The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (Pantheon Books) - Jacob Grimm [372]
Much of this matter found its way into the literary works of the late Middle Ages, the Reformation and Renaissance (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Hans Sachs, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, etc.) and then back, reshaped, to the people. The period of abundance continued to the time of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
Finally, in France, at the court of Louis XIV, a vogue commenced for the delicate refashioning of fairy tales and fables—inspired, in part by a new French translation of a late Persian rendering of the Panchatantra, part by Antoine Galland’s rendition of the Arabian Thousand Nights and One Night. The pastime yielded a plentiful harvest of freshly wrought, delicate pieces (La Fontaine, Perrault, the forty-one volumes of the Cabinet des Fées). Many were taken over by the people and crossed the Rhine.
So that by the time the Grimm brothers arrived to begin their collection, much material had overlain the remote mythology of the early tribes. Tales from the four quarters, inventions from every level of society and all stages of Western history were commingled. Nevertheless, as they observed, a homogeneity of style and character pervades the total inheritance. A continuous process of re-creation, a kind of spiritual metabolism, has so broken the original structures in assimilating them to the living civilization, that only the most meticulous and skillful observation, analysis and comparative research can discover their provenience and earlier state. The Grimm brothers regarded this rich composition as a living unit and sought to probe its past; the modern scientist, on the other hand, searches the unit for its elements, then ferrets these to their remote sources. From the contemporary work we receive a more complex impression of the processes of culture than was possible in the period of the Grimms.
Let us turn, therefore, to the problem of the individual tale—the migratory element that enters our system and becomes adapted to our style of existence. What is its history? What can happen to it during the course of its career?
Passing from Orient to Occident, surviving the revolutions of history and the long attrition of time, traversing the familiar bounds of language and belief—the favorite now of a Saracen king, now of a hard warrior, now of a Capucian monk, now of old Marie—the tale undergoes kaleidoscopical mutations. The first problem of research is to identify, fix, and characterize the key-complex, the formal principle of the story’s entity, that without which the story would not be. As the story then is followed throughout its peregrination, it is observed to assimilate to itself the materials offered from land to land. It changes, like a chameleon; puts on the colors of its background; lives and shapes itself to the requirements of the moment. “Such a tale,” writes an American authority, “is at the same time a definite entity and an abstraction. It is an entity in the particular form in which it happens to be recorded at any moment; it is an abstraction in the sense that no two versions ever exactly agree and that consequently the tale lives only in endless mutations.”*
In the life-course of any given version of a tale, a number of typical accidents may occur. A detail may be forgotten. A foreign trait may become naturalized, an obsolete modernized. A general term (animal) may become specialized (mouse), or, vice versa, a special generalized. The order of events may be rearranged. The personages may become confused, or the acts confused, or in some other way the traits of the story may cross-influence each other. Persons and things may become multiplied (particularly by the numbers 3, 5, and 7). Many animals may replace one (polyzoism). Animals may assume human shape (anthropomorphism), or vice versa. Animals may become demons, or vice versa. The narrator can appear as hero (egomorphism). Further: the story may be amplified with new materials. Such materials are generally derived from other folk tales. The expansion may take place at any point, but the beginning and end are the most likely to be amplified.