Ancient Fairy and Folk Tales

An Anthology

Graham Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429779008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

This anthology explores the multitude of evidence for recognisable fairy tales drawn from sources in the much older cultures of the ancient world, appearing much earlier than the 17th century where awareness of most fairy tales tends to begin.

It presents versions of Cinderella, The Emperor's New Clothes, Snow White, The Frog Prince and a host of others where the similarities to familiar 'modern' versions far outweigh the differences. Here we find Cinderella as a courtesan, Snow White coming to a tragic end or an innocent heroine murdering her sisters. We find an emperor's new clothes where the flatterers compare him to Alexander the Great, or a pair of adulterers caught in a magic trap. Tantalising fragments suggest that there is more to be discovered: we can point to a Sleeping Beauty where the girl takes on the green colouring of the surrounding wood, or we encounter a Rumpelstiltskin connected to a mystery cult. The overall picture suggests a much richer texture of popular tale as a fascinating new legacy of antiquity.

This volume breaks down the traditional barriers between Classical Mythology and the fairy tale, and will be an invaluable resource for anyone working on the history of fairy tales and folklore.

1

INTRODUCTION

Who’s been telling my tale?

The catchphrase above suggests that someone else has got there first: that familiar and much-loved stories we claim as ‘ours’¹ may not necessarily be so after all; we may not find older tellings instantly recognisable in every detail, but that is in itself a reason for looking further back than we have been accustomed to do. The dwarves in Snow White who ask that sort of question we take for granted as characters in a fairy tale; but it will be useful to define what sort of material such a term has come to entail, and just how old we might expect some fairy tales to be.

As a working definition of a fairy tale I have adopted the following: ‘a tale with a marked fantastic or magical content and a high moral standpoint’. Fairy tale belongs to the larger category of folktale, associated in the first instance with oral tradition. Within that broad grouping it differs from myth in not attempting explanation of creation or the world; it differs from legend in not offering historically believable material; and it differs from other non-magical folktale categories such as humorous tales and novellas in its framework of unbelievability.² It can include literary works of named authors as well as anonymous narrators: fairy tales are frequently presented even in literary settings as popular and traditional material being told orally to a listener or listeners. It is easy to think of examples where such categories overlap, and scholars may choose to see the story of the one-eyed ogre as fairy tale³ as readily as folktale.

So much for definitions in isolation. Students of fairy and folktale can voice frustration at the diversity of formulations possible; and we can feel left with a sense of confusion worse confounded.⁴ Of some half-dozen definitions collected by Stein⁵ those of Bolte and Ranke are similar to the above; those of Stith Thompson and Vladimir Propp emphasise their own specific interest in motifs and functions⁶ respectively. J.R.R. Tolkien invoked a background of what he called ‘Faerie’ for the ethos of the fairy tale.⁷ Perhaps the least satisfactory characterisation is ironically one by Jacob Grimm himself, simply contrasting the poetic quality of the fairy tale with the historical aspect of legend. The level of documentation is now such that the Grimms’ tales have acquired their own corpus of annotations, by Bolte and Polivka (1911–1932); and even Tolkien’s celebrated essay has acquired its own text and commentary! But some attempt at precision is necessary, because in practice the terms relating to popular storytelling are often loose and based on verbal association. Supernatural forces are normal in fairy tale, but need not be fairies as such; and many tales include gods, but not acting in some higher mythical capacity. The term ‘fairy tale’ is generally used as an equivalent to ‘magic tale’⁸ (German Zaubermärchen) or ‘wonder tale’ (Wundermärchen), but normal English usage now prefers Grimms’ Fairy Tales to Grimms’ Wonder Tales. Folk tale and fairy tale are often treated as almost interchangeable, but a traditional riddle-tale like King John and the Abbot is a folktale without any claim to being a fairy tale, precisely because any wonder or magical element is missing. The term ‘international tale’ is a useful professional term when linking folktales to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of tales (ATU),⁹ where magic tales occupy numbers 300–749; but again the term’s currency outside the academy is much less than that of folktale as a matter of common usage. In the end I chose to emphasise fairy tale because I think it best links an ancient tale like Cupid and Psyche with the elaborately decorated contes de fées of 17th-century France,¹⁰ and because fairy tales like those of Perrault or the Grimms are the kind of stories most likely to lie still partly submerged and undetected in the ancient world.¹¹

Fairy tales of any period present some specific expectations of thematic content. We might expect family disharmony that calls for resolution: typically sibling rivalry is involved, like that of Psyche and her sisters, or even incest, as in some forms of Cinderella. A tale may involve a quest or the solution to a problem, like Psyche’s implementation of tasks set by a future mother-in-law. Also important is the sympathy of the reader or listener for the protagonist. A supernatural agent, magic helper or magic object will somehow be expected to put matters right in the plot; and there will be rewards for the modest and virtuous, and punishments for those who are not. There are some distinctive motifs that seem to point to fairy tale quite inexorably: if anyone is turned into or out of a frog,¹² then fairy tale will be the first thing to suggest itself. If however someone turns into or out of a stag, the reader will be more likely to think of the story as myth¹³: such is the whimsical power of traditional association. We expect some typical tale elements, as when animal helpers assist the heroine to accomplish impossible household tasks, or a king offers half his kingdom for whatever it might be, or there is a surfeit of golden objects, or invisibility looms large. We are also prone to associate certain stereotyped phrases with the fairy tale: ‘All the better to x you with…’ is among the most distinctive; to say nothing of ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’, as well as ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ There may be gruesome features, like Psyche’s indirect murder of her sisters, and happy endings are not as assured as we tend to take for granted: Hippomenes and Atalanta undergo a transformation that denies them any sexual fulfilment, just as surely as Perrault’s version does not save Red Riding Hood from being finally eaten by the wolf.

The fairy tale: towards a traditional history

Before adding in a range of earlier examples, it is useful to suggest a chronological overview of Western fairy tale. Two Renaissance collections mark the beginnings of the modern genre as generally conceived: Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti (The Delectable Nights) (1550–1553) with 14 fairy tales among 73 tales; and Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (‘The Tale of Tales’, otherwise known as the Pentamerone), consisting of 49 tales and a frame (1634–1636). Both authors present an audience listening to a cycle of tales, preserving the illusion of orality, and in Basile’s case told by lower-class women. From the end of the 17th century come the significant markers of Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, with its sub-title Contes de ma mère L’oye (Mother Goose Tales) and tales by Madame D’Aulnoy, who coined the term Contes de fées itself (1698)¹⁴; it is with her set of 15 tales that the resourceful manipulation of fairy tale motifs might be said to come of age, and no fewer than five of her narratives look back to Cupid and Psyche as a model. Perrault had just produced what have become canonic versions of Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty and others; whatever the previous history of these tales, they here appear against an aristocratic, court background which valued good manners and an ethos of opulence. There is noteworthy inventiveness in evidence: d’Aulnoy’s Finette Cendron and her sisters touch on Babes in the Wood, and even a one-eyed cannibal giant tricked into his own oven, before their own Cinderella plot is completed. Such tales are the product of educated circles and set the pattern of fairy tales that are essentially literary, and authored by named individuals, in a world where Ancient Ovidian metamorphosis and Medieval romance effortlessly coalesce.¹⁵ The fashion for fairy tale continued, notably in the hands of educated women writers such as Marie-Jeanne L’héritier and Rose de la Force,¹⁶ till the substantial Cabinet des fées on the threshold of the French Revolution.

The tide now turned in favour of the notion of the oral tale collected from humble informants. By the early 19th century such tales could be collected along local or national lines for the most part, by individual scholarly initiatives, most notably those of the Brothers Grimm. In contrast to the educated output of the French salon-ladies, these tales were seen at least at the time as the preserve of the folk, the heritage of a nation’s soul¹⁷ through the spontaneous voice of the peasantry. This idealised state of affairs is now accorded a good deal of modification: the Grimms themselves edited and revised their collection Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) seven times between 1812 and 1857; and at least some of their versions appear to have been influenced by literate versions of French inspiration.¹⁸

Since the Grimms the study of the oral tale has greatly developed, and a landmark was reached in 1910 with Antti Aarne’s index of popular tale types, revised by Stith Thompson in 1928 and 1961 and much expanded by H.-J. Uther in 2004, under the title The Types of International Folktales. A series of monographs appeared until around 1960 by various researchers studying the motif-variations of individual tales according to the historic-geographic method.¹⁹ Stith Thompson’s revision of his motif-index of individual constituents of tales appeared in 1955–1958. The ‘magic tales’, otherwise fairy tales, are placed before religious tales, romances and stupid ogre stories in what is now the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification, though these categories also contain a sprinkling of fairy/magic tales as well. And the massive Enzyklopädie des Märchens begun by Kurt Ranke in 1977 saw its final supplementary volume in 2015.²⁰ Of course the production of individually invented fairy tales taking only their starting-point from the traditional fairy tale has continued through the last three centuries, faster than scholarly study can keep up with them.

Here the history of the fairy tale might be allowed to rest, with occasional skirmishing over the ‘invention’ of the first fairy tale: Ruth Bottigheimer saw Straparola as the actual inventor of the genre, giving rise to substantial controversy, particularly over whether the fairy-tale genre developed through oral use of written texts.²¹ But there remains a nagging doubt that the outline suggested so far cannot be the whole story. Two texts in particular stand out to challenge the above account: the 9th-century CE Chinese story of Yeh-Hsien which has been acknowledged as a fully-fledged Cinderella long before the European Renaissance, and one not truncated in any way²²; and the substantial tale of Cupid and Psyche forming the centrepiece of the picaresque novel the Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) by the Latin sophist Apuleius as early as the 2nd century CE.²³ Some classicists explain the latter piece in different terms, and it is indeed a richly multifaceted text²⁴; but only its mannered Late Latin language would prevent its being passed off as a text from an 18th-century French salonnière. The fairy tale has been around for a good deal longer, and reached its literary maturity early.

To address the question of continuity between ancient and modern fairy tale repertoire two treatments appeared around the millennium: the present author and William Hansen independently produced studies setting out to show that the links from An...