Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century marks the start of the modern fairy tale as we know it, and Perrault and Galland are the key exponents who, in the history of readership and reception, established as literature ‘the Fairy way of writing’. Collectors and writers like Perrault and, later, the Grimm Brothers, formed a corpus, even a canon, of fairy tales, and their printed versions established standard elements. When new storytellers later tackled ‘Hansel and Gretel’, they were consequently aware of a template in ways that a medieval storyteller might not have been.

  Baroque Licence: Basile in Naples

  The fashion for fairy writing was new and wildly popular, but the way of writing was old, as it turned out, and the salonnières and the Oriental taletellers who began filling volumes with their fairy tales belonged in a literary lineage. As Borges shows so incisively in his essay ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, the success of their way of telling reveals with hindsight the tradition’s landmarks, and pioneers of the genre who have been—and in some cases remain—rather overlooked. Many of the enchantments, characters, and plotlines in the stories of Perrault, D’Aulnoy, et al. are first encountered in print in two ebullient Italian collections, Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights, 1550–5) by the Venetian Straparola, about whom very little is known, and in Il Pentamerone ovvero lo cunto de li cunti (The Pentameron, or Tale of Tales, 1634–6) by a Neapolitan, Giambattista Basile, a courtier and soldier. It’s no accident that these two authors created their story cycles in great seaports, where cultures, languages, ideas—and above all travellers—met one another.

  Both writers dramatize with witty irreverence the most outlandish scenes of magic and metamorphosis, and intertwine them with real-life dramas of family rivalry and erotic passion, often in fantastic, exotic, and luxurious settings; their adult material flows through baroque, sophisticated, yet demotic prose, packed with fanciful imagery and proverbial turns of phrase; mandarin ironies, high-flown emotions fuse with crude jokes and japes to create a hybrid text, where preposterous entertainment meets lacerating cynicism about humankind. Basile distils a heady brew from Neapolitan dialect and courtly prose, all stuffed with proverbs, catches, and saws (not unlike Shakespeare, in this respect, and they are contemporaries in a humanist Europe, after all).

  Not all fairy stories’ endings are happy: in Straparola’s forerunner of ‘Puss-in-Boots’, the hero forgets all about the (female) cat’s help once he has become a prince. Early versions of ‘Donkeyskin’, Beast Bridegroom stories, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, and ‘Rapunzel’ also appear in these collections—again, with significant differences. Basile’s Cinderella, for example, conspires to murder her stepmother so her dear governess can marry her father instead. But her plan fails when the governess produces seven children of her own, whom she favours over Cinderella.

  Basile’s title—Il Pentamerone—nods to Boccaccio’s Decameron (Ten Days), and Basile also stages a storytelling scene: over the course of five days, ten crone storytellers, each savagely evoked in decrepitude and monstrosity, come forward one by one to tell fifty tales. The framing device, which holds the sprawling contents inside an overarching plot, is fundamental to the structure of the Arabian Nights, and has been much copied. In the view of the literary scholar Ros Ballaster, it defines the genre of the Oriental fairy tale. More importantly, it sets before us, the readers, a supposed anterior oral storytelling scene. This is the essential point: fairy tales on the page invoke live voices, telling stories aloud. A memory of a living narrator reverberates in the genre, even when the story is manifestly a highly wrought literary text. Authors like Straparola and Basile and D’Aulnoy are playacting, stepping into the roles of Shahrazad or Mother Goose, because one of the things that fairy tale promises is an unbroken link with the past.

  Box 3 ‘The Cinderella Cat’, by Giambattista Basile

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  ‘ … the king, taking it [the slipper] in his hand, said, “If the basement indeed is so beautiful, what must the building be? O beauteous candlestick, where is the candle that consumes me? O tripod of the bright boiler in which life simmers! O beautiful cork, fastened to the angling-line of Love, with which he has caught my soul! Lo, I embrace you, I press you to my heart; and if I cannot reach the plant, I adore at least the roots; if I cannot possess the capital of the column, I kiss the base. You who until now were the prison of a white foot, are now the fetter of an unhappy heart.”

  ‘So saying he called his secretary, and commanded the trumpeter to sound a “Too, too!” and make proclamation, that all the women of that country should come to a feast and banquet which he had taken it into his head to give.’

  Basile’s storytelling manner mimics, with hyperbolic gusto, oral techniques of enumeration, rhythm, and decoration, eddying and whirling word clusters; he relishes bodily functions with a Rabelaisian appetite and likes the off-colour anecdote—these are stories in which a fart may be celebrated in raiment more usually reserved, in later literature, for the apparel of fairies. Both Straparola and Basile communicate a fabulous vision, filled with contrasting colours, buoyant with that ‘leggerezza’ or lightness that Italo Calvino extols, combining horror, jests, and outrage, sweetness and irony, violence and cruelty. As Calvino wrote about Basile in his essay ‘The Map of Metaphors’ (1974): ‘In the Pentamerone, there are pages of devastating sensual excitement … ’

  Several of Basile’s stories reappear, with variations, in the Grimms’ celebrated collection, Children’s and Household Tales. Basile’s opening, for example, features a magic donkey, table, and cudgel given to the simpleton hero by a doting ogre. The Italianist Nancy Canepa has suggested that this tale mirrors Basile’s own strategy as a writer: he annexed tools of peasants’ storytelling to perform enchanted acts of his own.

  The distinction between genuine folk tales and literary fairy tales is difficult to maintain, faced with the metamorphoses of a single story—for example ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ or ‘Ali Baba’. Scholars who refute popular, unlettered participants in the tales’ history are staking too much on the literary record; the latter is interwoven in the dissemination of the story, in manuscript and print, and helps crystallize its features, but the case for the invention of an entire story, ab ovo, by an individual writer, flies in the face of the evidence—Plato mentions old women going down to the harbour to comfort the victims bound for the Minotaur’s table by telling them stories, and in the second century ad Apuleius places his marvellous ‘Tale of Cupid and Psyche’ on the lips of an old and disreputable bawd. This is partly a point about social history: people told stories before mass literacy; but it is also about desire: what is loved in stories is often an imagined link to a long, living lineage.

  German Dreams: The Grimm Brothers

  The Grimm Brothers’ anthology staged a crucial encounter between the Volk (the People) and the intellectual élite; their processes of collecting and editing reveal very clearly the entanglement of sources in the modern making of the classic fairy tales. During the turbulent times of the Napoleonic invasions, the writer Clemens Brentano, his sister Bettina, and her husband, their collaborator Achim von Arnim, hungered for an authentic, homegrown, original literature, stemming from the Volk. Like Romantics elsewhere, they were caught in a hum of voices present and past; they were not lone innovators but members of a large movement of national and cultural rediscovery of ‘that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man’, in the words of the essayist Charles Lamb. Their shared interest lay with materials hitherto disregarded as low and vulgar: popular wisdom and fancy, from ballads to facetious jokes, homespun animal fables to fierce stories of revenge and justice. Von Arnim and Brentano’s three-volume anthology of songs and ballads, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Wonderful Horn), filled with terrifying stories and desperate passions, first began appearing in 1805; as in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, an eerie light of faerie glowed in the poe
ms, and the frisson of cruel fate delivered brilliant dramatic effects. Schubert set ‘The Erl-King’, as transcribed by Goethe, and the sound of the piano rushes like the hoary demon god of the wind, a death spectre, an ogre who snatches the boy riding pillion on his father’s horse:

  ‘I love you, your beautiful form entices me;

  And if you’re not willing, then I will use force.’

  ‘My father, my father, he’s grabbing me now!

  The Erlking has done me harm!’

  When Brentano and his circle heard about the Grimm Brothers’ similar interests, they invited them to start collecting tales and to send them materials. The results have come to define fairy tale all over the world.

  In 1812, the first edition of their anthology, comprising eighty-six stories, came out in an edition of 600, with an apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. It was not really intended to be read for pleasure at all by the children and households of its title; it was a learned work setting out to reconfigure the cultural history of Germany along lines that would emancipate it from the monopoly of classical and French superiority. Yet this collection—by the final, standard edition of 1857 the number of tales had grown to 210—was to become the most widely translated work in the world after the Bible and the Qur’an, rendered into more than 160 languages so far, including Xhosa and Tagalog, and still counting.

  Here are the tall and trackless forests and the entranced castles, treacherous queens, murderous mothers, careless fathers, the magical bird that sings woe to evil-doers, the severed horse head that speaks the truth, gnomes and nixies, a queer little fellow like Rumpelstiltskin and a frog that wants to sleep on the princess’s pillow, the empty bowls that miraculously fill, the well with heaven lying in its depths, the brave siblings, the self-laying festive tablecloth, the clever and friendly creatures and the ravenous beasts, the ruthless plots, the bleak, deadpan tone, the fatalism—and the joyful sudden turn of events, when the world is set to rights after horror. Here are the classics that have travelled the world: ‘The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder’, ‘Snow White’, ‘Foundling Bird’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Little Redcap’, ‘The Girl with No Hands’, ‘The Singing Springing Lark’, ‘Ashypet’, ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, and ‘The Juniper Tree’.

  Germany wasn’t yet Germany. It was a congeries made up of dozens of principalities and archdukedoms, free Hanseatic ports and archbishoprics. History shows us that the modern nation-state develops long after a national culture and its language: think of Italy and of Dante, writing five hundred years before Italian unification. For centuries, most of the peninsula had been under German or Austrian or Spanish rule, while the Renaissance, indisputably Italian, was influencing the whole world. The Grimms were living in a time of turmoil and bloodshed. The Revolution in France inspired corresponding fervour among some of their Romantic compatriots; then Napoleon, leading his abused and adoring armies to invade one European territory after another, took possession of the city of Kassel, where the brothers were working in the library, and installed as ruler his brother, Jerôme, as King of Westphalia.

  One response to humiliation is to assert cultural riches and distinctiveness, even pre-eminence. The Grimms became part of the swelling movement to retrieve a record of the German spirit, through an encyclopaedic account of the German language, myths, history, customs, beliefs, and knowledge. They called it ‘Folk Poesy’, and they thought of it as part of nature—untutored, uncontaminated by book learning, wild as the forests and the mountains. In a ‘Circular Letter’, which Jacob Grimm sent out in 1815, he began by asking correspondents to find songs and rhymes, but he moved on swiftly to request the stories for which the Grimms have become the most widely read writers of fairy tales in the world. He specified ‘Local Legends (Sagen) not in verse, most especially both the various Nurses’ Tales and Children’s Tales (Ammen- und Kindermärchen) of giants, dwarves, monsters, king’s sons and daughters spellbound and set free, devils, treasures and wishing objects … Animal Fables in particular are to be noted … ’.

  The Grimms stipulated that ‘Folk Poesy’ must be unadulterated in its origins: ‘Above all,’ wrote Jacob, ‘it is important that these items should be gathered faithfully and truly, without decoration and addition and with the greatest possible precision and detail, from the mouths of the story-tellers, where practicable in and with their own authentic words … ’ (Figure 7).

  They themselves went around the country gathering tales, resembling the fairy tales’ own protagonists who set out to pick mushrooms and find kindling in the depths of the forests. In Marburg, for example, the university town where they were students, they visited the hospital where an old woman was celebrated for her repertoire, but they found she didn’t want to pass on her lore to the fine young scholars. So the brothers persuaded the little daughter of the hospital director to ask her for a story and bring it back to them—the result was ‘Aschenputtel’, the German ‘Cinderella’, in which the sisters cut off their heels and cut off their toes, before their eyes are put out one by one by the doves which have acted to help Cinderella throughout, the agents of her dead mother.

  Figure 7 Sources and gossip: women, children (and others) pass on the wisdom of the tribe. Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories, 1989.

  This is the cruellest variant of the famous story, and perhaps the old woman did not want the élite young men to see into the secret thoughts and dreams of revenge that generations of women have entertained?

  The brothers were questing for a true original and were filled with confidence that they would find a local, pristine, authentic tradition. They kept worrying at their material, so that in effect they rewrote what they collected into the form of the fairy tale—terse, affectless, peculiar, violent, and bafflingly illogical.

  But very soon doubts began about the unadulterated German character of the material: so many of their sources were literate, even French-speaking, sophisticates and much-travelled, and the Grimms were rattled by the correspondences and echoes. So they pulled one story and then another from the first edition: more than thirty tales were set aside for failing the nationality test, including ‘Puss-in-Boots’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’. Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.

  The quest for authenticity was a vertiginous experience, and the concept of a home culture was engulfed, replaced by a hubbub of voices, the narrative melée of the past jostling to find a place to speak for the present. Reading the Grimms can feel like a dreamscape where faces from different times are all jumbled, assembling and disassembling, crystallizing and melting, moving in so close as to lose focus and then evaporating—plots and motifs, monsters and princesses, elves and spirits from the Arabian Nights, from the Neapolitan Basile, from Boccaccio all jostling as in Bottom’s dream. In ‘Strong Hans’, this scene comes straight from an encounter with jinn: ‘each of the air spirits seized one of the hairs on his head, and then began to fly upwards’.

  The problem of authenticity was even more acute because several of the Grimms’ sources were educated and well-travelled women (and some men), themselves informed by contacts, crosscurrents, and migrations. The brothers gathered several from a cousin, known as ‘die alte Marie’ (Old Mary), code for the authentic voice of the Volk. A tailor’s widow, Dorothea Viehmann, became the most famous of their storytellers, her image on the frontispiece of their book.

  She told them the very strange story ‘Hans My Hedgehog’, and its performative potential shows in the repetitions of motifs and reprises, in the frightening and playful episodes, as the storyteller makes-believe that she—or he—is pricking the child with the animal’s quills.

  Not content with purifying the German tradition, Wilhelm began altering other stories because they were off-colour by the standards of the day (Rapunzel bedded and pregnant before she’s wedded!). The most acute quandary, however,
that Wilhelm faced was how to make the transition to the page and keep the sense of the pristine origin. The brothers claimed that they were reproducing the voice of immemorial tradition, but Wilhelm shaped and polished, cadenced and ornamented many of the best-known tales over the course of nearly fifty years; above all, he censored the stories’ frankness about sex, but let the violent reprisals stand. Eventually the brothers created the memorable tales in the form that has travelled the world.

  Comparison of the 1812 versions with the fuller, patterned 1857 final, now standard, edition shows that Wilhelm had a fine sense of narrative dynamics, and the tales benefited hugely from his multiple interferences. ‘The Frog King’, the opening tale of the book, first filled a single sparse paragraph. It now begins, ‘In the olden days, when wishing still worked, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest daughter was so lovely that even the sun … was struck with wonder … ’. These phrases strike what sounds like the pure note of fairy tale, but they are Wilhelm’s invention, and they breathe necessary air and fancy into the bare opening of the original, ‘There was once a king’s daughter … ’ (1812). This phrase was itself an improvement on the earliest transcript of all (1810), which sounds as flat as a Jack and Jill reading book: ‘The king’s daughter went out into the forest … ’.