This month I am looking into stories with no known author
Here are some fairies in a painting by Arthur Rackham [1867 – 1939] called “Twilight Dreams” at the Victoria Art Gallery and Museum.
There are stories from centuries past which were passed down and never written down until the 19th century, stories of fairies and giants, kings and princesses and wicked step-mothers, frogs and wolves and magic beans. You will know them, or half remember them from your childhood. You will have seen them acted out in pantomimes and watched them in Disney films, you will have heard them read out loud, but perhaps never wondered how they have travelled through the ages to be retold today.
Naturally we will start with the Brothers Grimm. Jacob [1785 – 1863] on the left, Wilhelm [1786 – 1859] on the right. Our knowledge and understanding of fairy tales has been formed by the work of these two men, some might say that they saved fairy tales, but in writing them down they halted the natural evolution of the oral tradition of story telling.
Born in Hanau in Hesse they studied law at Cassel University and became lawyers, but developed an interest in language, philology, and worked on a German dictionary. As they were looking into the origin of words they were led to the oral tradition of folk tales, which had never been printed, and published their first work “Kindermärchen” in 1812, followed by another collection in 1815, both of which were soon translated. I have a little paperback volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales [Popular Penguin Classics] which is handy reading for a few minutes diversion. They are all very short, only a couple of pages each, and have tales both well known and not so well known. Some illustrate how far the stories have been sanitised and made safe for the modern reader. Tom Thumb, The Elves and the Shoemaker, Hansel and Grettel, The Frog Prince, Rumpelstiltskin, and also Snow White, who in Grimm’s version was called Snow Drop.
Ladybird brought out versions, with a full page illustration next to each page of text, and tidied up some of the endings of the stories. These well thumbed volumes belonged to my children and have been handed down to the next generation.
For many the image of Snow White (or Snow Drop) is that created by Disney in 1937.
The Brothers Grimm were not alone in their interest in the oral tradition of story telling.
Sir Walter Scott [1771 – 1832] was already collecting Border Ballads published as “The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”, a collection of Scottish Ballads, in 1802. This shows that there are many ways of telling a tale, it can have rhyme and rhythm, it can have a tune, as long as it is memorable. Subsequent editions added more ballads, and one contributor, who had sung her version for Scott, commented the ballads – “war made for singing an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair”.
I had a book of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen [1805 – 1875], no idea where it has gone now, sadly, but I do remember the stories. Andersen was born in Odense in Denmark and had a poor start to life, but managed to gain an education. His writing began by revising the stories that he had heard as a child, and then writing new tales, which were published in a collection in 1835. The story that impressed me most was The Wild Swans, pity the poor girl who had to make shirts out of nettles to redeem her brothers from being turned into swans. Nettles were only too abundant and real to me! But Andersen also brought us The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, the Ugly Duckling [Disney again] and The Princess and the Pea.
Andersen was not the first to collect folk tales of Scandinavia, already P C Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe were collecting from Norway. These stories had giants and trolls, think of The Three Billy Goats Gruff.
What of English / British folk tales? This is really a nursery tale with the “pig, pig, jump over the stile or I won’t get home tonight” after each little episode.
Joseph Jacobs [1854 – 1916] was born in Australia but studied at Cambridge, and collected folk lore and fairy tales of the British Isles which he published as English Fairy Tales and Celtic Fairy Tales. He then branched out to Indian Fairy Tales, all in the 1890s.
He was one of many who were now interested in capturing the disappearing oral tradition of these islands. There were of course, similarities with other collections, but from Jacobs we have Cap o’Rushes, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs, The Three Bears, Henny Penny, Tom Thumb and Dick Whittington and His Cat.
In his Celtic collections he drew mostly from Scotland and Ireland, but also from the Isle of Man, Wales and Cornwall, having to use translators as he collected from native speakers. He noted there were similarities between the tales collected from different places. Many of these are not so familiar to me, the only one I had heard before was the Welsh ballad of Beth Gellert, about the baby in the cradle and the man who slew his favourite hound thinking it had killed the baby, when it was actually protecting the baby from a wolf.
If I was to retell some English folk tales, the only ones I can recall are the “The Hand of Glory”, the “Lang Pack” and perhaps at a push, “The Lambton Worm”. The Hand of Glory was a ghostly tale my father used to tell about Spittal Inn on the A66 above Bowes, if you want to know you will find it here ; The Lang Pack originates in Northumberland and you will find it on this page about Bellingham; The Lambton Worm in County Durham has a whole page to itself on wikipedia.
Rudyard Kipling [ 1865 – 1936] was a man of many parts, some now controversial, but he was a great story teller and collector of stories. He was born in India, wrote the Jungle Book in 1894 and Kim in 1901, and The Just So Stories in 1902. Certainly the Jungle Book has endured, been reprinted and given the Disney make-over. Thank fully many are being read to a new generation. Many will be able to remember the songs from the Disney film of 1967, which introduced Mowgli, the man cub, to film goers. Raised by wolves he had adventures growing up in the jungle protected by Baloo the Bear and Bagheera the Panther and other creatures until he finally joined a village of people. The Just So Stories explain the characteristics of various animals – How the Camel got his hump; The Leopard his spots, the Rhinoceros his skin etc etc.
Which brings us to fairy or folk tales from other parts of the world. There is a whole genre of tales that explain how animals have particular characteristics. We now live in a multi-cultural age, all races and creeds mix and share their heritage. I queue to collect small child in the school playground at three o’clock and see parents from all continents of the world. They have a heritage too. So I am glad that my grandchildren hear their stories at bed time.
The Elephant’s Friend has tales from India; the Tales of Mystery and Magic range from Inuit to Scotland to West Africa; the Forgotten Fairy Tales of Brave, Brilliant Girls are drawn from various parts of Europe from the Orkney Isles to Spain, and even draws comparisons with some tales in Shakespeare.
This painting is called “Aesop composing his fables” by Charles Landseer [1799 – 1899] at the Salford Art Gallery. Here he is supposedly writing the story of the Fox and the Stork. Aesop was possibly a collector of Greek fables which were about animals who had virtues and vices which each told a moral tale. They are still being retold.
So the children of today have a rich and varied source of stories to listen to and read for themselves when they are old enough. They come from all parts of the world, they have travelled down countless generations and evolved and developed. Kate Pankhurst’s introduction to Forgotten Fairy Tales of Brave and Brilliant Girls reflects that something was lost when tales were pinned down to a page, but also that “stories die when they are not told”.
Many years ago I came across a second hand copy of this. Not to be read to the grandchildren! it is brilliant, and covers every continent of the world with stories of “Brave, bold and wilful women” “Clever and resourceful women”, “Unhappy families”, “witches” etc, a chapter given to each category. The book includes Little Red Riding Hood, origin French, with the ending that the wolf ate both Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood, unlike the version with the woodcutter coming in the nick of time with his axe.
Angela Carter in her forward says that tales evolve to suit the audience, and such tales take on a life of their own, unlike stories with a known author. They deal with birth and death, poverty and riches, murder (and in some cases in the Virago book, incest) step families and siblings and runaways. They prepare the listener for all the twist, turns and dangers of life. They are a study in history, sociology and psychology. They do not always have a Happy Ever After ending.
So in the age before Charles Darwin could explain why things are as they are, and before we had David Attenborough delighting in the diversity of our world, story tellers wove imaginative tales which entertained and interpreted the world around us. Do they still have a place in our modern world? I will let you decide, but we would be poorer without them.
Don’t have nightmares, but do revisit the rich cultural heritage of stories from around the world that start with “Once upon a time”, it is a shame to just keep them for children!
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