Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder: The Venomous Maiden and Other Stories of the Supernatural is a collection of fifty-three medieval tales translated from their original languages and loosely organized into seven themes, such as “Animal Tales,” “Heroic Legends,” and “Licit and Illicit Love.” The current volume is itself a translation of a work originally published in French under the title Contes, diableries et autres merveilles du Moyen Âge (Paris: Imago, 2013). The editors have provided brief annotations at the end of some tales in addition to endnotes, a bibliography, and several appendices, including type, motif, and moral theme indices.
Despite this scholarly framing, the volume is constructed haphazardly at best. The editors consistently omit additional source details and references that would provide additional context or further reading, in addition to only briefly touching on their methodology as researchers, as editors, and as translators. For example, the first appendix, “Survival and Transformation of the Narratives,” presents post-medieval versions of five of the tales that the editors claim are “worthy of note because of the alteration of the essential elements, which thereby document the evolution of the narrative based on the talent of the storyteller” (5). Why these five particular tales were chosen out of the many hundreds of possible post-medieval analogues is not specified, and the actual changes between the medieval and post-medieval versions are only cursorily, if at all, noted. More fundamentally, the appendices—and the volume as a whole—lack a cohesive claim about why these tales matter and why they have been collected, edited, and translated as they have been.
The treatment of the thirteenth-century tale, “The Ogre and the Travelers” (“Der Turse,” 154–55), from the medieval German poet Der Stricker aptly demonstrates some of the fundamental frustrations of this collection. In this tale, twelve men become lost in a forest. After some time, they come upon a cottage and are provided hospitality by a beautiful woman. Their hostess soon hears her husband, who is a giant, returning from his labors. In a panic, she hides the men in a cupboard. The giant, however, knows that someone is in his house, discovers the men’s hiding place, and demands that they give up one of their number for his meal. He devours the man and repeats his demand again and again until only a single man remains. This last man refuses the giant’s demand and vows to fight back. The giant tells him that he might have succeeded when he stood together with his eleven other companions, but he stands no chance on his own.
The collection includes a number of images alongside some of the tales, but the editors provide no details on their provenance. It is entirely unclear whether each image is actually related to the tale with which it is associated (e.g., a manuscript illustration for one of the tale’s medieval source texts) or if the image simply shares a common theme with the text and the editors thought it would add some medieval color. “The Ogre and the Travelers,” for instance, is accompanied by an image of a cyclops devouring two men. A reverse-image search successfully identified it as an illustration from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the thirteenth-century encyclopedia De natura rerum by Thomas of Cantimprè [1]. The illustration is included in Thomas’s entry on the cyclops and does not relate to Der Stricker’s tale at all.
Similarly frustrating is a footnote on the giant’s words when he enters the house and knows that he’s had company: “When someone is here, I know it at once” (154). The editors’ cryptic note on this sentence reads, in its entirety, “Here is the ancestor of ‘that smells like fresh flesh’.” Without access to the original French edition, I can only surmise that the original reads, “il sentait la chair fraîche,” seemingly a reference to Perrault’stale “Le Petit Poucet” (Tom Thumb), which contains a similar episode (36). This note is not an outlier; throughout, the explanatory footnotes frequently suffer from broad generalizations (e.g., “When trying to win back the fairy, the hero must always be alone” (68)) or lack enough information to be useful to readers hoping to track down additional resources (e.g., “According to one tradition, the lioness ate her children at birth” (187)).
Of particular note is the superficial attention given to translation throughout the volume. The original work translates texts in various medieval languages to modern French; the work under review is consequently a translation of a translation, and one wonders at how much nuance is lost in these multiple mediations. The translators of the original French work as well as the translator of this English-language volume are largely silent about their actual approach to translating these medieval-language texts, save for a brief statement in the introduction:
“To translate these legends in a literal way, word for word . . . results in a text that only specialists can appreciate. So we have adapted these stories by tidying them up—in other words, by eliminating redundancies and summarizing the long descriptions and the constant references to God, and to his Mercy and Omnipotence, except when such elements play an important part in the narration” (5).
The above claim seems to undermine one of the editors’ main theses: that the study of medieval tales and legends “provides us with valuable information about the mentalities of the long-distant past, as these stories are riddled with realia borrowed from the civilization in which they are immersed” (3). This reviewer found that the translation approach taken here has worn smooth the particular idiosyncratic texture of these tales’ medieval origins, to their detriment. The end result is that the translated texts read as archetypal versions of some ur-form rather than as stories situated within particular temporal, geographical, and cultural contexts.
[1] The manuscript is held at the Openbare Bibliotheek Brugge. See http://www.flandrica.be/items/show/903/. The image of the cyclops is on folio 4r.
[2] Charles Perrault. Contes des fées. Montréal: Beauchemin and Valois, 1886.
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[Review length: 994 words • Review posted on February 17, 2023]