Lairy Fights - Folklorists debate the origins of fairy tales
May 26
Where did the girl who worked among the cinders and went on to marry a prince first come from? Most would have guessed from the oral traditions of peasants and villagers, which became the humble folklore that was later transcribed and immortalised by the likes of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. But a new book by Ruth B. Bottigheimer, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, says otherwise.
In Fairy Tales: A New History, Bottigheimer argues that fairy tales can find their origins in print:
‘It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition. It may therefore surprise readers that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact… Literary analysis undermines it, literary history rejects it, social history repudiates it, and publishing history (whether of manuscripts or of books) contradicts it.’
As a case in point, Bottigheimer cites the rags-to-riches genre, best captured in tales like ‘Cinderella. She argues that the first of these stories can be found in Le piacevoli notti (Pleasant Nights), a volume by the Italian writer Straparola, which was published around 1550 and also contained the earliest known version of Costantino Fortunato (Puss in Boots). It was this printed volume, not oral tradition, which would have influenced the Brothers Grimm as it travelled from Italy to France and Germany. ‘You just don't get that story before the 1550s,’ she says the rags-to-riches tale. ‘It seemed to me that if I wasn't seeing any stories like this, it was because there weren't any stories like this.’
This type of thinking hasn’t been well received by other passionate folklorists. At the annual congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, other academics were apparently in uproar. According to Dan Ben-Amos, who lectures at the University of Pennsylvania ‘the whole audience went up in arms against her. I have never seen a scene like that in an international meeting or an American meeting… She’s turning things upside down.’ A similar outcry occurred later in Milwaukee.
Other folklorists take a more rounded view, arguing the origins of stories like Snow White, The Girls Without Hands, The Three Brothers and Hanzel and Gretel have a complex and nuanced history that involves both oral and printed traditions.
Perhaps as George MacDonald, author of At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin suggests, it doesn’t really matter: ‘were I further begged to describe the fairytale, or define what it is, I would make answer, that I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being. A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is just a face’.
JA
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Comments
26 May 09 at 18:35
Nury Vittachi has a convincing argument that Cinderalla was appropriated from Chinese folklore. He claims it was written around AD 860 in East Asia and featured Yeh-Shan, who had the smallest feet in town: a key signifier of beauty in traditional Chinese culture. The 1550s date would have tied in with the return of European merchants from China who brought the story to the West. (A large bra would have been a more appropriate Western sign of beauty).
...31 May 09 at 22:18
The fact that a particular expression of a story has been traced to one author doesn't mean that there weren't lots of similar-themed stories floating around in the oral tradition.
After all, Star Wars is based on the general story of the Hero's Journey. As far as I know, that was a conscious decision by George Lucas.
Straparola could have had a similar inspiration.
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