Download PDF | Dr. Jan M. Ziolkowski - Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales_ The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (2007).
513 Pages
Introduction
the tale of this fairy tale fifteen years ago I cast about for a topic that would enable me to connect today’s culture with the literature in my main field of interest (and please do not put down this book after reading the next three words), Medieval Latin literature. My professional situation prompted me to think of folktales and fairy tales.
On the one hand, half of my appointment was in a classics department, where, at that time, the meaning and value of philology were topics of considerable discussion and even tension. In addition, I was trying to find common ground with most of my colleagues in Medieval Latin outside my university, who were predominantly Europeans, who held positions flagged explicitly as Medieval Latin philology, and who devoted much of their research and writing to editing, textual criticism and transmission, and other unquestionably philological pursuits.
On the other hand, the remaining half of my salary came from a department in comparative literature, which I subsequently chaired for a number of years. Although comparative literature has never been defined overtly so as to exclude premodern literatures, the understanding of it as “the systematic study of supranational as - semblages” tends to diminish the ease of including in it literatures from before when nations existed.1 Furthermore, comparative literature, which was once bound up with the languages and literatures of different traditions, has become increasingly connected with theoretical approaches, among which the place of philology has been extremely controversial
Classics and comparative literature differed starkly from each other in the time periods with which they were most often concerned and in the theoretical approaches with which they were associated. A way to elide the differences came to me through one of the happiest serendipities in my intellectual life. Very soon after being hired at Harvard, I had been enlisted by Albert B. Lord (1912–91) to serve on a committee devoted to the study of folklore and mythology. In seeking a confluence between my two or more intellectual identities, I gravitated toward a number of texts written in Medieval Latin that recounted tales that were also documented in later times (especially the Romantic era) in fairy tale collections. Some topics seemed too narrow and specific, others too broad and amorphous, but fairy tales seemed just right: Goldilocks would have been happy. Upon delving more deeply into these texts and the scholarship that had grown rampant around them, I discovered that the tales had been relatively neglected. Medieval Latinists had edited them and sometimes translated them (particularly into German or Italian), but on the whole they had not grappled in any depth with what the tales might mean, either in their own right or in their significance for the history of folktales and fairy tales. In such inter - pretations as had been formulated, Medieval Latinists had not been especially troubled about exploring closely the connections of the tales with folk liter - ature in general or the Grimm collection in particular. Although fairy tale scholars of past generations had sometimes noticed the tales and discussed them briefly, by and large the texts had been consigned to the same forlorn and overlooked corner where much of Medieval Latin literature has undeservedly languished.
The texts were too unclassical for Medieval Latin philologists, too recherché (and too Latin) for folklorists and fairy tale scholars. But noticing that the tales recounted in these poems could help me to find an intersection with a general public (and even with my three daughters, who were children when the work began and are now adults), I became ever more convinced that the folktales and fairy tales recorded in Latin could afford one of the few means—and maybe the only one—for putting on display for a broad college audience the materials I study as a specialist. Already a decade and a half ago, it seemed that a professor could canvas twenty-five bright and well-schooled students and find surprisingly few texts, especially from before the twentieth century, that they would have in common. Even the Shakespeare they knew might turn out to be different comedies and tragedies: this one had read Macbeth and As You Like It, that one Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But to what poems, plays, or novels had they all been exposed? The common store of allusions among them was to be found not in literature and especially not in verse but instead in films, television, and celebrity-oriented current events.
If acquaintance with Anglo-American literature from hundreds of years ago was limited, a collective familiarity with literature from elsewhere in the world and not in English had grown even slighter. Among the many factors that have come into play, both economics and politics of language have been involved.3 Although it was possible in the aftermath of World War II to hope for the foundation of a “world literature” (Weltliteratur) that would draw together the best from everywhere,4 it has become ever more common for people in the United States in particular to slake their thirst for exoticism by engaging texts produced by ethnic minorities within American culture or literatures written in English in (or translated into English from) outside cultures. I am not faulting this attraction, but I am suggesting that there is much to be gained by remaining open to narratives from other places and times.
Being closed to human culture from earlier stretches of history is no different from xenophobia, racism, or other such hostilities, even if it harms no living victims. While pondering the least common denominators of Western culture as it manifests itself today (at least in North America), I realized that fairy tales could give me an ideal and probably unique opportunity. Fairy tales are one of the few literary genres shared by people of all ages and social classes in all Western countries, from Europe to America and beyond. Virtually the only type of older narrative known to everyone, regardless of age or education, are versions of the fairy tales that were given vintage expression by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), Madame Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–80), Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), and others; and even these tales are most often received not directly with acknowledgment of their authors’ names but, rather, as adapted in children’s picture books or animated films, without acknowledgment of their ultimate sources.
A small subset of the Grimms’ fairy tales is known nearly everywhere. Sometimes the tales are familiar from one of the original collections; the first volume of the first edition was published in 1812, but the selection and contents of the collection evolved through the seventh, final edition, published in 1857 (confusingly, the final, 1856, edition of the Grimms’ own volume of commentary on their collected fairy tales is the third, not the seventh). Sometimes the tales have won favor separately as retold in individual illustrated children’s stories, other times in feature-length Walt Disney animations or other cartoon versions, advertisements, and other minor media (among which may be included scholarship). Because of the ways in which their stories and their collective name have permeated mass culture, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (and not very many in the populace at large are on a footing to know them by their first names, Jacob and Wilhelm) would loom large even if no one read another book.
Being incorrigibly optimistic (if only when it comes to stories), I have faith that people will be inquisitive about ancient and medieval literatures if those literatures can be shown to relate somehow to their present. At the risk of sounding irreparably old-fashioned, I would maintain that past literature contains beauty and wisdom, both of which we can ill afford to jettison. Much older literature has survived a selection process that guarantees it has exercised a strength and depth of meaning over a variety of readers across a long time and wide space. That statement is a long-winded way of saying that much past literature is tried and true, which is why (from the Romantic era down to the present day) fairy tales have so often been viewed—without much examination of the reasons why—as the symbolic expression of a profound wisdom.5 Our culture, even our mass culture, could benefit from informed looks at past literature, even so far back as the Middle Ages and beyond.
The heroes of comic books, video games, and best-selling children’s literature hold the same enormous appeal among popular audiences as do the writings of Joseph Campbell (1904–87), because people have an insatiable desire for stories that hold the promise of deep meaning—of revelation, therapy, life lessons, escape, and entertainment.6 In addition to building our entertainment and edification upon comic-book heroes and making feature-length films of narrativeless video games or old television serials, why not venture further afield and, in the process, find narratives that have been market tested across hundreds of years and thousands of miles? In the case of the medieval folktales and fairy tales, we have the chance to confront a triple challenge and receive a triple pleasure. Not only are the medieval texts fascinating in their own right, but they enable—and even require—both the exploration of folk literature in the Middle Ages and the study of its later appropriation and conversion, particularly in the Romantic era.
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