The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (Pantheon Books) - Jacob Grimm [3]
Because they had few possessions and these transmitted to them, or made by their own hands or the hands of people they knew, the tellers and hearers of these stories valued things, visible, tangible, usable things. They put a thing in the center of the story and it gave a pattern. What an advantage it is to a storyteller to have a feeling for the value, for the uniqueness of a thing! Things remain real while mental states become doubtful to us.
The golden slipper on the stairway is what the incidents in “Cinderella” lead up to and lead away from. And the gold of the slipper puts into greater obscurity the drably dressed girl crouched by the ashes. In “Snow White” there is the looking glass of the wicked queen which is doubled in the glass coffin in which Snow White is laid by the kindly dwarfs. In “Briar Rose” there is the spindle that is doubled in the thorns that hedge the castle. In “The Goose Girl” the horse’s head that speaks is doubled in the hat the wind blows away, and in “King Thrushbeard” the crockery which the king’s daughter has to sell is doubled in the jars which, as the kitchen maid, she uses to bring the dinner leavings home, and which break, too. These correspondences are like rhymes which chance gives a poet and which, duly set down, gives his poem a happy completeness. Another kind of correspondence is in “Rapunzel:” the maiden has long hair and the witch confines her in a tower, and we do not know whether the tower makes it proper she should have long hair, or whether her long hair makes the tower part of the story.
It is this achievement of pattern so much more fundamental than that achieved by the conscious writer that makes the best of these stories so memorable. In “The Water of Life” the flowing of the fountain (not a still well, mark!) is set against the rigid lines of the ravine that the narrow-minded brothers find themselves in and the iron wand and the iron doors that close at twelve o’clock. The flowing water, the unconsumable loaf, the sword that ends the waste of war are things proper for the generous-minded younger brother to gain. And there is the golden road that leads to the princess’s castle. Narrow-minded as before the elder brothers can only take one side of it while the younger brother can take its whole expanse.
The primary stories—leaving out of account fables and anecdotes—are concerned with subjection, the subjection of the hero or heroine, and this has to be made striking or pathetic; with wisdom from within or without that provides release, and this has to be made transcendent, with compensation that means a return to a human life that is greatly enhanced. In some of the stories the subjection, the release, the compensation have to come over again as in the case of the girl whose wisdom released the hero and who is displaced by the false bride. The incidents have to be marvellous but the human situation has to be recognizable.
Recall “One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes.” The incidents apart from the characters with one eye and three eyes are marvellous: her goat provides meals for a hungry girl and when it is killed its entrails planted in the yard grow into a tree with golden and silver fruit. But how recognizable is the situation of Little Two-Eyes between her jealous sisters and her inimical mother. Being different from the others she is spied upon and talked about and no gentleness on her part can save her from that excess of ill-will which unfeeling people can always find in themselves. A sentence reveals how poignant her situation is: “Then Two-Eyes said the shortest prayer she knew, ‘Lord God, be with us always. Amen,’ and helped herself to some food and enjoyed it.” We know that the girl was really hungry.
Told by generation after generation, the traditional stories projected the deepest wishes of the folk, generalized