A crisis in the history of the European folk tradition becomes apparent, about the tenth century A.D. A quantity of Late Classical matter was being imported from the Mediterranean by the itinerant entertainers, minstrels and pranksters, who came swarming from the sunny south to infest the pilgrim routes and present themselves at castle doors.‡ And not only minstrels, missionaries too were at work. The fierce, warrior ideals of earlier story were submitting to a new piety and sentimental didactic: Slandered Virtue is triumphant, Patience is rewarded, Love endures.
There seems to have prevailed a comparative poverty of invention until the twelfth century, when the matter of India and the matter of Ireland found their ways to the fields of Europe. This was the period of the Crusades and the Chivalrous Romance, the former opening Europe wide to the civilization of the Orient, the latter conjuring from the realm of Celtic faërie a wild wonderworld of princesses enchanted in sleep, castles solitary in the forest adventurous, dragons steaming in rimy caverns, Merlin-magic, Morgan le Fay, cackling hags transmuted by a kiss into the damsel of the world. Europe inherited nearly everything of its fairyland from the imagination of the Celt.*
Shortly after this time came the Hindu Panchatantra. The work had been translated from Sanskrit into Persian in the sixth century A.D., from Persian into Arabic in the eighth, and from Arabic into Hebrew, around the middle of the thirteenth. About 1270, John of Capua turned the Hebrew into Latin, and from this Latin version the book passed into German and Italian. A Spanish translation had been made from the Arabic in 1251; an English was later drawn from the Italian. Individual stories became popular in Europe, and were then rapidly assimilated. “Out of the literary works,” wrote Benfey, “the tales went to the people, and from the people they returned, transformed, to literary collections, then back they went to the people again, etc., and it was principally through this cooperative action that they achieved national and individual spirit—that quality of national validity and individual unity which contributes to not a few of them their high poetical worth.” †
A wonderful period opened in the thirteenth century. With the passing of the gallant days of the great crusades, the aristocratic taste for verse romance declined, and the lusty prose of the late medieval towns moved into its own. Prose compendiums of traditional lore began appearing, filled with every kind of gathered anecdote and history of wonder—vast, immeasurable compilations, which the modern scholar has hardly explored. A tumbling, broad, inexhaustible flood of popular merry tales, misadventures, hero, saint, and devil legends, animal fables, mock heroics, slap-stick jokes, riddles, pious allegories and popular ballads burst abruptly into manuscript and carried everything before it. Compounded with themes from the Cloister and the Castle, mixed with elements from the Bible and from the heathenness of the Orient, as well as the deep pre-Christian past, the wonderful hurly-burly broke into the stonework of the cathedrals, grinned from the stained glass, twisted and curled in humorous grotesque in and out of the letters of illuminated manuscripts, appeared in tapestries, on saddles and weapons, on trinket-caskets, mirrors and combs.* This was the first major flourishing in Europe of a literature of the people. From right and left the materials came, to left and right they were flung forth again, sealed with the sign of the late Gothic; so that no matter what the origin, they were now the re-creation of the European folk.
Much of this matter found its way into the literary works of the late Middle Ages, the Reformation and Renaissance (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Hans Sachs, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, etc.) and then back, reshaped, to the people. The period of abundance continued to the time of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
Finally, in France, at the court of Louis XIV, a vogue commenced for the delicate refashioning of fairy tales and fables—inspired, in part by a new French translation of a late Persian rendering of the Panchatantra, part by Antoine Galland’s rendition of the Arabian Thousand Nights and One Night. The pastime yielded a plentiful harvest of freshly wrought, delicate pieces (La Fontaine, Perrault, the forty-one volumes of the Cabinet des Fées). Many were taken over by the people and crossed the Rhine.
So that by the time the Grimm brothers arrived to begin their collection, much material had overlain the remote mythology of the early tribes. Tales from the four quarters, inventions from every level of society and all stages of Western history were commingled. Nevertheless, as they observed, a homogeneity of style and character pervades the total inheritance. A continuous process of re-creation, a kind of spiritual metabolism, has so broken the original structures in assimilating them to the living civilization, that only the most meticulous and skillful observation, analysis and comparative research can discover their provenience and earlier state. The Grimm brothers regarded this rich composition as a living unit and sought to probe its past; the modern scientist, on the other hand, searches the unit for its elements, then ferrets these to their remote sources. From the contemporary work we receive a more complex impression of the processes of culture than was possible in the period of the Grimms.
Let us turn, therefore, to the problem of the individual tale—the migratory element that enters our system and becomes adapted to our style of existence. What is its history? What can happen to it during the course of its career?
Passing from Orient to Occident, surviving the revolutions of history and the long attrition of time, traversing the familiar bounds of language and belief—the favorite now of a Saracen king, now of a hard warrior, now of a Capucian monk, now of old Marie—the tale undergoes kaleidoscopical mutations. The first problem of research is to identify, fix, and characterize the key-complex, the formal principle of the story’s entity, that without which the story would not be. As the story then is followed throughout its peregrination, it is observed to assimilate to itself the materials offered from land to land. It changes, like a chameleon; puts on the colors of its background; lives and shapes itself to the requirements of the moment. “Such a tale,” writes an American authority, “is at the same time a definite entity and an abstraction. It is an entity in the particular form in which it happens to be recorded at any moment; it is an abstraction in the sense that no two versions ever exactly agree and that consequently the tale lives only in endless mutations.”*
In the life-course of any given version of a tale, a number of typical accidents may occur. A detail may be forgotten. A foreign trait may become naturalized, an obsolete modernized. A general term (animal) may become specialized (mouse), or, vice versa, a special generalized. The order of events may be rearranged. The personages may become confused, or the acts confused, or in some other way the traits of the story may cross-influence each other. Persons and things may become multiplied (particularly by the numbers 3, 5, and 7). Many animals may replace one (polyzoism). Animals may assume human shape (anthropomorphism), or vice versa. Animals may become demons, or vice versa. The narrator can appear as hero (egomorphism). Further: the story may be amplified with new materials. Such materials are generally derived from other folk tales. The expansion may take place at any point, but the beginning and end are the most likely to be amplified. Several tales can be joined into one. Finally: the inventiveness of an individual narrator may lead to intentional variations—for better or for worse.†
The serious study of popular story began, in Europe, with the Romantics. With the Grimm brothers the science came of age. With the foundation in Helsingfors, in 1907, of the Finnish society of the “Folklore Fellows,” the now colossal subject was coordinated for systematic research over the entire world. The technique of the Geographic-Historical Method, perfected by the associates of this pivotal group,‡ enables the modern scholar to retrace the invisible path of the spoken tale practically to the doorstep of the inventor—over the bounds of states, languages, continents, even across oceans and around the globe. The work has required the cooperation of the scholars of the five continents; the international distribution of the materials has demanded an international research. Yet the work started in the usual way of folklore studie
s, as a labor of local, patriotic pride.
About the middle of the nineteenth century, a strong nationalist movement had begun to mature in Finland. Buffeted for five hundred years between Sweden and Russia, the little nation had been annexed in 1809, by Czar Alexander I. Since the close of the eighteenth century, Swedish had been the official academic language. A group of young patriotis now began to agitate for the restoration of the native spirit and the native tongue.
Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), a country physician and student of Finnish philology, collected ballads and folk tales among the people. His work was a northern echo of the labors of the Brothers Grimm. Having gathered a considerable body of folk poetry around the legendary heroes, Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkainen, and Kullervo, he composed these in coordinated sequence and cast them in a uniform verse. 1835 he thus published the first edition of what has since become known as the folk-epic of Finland, the Kalevala, “The Land of Heroes.”*
Julius Krohn (1835–1888), the first student at the university to presume to present his graduate thesis in Finnish, devoted himself to the study of the folk tradition, and in particular to the materials gathered by Lönnrot in the Kalevala. He discovered that among the ballads and popular stories of the Swedes, Russians, Germans, Tatars, etc., many of the motifs of Lönnrot’s epic reappeared, but in variant combinations. The Kalevala, therefore, could not be studied all of a piece; its elements had to be traced down separately. With this discovery he took the first step toward the development of the Finnish geographic-historical method.
Julius Krohn next found that not all the Finnish examples of a given theme could be compared trait for trait with the foreign versions; only what seemed to him to be the oldest of the Finnish forms closely resembled those of the neighboring lands. He concluded that the materials of the native epic had entered Finland from without and had undergone within the country gradual modification.
Furthermore and finally, Julius Krohn perceived that each of the native modifications seemed to be limited in its geographical distribution. He took care, therefore, to keep precise note of the geographical sources as well as chronological relationships of his materials. In this way he was enabled to study the transformation of the motifs of a tale in its passage from mouth to mouth over the land and through the years. “First I sift and arrange the different variants according to chronology and topography,” he wrote to the Hungarian philologist, P. Hunfalvy in 1884; “because I have discovered that only in this way is it possible to distinguish the original elements from the later additions.”*
With respect to the Kalevala, Julius Krohn concluded that neither was it a very old legend nor were its materials originally Finnish. The narrative elements had arrived on the waves of a culture tide that had streamed over Europe through the centuries. Stemming from the gardens of the East and the fertile valleys of Antiquity, they had crossed southern Europe—largely by word of mouth—, then turned eastward again to the regions of the Slavs and Tatars, whence they had passed to the peoples of the north.† And as each folk had received, it had developed, reinterpreted and amplified, and then handed along the inheritance to the neighbor.
Thus in Finland, as in Germany, what had begun as the study of a national, developed inevitably into the review of an international tradition. And the scholarship that had started in patriotic fervor opened immediately into a worldwide collaboration. The son of Julius Krohn, Kaarle Krohn, applied the geographical method developed by his father to the special problem of the folk tale,* and it was he who in 1907, in collaboration with German and Scandinavian scholars, founded the research society that since his time has coordinated the work of many regions.
To illustrate the manner in which the research has been carried on:
An index of folk tale types was issued in 1911 by Antti Aarne.† (The types distinguished in this basic study are those indicated above, pp. 844–845, for the varieties of story in the Grimm collection.) Each class was subdivided, and under each head appeared a directory of examples. Coordinated to Aarne’s index then were published a series of special catalogues for a number of folk traditions: Finnish, Esthonian, Finnish-Swedish, Flemish, Norwegian, Lapp, Livonian, Rumanian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Spanish, and Prussian. For each culture all the available tales from the various published and unpublished archives were classified according to the principles of Aarne’s index. Thus an order was beginning to be brought into fluid chaos.
Another type of work undertaken was that of the monograph. A monograph is a special study devoted to the tracing of a single tale through its twists and turns, disappearances and reappearances, over the globe and through the corridors of time. The technique for the preparation of such a work has been described as follows:
“1) The scholar undertaking to write a monograph on any folk narrative (folk tale, saga, legend, anecdote), must know all the extant versions (‘variants’) of this narrative, whether printed or unprinted, and no matter what the language in which they appear.
“2) He must compare all these versions, carefully, trait by trait, and without any previously formed opinon.
“3) During the investigation, he must always keep in mind the place and time of the rendering of each of the variants.”*
“The homeland of any given folk tale can generally be judged to be the region in which the richest harvest of variants appears; furthermore, where the structure of the tale is most consistent, and where customs and beliefs may serve to illuminate the meaning of the tale. The farther a folk tale wanders from its home, the greater the damage to its configurations.”†
The researches of the Finnish folklore school were supported and extended by an originally independent enterprise in Germany. In 1898 Professor Herman Grimm, the son of Wilhelm, turned over to Johannes Bolte (1858–1937) the unpublished materials of his father and his uncle, with the hope that a new edition might be prepared of the Commentaries to the Nursery and Household Tales. These commentaries had first appeared as appendices to the volumes of 1812 and 1815, then as a special volume in 1822, and finally in a third edition, 1856. Professor Bolte collated, trait by trait, with all the tales and variants gathered by the Grimms everything that could be drawn from the modern archives. He enlisted in the enterprise Professor Georg Polívka of Prag, who assisted in the analysis of the Slavic analogues. During the course of the next thirty-four years the opus grew to five closely printed volumes. The original work of the Grimms, which had opened a rich century of folk studies, collection and interpretation, was brought by this labor to stand securely in the mid-point of the modern field. The Nursery and Household Tales are to-day, as they were the first moment they left the press, the beginning and the middle, if nowise the end, of the study of the literature of the people.
The following classification of the stories according to the above described stages of development † is adapted from that supplied by Friedrich von der Leyen to his edition of the Nursery and Household Tales (Jena, 1912). The listing enables the reader to study for himself the stratifications of the inexhaustible text.
I. Primitive Belief: 28. 39. 55. 60. 85.105, i. ii. 109. 154.—II. Hero Sagas from the Period of the Migrations: 47. 52. 89, 111. 198.—III. Minstrel Work of the Tenth Century: 8. 18. 20. 33. 37. 45. 61. 64. 90. 91. 103. 112. 114. 146. 151. *151. 166. 183.—IV. Chivalrous Work of the Middle Ages: 1. 3. 4. 9. 11. 12. 13. 15. 19. 21. 24. 25. 31. 42. 43. 46. 49. 53. 57. 62. 63. 65. 67. 76. 88. 97. 106. 108. 113. 121. 123. 126. 127. 130. 135. 136. 137. 144. 169. 186. 192. 193. 201–210.—V. Oriental Influences: 6. 16. 29. 36. 51. 54. 56. 68. 71. 79. 92. 93. 94. 98. 107. 122. 129. 134. 143. 152. 165. 182.—VI. Animal Stories: 2. 17. 23. 27. 48. 58. 72. 73. 74. 75. 102. 132. 148. 157. 171. 173. 177. 187.—VII. Work of the Townsmen of the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries: 7. 4. 32. 34. 35. 44. 59. 70. 77. 81. 82. 83. 84. 87. 95. 100. 101. 104. 110. 115. 116. 118. 119. 120. 124. 125. 128. 147. 149. 153. 162. 164. 167. 168. 170. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 180. 183. 184. 189. 194. 195. 199.—VIII. From the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: 5.
22. 26. 40. 50. 69. 78. 96. 99. 117. 133. 141. 142. 145. 150. 155. 156. 160. 161. 163. 179. 181. 188. 191. 197.—IX. Jokes and Anecdotes: 10. 30. 38. 41. 66. 80. 86. 105, iii. 131. 138. 139. 140. 158. 159. 190. 196. 200.
* A review by Dr. Ruth Benedict will be found in The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, article, “Folklore”; one by Professor William H. Halliday, under the same heading in The Encyclopaedia Britannica. A more detailed account with complete bibliography appears in Bolte and Polívka, op. cit., Vol. V, pp. 239–264.
† Theodor Benfey, Pantschatantra: Fünf Bücher indischer Fabeln, Märchen und Erzählungen. Aus dem Sanskrit überzetzt mit Einleitung und Ammerkungen, Leipzig, 1859.
* For examples, see the classification of tales at the conclusion of the present section, p. 856, infra.
† Magic formulae betraying features of the early Germanic verse-style stand to this day in the Grimm collection:
Rapúnzel, Rapúnzel,
Lass dein Haár herúnter (No. 12.)
Éntchen, Éntchen,
Da steht Grétel und Háensel
Keín Stég und keíne Brúecke
Nimm úns auf deínen weíssen Rúecken. (No. 15.)
‡ How much Hellenistic and Roman material had infected the German tribal mythologies during earlier centuries, before and after the fall of Rome, remains a question; it is certain that much of the Balder and Woden imagery is by no means “primitive Aryan.” (Cf. Franz Rolf Schröder, Germanentum und Hellenismus, Heidelberg, 1924; Altgermanische Kulturprobleme, Berlin and Leipzig, 1929.)
* The Youth of Siegfried, Brynhild’s sleep, the sword in the tree and the broken sword, are motifs adopted from the Celtic tradition. The Icelandic Sagas and Eddas were powerfully influenced by the bards of Ireland. In the classification at the conclusion of the present section the tales under heading IV, Chivalrous Work of the Middle Ages, represent this body of matter as it was reworked under the influence of twelfth century Romance.
The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales Page 81
