Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale Read online

  Fairy tales are one-dimensional, depthless, abstract, and sparse; their characteristic manner is matter-of-fact—describing a wolf devouring a young girl, ordering a palace chef to cook a young woman, or chopping up a child to make blood pudding arouses no cry of protest or horror from the teller. This is as it is, as it happened; the tale is as it is, no more no less.

  The conventional character of the repertory that typifies fairy tales has inspired scholars to draft various systems to capture it. The Russian formalists codified the stories: Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928) produced a grid; he argues that there are so many characters and functions and plots, and many of the structuralist terms he used, such as ‘animal helper’, have become standard (though the numbers he determined have proved elastic). Folklorists in Scandinavia, with many adherents in Germany, worked on the remarkable Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of tale types and its companion magnum opus, the Motif-Index; these great encyclopaedic works tabulate and cross-reference every component of fairy tales on record. But the work can never be done, and currently the established taxonomy is growing to include motifs and plots from the Nights and from other cultures’ multifarious bodies of storytelling. Such work produces databases of great usefulness, especially for cross-cultural comparison and pattern recognition; these databases are monuments of literary archaeology, and they prefigured the age of computers and the current fashion for combinatorial archiving of narrative, as they juggle the units in play in fairy tales. But, as in the fabulist Jorge Luis Borges’ brilliant short tale ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in which the map grows to encompass every detail of the terrain until it becomes the size of the land it represents, these indices are ultimately self-defeating. The insight they give into what makes fairy tales compelling is limited: the universalizing method which ipso facto looks for resemblances, not distinctiveness, erases historical and social conditions; the comparisons and sets do not allow for differences in reception according to changing contexts, and they give no clue to the pleasure the fairy tales inspire or the reasons for that pleasure.

  In a fine essay of l939, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tolkien stepped into the kitchen: ‘Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty … If we speak of a Cauldron, we must not wholly forget the Cooks. There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly.’ Angela Carter picked up the metaphor more pithily: ‘Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. This is how I make potato soup.’ By contrast, the Czech poet Miroslav Holub reached for a biblical analogy: he compared writing to the miracle in the New Testament, when Jairus calls out to Jesus to help his 12-year-old daughter. Jesus enters the house only to find that the child has already died, but he comes out and tells the family and friends gathered there that she’s merely sleeping. And so it turns out.

  What Holub means is that literature is always a resurrected body, or a body that is continuously being resurrected. Its continual survival depends on its transformations.

  Another alternative term for ‘fairy tale’ is ‘wonder tale’, from the German Wundermärchen, and it catches a quality of the genre more eloquently than ‘fairy tale’ or ‘folk tale’. Although it does not enjoy the currency of ‘fairy tale’, ‘wonder tale’ recognizes the ubiquitousness of magic in the stories. The suspension of natural physical laws produces a magical state of reality throughout this form of narrative, which leads to wonder, astonishment, ’ajaib, as invoked by Arabic literary ideas of fairy tale. Supernatural agency and the pleasure of wonder are interwoven in the character of fairy tales—this interrelationship presents a fifth defining characteristic.

  Wonders shape plots that promise all kinds of riches; fairy tales are ‘consolatory fables’, the term the great Italian novelist and editor of fairy tales Italo Calvino (1936–85) uses, and they typically offer hope of release from poverty, maltreatment, and subjection. A happy ending is one of their generic markers. The American scholar Harold Bloom, reflecting on the function of imagery, relates it to the concoctions of fairy worlds and their promises: ‘We welcome literary metaphor,’ he has written, ‘because it enables fictions to persuade us of beautiful untrue things … I tend to define metaphor as a figure of desire rather than a figure of knowledge.’ Fairy tales report from imaginary territory—a magical elsewhere of possibility; a hero or a heroine or sometimes both together are faced with ordeals, terrors, and disaster in a world that, while it bears some resemblance to the ordinary conditions of human existence, mostly diverges from it in the way it works, taking the protagonists—and us, the story’s readers or listeners—to another place where wonders are commonplace and desires are fulfilled. André Jolles’s comment is sharply perceptive: ‘The miraculous is here the only possible guarantee that the immorality of reality has stopped.’

  The imaginary place and an imaginary time, constituted by magic and wonders performed by beings who have powers to enchant, are essential to this act of symbolic projection, and so a sixth defining characteristic of the genre can be placed under the heading of ‘the happy ending’: fairy tales express hopes. The agents who bring about miracles of hope in the stories vary from place to place, as they rise from local belief systems which belong to tradition. The tradition may contain imaginary elements but also traces of history: fairies and goblins on the one hand, cunning beldames and stepmothers on the other. The history is itself often an imagined history: King Arthur inspired romances that in turn carry into fairy tales motifs and plot devices—enchanted objects (swords, mirrors, cups), tests and riddles, dangers from monsters and forests, dream journeys, and a sense of the other world near to hand. The actions of such distant predecessors then add to the sum of knowledge of our situation now; from a distance, the other zone throws light on circumstances in the one we know. Fairy tales evoke every kind of violence, injustice, and mischance, but in order to declare it need not continue.

  Angela Carter called the spirit of fairy tale ‘heroic optimism’, a better phrase for the promise of the happy ending. Others identify it as blind hope, or as wishful thinking, the life principle in action. It carries the tales of terrible dark deeds to their unlikely conclusion. There is the occasional well-known fairy tale that ends badly, like ‘Red Riding Hood’ according to Charles Perrault. But it is an aberration, as shown by myriad popular variations in which the young girl tricks the wolf out of his prize or even kills him herself. The most often told version introduces a hero: the Grimms brought her father into the plot.

  You have a sketch map and a rough guide; the lights are lit in the windows of that house in the deep dark forest ahead of us. We can begin to move in, listening out, eyes open, trying to find our bearings.

  1

  The Worlds of Faery

  Far Away & Down Below

  Up the airy mountain,

  Down the rushy glen,

  We daren’t go a-hunting

  For fear of little men;

  Wee folk, good folk,

  Trooping all together;

  Green jacket, red cap,

  And white owl’s feather!

  William Allingham, ‘Rewards and Fairies’

  Few people believe in fairies, now, but they featured powerfully in the belief systems of the past, and not always benignly. Like witches, fairies have inspired fears that led to terrible acts, and not in only pre-modern societies far away, but ones closer to hand: King James I believed in demons. Fairy tales have a tangled relation to this history, for the stories develop within a complex of fancies, superstitions, and stories around supernatural creatures such as elves or jinn, but they also, over a long and varied development, express a way of discounting the terrors attached. It is now implicit in the term fairy tale that the story told is not credible, that it does not command serious allegiance or faith. Fair
y tales in this way face two ways: towards a past realm of belief on one side and towards a sceptical present on the other. They offer the pleasures of imaginative entry into a world that does not have intellectual or religious authority. In that essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tolkien remembers how he ‘desired dragons with a profound desire’. He feels this desire, he continues, because ‘The dragon had the trademark of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie.’ The Other Worlds which fairy tales explore open a way for writers and storytellers to speak in Other terms, especially when the native inhabitants of the imaginary places do not belong to an established living faith and therefore do not command belief or repudiation. The tongue can be very free when it is speaking outside the jurisdiction of religion.

  Baba Yaga the ogress rides in a flying mortar and pestle (Figure 1), and uses the skulls of her victims for lamps on the fence of her forest lair, while her myopic German cousin in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ builds her house of gingerbread; French fées and Italian fate are beautiful, tall and stately, closer to the great ladies and enchanters who figure in the stories than to the wee folk—the imps, hobgoblins, and pixies who troop by twilight in the Celtic tradition. Different cultures produce different imaginary features for the population of fairytale settings: the genies of the Arabian Nights are smoky, fiery, volatile, and infinitely shifting in size, sometimes gnarled and fearsome, sometimes graceful and incomparably beautiful; as they have Qur’anic authority and are part of orthodox Muslim cosmology, the stories read differently in their own homelands (see Figure 4).

  Figure 1 Baba Yaga rides through the forest in her mortar searching for prey, in Vasilissa the Beautiful, illustrated by Ivan I. Bilibin, 1902.

  Fairies do not need to appear to stamp a story a fairy tale: standard favourites (‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Puss-in-Boots’, ‘Rapunzel’) do not feature them; new-fangled stories, which were thought of as fairy tales by their creators and first audiences, such as the Alice books, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia cycle, and even ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, do not include fairies as the agents of the wonders they relate. Magic, however, needs to be implied and present in a fairy tale, and it conjures the presence of another world, a sense that the story has casements thrown open on a view of fairyland, or, as John Keats spelled the word, on the realms of faery. The poet W. H. Auden, discussing these imaginary zones, adopted the term ‘Secondary World’, which had been used by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and declared, ‘Every normal human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday, world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but also cannot stop himself creating … Stories about the Primary world may be called Feigned Histories; stories about a Secondary world myths or fairy tales.’ Secondary worlds can be mischievous and merry, as in Shakespeare’s enchanted wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Christina Rossetti’s luscious, sinister goblin orchards, the distant sumptuous Isles of the King of the Blue Jinn, or the chilly ‘under-land of Null’ evoked by the Scottish balladeer and poet Helen Adam; but whatever their atmosphere, they’re also laboratories for experiments with thought, allegories of alternatives to the world we know. In the story ‘Starlight’ the French wit and social critic Henriette-Julie de Murat imagined a topsy-turvy world in which men rock the babies and women manage the peaceful nation. Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, John Ruskin’s Stiria and its Golden River are also secondary worlds that refract our own, and are populated by imaginary alter egos, dream selves, and saviour figures, often a child quester, who face ordeals and enemies within and without. These fantastic horizons are fraught with the unknown or the intimated—the violence of monsters and the caprices of imps—or open to blissful idleness and pleasure (which present their own risks, of course), but they are by definition operating along mysterious lines, organized according to principles that differ from ordinary life. Fairylands are zones of enchantment; like the key in Bluebeard, they are ‘fée’, magic—as in ‘fey’, from ‘fated’, itself derived from ‘fatum’, meaning ‘that which has been spoken’.

  Dangers & Pleasures: Shape-Shifters, Doubles, and Goblin Men

  The inhabitants of this other place, this enchanted dimension, play a part in the English Renaissance, and signalled the recovery of a native image store, beyond the classical tradition. Queen Mab is the fairies’ midwife, as Mercutio tells Romeo in Shakespeare’s play, and drives about in a chariot made from an empty hazel nut, harnessed by spiders’ webs to ‘a team of little atomies’:

  And in this state she gallops night by night

  Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.

  (I.iv.70–1)

  Queen Mab embodies three salient features of the fairy realm, which make it the necessary backdrop to the fairy tale as a story: her occupation involves her in secret intimacies, her closeness to dreams intensifies the powerful undercurrents of romance and eros in the genre, and her miniaturized universe draws attention to the unpredictable disjunctions of scale in the scenery of a fairy tale (the stories can include giants of colossal proportions alongside tiny pixies and sprites skipping daintily about to hang ‘fairy favours’ and dewdrops on cowslips’ petals).

  Puck is ‘a Fairy’ and ‘a merry wanderer of the night’, who boasts he can change himself into ‘a filly foal’ or ‘a roasted crab’; Ariel in The Tempest is sometimes also called ‘a Fairy’, as well as an ‘airy spirit’ and a ‘chick’, and he shape-shifts—now a harpy, now a sea nymph, now a creature so small that he sings:

  Where the bee sucks, there suck I

  In a cowslip’s bell I lie …

  (V.i.88–9)

  He/she can also put ‘a girdle around the earth in forty minutes’, fly like a jinni, raise storms, and sing eerily of mysteries far beyond ordinary ken (see Figure 2).

  But Ariel, a magical intermediate being who, while subject to Prospero’s enchantments, is not subject to human laws, puts before us a new dimension of experience. Harold Bloom proposes that we grasp the function of Ariel and Puck in rhetorical terms: they create a bridge between our human world and fairy worlds, conforming to what is known in George Puttenham’s work The Art of English Poesie (1589) as a ‘farfet’, ‘as when we had rather fetch a word a great way off then to use one nerer hand to expresse the matter as wel and plainer’. Ariel’s presence does not make The Tempest a fairy tale, but it does reveal the form’s connection to imaginative flights.

  The learned élite became crucial to the collection of popular lore about fairies, long before the word ‘folk-lore’ was first used in English in 1846. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, the craze for fairy tales, which took hold after the 1690s when Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Charles Perrault (an older relative of hers) began writing them, was intertwined with a rejection of classical myth, and ethnographical curiosity about the French and their true identity. In England, a combination of religious confusion and Enlightenment insatiability spurred divines and scholars to find out what ordinary people believed, and antiquarians such as Francis Douce and William Stukeley swelled the corpus of fairy lore, while in Scotland a similar impulse towards excavating a national past inspired the Reverend Robert Kirk to draw up an anthology of his parishioners’ ideas about changelings, doppelgängers, fairy abductions, and what he calls ‘Second Sight’. When the industrious folklorist Andrew Lang edited Kirk’s manuscript in 1893, he gave it a new title, The Secret Commonwealth of Fairies, Fauns and Elves.

  In these early modern fairylands we meet many returning magical motifs of fairy tales: uncanny powers of clairvoyance (second sight), abductions, spellbound sleep, doubles, curses, prophecies, and powerful charmed things. The straight, near scientific language of the ethnographer reporting from the field gives Kirk’s work an enhanced strangeness: there is nothing like belief in the reality of something you think unreal to sharpen a sense of m
ystery and wonder. Such material nourishes the marrow of fairy tales: changelings, for example, range from the Indian boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the baleful baby made of ice in Maurice Sendak’s most shivery picture book, Outside Over There (1981); the binding power of naming governs the plot of Rumpelstiltskin when the princess tricks him out of marrying her; doppelgängers inspire alarm and even madness in a story such as Hans Andersen’s The Shadow; abduction into another enchanted world is a fundamental ordeal, poetically dramatized in Angela Carter’s ‘The Erl-King’.

  When the Romantics were following up antiquarians’ discoveries, they revived the fairies whom they encountered in ballads, nursery songs, local legends, and superstitions. Potent tales were scattered among these materials: Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry includes several traditional episodes about eerie enchantment, robber bridegrooms, and supernatural revenges for cruel death. Such marvellous and ancient stories jolt us out of the ordinary through the taste they give of the dangers—and the pleasures—of the fairy world.

  In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published the founding anthology of English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads, in which Coleridge included several uncanny poems of the supernatural which have become touchstones of literary imagination: the ballad of the Ancient Mariner and his accursed voyage, the tale of the spellbound, love-struck Christabel. In 1801, a friend of Coleridge’s, the radical poet John Thelwall, wrote a long narrative poem embroidering on Arthurian themes, called The Fairy of the Lake: A Dramatic Romance; it features a sorceress as well as the benevolent heroine, her ‘train of fairies’, ‘Giants of Frost’, and ‘Incubus, a frozen demon’. A few years later (1813) Percy Bysshe Shelley crossed Shakespeare’s fairy midwife Queen Mab with the Queen of the Fairies, Titania, to conjure an ethereal vision in his long political poem called ‘Queen Mab’. For these writers, Romantic fairies are the imagination’s powerful voices, and they can speak of ‘unheard’ things that cannot be spoken of in other ways openly. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ stages a drama of high octane love between women, and enigmatic eroticism charges the dream of Keats’s knight in his ballad, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.