 75. 84 Brenda E.F. Beck et al. (eds), Folktales of India (Chicago/London 1987), 118–121, 305. 85 F.A. Steel and R.C. Temple, Wide-Awake Stories. A Collection of Tales Told by Little Children (London 1884), 178–183. 86 Mrs H. Kingscote and Pandit Natesa Sastri, Folklore of Southern India (London 1890), 102–106; the volume was reissued in 1891 as Tales of the Sun. An updated version in which Kali is rendered as ‘the Goddess’ is published in K.A. Seethalakshmi, Folk Tales of Tamil Nadu (Delhi 1969), 75–79. 87 Cf. Michael Chesnutt, ‘Polygenese’, EM 10 (2002), 1161–1164. In England Clouston and Jacobs supported the diffusion theory. 88 Her version of type 480, in Roberts as Ind 1 A, belongs more to type 511, cf. Rooth, The Cinderella Cycle, 82ff. Since Rooth (p. 152), it had been argued that in regions with a Hundu religion the cow appeared only in variants which relied on European tradition; cf. Sigrid Schmidt, ‘Einäuglein, Zweiäuglein, Dreiäuglein’, EM 3 (1981), 1197–1203, esp. 1199; Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 250. If that is so, the Wadia text was subsequently enriched with references to jsuara, see: Putlibai D.H. Wadia, ‘Folklore in Western India’, The Indian Antiquary 23 (1894), 160–164. 89 Here I see more similarity than difference between India and Europe, cf. Sadhana Naithani, In Quest of Indian Folktales: Pandit Ram Charib Chaube and William Crooke (Bloomington 2006), 54, who sketches the folklore activities of Colonialists as an opposition between nationalisms.

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90 Steel and Temple, Wide-Awake Stories, 330. 91 Joseph Jacobs, Indian Fairy Tales (London 1892), 234. 92 Quotation from: Richard Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago 1968), 377. 93 Also noticed by Roberts, Kind and Unkind Girls, 131–132. 94 Opie and Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales, 156. 95 D.L.R. Lorimer and E.O. Lorimer, Persian Tales (London 1919), 79–85; Arthur Christensen, Märchen aus Iran ( Jena 1939), 90–96, 289. 96 ANE, 105. 97 N. Adriani, ‘Trekken van overeenkomst tusschen de Germaansche en de Toradja’sche en Minahassische volksverhalen’, De Indische gids 32 (1910), 253–284, esp. 282–284; J. Alb. T. Schwarz, Tontemboansche teksten. Vertaling (Leiden 1907), 155–158, 119–120. 98 Jan de Vries, Volksverhalen uit Oost-Indië (Zutphen 1925), 110–118, 365, from G.J. Ellen, ‘Verhalen en fabelen in het Pagoe met vertaling’, Bijdragen tot de taal-, landen volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië 72 (1916), 141–195, esp. 166–171. 99 S. Luinenburg, ‘Javaansche Legenden’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap 52 (1908), 22–43, esp. 32–40. Cf. Dégh, ‘What Did the Grimm Brothers Give and Take from the Folk’, 80–81, about a similar Monobo story, possibly influenced via Java. 100 Cf. the work of Waldemar Liungman, especially his two-volume Traditionswanderungen Euphrat-Rhein (Helsinki 1937–1938). 101 Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 137. 102 Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 114. 103 There is no reference in either Chauvin or the ANE. 104 Holbek, Interpretation, 161. 105 Cf. Roberts, Kind and Unkind, 101–102, who delegates marriages to the ‘other traits’ category. 106 Cf. ‘Der gute und böse Geist’, an undated story in the Grimm papers, Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, III (1918), 459. Wilhelm Grimm marked the file as ‘leftovers’ and it is plausible that they stemmed from the phase between the second, 1815 volume and the 1819 reworkings, cf.: Breslau, Nachlass, 636, C 1, 4. 107 Cf. Jones, The Fairy Tale, 133.

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Epilogue: towards a theory of talecraft

In every day life magic words on paper presented power, from written charms to ward off evil influences to the magic book full of conjurations, which had such an authority that it did not even have to be read. The Bible was considered among the most magical of all, especially the Gospel of St John, in which words materialized, ‘became flesh’. Whereas a stream of admonitions against the unauthorized use of magic literature were issued, at the same time they also served to stress its value. Campaigns against the various magical discourses resulted in failure more often than that they bore any success and grimoires kept on being composed, printed and distributed.1 But it would be wrong to put tales of magic on a par with books of magic, equate a manual of spells (or indeed the Bible) with a Zaubermärchen and to consider every ‘magical’ story within same category. As was mentioned in the discussion of the Magician and His Pupil, genuine magic books were considered to be dangerous. It was not just that the spirits and demons were difficult to control; the owner of a magic book had forfeited his soul. In the nineteenth-century version of the fairy tale, on the other hand, the use of the magic book was taken as a matter of fact and subject to the apprentice mastering his master. Instead of losing his soul, the hero gained the maiden. In the development of the tale, the sixteenth-century sexuality metaphor (implicit in the shape-shifting) became weakened and in retellings magic was often taken literally. As a consequence magic was expressed in terms of mastering books. Without the warning against uninitiated reading and entering a devil’s pact, the substitution of reading for the original spying in Straparola’s story can be read only as symbolizing the advance of literacy. In the process the story’s emphasis shifted: a boy’s changing of shapes was merely growing up, like sprouting a beard. His knowledge of books was a lifelong skill. The difference between the fairy tale and daily life in which magic was supposed to work was a matter of genre which, in spite of all their bookish erudition, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm could hardly overlook and which they designated as the difference between Märchen and Sage (‘belief legend’).

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During the early modern and modern period European society was not just attempting to come to terms with magic, it became saturated with literacy. If the latter was not actively promoted through compulsory education, it was dominantly present in religion, law and commerce, even though there may have been subtle differences between Protestant and Catholic practices. Within this context the presumption of a separate lower-class ‘oral culture’ is inconceivable, if not a major historical fallacy. Not everyone may have been able to read, but with an increasing frequency people became available who could and there was no question about the lucrative market for cheap print. Next to oral storytelling events the public reading of newspapers and books developed and by the nineteenth century the literacy levels across Europe were too high to be discounted. Stories circulating in print penetrated into the most remote corners of society. With this book I hope to have enhanced the probability that many later orally recited and subsequently recorded fairy tales had their basis in printed form, from cheap booklets, broadsheets to newspapers, rather than the other way around. Folklorists in search of an idealized orality, however, strove to conceal the connection as much as possible. As Linda Dégh concluded after discussing the results of twentieth-century European fairy tale recording: When the informant of a folklorist referred to a book as his source, he was not listened to; and when it appeared afterward that the original of his text could be found in a calendar, it was removed from the collection. The fact that we can still find much material of literary origin in folklore collections is due solely to the ignorance of the researchers concerning the field of cheap literature. Right at the beginning of folklore collection, the influence of popular reading matter was already a factor to be taken into account. It is above all the folklore material which appeared in cheap books and popular pamphlets which had a great influence on the international folktale. In more than one case the regional redactions of certain tale types coincide with those printed in popular publications.2

Collecting folklore coincided with a major revolution in the distribution of prints, if it was not actually lacking behind. Folklore’s theoretical underpinnings, in contrast, made the collected stories into relicts of an ancient mythology and a nationalistic counterpoint to the earlier French expansion. To the collectors this political use of fairy tales proved doubly fortuitous, both as a sign of an ancient ‘folk culture’ and as a denial of a not so ancient, often French past. Yet the evidence of the historical relation between printed text and, as Ruth Bottigheimer called it, a ‘thrice told tale’ never completely disappeared. If folklorists had recognized every derivation they would hardly have notated any tale of magic. It thus becomes a matter of looking at the nineteenth- and twentieth-century material with different eyes. In 2007 Satu Apo and Maria Kaliambou traced the reception of a number of printed texts in Finnish and

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Greek narratives respectively; they also underlined the folklorist’s bias towards orality.3 Caroline Sumpter pointed to serials containing fairy tales, current in England and Ireland from the early decades of the nineteenth century onwards. Even though an indisputable link with the tales that were later orally recorded there has not been established yet, it is beyond question that they were also shaped by these prints.4 Ever since the Grimms, fairy tale theory has abounded with unfounded theoretical assumptions about orality which have never been completely resolved. On both the practical and the theoretical levels, every indication is therefore that it is mainly a lack of research that prevents an unassailable conclusion of the literary dependence of tales of magic on a European scale. Those areas outside Europe which brought forth tales similar to those earlier found within its boundaries will more often than not have borrowed their material through commercial and colonial links, as has been argued in the case of the Magician and His Pupil and the Kind and Unkind Girls. The conclusion to be drawn from this book can be cautiously formulated as a hypothesis: nineteenth-century tales of magic can all be traced back to earlier nineteenth-century or late-eighteenthcentury publications. After two centuries of covering the lack of oral evidence with the circular argument about the lack of oral evidence, an alternative assumption, stressing the absence of eighteenth-century (and earlier) orally transmitted tales of magic deserves serious consideration, especially since it conforms to everything that is known about fairy tale research and theory. Apart from all the other instances presented in this book, the influence of written on oral tradition is also good to follow with a single story such as Jorinde and Joringel (KHM 69) which the Grimms had appropriated from the eighteenthcentury writer Heinrich Jung-Stilling. A malicious witch has turned the girl Jorinde into a nightingale and her boyfriend Joringel is capable of saving her only after dreaming about a disenchanting flower. This story was eventually pigeonholed under number ATU 405, although ‘only a few oral examples’ were recorded.5 The story was unknown, for instance, in the well-researched Holstein tradition and in Flanders. Neither did it turn up in Denmark or in Hungary. Variants that led to the designation as type were based on the Grimm publication.6 And given the Irish propensity to copy from foreign works, the genuinity of the three Irish versions is also dubious.7 Two other stories in the KHM were also taken from Stilling;8 the author himself was, among other things, inspired by chapbooks.9 Another literary to oral example in which the KHM played a decisive part is the story of Snow White and Rose Red (KHM 161). The Grimms copied it from the early nineteenth-century collection by Karoline Stahl. The story, originally about an ungrateful dwarf who is repeatedly rescued by Snow White until he is eaten by a bear, was adapted by Wilhelm Grimm,

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who turned the bear into an enchanted prince and decided to give the dwarf a reason to be angry: in order to be saved his beard had to be cut and that was where his power resided. In Germany it was mainly distributed through the text of Wilhelm Grimm, who also had to invent a brother of the bear to be married to Rose Red. Later the story was classified as ATU 426: the Two Girls, the Bear and the Dwarf and as Ranke noticed: ‘post Grimm versions are undoubtedly influenced by the Grimm tale’.10 The two French versions, one of which was told by someone from Switzerland, were also thought to have been taken from the KHM or from Lehnert’s Mährchenkranz für Kinder (1828) in which the KHM rendering was copied.11 These undisputedly literary texts alone could have alerted folklorists that the phenomenon had a much wider scope. Instead, they excelled in damage management and restricted the possibility of a printed derivation primarily to texts so close to the KHM, or where necessary Perrault, that the relation was inescapable. Another series of Grimm texts is not indicative so much of the printed character of the tales of magic as of its contemporary fabrication.12 In these cases especially Jacob recognized their origin in the creativity of the suppliers, and careful textual analysis will have to decide to what extent it relates to, for instance, the products of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff or her von Haxthausen cousins Anna and Ludowine.13 Since the brothers let other, similarly contrived stories from the same source pass (see Chapter 4), it once more shows their criterion of selection: a sense of tradition acquired from reading rather than a clear notice of the practice of oral storytelling. As Wilhelm Grimm regularly adjusted the selection, this criterion will have been in some state of flux and one can only wonder whether especially Jacob will have harboured suspicions about the feeble basis of the entire KHM collection, at least of those stories which he and Wilhelm had recorded from their young female friends. Again the later folklorists should have harboured doubts.14 The fact that they mostly did not shows not only their reliance on the authority of the Grimms and their lack of critical text assessment, but above all their romantic ‘belief’ in orality. The issue of literary derivations stretches far beyond the shifting popularity of Perrault and the KHM and it may very well turn out that in some places Straparola and Basile, or the Arabian Nights, were much more influential than previously suspected. Refined research into individual publications, yet taking account of international influences, is needed to make this more apparent. Such an undertaking may question current ‘oral’ designations, but also redefine the differentiation between popular tale and artificially authored story, between the Volksmärchen and the Kunstmärchen, as the Grimms called it. If popularity is to be the decisive criterion, then the medium of transmission becomes irrelevant, although printed stories may have had a much larger appeal than merely oral ones.

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Together, the eighteenth-century published French stories, including the Oriental and pseudo-Oriental stories translated into French or written directly in French, constitute the genre of fairy tales. Their reception elsewhere in Europe, first in the French language and in the course of the eighteenth-century also in translations, made the genre international, the more so when other authors started to write their own ‘fairy tales’. In their turn the French aristocratic authors used everything they could lay their hands on: first and foremost the Italian works of Straparola and Basile, but also the work of less known authors such as Lorenzo Selva (see Chapter 2), and the medieval romances and works of mythology. It gave the fairy tales an intended sense of tradition, of a centuries-old magic, but it could not redefine these predecessors as fairy tales themselves historically, since they had never been addressed that way. Essentially these stories form the core of what in this book is called ‘tales of magic’; from that perspective the Grimms corrupted the concept by falling back on an older meaning of Märchen as lie or falsehood. Hence the present-day inclusive fairy tale catalogue comprising most narrative genres (with the curious omission of the migratory legends), including the tales of magic which among both specialists and the general public are considered the genuine fairy tales. The echoes of the eighteenth-century fashion still define today’s fairy tales. What I have tried to indicate in the preceding chapters is that the later texts collected by the folklorists were the remnants of this fashion, rather than of a pre-Christian, possibly shamanistic past of which they also carried some decontextualized traces. These latter, however, were not the result of a centuries-old oral tradition, but deliberately inserted, with results that their original authors probably did not even dream of. A historical approach to fairy tales has profound consequences for the organisation of one of folklore’s main methodological tools, the tale-type index. Instead of a type, the scholar now has to consider a complex story genealogy and to decide at what point a particular variant has branched off. Instead of regional ‘oikotypes’, one has to take account of copying and retelling on an international scale; what Christiansen once called ‘“displaced” folktales’ may be instances of a much wider phenomenon,15 unnoticed mainly because the compilers of national catalogues did not immediately look at variants outside their area.16 Alternative research into tales of magic will need to catalogue the many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century published texts, in cheap printed material, broadsheets and newspapers, and to establish the scope of their reception among the providers of the stories which were later taken to belong to an oral tradition. Grätz’s work on Germany deserves to be extended both to other countries and to the nineteenth century. It has to include translations, anathema for the nationally oriented folklorist but indispensable in determining the spread of stories from one language to another.

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Oralists habitually argue that the variants of a story are a definite proof of its orality, the more deviant the better (be it within the boundaries of a type). They fail, however, to thematize textual variety and in practice it usually comes down to deviation from an already abstracted type description that often owes its construction to the KHM.17 Since the KHM texts both included variation and differed from their printed predecessors, the outline of the ‘normal’ story was already blurred even before oral retellings, either from the KHM or from parallel publications, to other folklorists a generation later made the issue yet more complex. In other words: variation was – and still is – measured against a construct rather than against a historical series of texts. And there are a number of additional reasons for the existence of tale variants, without the necessity of invoking a centuries-long oral tradition. On the level of written tradition variation automatically ensued because authors never copied or translated earlier works word by word. At least they elaborated them, if they did not insert elements from other available stories. Literary creativity more often than not amounted to rearranging plot elements and inserting details from other stories. It can even be argued that writers of the fantastical were more restricted in this than their counterparts who stuck to ‘historical reality’, as the potential consumers of their products needed to be able to recognize the familiar elements of tales of magic. In the case of an oral recording, variation was already guaranteed at the first stage, when a story was retold from having been read in print or having been read out and listened to. The occasional skilled storyteller will have excelled in breaking down a published story to its essentials,18 but no one reproduces a story in exactly the same way. Individual touches were always added, both in the structure and in the specific descriptions. As mentioned previously (see Chapter 6), when the public of storytellers overlapped, competition between them ensued and thus more variation and improvisation, instead of the stability postulated by Anderson and his acolytes. One can yet again refer to Dégh, who observed that the ‘gifted raconteur’ adapted himself or herself to the circumstances and that ‘research must differentiate between the different quality of storytelling situations’.19 And even the stories of one narrator changed over time: ‘It is inconceivable that a narrator should repeatedly tell a long tale, letterperfect, according to what he had heard in his childhood.’20 In his work on (written) medieval Irish romances and their influence on later oral tradition, undeservedly forgotten by most folklorists, Alan Bruford concluded that one of the main ways in which a story changed was borrowing: either the borrowing of details from other stories, or the self-borrowing of duplicating an episode within the same story. Anything may be borrowed from any story in

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roughly the same style – [. . .] mostly from international or native hero-tales and wonder-tales – and may even flourish until it is better known in the new environment than the old. This applies to names, dialogue, poems, runs and similar paragraphs, small details, long episodes and even whole stories which may be tacked on.21

Without a fixed text no one is capable of repeating a story word for word, if anyone wanted to do such in the first place. But storytelling specialists were sparse and few and, when folklorists found mere informants instead, forgetfulness figures as an indubitable factor in the preserved notations. One could call such an informant a ‘passive bearer of tradition’, if that did not presume that there was something as a tradition in the case of tales of magic. The number of adolescents (often school children), both as providers and as collectors of stories will have amply contributed to the production of variance, too. On the whole, children cannot be assumed to have been as versed in storytelling as their elders; they simply lacked the necessary experience. But even when many narrators displayed lapses in coherence or dropped details, one can never reduce orality to decay as Wesselski did, have the texts ‘crumble into gibberish’.22 A failing memory was always balanced by creativity, in whatever form. A prime example of how folklore theory argues away the practice of storytelling in favour of the continuity of oral tradition can be found in the concept of ‘craftsmanship’ which attempts to allow for individual skill while adhering to a presumed collectivity.23 In this way the ‘traditional expectations’ of the audience ensure that a narrator keeps his variations in check, very much like the child who corrects a parent during the reading of a bedtime story. However, text adaptation, whether by skilled or occasional narrators, needs to be understood as individual creativity, not specific of oral tradition. Every author takes (sometimes more, sometimes less) account of the audience and, when it concerns the use of available material, the medium of transmission hardly matters. The ‘craftsmanship’ theory tries to reconcile the political notion of a collective ‘folk’ with the historicity of an individual skill, while denying extraneous influences such as printed texts and translations. In doing so it becomes very close to Anderson’s ‘law of self-correction’, and it is as condescending and patronizing. Instead of levelling the unequal relation between folklorist and narrator, the folklore theories enhance the dominance of the folklorist, by putting a idealized collective above the individual creative narrator. That is never a proper basis for communication and exchange. It may even be argued that the concept of a fixated narrative which forms the cornerstone of these theories is itself literary. Only in print could stories stay in one piece and, since printed versions could be reprinted, the same story could be passed on to different generations and be distributed over vast distances. In an oral setting this would have been impossible

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and the ‘craftmanship’ and ‘self-correction’ theories may thus be seen as carrying their own contradiction. The ideal narrative community is mirrored in the ideal narrator. Given that it took almost a century before the attention the Grimms had given to Dorothea Viehmann translated into genuine folklore interest for the tellers of tales and their repertoires, it is perhaps typical that an often reproduced image of the brothers portrayed them in a countryside setting, listening to the elderly woman. The scene is indoors, but the chickens are freely walking around while children are listening attentively. The image is a late nineteenth-century fabrication, for one reason because the brothers were much younger when they actually interviewed Viehmann at their home in Kassel. A similar title-page illustration in the English 1839 KHM edition displays Gammer Grethel and children gathered at the fireplace, which brought the visual in line with the notion of orality.24 For it not only corrected the previous illustration in which the performer is reading from a book, it also reinforced the difference as it was perceived between English and German storytelling events. However, the later pictures not only visualized the fiction about the origin of the ‘oral’ KHM tales, they also connected to a series of French frontispieces of around 1700, in which lower-class old women were presented as the keepers of traditional lore, as the mothers of geese. As Elizabeth Harries has pointed out, this was very much a male image, since the conteuses saw themselves more as aristocratic storytellers, symbolized by Athena, the goddess of wisdom.25 From the adept narrator to the occasional informant people should at least be assumed to have attempted to satisfy the collector’s curiosity in the best possible way. Collectors, on the other hand, were very well aware that they often recorded damaged and truncated tales and even coined the terms ‘zersagen’ (mistelling) and ‘contamination’ to indicate this. In their opinion, however, such fragments referred to a mythology which had to be augmented and rearranged in order to glimpse the suspected full story, like the shards dug out from an archaeological site. As good schoolmasters, folklorists did not see any problem in correcting the texts they had notated from people they saw as having less literary skills than themselves and who mainly served as repository of ancient lore. To designate this process as ‘censure’, as Zipes proposed, is counterproductive. It concerns texts which, like every historical document, need to be related to their production. When this becomes more complicated than usual in the case of edited folklore texts, there is still no reason to neglect it. The notion of a printed origin actually facilitates the process of separating the different layers within the final text, as in each case the most proximate published text can serve as a parameter for the subsequent changes, even when in the odd instance the existence of such a text has to be merely surmised. Editorial interference, mostly a nineteenth-century phenomenon, can be recognized in those details that seem

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to have jumped the centuries, but were most likely copied from then available editions of late medieval works. Since the high Middle Ages, the advance of literacy, of writing down stories, has enabled a process of distancing from every day life experiences. This also applied to magic: in fairy tales it became so far removed from the magic people normally encountered that the stories themselves, already situated in unnamed fantasy countries and about princes and princesses (and not nobility in general), could be considered only as unreal, as not immediately related to everyday concerns (but addressing more abstract issues). When in the nineteenth century a competent storyteller felt uncomfortable with the distance, he or she would insert his or her individual details and they could include references to familiar experiences, even elements of popular religion.26 Yet it does not follow that every non-magical element originated in daily life, as it could also easily be part of the (mostly literary) tradition. When for instance Marie Hassenpflug told the Grimms about the brother and sister abandoned in the wood, she did not refer to contemporary poverty among peasants, but merely copied the motif from Perrault and d’Aulnoy (with some Allendorf Pentamerone influences mixed in). If Hansel and Gretel had a history, it was one of fleeing lovers.27 And if there was a medieval predecessor of her other brother and sister story (KHM 11; ATU 450), it related in all likelihood to an incest narrative, such as the Maiden without Hands. However, in the Middle Ages the ancestors of the fairy tales were, as the fairies themselves, created in an aristocratic environment and had very little to do with lower-class social hardships. The main question about the tales of magic as they were recorded later in the nineteenth century from lower-class people such as Tang Kristensen’s informants in Danish Jutland, or from Dégh’s mid-twentieth-century story-tellers in Hungarian Kakasd, is how deep they were anchored in their worldview. How should one understand an outlook on life complicated enough to allow for odd pieces of fantasy such as fairy tales, situated in dreamlands otherwise out of reach? How does otherworldliness relate to the struggle for daily existence? The answer can only be that it hardly did. When the Dutch-German narrator Egbert Gerrits, whose stories were recorded by Gottfried Henssen in the 1930s, is taken as a next example, it appears that he related very few tales of magic. Those he knew, he had, directly or indirectly, obtained from printed sources.28 In his case Dégh is not completely justified when she classifies him as a narrator who ‘merely reproduces’ stories, a ‘passive bearer of tradition’ whose ‘knowledge is quickly exhausted’.29 After all, his repertoire filled a whole book. In all likelihood the narrator who had picked up the occasional tale of magic to join a personal repertoire of legends, anecdotes, memories and songs was the more common. As Schenda concluded, in the nineteenth century fairy tales played only a very

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minor role at various public narrative events.30 When they did, both the custom of referring to familiar events and the presentation of a fairy tale as an entertaining fiction will have contributed to bridging the distance to daily existence. Narrators obtained their material from a variety of sources, oral and printed. As far as it concerned tales of magic, they ultimately drew on booklets, pamphlets, broadsheets, journals and other reading matter. The inclusion of these originally literary stories signalled a breach with the past, especially with an older repertoire of legends about everyday-life magical figures.31 In their oral manifestations witches, werewolves, ghosts, and nightmares and other malicious beings did not mesh very well with their fairytale counterparts. When in the late eighteenth century tales of magic began to be used for teaching, for injecting a sense of morality into children, they were part of the drive to reform notions that were depicted as ‘superstitious’ by teachers, ministers and journalists – the same group of people from which the folklorists were recruited. In that sense both the tale that contained the warning about the magic book and the one in which it was freely consulted fell into the same educational slot. When the people who responded to queries about stories related tales of magic rather than stories about witches and their kind, they conformed to standards that were more modern than their interpretators would have it. There is still a lot of work to do on both the changes in narrators’ repertoires and the collecting and interpretative activities of folklorists, but signs are that those folklorists who took the trouble submerging themselves in the field (instead of merely asking colleagues or pupils about stories) were less ready to promote mythological theories than those who stayed away from it. If the field workers unearthed anything, it was contemporary notions instead of remnants of a distant, preferably pre-Christian past. Folklorists in the field still exhibited a paternalistic attitude to their informants, but less so than their armchair colleagues. And in a number of cases contact with possible sources of stories was frustrated from the start.32 During the nineteenth century communal narration was in a state of transition. Some narrators may have stuck to their trusted stock of tales, others went with the times and started to include tales of magic, replacing the older legends. Literacy and orally transmitted magic were opposite forces and the power that was traditionally ascribed to magic books reflected this. As literary products, the tales of magic never belonged to the orality side; they were part of the movement to combat it. When in the course of the nineteenth century more and more tales of magic were recorded from oral sources, a process that continued well into the twentieth century, it showed the relative success of the campaign against orally transmitted concepts such as witches and revenants. Tales of magic which presented magic as something out of a fantasy world, at least in the repertoires of a limited number of storytellers, gradually replaced

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the everyday-life magical discourses and made them harmless. The witch in whom one does not believe any more becomes a fairy tale witch.

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Notes 1 Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford 2009). 2 Dégh, Folktales and Society, 147. 3 Satu Apo, ‘The Relation between Oral and Literary Tradition as a Challenge in Fairy-Tale Research: the Case of Finnish Folktales’, Marvels and Tales 21 (2007), 19–33; Maria Kaliambou, ‘The Transformation of Folktales and Fairy Tales into Popular Booklets’, Marvels and Tales 21 (2007), 50–64. 4 Caroline Sumpter, The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Basingstoke 2008), 11–25. 5 Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 69: Schwalmgegend (Siebert); Uther, Handbuch, 164–167. 6 Ranke, Schleswig-holsteinische Volksmärchen, II (1958), 18. 7 The story figured in the early KHM translation: Grimm, German Popular Stories (London 1823), 75–81. 8 KHM 78 (ATU 980), which was not a fairy tale but a moral novelle with medieval ancestry, see: Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, II (1915), 135–140. KHM 150, Alte Bettelfrau (The Old Beggar Lady), never made it into a type, although the Grimms compared it to the Edda episode in which Odin takes on the guise of the beggar Grímmir, Bolte and Polívka, Anmerkungen, III (1918), 150–151. 9 Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 76, 231. See further Grätz, Das Märchen, 180–181; HansJörg Uther, ‘Die Brüder Grimm und Heinz Jung-Stilling. Von Jorinde und Joringel und andere Erzählungen’, in: Ulrich Müller and Margarete Springeth (eds), Paare und Paarungen. Festschrift Werner Wunderlich (Stuttgart 2004), 294–305. 10 Ranke, Schleswig-holsteinische Volksmärchen, II, 53. See for a detailed comparison: Zorger, Buchmärchen, 65–80. The one Frisian occurrence is also clearly based on Wilhelm Grimm’s edition, Jurjen van der Kooi, Volksverhalen in Friesland, 326. For a late nineteen-century Dutch version in which the father of the two girls overcomes the dwarf by walling up the dwarf cave see: Meder and Hendriks, Vertelcultuur in Nederland (Amsterdam 2005), 347–349 (no. 370). 11 Uther, Handbuch, 333–336; Scherf, Märchenlexikon, 1041–1043; Heinz Rölleke, ‘Mädchen und Bär’, EM 8 (1996), 1350–1353; cf. Delarue and Tenèze, Le conte populaire, II (1964), 110. 12 Zipes’s publication of a selection of these ‘posthumous tales’ together with the other KHM stories, without a clear indication of their historical status (see his edition of the Complete Fairy Tales), only contributes to the confusion. It did not relate to stories which the Grimm only received so late that they could not incorporate them in the KHM any more, as the label ‘posthumous’ suggests, but stories they had been given in the late 1810s and put aside. 13 Cf. Jacob’s note to the story about the ‘Königssohn, der sich nicht fürchtet’ (The prince without fear), from Anna von Haxthausen: ‘Ist gewaltig und erfunden’

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14 15

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16

17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32

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(contrived and made-up). Or his remark at a story in the handwriting of Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff: ‘Scheint viel Erfundenes zu enthalten’ (appears to contain much that is invented). See: Rölleke, Märchen aus dem Nachlass, 27, 30. Johannes Bolte published a number of these texts in volume III of his Anmerkungen. Reidar Th. Christiansen, ‘“Displaced” Folktales’, in: Wayland D. Hand and Gustave O. Arlt (eds), Humaniora: Essays in Literature, Folklore, Bibliography (Locust Valley, NY 1960), 161–171. This may solve some of the problems which confronted scholars when compiling catalogues, cf. Christine Shojaei Kawan, ‘La classification des contes’, Cahiers de littérature orale 57/58 (2005), 27–42. On varierity in oral performances, see: Lauri Honko (ed.), Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition (Helsinki 2000). Honko’s own paradigm consists of the oral epic and it is hard to transfer his observations to historical material. As he puts it: ‘The advantage of fieldwork over archive studies is that even if the object is the same, an oral narrative, for example, the problems of variation become much more multifaceted when viewed against a more general model of textualisation’ (19). See the analyses by Zorger, Buchmärchen. Dégh, Folktales and Society, 11, 76. Dégh, Folktales and Society, 168. In general: Johannes Merkel, ‘Kreativität’, EM 8 (1996), 359–364. Bruford, Gaelic Folktales and Medieval Romances (Dublin 1969), 247. The translation (cf. Chapter 2, note 41) is by Donald Ward, ‘Do Märchensingverse Indicate Orality?’, in: Ursula Schaefer and Edda Spielmann (eds), Varieties and Consequences of Literacy and Orality (Tübingen 2001), 126. I am following – and criticizing – the discussion in Holbek, Interpretation, 39–42. Reprinted in Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 190 (but drawn three years later than indicated). The counter-image is partly reproduced on p. 160, in a different context. Harries, Twice Upon a Time, esp. ch. 2. Cf. Marisa Rey-Henningsen, ‘Folklore and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Denmark: Five Examples of Analyses of Folk Narratives’, ARV 58 (2002) 43–75, who sees these elements as indicative for the story’s situated meaning. See for instance: Jack Zipes, ‘The Rationalization of Abandonment and Abuse in Faire Tales: The Case of Hansel and Gretel’, in his Happily Ever After. Fairy Tales, Children and the Culture Industry (New York/London 1997), 39–60, who reads the tale as a reliable picture of historical reality. Zorger, Buchmärchen im Volsmund, 15–19, lists three of his stories as taken from Grimm and one from Musäus. Several others may be added. Dégh, Folktales and Society, 76, 112, 167. Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 265. See also: Jürgen Beyer, ‘Prolegomena to a History of Story-Telling around the Baltic Sea, c. 1550–1899’, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 4 (1997), 43–60. More comprehensive in: Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr, 245–261.

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A very select bibliography

References are given in the notes. Repeated references are abbrievated; only those have been included here. Aarne, Antti, Leitfaden der vergleichenden Märchenforschung (Hamina 1913). ——, Der reiche Mann und sein Schwiegersohn. Vergleichende Märchenforschungen (Hamina 1916). ——, Die magische Flucht. Eine Märchenstudie (Helsinki 1931). Afanas’ev, Aleksandr, Russian Fairy Tales (New York 1945) tr. Norbert Guterman. Bolte, Johannes & Georg Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, I–V (Leipzig 1913–1932). Bottigheimer, Ruth B., Grimms’ Bad Girls & Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (New Haven/London 1987). ——, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia 2002). ——, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany 2009). Bottigheimer, Ruth B. (ed.), Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm (Philadelphia 1986). Breslau, Ralf, Der Nachlass der Brüder Grimm (Wiesbaden 1997). Bruford, Alan, Gaelic Folktales and Medieval Romances (Dublin 1969) (Béaloidas 34). Chauvin, Victor, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes, IV–VII (Louvain 1900–1903). Clausen-Stolzenburg, Maren, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition (Heidelberg 1995). Cosquin, Emmanuel, Études folkloriques. Recherches sur les migrations des contes populaires et leur point de départ (Paris 1922). Dasent, Georg Webbe, Popular Tales from the Norse (Edinburgh 1859). Davidson, Hilda Ellis & Anna Chaudhri (eds), A Companion to the Fairy Tale (Cambridge 2003). Dégh, Linda, Folktales and Society. Story-telling in a Hungarian Peasant Community (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 2nd edn, 1989). ——, Narratives in Society: A Performance-Centered Study (Helsinki 1995). ——, ‘What Did the Brothers Grimm Give to and Take from the Folk?’, in: James M. McGlathery (ed.), The Bothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana/Chicago 1991), 66–90.

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Delarue, Paul & Marie-Louise Tenèze, Le conte populaire français, I–II (Paris 1957, 1964). Draak, A.M.E., Onderzoekingen over de roman van Walewein (Amsterdam/Groningen 1975). Feen-Mährchen. Zur Unterhaltung für Freunde und Freundinnen der Feenwelt. Ulrich Marzolph (ed.) (Hildesheim 2000). Grätz, Manfred, Das Märchen in der Deutschen Aufklärung. Vom Feenmärchen zum Volksmärchen (Stuttgart 1988). Haney, Jack, An Introduction to the Russian Folktale (New York/London 1999). Harries, Elizabeth Wanning, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton 2001). Holbek, Bengt, Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Danish Folklore in a European Perspective (Helsinki 1987). Horálek, Karel, ‘Märchen aus Tausend und einer Nacht bei den Sklaven’, Fabula 10 (1969), 155–195. Johns, Andreas, Baba Yaga: The Ambitious Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (Frankfurt am Main 2004). Jones, Steven Swann, The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination (New York/ London 2002). Kamenetsky, Christa, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics (Athens, OH 1992). Kiefer, Emma Emily, Albert Wesselski and Recent Folktale Theories (Bloomington 1947). Liungman, Waldemar, Schwedische Volksmärchen. Herkunft und Geschichte (Berlin 1961). McGlathery, James M. (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana/Chicago 1991). Marzolph, Ulrich & Richard van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, I–II (Santa Barbara/Denver/Oxford 2004). Müllenhoff, Karl, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzogtümer Schleswig-Holstein und Lauenburg (Kiel 1845). Murphy, G. Ronald, The Owl, the Raven and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales (Oxford 2000). Opie, Iona & Peter, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford/New York, 2nd edn, 1992). Paradiz, Valerie, Clever Maids. The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales (New York 2005). Philip, Neil, The Penguin Book of English Folktales (Harmomdsworth 1992). Propp, Vladimir, Morphologie des Märchens (Frankfurt am Main 1975). Ranke, Kurt, Schleswig-holsteinische Volksmärchen, II (Kiel 1958). Robert, Raymonde, Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du xviie à la fin du xviiie siècle (Paris 2002). Roberts, Warren E., The Tale of the Kind and Unkind Girls, Aa-Th 480 and Related Titles (Detroit 1994; reprint first ed. Berlin 1958). Röhrich, Lutz, Märchen und Wirklichkeit. Eine volkskundliche Untersuchung (Wiesbaden 1956). ——, Erzählungen des späten Mittelalters und ihr Weiterleben in Literatur und Volksdichtung bis zur Gegenwart: Sagen, Märchen, Exempel und Schwänke, I, II (Bern 1962, 1967).

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——, ‘Und weil sie noch nicht gestorben sind . . .’ Anthropologie, Kulturgeschichte und Deutung von Märchen (Köln/Weimar/Wien 2002). Rölleke, Heinz, ‘Wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat’. Gesammelte Aufsätze zu den ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’ der Brüder Grimm (Bonn 1985). ——, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Trier 2000). Rölleke, Heinz (ed.), Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm (Cologny/Genève 1975). ——, Märchen aus dem Nachlass der Brüder Grimm (Bonn 1977). Schenda, Rudolf, Von Mund zu Ohr. Bausteine zu einer Kulturgeschichte volkstümlichen Erzählens in Europa (Göttingen 1993). Scherf, Walter, Das Märchenlexikon (München 1995). Schoof, Wilhelm (ed.), Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit (Weimar 1963). Schoof, Wilhelm, Jacob Grimm. Aus seinem Leben (Bonn 1961). Steig, Reinhold, Achim von Arnim und Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (Stuttgart/Berlin 1904). Tatar, Maria, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton/Oxford 2003). Thompson, Stith, The Folktale (New York 1946). Tille, Václav, Verzeichnis der böhmische Märchen (Helsinki 1921). Tubach, Frederic C., Index Exemplorum. A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki 1969). Uther, Hans-Jörg, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, I–III (Helsinki 2004). ——, Handbuch zu den ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’ der Brüder Grimm (Berlin/New York 2008). Uther, Hans-Jörg (ed.), Märchen vor Grimm (München 1990). Ward, Donald, ‘New Misconceptions about Old Folktales: The Brothers Grimm’, in: James M. McGlathery (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana/Chicago 1991), 91–100. Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde. On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London 1995). Wesselski, Albert, Märchen des Mittelalters (Berlin 1925). ——, Versuch einer Theorie des Märchens (Reichenberg 1931). ——, Deutsche Märchen vor Grimm (Brünn/Leipzig 1938). Wolf, Johann Wilhelm, Deutsche Hausmärchen (Göttingen 1851). Ziolkowski, Jan M., Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales. The Medieval Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor, 2007). Zipes, Jack, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (New York/ London 2006). Zipes, Jack (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford 2000). ——, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York/London 2001). Zorger, Annemarie, Buchmärchen im Volksmund (Frankfurt am Main 2008).

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Tale type index

Uther, The Types of International Folktales (ATU) 47A The Fox Hangs Onto the Horse’s Tail 119 130 The Animals in Night Quarters 139 222 War Between Birds and Quadrupeds 140–141 234 The Nightingale and the Blindworm 92 300 The Dragon-Slayer 2, 38, 83, 143, 148, 152–153, 179 301 The Three Stolen Princesses 72, 167 302 The Ogre’s Heart in the Egg 166, 179–181 302C* The Magic Horse 167–70, 176–178 303 The Twins or Blood Brothers 38, 139, 152–153, 182 304 The Dangerous Night-Watch (The Huntsman) 15, 137–138, 142–144, 154, 167 306 The Danced-out Shoes 52, 119 310 The Maiden in the Tower 10 311 Rescue by the Sister 92, 96 312 Maiden-Killer (Bluebeard) 29, 92, 97, 98, 99 313 The Magic Flight 2, 7, 15, 29, 81–83, 85–88, 94–97, 148, 204 314 Goldener 91, 112, 119, 178 317 The Tree That Grows up to the Sky 14, 164–166, 181–184 325 The Magician and His Pupil 2, 7, 13, 108–112, 113–115, 118–126, 167, 175, 219 326 The Youth Who Wanted to Learn What Fear is 114, 138, 141, 158n28, 167 327A Hansel and Gretel 10, 15, 81, 82, 95–96, 137, 148, 227

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327B The Brothers and the Ogre 96, 190n107 328 The Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure 14, 166, 181 330 The Smith and the Devil 31, 120 331 The Spirit in the Bottle 22n68 333 Little Red Riding Hood 2, 11, 32, 97 335 Death’s Messengers 335 360 Bargain of the Three Brothers with the Devil 31, 139 361 Bear-Skin 31 400 The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife 138, 140, 167, 173 402 The Animal Bride 32, 47n52, 85, 139, 141, 148, 151 403 The Black and the White Bride 97, 99, 135n26, 138, 194, 198 405 Jorinde and Joringel 221 410 Sleeping Beauty 204 425 The Search for the Lost Husband 15, 138, 141, 146–148, 154, 173, 203 425C Beauty and the Beast 94, 97–98, 104n52, 106n82, 147, 204 426 The Two Girls, the Bear, and the Dwarf 221–122 431 The House in the Forest 194, 214n31 440 The Frog King Or Iron Henry 88 441 Hans My Hedgehog 112, 141, 152 442 The Old Woman in the Forest 22n68 449 Sidi Numan 58–59 450 Little Brother and Little Sister 97, 98, 227 451 The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers 137, 153, 154, 173 460 The Journey to God (Fortune) 30

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INDEX OF TALE TYPES

461 Three Feathers from the Ogre (Three Hairs from the Devil’s Beard) 16, 23–24, 25–26, 29, 32–33, 34–35, 38, 39–40, 138, 141, 154, 171 470 Friends in Life and Death 31 475 The Man as Heater of Hell’s Kettle 31, 133n86, 140–141 480 The Kind and the Unkind Girls 13, 14, 38, 95, 192–198, 200–203, 205–212, 213n21 485 Borma Jarizhka 31 503 The Gifts of the Little People 10 505 The Grateful Dead 31 510A Cinderella 67, 93, 96, 98, 100, 119, 190n107, 196, 209, 210 510B Peau d’Asne 11, 21n56, 98, 99 511 One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three Eyes 193, 209 513A Six Go through the Whole World 139, 140, 153 513B The Land and Water Ship 43 516 Faithful John 61, 138, 153, 162n93 518 Men Fight over Magic Objects 173, 187n49 519 The Strong Woman as Bride 174, 176, 178 530 The Princess on the Glass Mountain 166, 173–176, 183–184 531 The Clever Horse 64, 72 533 The Speaking Horsehead 15, 138, 147, 149, 152 545 The Cat as Helper 29, 32, 92, 94, 97, 106n81 550 Bird, Horse and Princess 2, 12–13, 51–52, 54–55, 56, 60–62, 66–72, 83, 89, 158n13, 159n30, 171, 206 551 Water of Life 2, 14, 22n68, 56, 62–64, 65, 143 552 The Girls Who Married Animals 167, 179 554 The Grateful Animals 167 555 The Fisherman and His Wife 29, 182 556F* The Shepherd in the Service of a Witch 167–170, 176–178, 183, 184 563 The Table, the Donkey and the Stick 90, 121 565 The Magic Mill 99 566 The Three Magic Objects and the Wonderful Fruits 142 567 The Magic Bird-Heart 108 570 The Rabbit-Herd 43, 121

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571C The Biting Doll 112 575 The Prince’s Wings 127 592 The Dance among Thorns 94, 96 610 The Healing Fruits 16, 25, 42–3, 50n117 612 The Three Snake-Leaves 127 650A Strong John 138 652 The Prince Whose Wishes Always Come True 15, 138, 144–146 653 The Four Skillful Brothers 108 660 The Three Doctors 141, 149 675 The Lazy Boy 29, 46n32, 112, 145–146 678 The King Transfers His Soul to a Parrot 115–116 706 The Maiden Without Hands 2, 98–99, 138, 142, 153 707 The Three Golden Children 62 709 Snow White 39, 93, 98, 106n82, 145 720 The Juniper Tree 14, 29, 95 729 The Merman’s Golden Axe 31 736 Luck and Wealth 31 750 The Three Wishes 7 780 The Singing Bone 88 812 The Devil’s Riddle 142 851 Turandot 151 852 Lying Contest 182 875 The Clever Farmgirl 108, 141, 149, 158n25 884 The Forsaken Fiancée 98 887 Griselda 7 900 King Thrushbeard 143 930 The Prophecy, 30, 38 954 The Forty Thieves 119 955 The Robber Bridegroom 99 956 The Hot Chamber in the House of Robbers 143 960 The Sun Brings All to Light 141 980 The Ungrateful Son 229n8 1405 The Lazy Spinning Woman 139 1450 Clever Elsie 138 1535 The Rich and the Poor Farmer 47n51, 139 1641 Doctor Know-All 139–140 1696 “What Should I Have Said (Done)?” 120 1697 “We Three; For Money” 32 1831A* Inappropriate Actions in Church 120 1960A The Great Ox 22n68, 182 1960G The Great Tree 182, 183

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References to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen

Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812 edition) 6 Von der Nachtigall und der Blindschleiche 92 8 Die Hand mit dem Messer 92 33 Der gestiefelte Kater 29, 92, 94, 97, 106n81 59 Prinz Schwan 147 62 Blaubart 92, 98, 99 66 Hurleburlebutz 97, 147, 204 70 Der Okerlo 81, 94, 96, 97, 204 71 Prinzessin Mäusehaut 98 73 Das Mordschloss 92 75 Vogel Phönix 23, 35 Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1857 edition) 1 Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich 88 4 Märchen von einem, der auszog das Fürchten zu lernen 138, 141 6 Der treue Johannes 138, 153 9 Die zwölf Brüder 137, 153 11 Brüderchen und Schwesterchen 97, 98, 227 12 Rapunzel 10 13 Die drei Männlein im Walde 99, 138, 198 15 Hänsel und Gretel 10, 15, 81, 82, 95–96, 137, 148, 227 19 Von dem Fischer un syner Fru 29 22 Das Rätsel 151 24 Frau Holle 95, 194–195, 198, 209, 213n21 25 Die sieben Raben 173 26 Rotkäppchen 97

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27 Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten 139 28 Der singende Knochen 88 29 Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren 16, 23–24, 32, 38, 41, 138, 154 31 Das Mädchen ohne Hände 98–99, 138, 142, 153 34 Die kluge Else 138 40 Der Rauberbräutigam 99 46 Fitchers Vogel 96 47 Von dem Machandelboom 29, 95 50 Dornröschen 204 51 Fundevogel 81, 94, 95 56 Der Liebste Roland 82, 91, 94, 96, 97, 148 57 Der goldene Vogel 15, 56, 67–68, 70, 71–72, 83, 89, 158n13, 206 60 Die zwei Brüder 139, 152–153 61 Das Bürle 139 63 Die drei Federn 151 67 Der König mit dem Löwen 98 68 De Gaudeif un sien Meester 118, 119–120 69 Jorinde und Joringel 221 71 Sechse kommen durch die ganze Welt 139, 140, 153 76 Die Nelke 15, 138, 154 78 Der alte Grossvater und der Enkel 229n8 79 Die Wassernixe 81, 94, 96 88 Das singende springende Löweneckerchen 99 89 Die Gänsemagd 15, 138, 149, 152 90 Der junge Riese 138 91 Dat Erdmänneken 72 92 Der König vom goldenen Berge 138, 140 93 Die Rabe 173 94 Die kluge Bauerntochter 141, 149

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REFERENCES TO THE KINDER- UND HAUSMÄRCHEN

96 De drei Vügelkens 62 97 Das Wasser des Lebens 22n68 98 Doctor Allwissend 139 99 Der Geist im Glas 22n68 100 Des Teufels russiger Bruder 140 102 Der Zaunkönig und der Bär 140–141 103 Der süsse Brei 99 106 Der arme Müllerbursch und das Kätzchen 139, 141, 151 108 Hans mien Igel 141, 152 110 Der Jude im Dorn 94, 96 111 Der gelernte Jäger 15, 137, 141, 142–144, 154 112 Der Dreschflegel vom Himmel 22n68, 182 113 De beiden Künigeskinner 82 115 Die klare Sonne bringts an den Tag 141 118 Die drei Feldscherer 141, 149 120 Die drei Handwerksburschen 139 123 Die Alte im Wald 22n68

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125 Der Teufel und seine Grossmutter 142, 149 127 Der Eisenofen 138, 141, 154, 173, 203 128 Die faule Spinnerin 139 132 Der Fuchs und das Pferd 119 133 Die zertanzten Schühe 52, 119 136 Eisenhans (De wilde Mann) 91, 119 137 De drei schwatten Princessinnen 119 142 Simeliberg 119 150 Die alte Bettelfrau 229n8 161 Scheeweisschen und Rosenroth 221–222 165 Der Vogel Greif 42–43 169 Das Waldhaus 198, 214n31 182 Die Geschenke des kleinen Volkes 10 186 Die wahre Braut 83 193 Der Trommler 83, 173 195 Der Grabhügel 158n27 196 Oll Rinkrank 173 197 Die Kristallkugel 179 201 Der heilige Joseph im Walde 198

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Index

Aarne, Antti 16, 29, 30, 37, 38, 39, 52, 68, 85–86, 108, 109 Afanas’ev, Alexander 30, 51, 52, 59, 178 Anderson, Graham 135n121 Anderson, Walter 48n67, 58–59, 60, 224, 225 Andrásfalvi, György 176–177 Arabian Nights 7, 31, 59, 72, 113–114, 119, 126, 144, 145, 180 Argonauts 43, 65, 86, 88, 178 Arnim, Achim von 88, 95, 96, 149, 150, 179 Arnim, Friedmund von 40, 179 Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine d’ 5, 7, 67, 92, 96, 98, 194, 227 La belle aux cheveus d’or 64, 72 La biche au bois 97 La chatte blanche 32, 85, 141, 148, 152 Finette cendron 96, 100, 190n107 L’oranger et l’abeille 7, 29, 85, 87, 94, 97 Le nain jaune 8 Basile, Giambattista 4, 7, 11, 85, 202, 204, 222, 223 Lo cunto de li cunti (Pentamerone) 7, 9, 28, 29, 39, 86, 92, 94, 95, 104n51, 114, 157, 202, 209, 211, 227 Cienzo 153 Cintiella 143 Lo cuorvo 61, 153, 160n48 Lo ’ngorante 140, 153 L’orza 11 La palomma 88, 94, 148 Penta 153 Peruonto 146 Pinto Smalto 148

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La polece 148 Rosella 7, 86, 96 Li sette palommielle 153, 154 Lo serpe 104n52 Le tre fate 200, 202, 208 Li tre re animale 179 Baudoin, Jean 65 Bauer, Balthasar 156, 158n17 Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie le Prince de 11 Beauty and the Beast 94, 97–8, 106n82, 147, 204 Bechstein, Ludwig 123, 198, 206, 207, 217n78 Benedek, Elek 164, 165, 166, 167, 180, 181, 184 Benfey, Theodor 13, 37, 108–109, 117, 127, 208 Berthe 15, 152 Bignon, Jean-Paul 65 Blackwell, Janine 100 Blaue Buch zum Todtlachen 140 Bocaccio, Giovanni Decamerone 7, 144, 202 Bodding, Paul Olaf 117 Bolte, Johannes 4, 80, 92 Bottigheimer, Ruth B. 3, 6, 80, 101, 112, 220 Brentano, Clemens 67, 84, 88, 89, 92, 94–95, 98, 99, 149 Brückner-Ehemant, Regine 91 Bruford, Alan viii, 74n33, 224 Buell, Jane 207 Büsching, Johann Gustav Gottlieb 16, 32–34, 40, 42, 52, 85, 93, 144 Bussmann, Auguste 94–95

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INDEX

Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe de 43 Chaube, Pandit Ram Charib 117 Christiansen, Reidar 206, 223 Cieco, Francesco Bello El 86 Cinderella 67, 93, 96, 98, 119, 196, 209, 210 Clausen-Stolzenburg, Maren 151 contes des fées 11, 20n44, 26, 27, 29, 33, 53, 84, 97, 201, 204, 223 Cosquin, Emmanuel 13, 108, 109, 113, 202, 208 cunning folk 10, 36–37, 48n74, 170, 184, 191n117, 199 Dasent, Georg Webbe 206, 207, 209, 211 Dedushkiny progulki 52, 59, 72, 180 Dégh, Linda 56–57, 59, 83, 151, 165–169, 170, 172, 177, 181, 183, 207, 220, 224, 227 devil 10, 31–32, 98, 111, 122, 140–141, 149, 219 Draak, Maartje 12, 38, 54–55, 68 Dravidian Nights Entertainments 115, 116, 117 Droste-Hülshoff, Annette (Anna Elisabeth) 100, 118, 132n66, 137, 156, 222 Droste-Hülshoff, Jenny (Maria Anna) 15, 52, 91, 118–120, 137, 182, 230n13 fairies 1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 19n20, 26, 27, 84, 168, 197, 199, 200, 203–205, 210, 227 Feen-Mährchen 87, 93, 94, 99, 146, 147, 148, 153, 197, 211 Fejes, József 169 Finnish School 38–39, 56–58, 60, 70, 109, 121, 171, 193, 194, 210 Floris ende Blancefloer 55 Force, Charlotte Rose de la L’enchanteur 8 Plus belle que fée 76n69 Fortunatus 7, 142 Frau Holle 95, 194–195, 198, 209, 213n21 Fülleborn, Georg Gustav 139 Gaal, Georg von 167, 177 Galland, Anthonie 7 Gehrts, Heino 170–172

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gender 6, 18n18, 83–85, 91, 111, 143, 154, 196, 200 Gentry, Jane Hicks 207 geographical method 16, 37–39 see also Finnish School Gerrits, Egbert 227 Gesta Romanorum 39, 40, 114, 155, 202 gesunkenes Kulturgut 8 Gobius, Johannes 62 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 13, 90, 99, 146, 149, 150, 151, 160n64, 160n65 Goldberg, Christine 21n56, 181–182 Goldmann, Georg August Friedrich 139, 173, 194–195 Grätz, Manfred 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 17, 27, 67, 223 Grimm, Albert Lud(e)wig 106n74, 106n82, 161n87 Grimmelshausen, Jacob von 32 Grimm, Ferdinand 137 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 4, 27, 80, 88–89, 91, 92, 118, 137, 148–150, 156, 222 Kinder- und Hausmärchen 12, 28, 35, 224 see also 237–238 Grimm, Lotte 67, 89, 90, 98 Grundtvig, Sven 35 Günther, Wilhelm Christoph 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 93 Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der 91, 144 Hahn, Johann Georg von 124, 126, 134n108 Hahnzog, Christian Ludewig 9 Haltrich, Joseph 183 Hamilton, Anthony 105n68 Haney, Jack 53 Hansel and Gretel 10, 15, 81, 82, 95–96, 137, 148, 227 Harf-Lancner, Laurence 6 Harries, Elizabeth 226 Hassenpflug, Amalie 24, 26, 138 Hassenpflug, Jeannette (Hanne) 15, 89, 90, 97, 98, 204 Hassenpflug, Ludwig 90, 91 Hassenpflug, Marie 15, 23, 25, 35, 41, 80, 81, 83, 88, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 152, 153, 173, 227 Haxthausen, Anna von 222, 229n13

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INDEX Haxthausem, Fritz von 118 Haxthausen, Ludowine von 15, 72, 82, 89–90, 100, 156, 222 Henschel, Amalie 26, 33, 38, 41, 43, 80, 90, 95, 138, 154 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 149–150 Héritier de Villandon, Marie-Jeanne le 5, 201, 215n46 Histoire de Kébal 25, 33, 145 History of the Forty Vezirs 113 Höfler, Otto 172 Holbek, Bengt 31, 34, 38, 84, 129n24, 196, 211 Holle (Holda, Hulda) 13, 14, 198–200 Hoppál, Mihály 184 Horálek, Karel 143, 184 Jablonský, Heliodor 39 Jack and the beanstalk 14, 166, 181–182 Jacobs, Joseph 127, 181, 217n87 Jordis, Lulu 90 Jung-Stilling, Heinrich 221 Kalevala 38 Kamenetsky, Christa 103n34, 103n36, 151, 160n60 Kennedy, Patrick 68, 206 Ker, William Paton 55 Klaniczay, Gábor 184 Kletke, Hermann 124 Köhler-Zülch, Ines 85 Koshchay 51, 52, 53, 61, 178, 183 Kovács, Ágnes 164, 165, 167, 170, 183 Kristensen, Evald Tang 9, 34, 77n75, 227 Krohn, Kaarle 37, 109 Leb(e)recht see Tieck Lehnert, Johann Heinrich 205, 222 Lekarstvo ot zadumcivosti 54, 175 Levin, Isidor 53 Little Red Riding Hood see Perrault Liungman, Waldemar 34, 42, 77n76 Lohr, Johann Andreas Christian 159n35, 205 Lüthi, Max 30, 83 Mabinogion 111 Mailly, Jean de 7, 97, 116, 180

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241

Majláth, János (Johann) 39, 167, 178, 180, 181, 205 Malegijs 111 Mannel, Friederike 15, 81, 89, 94, 96 Märchen 1, 9, 11, 12, 27, 29, 30, 32, 57, 58, 92, 149, 150, 219, 222, 223 Mardrus, Joseph-Charles 77n81, 113, 114, 134n107, 209 Meier, Ernst 40 Melusine 87, 200, 203 migratory legend 10, 13, 32, 158n28, 223 monogenesis 37, 38, 109, 174 Mother Goose 5, 8, 12, 15–16, 27, 84, 152 see also Perrault Müllenfoff, Karl 40 Müller, Marie (‘old Marie’) 90, 104n39 Münchhausen, Baron von 43, 182 Münch, Johann Gottlieb 93, 99 Murat, Henriette-Julie de Castenau de 7, 92, 152 Musäus, Johann Carl August 93, 98, 119, 179, 180, 197 Nachtigal, Johann Carl Christoph (Otmar) 93 Nagy, János Berze 166 Naturpoesie 148–150, 156 Naubert, Benedikte 84, 93, 197, 200 Nehrlich, Carl 99 Opie, Iona and Peter 57 oral tradition 35–36, 37, 42, 53, 92, 96, 155, 174–175, 223–225 Ortutay, Gyula 183 Palkó, Zsuzsanna 48n74, 165–167 Panchatantra 108, 127 Peele, George 2, 200, 205 Pentamerone see Basile Perchta 214n39 Peregrinaggio116 Perrault, Charles 7, 8, 11, 31, 35, 92, 98, 151, 156, 222, 227 Contes de ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose) 7, 9, 12, 97 Cendrillon 67 La barbe bleue 29, 92, 97 Le chat botté 29, 32, 92, 97

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INDEX

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Les fées 193, 196, 201, 202, 210 La patience de Griselidis 7 Peau d’âne 11, 98, 99 Le petit chaperon rouge 2, 11, 32, 97 Petit Poucet 96 Les souhaits ridicules 7 Polívka, Georg 4 Potyomkin, Pyotr 51 Pröhle, Heinrich 40, 123–124 Propp, Vladimir 30, 53 Ramus, Charlotte and Julia 4, 15, 90, 136, 137, 139, 154, 155, 156 Ranke, Kurt 38, 56, 120, 172, 222 Rasmussen, Kjeld 47n61, 48n74, 134n103 Renz, Samuel 175 Reynitzsch, Wilhelm 198 Roberts, Leonard 207 Röhrich, Lutz 24–25, 39, 171, 172 Rölleke, Heinz 3, 25, 28, 80, 95, 98, 137, 149, 153 Rooth, Anna Birgitta 193 Rübezahl 33, 41 Ruckart, Georg Christoph 140 Runge, Philipp Otto 29, 32, 89, 95, 156 Saxo Grammaticus 24, 41, 95 Schmid, Friedrich 43 Schenda, Rudolf 2, 3, 36, 56, 85, 227 Scherf, Walter 3 Schummel, Johann Gotlieb 140 Schwertzell, Wilhelmine von 90 Selva, Lorenzo 65, 72, 223 shamanism 14, 170–173, 174, 182, 184, 185, 223 Siddhi-Kür 109, 116, 117 Siebert, Ferdinand 195 Skaski russi 176, 178 Smith, Tommy 206 Snow White 39, 93, 98, 106n82, 145 Solymossy, Sándor 170, 185 Spitta Bey, Guillaume 114, 134n107 Stahl, Karoline 84, 205, 221 Steel, Flora 209 Straparola, Gian Francesco 7, 8, 11, 112, 121, 222, 223 Le piacevoli notti

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Adamantina 112 Biancabella 200, 201 Cesarino 179 Corvetto 181 Flamminio 158n28 Fortunio 112, 176, 179, 189n86 Galeotto 112, 152 Guerrino 119, 178 Livoretto 62, 64, 71, 72, 176, 179 Maestro Lattantio 7, 14, 109–112, 126, 219 Pietro Pazzo 29, 112 Stravinsky, Igor 51 Sustrac, Catherine 202, 215n51 Swan, Jan-Öjvind 172 Sydow, Carl Wilhelm von 6 Tatar, Maria 80 Thompson, Stith 9, 29, 30, 31, 56, 108, 194 Tieck, Johann Ludwig 32, 97, 159n32 Timofeev, Pjotr 176 Trüdchen 43 Utgarta-Loki 41 Uther, Hans-Jörg 3 vetala 117 Viehmann, Dorothea 15, 26, 35, 38, 68, 90, 136–142, 144–145, 148, 149, 151–157, 166, 226 Villeneuve, Gabrielle Suzanne Barbot de 98, 99, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 211 Voss, Johann Heinrich 94 Vulpius 43, 161n79 Wackernagel, Wilhelm 43 Wadia, Putlibai 208, 217n88 Walewein 12, 54, 55, 70 Ward, Donald 36 Warner, Marina 5, 6, 7, 19n22, 84 werewolves 11, 204, 228 Wesselski, Albert 6, 13, 28, 29, 30, 33, 37, 56–59, 72, 108, 225 Wieland, Christoph Martin 29 Wild, Dortchen 15, 82, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 107n91, 138, 143, 194–195, 200

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INDEX

183, 184, 195, 199, 204, 206, 207, 221, 228, 229 Wolf, Johann Wilhelm 35, 38, 39, 40, 69 wonder tales 3, 6, 20n44 Zipes, Jack 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 129n25, 226, 229n12

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Wild, Gretchen 89, 94, 138, 147 Wild, Lisette 89 Williams, Noel 203 Wisser, Wilhelm 85, 133n86 witchcraft (witch) 1, 5, 10, 11, 13, 36, 40, 82, 83, 94, 95, 97, 111, 119, 146, 148, 167, 168, 169, 173, 176, 178,

243

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