Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  The emphasis on nature and phantoms is recognizably Romantic, and the modern fairy tale that evolved through the work of the Grimm Brothers and other collectors relies on an idea of natural magic. Magic in European fairy tale works along lines closer to magnetism and the pull of the tides or the silence of eclipse, because it reflects a vision of organic correspondences that developed in early modern society. It was in the fifteenth century, for example, that Paracelsus, the Swiss physician and alchemist, first classified elemental beings: he called them gnomes (earth), sylphs (air), salamanders (fire), and undines (water). Each was destined to spark the narrative imagination to such an extent they now appear generic fairytale characters.

  These supernatural creatures entered our thinking about the population of faerie from German culture: Goethe dramatized the Paracelsian vision in his vast poetic drama Faust, and the artist Phillip Otto Runge, who set down on paper for the first time the extraordinary, powerful story of ‘The Juniper Tree’, painted many scenes of fairyland, its spirits and changelings, bathed in a golden otherworldly light. The English poets, especially Coleridge, were profoundly influenced by this predominantly German dream of a pastoral uncanny, and Romantic writers everywhere enriched it. Another fatal romance, for example, overtakes a mortal when the water nymph Undine emerges from a spring in Friedrich de La Motte Fouqué’s elaborate Romantic fairy tale of c.1811; she then migrates through literature and ballet and eventually takes her place among Disney princess dolls as red-haired, fish-tailed Ariel, the Little Mermaid. The magical motifs in the vision of the mystically minded German Romantic poet Novalis shed all folkloric and religious baggage to become symbolic ciphers enclosing secret wisdom: he yearned to discover the blue flower, his holy grail. In the work of such idealists, fairy tale turns into metaphysical allegory. Goethe’s story, simply entitled ‘A Fairy Tale’, reads woodenly for contemporary readers, but the librettist of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Hugo von Hofmannstahl for Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) belong in this lineage, and their language of symbols is memorably peculiar and powerfully grounded in human passions.

  Into the Woods

  Those powers who govern the multiple currents of supernatural power are sometimes recognizable as dangerous, sometimes disguised as friendly, sometimes ambiguous. They can be seductive, they can tempt us with presents (gingerbread houses with windowpanes of sugar; juicy red apples), or draw us into a conspiracy of terror. Queens of the Night demand our obedience; ogres threaten; witches infest the woods. Inhabitants of fairylands often live apart from human society—in the depths of the forest, or in a far distant castle—but evil-doers also occupy the heart of the home: the wicked mother, the queen, and the fabled stepmother return again and again, in one story after another, as the agents of potent and lethal spells (see Figure 16). In ‘The Prince of the Black Islands’, the beautiful wife of the hero drugs him so she can visit her lover, and cruelly changes her husband half to stone and beats him. The wicked queen uses poison in ‘Snow White’; Mother Gothel, the old witch, imprisons Rapunzel in a high tower with no door and cuts off her hair when she tries to escape. Sometimes the evil figure doesn’t cast spells or work magic but acts against nature so profoundly that she exudes diabolical perversity, tantamount to black magic—when she abandons her children in the forest to die because the family has no food. Sometimes she has no motive, indeed seems to be acting against her own interests, so possessed by malice that she’d rather destroy herself than let anyone else flourish: in ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, she orders the palace chef to casserole her daughter-in-law and grandchildren.

  Females dominate fairytale evil. However, ogres share witches’ appetite and bloodthirstiness—they’re a species from another alien world, but they are often slow-witted, bumbling giants not gifted at magic at all. Cheeky Jack gets the better of one, with the help of his kindly wife, in an English favourite, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Jack is a trickster figure, and widespread throughout European fairy tales and beyond. A trickster heroine like Finette, who avenges her sisters against their abductor, also overcomes the villainous ogre, when he is bent on seduction as in the Bluebeard group of stories about a serial murderer.

  Enemies lurk in the woods and some beasts are wholly unregenerate, however: beware the wolf. He comes in disguise, and looks as sweet and gentle as Granny in bed in her bonnet. In raunchy traditional versions, Little Red Riding Hood isn’t taken in by the wolf in Granny’s bed. As Angela Carter puts it, she is ‘nobody’s meat’.

  Yet nature also wraps the protagonist in intimate relationships, and many creatures are on our side, it turns out; they are gallant and faithful and resourceful. In the exuberant fairy tales of Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, wildernesses are forbidding, but they also harbour friends and familiars—the good little mouse, the loving great green worm (who is not requited). D’Aulnoy shows the influence of the Arabian Nights, in which animal metamorphoses are elaborate, involving numerous adventures, as in ‘The Tale of the Second Dervish’, in which the prince is turned into a monkey and performs many marvels on behalf of his rescuer. In ‘Hansel and Gretel’, a duck befriends the children and carries them back home safe and sound on her back. An ugly fish—a flounder—turns out to be as all-powerful as a god until the fisherman’s wife asks for one wish too many. In ‘The Juniper Tree’, when the sister, little Marlene (Marleen, Marlinchen), buries her murdered brother’s bones with his mother’s beneath the tree ‘it began to move. The branches separated and came together again as though they were clapping their hands in joy. At the same time smoke came out of the tree, and in the middle of the smoke there was a flame that seemed to be burning. Then a beautiful bird flew out of the fire and began singing magnificently.’ This is her brother reborn, metamorphosed into a glorious phoenix, who works his revenge:

  ‘It was my mother who butchered me,

  It was my father who ate me,

  My sister, little Marlene,

  Found all my little bones,

  Bound them in a silken cloth,

  And laid them under the Juniper tree.

  Peewit, peewit, what a beautiful bird am I!’

  The story drives to its cruel end: ‘As she [the wife/stepmother] went out the door, crash! The bird threw the millstone down on her head and she was crushed to death. The father and Marlene heard the crash and went outside. Smoke, flames, and fire were rising from the spot, and when it was over, the little brother was standing there. He took his father and Marlene by the hand, and all three were very happy. Then they went into the house, sat down at the table, and ate.’

  With the bad mother destroyed, the family regroups around the paternal table—exonerating the father altogether from having guzzled on his dead son’s flesh.

  Not all powerful wielders of magic are irreversibly good or evil; this unpredictability adds to the dramatic effects of the fairy tale: jinn can be converted to virtue and act lavishly on behalf of the heroes and heroines, and a witch like Mother Holle, who when she shakes out her feather bedclothes makes snow fall on earth, can change the fortunes of a good kind girl but act very cruelly to a bad unkind sister.

  The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously commented that animals were ‘bons à penser’, good to think with, and fairy tales speak through beasts to explore common experiences—fear of sexual intimacy, assault, cruelty, and injustice and, in general, the struggle for survival. A tradition of articulate, anthropomorphized creatures of every kind is as old as literature itself: animal fables and beast fairy tales are found in ancient Egypt and Greece and India, and the legendary Aesop of the classics has his storytelling counterparts all over the world, who moralize crows and ants, lions and monkeys, jackals and foxes and donkeys, to mock the follies and vices of human beings and display along the way the effervescent cunning and high spirits of the fairytale genre.

  By contrast with animal fables, where something of an animal’s observable, actual character helps make the point (monkeys are clever,
sharks, well, shark-like, in ‘The Heart of a Monkey’ from Zanzibar), the beast of fairytale romance comes in fantasy shape—mythological creatures such as a dragon, a snake, a yellow dwarf, or the ‘Great Green Worm’ (A. S. Byatt’s rendering of D’Aulnoy’s ‘Le Serpentin vert’), and they belong in a world of romance and psychology rather than satire and practical wisdom. Monster bridegrooms can also take the form of animals that used to pose a very real threat—wolves and bears and pigs and warthogs (Walter Crane’s chosen beast for his elaborate and richly coloured illustrations of ‘Beauty and the Beast’). Mme de Murat even imagined an unwanted husband in the shape of a rhinoceros—then a novelty in Europe. Often hybrid, huge, scaly, tusked, and bristling, such beasts endanger and even rape the heroine, in far-flung exotic settings or close to home. Protagonists mutate into a strange, often loathsome and sometimes terrifying outward shape, a boar, a bear, a snake, or a raven, often the outer proof of their inner viciousness. Angela Carter chose to translate ‘Prince Chéri’, another of D’Aulnoy’s tales, in which the good Fairy Candida changes Prince Sweetheart into a monster: ‘Henceforward, you shall look like what you are—angry as a lion, brutal as a bull, greedy as a wolf, and treacherous as a snake.’ But the victims of metamorphosis can also be innocent, and assume a more domestic, hapless, absurd animal form—an ass, a ram, a frog, a bird, a hedgehog.

  No power of witches or gnomes or goblins or ogres or beasts, however, can completely extinguish the intrinsic good of the life force that runs through nature. The vital current enlivens everything, no matter how inert. It doesn’t depend on being housed in individuals or their bodies, but like a lizard that grows another tail when one has been cut off, a fairytale victim can hardly ever be extinguished.

  Charmed Life, Active Things

  The vehicle of magical effects does not however need to have possessed life in the first place: inorganic things are also animate and dynamic. While magical life forces flow principally through natural phenomena—flora, fauna, bodies—ordinary things can become spellbound as well as spellbinding; they can be charmed and changed by the right combination of words, which is usually a secret only the witch or the magician or the clever animal helper knows, but which the protagonists sometimes overhear and can use as well. The wise women who come to the christening feast of the baby princess, Briar Rose, heap presents on her, but one of the wise women isn’t given a gold plate to eat off, and she curses her: ‘In her fifteenth year, the princess shall prick herself with a spindle and fall down dead!’ Another wise woman—sometimes the youngest fairy present—reprieves the little victim, and though she is not strong enough to lift the curse altogether, Briar Rose instead ‘shall fall into a deep sleep for one hundred years … ’.

  The king and queen give the order that every spindle be destroyed. But the princess later climbs a tower in the castle and finds there an old woman spinning—and the fatal words come true.

  Spells are principally verbal: ‘Open Sesame!’, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair!’ The dynamics of the narrative assume their efficacy: nobody in a fairy tale scoffs at a curse or prophecy or dire prohibition.

  Animist vitality endows inert objects with active power (Princess Badoura’s talisman and Aladdin’s lamp in the Nights, Bluebeard’s bloody key, Cinderella’s glass slipper); the plots are carried forward by self-moving objects often in combination with the right formulae (the flying carpet, the magic club that attacks all comers, the magic tablecloth that always spreads a feast, the magic mirror, in ‘Snow White’, which tells the wicked queen the truth). Alongside the powerful enchanters, cannibal witches and ogres, elves, gnomes, nixies or water sprites, the speaking ‘poetical animals’, fairytale magic works through the uncanny activity of these inert objects, and it deepens the sense that invisible powers exist around us, and intensifies the thrill, the strangeness and terror of the pervasive atmosphere of enchantment. Magical worlds are a danger zone.

  Fairy tales operate according to several other fundamental principles of magical thinking besides natural magic and animist vitality: animal metamorphosis and changeable bodies on the one hand, and the binding power of promises and curses on the other, govern the logic of the plots—although logic is hardly the mot juste, since magic springs continual surprises that break all the rules of probability. The implied, ever-present possibility of transmogrification means that fairytale protagonists, like the orphan and his sister in ‘The Juniper Tree’, a feckless hero like Aladdin, and a virtuous heroine like Petrosinella (an Italian Rapunzel), may be changed, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. A stroke of fate will raise them high or lay them low. We readers are placed on their side and we feel keenly the danger of falling under a spell, condemned to die at the hands of a cruel stepmother or a witch with little near-sighted red eyes.

  Although magic operates according to fundamental principles, its manifestations differ from culture to culture, and era to era, which adds spice and variety to fairy tales. In the classic French ‘Cinderella’, Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon, ou le petit pantoufle de verre, the fairy godmother conjures the slippers and the dress and the pumpkin coach and the rat coachman and the lizard footmen, and Perrault, ever the worldly courtier, stresses at the end in his moralité that it’s crucial for everyone to have such a figure in their lives—a society patron. The fairy godmother is the principal agent of the transformations that take place, and he shifts the origin of her powers from supernatural to social: from gods to patricians.

  In versions collected in other cultures, Cinderella’s dead mother returns in the form of an animal, who cares for her and feeds her: a little cow in the Scottish tale ‘Rashen Coatie’, a cat in Angela Carter. The enchantments in the Arabian Nights work within a cosmology of daemonic energy, flowing through the jinn, who are somewhat like fairies, intermediate beings between angels and humans (Figure 4). In ‘The Tale of the Fisherman and the Genie’, the genie Sakhr streams out of an old barnacled copper flask fished up from the depths of the sea; he has been shut up inside with a stopper of lead stamped with the seal of Solomon, but when a fisherman opens it and releases him, he towers to the sky, his powers to do good or ill undiminished by his long inactivity inside the bottle. This is the elemental landscape of wonder, humming with invisible forces and other-than-human creatures.

  Figure 4 Jinn: unpredictable, metamorphic, hybrid beings with immense magical powers can be male (as here) or female. Tile inspired by Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing by al-Qazwini, Iran, 19th century.

  The Magic of Metamorphosis

  The way magic runs against the grain of reality, making all these improbable twists and turns, lifts the tale into the realm of surprise. Or rather, into the realm of surprisingness, as C. S. Lewis realized, because we have heard the story before and we know what will happen. Even if we cannot remember it exactly, we expect the ending to be happy because this is a fairy tale. Cinderella will be recognized for her true self; Snow White will be jolted on her bier and cough up the piece of apple that’s choking her; the evil stepmother will meet her doom—and this foreknowledge increases rather than decreases our sense of satisfaction at the happy outcome.

  Walter Benjamin, who in l936 wrote a marvellous essay called ‘The Storyteller’, likes the justice meted out in the tales by magic. He comments that they give hope that ‘cunning and high spirits’ will win in the end against dark malignant forces.

  Metamorphosis in fairy tales has a clear relation with myth, and fairytale variants spin twists on the tradition: for example, the ‘witch’s duels’, or battle sequences of ever-changing metamorphoses as one character battles with another, pick up the struggle of shape-shifters like Thetis against Peleus’s advances, but whereas in myths the outcome is not happy (shape-shifting Thetis is overborne by Peleus, and conceives Achilles), such battles in fairy tale end with the defeat of the enemy or the happy triumph of the hero (see Figure 11). The price can be high: the apocalyptic contest between a princess and the evil jinni in the S
econd Dervish’s Tale ends with his destruction, but she is scorched by her own fiery metamorphoses, and cannot survive. It is a sign of the trend in early twentieth-century fairy tale that when Lotte Reiniger adapted the scene in her 1926 film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the ‘Witch of the Fire Mountain’ prevails against the Demons of Waq Waq. During the course of a furious shape-shifting duel, her adversaries morph from lion to scorpion to serpent, to eagle, to cat, cock, etc. and maul and pounce and grapple, flowing apparently seamlessly from one form to another. This sequence, the first of its kind on screen, exploits the extraordinary potential film animation offers for fluid metamorphosis in movement and has had a significant influence: on the wizards’ duel in The Sword and the Stone, for example (Disney, 1963).

  The enchanters and enchantresses of fairy tales (Figure 5) also have recognizable mythic counterparts. Circe, who changes men into beasts in both Homer and in Ovid, and her niece, Medea, are the precursors of many fascinating sorceresses, such as the Queen of the Serpents in the prodigious sequence of fairy tales about the hero Buluqiya in the Arabian Nights, or the many evil queens and stepmothers, who are equally skilled at poisons and potions and transmogrifying their victims: they can make a donkey’s tail grow from the brow of an unkind sister, or another spit toads and snakes when she speaks; Joringel is changed into a bird and kept in a cage until Jorinda rescues him; the wicked queen in ‘Snow White’ turns herself into an old pedlar and offers her victim a poisoned comb, stay-laces, and, finally, the apple.

  Figure 5 The wicked wizard wears a crocodile skin and brandishes a wand of writhing serpents in ‘The Golden Branch’ by Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, illustrated by Clinton Peters, 1900.

  Unlike classical myths, fairy tales usually restore the victims of metamorphosis to their original form. Or they transfigure them to be far more beautiful than before. The restoration leads to recognition: when the beast guise falls away, the true prince appears. In every case, the outer form has hidden the inner man, and it takes something momentous to overturn the beast’s fate. Beast fairy tales like these follow a narrative arc: the story begins with a spell or a curse that binds the male hero under a terrible disguise, and after a passage of ordeals and horrors, closes with recognition and fulfilment (these are Cinderella tales with a male protagonist). Sometimes the plot follows emotional or psychological logic, but not always; a great deal of the impact of these fairy tales depends on the stark absence of explanation, on the sheer mysteriousness of the premises and outcome: how did the Beast come to be a Beast? Why is Hans a hedgehog? The stories are moulded to traditional patterns which lead our expectations as listeners or readers, but getting to the dénouement goes by unpredictable and wayward routes: burning the snakeskin, in Basile’s tale ‘Il re serpente’ (The Snake King), or hurling the frog against the wall of the princess’s bedroom in ‘The Frog Prince’. Occasionally, as in the magnificent group of fairy tales which Andersen revisits in ‘The Wild Swans’, the trace of the animal lingers—in the wing of one of the heroine’s transformed brothers, because she has not had time to finish the shirt she has been so painfully weaving and sewing from star flowers or nettles. The scent—the miasma—of faery enchantment rises sharply from that unfinished sleeve, that remaining wing.