Jack Zipes, Emeritus Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, has for decades been the U.S. Grand Master on European folk and fairy tales, with a special interest in the Grimm Brothers, to whom he devoted a book in 1988. Now, only a year after his Princeton University Press publication, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, he is back with a massive, beautifully produced volume. It is basically an anthology of mostly translated texts, but with a thirty-seven-page presentation and illuminating introductions to each of the eighteen thematic sections. At the end, we get fifteen pages of short biographies of the collectors of the tales and a twenty-eight-page bibliography of collections, reference works, and criticism.
In 2001, Zipes published an anthology, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, which does not appear in his Collections, probably because it was based on published texts. The new book is concerned with what he sees as the pioneering call of the Grimm brothers: that tales--and songs, nursery rhymes, riddles, local customs, and beliefs--should be recorded from the oral tradition of simple people, unaltered, and documented, as they themselves did in the 156 tales of their first edition of 1812/15—although it appeared later that in most cases they were mediators rather than recorders. Apart from the approximately forty tales they took down from Dorothea Viehmann, the majority were transmitted to them by relatives, friends, colleagues, and correspondents. And between the second edition of 1819 and the seventh of 1857, the last one they supervised, the tales lost much of their original rawness and were made more pristine, with foreign words and references to particular times, places, and events eliminated, and some stories dropped either as being of foreign (and hence, bookish) origin or as being unsuitable for an audience that might include children. Here, Zipes does not clearly account for the difference between the two brothers. Jacob, primarily a linguist, was in favour of leaving them as recorded, while Wilhelm, primarily a literary man, strove to make them well-rounded, complete, logical in their story lines, morally satisfactory (at least in the fairy tales), and stylistically homogeneous; as they both considered them fragments of myths, they had no qualms about re-arranging and combining such bits and pieces. It is true that the brothers worked desk-next-to-desk for the greater part of their lives, but Jacob left the reworking of the texts from edition to edition largely to Wilhelm, who developed a concise, aesthetically pleasing fairytale mode all his own, which became a model not only for later German collectors; the first comprehensive Swedish collection, for instance, by Hyltén-Cavallius, is unthinkable without the Grimm model.
This process of “perfecting” the tales can clearly be followed in the book, as Zipes always provides the 1812/15 and the 1857 versions of each Grimm tale included. When it comes to tales from other sources, his linguistic competence stands him in good stead. Not only does he himself translate tales from a variety of German sources, but also tales in French and Italian. In other cases, he had to rely on existing translations. Where the rich Scandinavian, East European, Greek, and Iberian traditions are concerned, he had to rely on existing German or English translations. He regularly uses the same German translators for Greek tales (Hahn and Schmidt) and Sicilian tales (Gonzenbach), and English translators for Scandinavian (Thorpe), Russian (Magnus), Roman and Florentine (Busk), and Portuguese (Monteiro) tales.
Each of the eighteen sections which provide the bulk of the book is concerned with tales around a particular theme, starting with Brotherly Love and ending with Bloodthirsty Husbands and Serial Killers, followed by the numbers they have in The Types of International Folktales in H.-J. Uther’s 3rd edition of 2004. One type covers the tales in twelve sections, two types in four, and three types in two. Each section is preceded by a whole-page black-and-white illustration produced by students in a Cambridge School of Art class on illustrating children’s books, in no way childishly pretty and with a certain homogeneity despite their different creators. After the Grimm texts, the tales are printed chronologically, according to their date of publication. There is no space here to describe the composition of each section and to discuss details; I will have to limit myself to indicating what themes they cover.
It is reasonable to combine, in Brotherly Love, both Type 300 “The dragon slayer” and Type 303 “The twins or blood brothers,” because there is considerable overlap. In both types the protagonist usually saves a princess from being given over to a dragon, is often almost replaced as her future husband by a usurper, and is saved by his brother, whom the princess and the court believe to be him, or by animal companions, while the usurper is defeated when the hero can produce the dragon’s tongues. It is also, as the editor says, one of the oldest and most widely spread of fairytales, with ancestors as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. What we get here, apart from five Grimm texts, are seven European tales with widely varying constituents. Three are basically of the Dragon-slayer type, one each from Sweden, NW France (Lorraine), and Italy; in the latter case, they are three brothers, and none of them gets the princess and half the kingdom. Four are of the Two Brothers Type, one each from an unidentified Slavonic source, Austria, Brittany, and Sicily, the latter from Laura Gonzenbach’s classic collection of 1870.
Section 2, The Power of Love, is concerned with only one type, ATU 810 “The Maiden in the Tower,” where a girl secluded from the world is only accessible by way of her long hair—and that is how her future partner, a prince, gets to know her. In the Grimm collection, her name is Rapunzel, and despite the brothers’ eagerness to turn out a folktale, her ancestry is entirely literary. It is a type rooted in the Mediterranean region, the oldest written version being “Petrosinella” in Basile’s Pentamerone. From the French Contes de fées it reached Germany in a retelling published in 1790, and that is where the Grimms found her. So there is no wonder that of the seven non-Grimm texts in this section, four are of Italian origin, along with a Basque and a modern French one. In the one originally English text, Andrew Lang’s “Prunella,” it is the witch’s son who takes the place of the prince, enabling the girl to solve the impossible tasks the witch sets her; despite his prominence in the book’s title, this is Lang’s only appearance. Why the Sicilian text appears in this section is not clear; no suitor or use of long hair occurs. The girl outwits a man-eating witch and would be better placed with the Hansel & Gretel stories of Section 4.
Section 3, Facing Fear, offers jocular tales about a fearless man who goes through a series of scary adventures, often because he is a simpleton who lacks the imagination to be scared; they are by nature episodic and hence can vary enormously in length. Although this type of tale is widely spread, ever since Straparola penned a version in the sixteenth century, Zipes includes relatively few versions, apart from three Grimm texts, three more German variants and one each from Sicily, Brittany, and Eastern France.
In Section 4, Abandoned Children, we get one of the best-known of the Grimm tales, “Hansel and Gretel,” as the point of departure; it grew to twice its original size after an Alsatian published source had been incorporated in 1843. In his introduction, Zipes sketches the economic and social background of such tales in times of poverty and frequent death in childbirth. It is the sister who is the resourceful sibling and secures their survival. Here we get two French tales, a Gonzenbach from Sicily, one from Portugal, two additional German ones, and one from Rumania. For the last of these, and for one of these German tales, it is questionable whether they belong here. In the Rumanian tale, the boy is slaughtered by his stepmother; the girl collects his heart and bones, and he turns into a bird, as in the Machandelboom story (Grimm 47, ATU 720). In the Zingerle story, “The Ogre,” there is no sister at all; it is another version of a boy protected by the cannibalistic ogre’s mother or grandmother, the central situation in the story of the devil with the three golden hairs (Grimm 29, ATU 461).
The title of Section 5, Dangerous Wolves and Naive Girls, prepares us for another universally known Grimm tale, “Little Red Riding Hood.” Its literary ancestor was Perrault’s published tale of 1697, the source of Tieck’s Rotkäppchen drama of 1800, which the Grimms knew. So it is no wonder that six (often, quite short) texts have French originals; another is from Brittany, one Slavonic, and one from South Tyrol. In one French version, it is a five-year-old boy who is eaten by the wolf. These must have been cautionary tales; they often lack the Grimm happy ending.
Section 6, The Fruitful Sleep, gathers tales connected with another universally known Grimm tale, “Dornröschen” (Briar Rose), where the sleeping beauty awakes after a hundred years, when a prince kisses her, and they get married. Yet in popular tradition, few tales of this type are so sweet and romantic; even in Perrault’s “Belle au Bois Dormant” of 1697, which may well be the ultimate source of the Grimm version, the prince’s mother intends to eat the children her daughter-in-law gives birth to, and throws their mother into a snake pit. We get the same ending in two Sicilian versions, and in the oldest Italian version recorded in the seventeenth century, “Pentamerone,” the sleeping beauty gives birth to two children and suckles them without even waking up; when she does, it is the prince’s wife back home who is after their lives. In an Austrian and a Greek tale, the young man who finds her is murdered by his jealous elder brothers but regains life with the help of animals he has spared. In an Irish variant, the fairy king Kinvarra abducts the beautiful wife of a nobleman; she remains in a dormant state until a girdle is burnt and a pin buried.
Section 7 contains stories about animal husbands. Apart from two Grimm versions of “The Singing Springing Lark,” it features ten tales covering a much larger area of Europe. The animal, to be disenchanted by the steady love of a girl, usually the youngest of three sisters, can be a lion (Grimm), a frog (a tale from Hanover) or a toad (Brittany), a white bear, presumably a polar bear (Norway), a pig (Sicily), a bird (Russia), a dog (N. England), a dragon (Russia), or simply a “beast” (Portugal), which for most of the story only manifests itself as a voice. The two stories from Russia, which has such a rich folktale tradition, are disappointing; the one recorded by Afanas’ev is very short and bare, only the point of departure for most other tales, and the one translated from Polevoi is written in insufferably stilted, faux-archaic English. The Sicilian tale recorded by Pitrè does not really belong here; there is no animal husband, the only link with the Amor and Psyche complex being a stump of wax candle her mother gives the heroine so she can see a sleeping person, but that remains a blind motif in the story.
Some tales in Section 8. Cursed Princes and Sweet Rewards, seem to be in direct contradiction to what the animal husband stories teach: that a young woman has to overcome her fear or revulsion to liberate an enchanted young man; at least in the well-known Grimm version (though not in two others they collected), the prince appears when she throws the frog against a wall in disgust. In two English versions, a fish asks her to cut his head off; and indeed, it is not rare in fairytales that an unusual companion or helper has to be killed to regain his true shape. In a Breton version, it is a boy who has to accept an animal wife; not surprisingly, since the gender of “frog” is feminine in French (grenouille). In a Slav variant, the animal is a (male) snake; it probably belongs to ATU 551 (Water of Life) rather than to the ATU 440 stories in this section. It is fairly obvious that both the Grimm and the English versions have their origin in two originally unconnected nursery rhymes, one used by the frog (or other animals) in his demands, and the other about the bands of iron around the heart of the true servant Henry breaking when his master has regained his human shape. In a Hungarian variant, the frog turns out to be “a handsome Magyar lad” with gold spurs on his boots.
Section 9 is entitled The Fate of Spinning and covers tales of ATU 501, The three old spinning women, and also ATU 500, The supernatural helper, in the Grimm collection known as Rumpelstilzchen, as the two motifs are often connected. A mother beating her daughter (for laziness or disobedience) is caught in the act by a passing nobleman and claims she does it because the girl is an insatiable spinner. The passer-by, usually a king or prince, takes her along and will even marry her if she lives up to her mother’s claims. The girl has no hope of doing so but three ugly old women offer to do it if they are invited to the wedding as her relatives. When they appear, they claim that their deformities are due to lifelong spinning, whereupon the husband forbids his wife to do any spinning ever, or even wants to see all spinning equipment destroyed. In ATU, these tales are classified as tales of magic, as a supernatural helper is involved, but their point is more that of a jocular tale: the husband ends up with a partner credited with skills she does not have. In an Austrian tale, “Chruzimügeli,” no spinning is involved, only guessing a magic helper’s name (in England, Tom Tit Tot).
The Cinderella stories of Section 10, The Revenge and Reward of Neglected Daughters, were current in Europe long before the Grimms, but it is in the form they gave them that they are best known today; like Snow White, Cinderella has become the embodiment of the long-suffering “good’ girl,” even though Zipes’ title suggests a more assertive personality. What we do not get in Grimm is the cannibalistic beginning common to Greek and other Mediterranean variants: in a time of famine, one of three spinning women will be slaughtered, either chosen by lottery or, more often, the one whose thread breaks most frequently and who is bound to belong to the older generation, and it is her daughter who receives supernatural support at her grave, as in the Grimm version, or where her bones, fumigated with frankincense, are stored. It also happens often that Cinderella’s mother turns into a calf or cow providing her with food, dresses, or riches, invariably also killed when the stepmother finds out, but providing comfort and support even after that. In the Afanas’ev version “Vasilisa the Fair,” the Cinderella tale is combined with the theme of the father charged with bringing a rare gift to his youngest daughter (Section 7) and that arch-Russian man-eating witch, the Baba-Yaga. There is no step-relationship or jealousy in Pitrè’s “Date, Oh Beautiful Date” from Sicily; it must have been put in this section because the heroine avoids the attention of a festive or church-going crowd and an amorous prince in the same way as Cinderella does.
We meet the Baba-Yaga again in Section 11, Incestuous Fathers and Brothers, where, in the Afanas’ev story, “By Command of the Prince Daniel,” she dies in a fiery sea while her daughter helps a teenager to escape the amorous intentions of her brother. Otherwise it is fathers wanting to marry their daughters, usually because their dying wives have told them only to marry somebody who fits their clothes, a ring, or some other property of hers, or simply is as beautiful/fair-haired as she was. That is a daughter, but it never comes to the act; it is simply the reason why the girl steals away after demands for impossibly rich and artful dresses, jewellery, etc., have been fulfilled. The high-born girl has to take a Cinderella job as a scullery maid, fowl-keeper, and the like, but finds good use for her fancy outfits in church, at a wedding, or some other festivity, where she becomes the center of attention, and invariably ends up with a king or prince as a husband after having escaped him (and so heightened his infatuation) three times. In Joseph Jacobs’ “Catskin” (Scotland), there is no looming incest; here, a father is so disappointed that he got a daughter instead of a son that he does not wish to see her ever and gives her away to the first nasty suitor who turns up—this is the reason for her escaping in a cat-skin coat and then going through a similar sequence of adventures.
Section 12, Wild and Golden Men, unites tales from ATU 502 and 314, as they are often connected. A prince releases a Wild Man who has been caught (Iron Man in Grimm) from his cage so as to get his ball or golden apple back, and has to leave home because his father has proclaimed the death penalty on anybody who does so. He is trained as a knight on the Wild Man’s property and then has to take a job as a gardener’s assistant on a royal estate where, thanks to his golden hair, he wins the love of the youngest of three princesses and, with the Wild Man’s help, saves a battle for her father or excels at a tournament arranged by him. The Wild Man is not always an outsize hairy creature; in a Swedish tale, he is an ugly dwarf, in a Basque tale, he is called Tartaro but never described. In “Georgic and Merlin,” from Brittany, the story is combined with a dragon-slaying (ATU 300) and saving a king’s life by obtaining the water of life from a magic beyond (ATU 551). The title of a Swedish tale, “The Princess on the Glass Mountain,” shows that it belongs to ATU 530, a type not otherwise represented in this collection but offering similar situations in the process of winning the princess.
Section 13 covers tales from ATU 513, The Extraordinary Companions (Zipes misleadingly calls them Heroes), and its sub-types A and B, Six Go through the Whole World’ and The Land and Water Ship. In his introduction, Zipes criticizes the Grimms for not mentioning the Argonautica epic of Apollonius of Rhodos as the likely archetype of such stories and provides a summary account of the ancient epic. The protagonist, usually a prince on a quest for a high-born partner, runs into companions with extraordinary physical gifts (sight, hearing, strength, etc.) by accident, and they make it possible for him to solve the impossible tasks the girl’s father imposes on him. Singly, they appear as supernatural helpers in other tales, but here, they form a group that leaves the hero when his problems are solved. In a Russian tale by Polevoi, he has to provide a flying ship, and in another Slavic tale, “Long, Broad and Sharpsight,” the trio helps him to rescue a beautiful girl from an evil wizard. In the Sicilian tale, it is Saint Joseph (in disguise) who leads him to the companions and tests his moral fibre. In the Scottish Highlands tale, “The King of Lochlin’s Three Daughters,” the boy has to spend three years as the slave of an underground giant and feed the eagle carrying him with a part of a thigh to reach the earth, a frequent motif in descriptions of travel from the superhuman to the human world.
Section 14 is entitled Shrewd Cats and Foxes, for in the majority of texts it is not “Puss in Boots” that makes a poor fellow a rich estate-owner and husband of a princess but a fox, which makes sense, as in the majority of animal tales and epics it is the fox that tricks and deceives other creatures. The human being who benefits from the fox’s ingenuity does not need any physical, intellectual or moral qualities, since the fox does it all for him. The owner of the vast estates and magnificent palaces that are presented as belonging to him is usually an ogre or a dragon, and the weakness of some of these tales is that it is hard to believe that such creatures would so easily be deceived and scared. In a version from Brittany, the owners are monks, and they are mercilessly burnt to death by the fox. At the end of the story, the fox usually pretends to be dead to test his master’s loyalty, and in most cases the master has him thrown on a dunghill or the like. Upon the fox’s reproaches or threat to reveal his poor background, he more often than not repents, but in one Sicilian version recorded by Pitrè, he kills the fox, while in the Gonzenbach version, the fox is finally buried with due honors. There is in this compilation a Caucasian tale with a Muslim background, but not one from Greece, where this type is frequent. The cat/fox is basically a manipulator, and such ruthless but successful individuals have always been admired in the Mediterranean countries, as the Berlusconi story shows in our days. In this section, there is only one Grimm text, for the “Puss in Boots” story of the 1812 first edition was excluded from 1819 onwards as too obviously deriving from the Perrault print of 1697.
In Section 15, The Wishes of Fools, too, the Grimms have a precarious presence. In the 1812 (first) edition there was a tale, “Simple Hans,” provided by the Haxthausen sisters, but in 1819 it was replaced by an unrelated fairytale, either because of a 1778 publication by Wieland (deriving from Basile’s Pentamerone) or, as Zipes suggests, because an unwanted pregnancy was considered an unsavoury topic.[2] Simple Hans, “a little, crooked hunchback,” can make a princess pregnant simply by wishing it. It is not stated how he obtained this wishing power, whereas in most such tales the giver is identified: either a fish whose life was spared (two Slavonic and a Greek version, compare the Grimm tale 19 of the fisherman and his wife), or three fairies or nymphs whom the simpleton has protected from the blazing sun (versions from Rome and Sicily); in a Portuguese tale, it is first a fish, then it says “a fish or fairies,” but in the end the fish turns into a prince and marries the princess while the baker’s son, who first caught him, returns home rich. In two Slavonic tales, no pregnancy occurs. In “Simple Hans,” “The Half-man” (Greek), and “The Baker’s Idle Son” (Portugal), the protagonist uses a trick famous from the Old Testament, when Joseph makes Benjamin a thief by putting a cup in his bag; here it is used to teach the king, who treated his pregnant daughter cruelly, the lesson that one should not jump to conclusions.
Among the Snow White stories of Section 16, Evil Stepmothers and Magic Mirrors, we get three Grimm variants: apart from the first and last printed editions of 1812 and 1857, there is also a manuscript that Jacob Grimm got from his brother Ferdinand. They follow the same pattern, but the real mother of 1812 became a stepmother in 1819, which made her envy and hatred more plausible. In an English tale, it is also the real mother who is after the beautiful daughter’s life, and in a story from South Tyrol, two elder sisters resent the fact that a prince has eyes only for the youngest one. In the Grimm tradition, the dwarfs, the glass coffin, and the prince who gets it are the basic elements, but this is not always the case. In a Sicilian version by Gonzenbach and a Portuguese one by Coelho (in its mawkishness and bad English probably the weakest story in the whole book; there is a slightly better Coelho in Section 18), Snow White looks after a robbers’ den, in the South Tyrol an old man protects her, in Greece it is a monk who is also her guardian angel. In the frequently used Portuguese collection of Pedroso, the owner of a simple abode in the woods gives her a choice to stay as his wife or his daughter (she chooses the latter), and in the Pitrè tale from Sicily, it is a dying woman in a palace who warns and protects her even from beyond the grave. In an English tale, she finds temporary security in a far-off country, and when the prince whom she married, believing her dead, remarries, it is the second wife who defeats the evil stepmother, and the prince keeps them both-–no envy or jealousy in that household, it seems. Snow White, like the heroine’s escaping a father’s desire, is almost always a princess, but in Portugal she can be an innkeeper’s daughter and in a local Swiss legend a peasant girl.
Section 17 is entitled The Taming of Shrews, as Shakespeare’s play is the internationally best-known embodiment of this kind of politically incorrect narrative; the Grimm version is known as “King Thrushbeard,” as one particular royal suitor’s chin reminds the haughty princess of the beak of a thrush. The slighted prince invariably turns up in a commoner’s guise and makes her do a variety of menial work for which she is unsuited. He also demands that she steal something from her employer and then, as prince, denounces her as a thief. In Asbjørnsen’s Norwegian and Pitrè’s Sicilian variants, he gets the princess pregnant, whereupon she is banished from the court; in both of these tales, he attracts, in disguise, her interest by precious objects he displays, and finds the way into her bed by noisy clattering of teeth. In addition to these two and the Grimm texts, we get three Italian, one Spanish, one French, one Irish, and two German tales in this section.
The last section, Bloodthirsty Husbands and Serial Killers, has the largest number of texts (13), no surprise as it covers three ATU types, 955 The robber bridegroom, 311 Rescue by the sister maiden, and 312 Maiden-Killer (Bluebeard). There is only one text that represents 955, Grimm’s 1819-1857 version of that name, but there are many connections between all these tales. In “The Robber Bridegroom,” the evidence of the robbers’ murderous practice is a severed finger with a ring, that the escaped maiden can produce, and the same happens in a Hungarian tale, where there are three Bluebeards posing as counts. In Type 311, we always get three sisters, where the two elder ones are murdered and the youngest one not only manages to revive them, but gets the bluebeard husband to carry them (and herself) back to their father’s house. This type is represented by the 1812 and 1857 versions of “Fitcher’s Bird” and by a Scottish and a Portuguese tale. Both in these and in the eight Bluebeard stories (in Gascony, the beard is red), the killings are brought about by the young women ignoring Bluebeard’s taboo of opening one door; the youngest one does so, too, but manages to hide the evidence of her misdemeanor. Commentators offer various explanations for the popularity of such blood-chilling tales: male domination with a potential of violence towards the “weaker” sex, the stereotype of female curiosity, or the mere appetite for horror stories. Yet in Type 311, it is a clever female that fools the violent but dumb male, and hence, there is quite a farcical element; consequently, in the type catalogue, the Bluebeard stories are ranged neither under “tales of magic” nor “jocular tales,” but “realistic tales (novelle).”
It becomes obvious to the reader that translations almost never read as well as an original English text, and this is a problem particularly in the translation of rhymes or incantations. Yet the author has done the English-reading public a great service by translating a great number of texts, even though he does not always avoid words or constructions that do not quite click in English. A dozen misprints, doublings, and omissions do not matter in a book of this size. A master in his field has to be congratulated on yet another achievement.
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[Review length: 4797 words • Review posted on May 22, 2014]