Read The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Franz Xaver von Schonwerth
The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (Penguin Classics) (23 page)
The scatological elements in the tale are not to be found in collections like those of the Brothers Grimm. To them it would have been unseemly to refer to buttocks being ground down or used as a weapon. Nor would they have portrayed the good-natured Hans relieving himself—in ways that create a minor natural disaster—after a hearty dish of dumplings. The series of self-contained episodes in this tale suggests the possibility that those gathered at tables, firesides, or harvesting rooms could each contribute a vignette to produce a never-ending cycle of Hans narratives, with a hero who is of two minds and moods, at times a merry prankster and at times a determined pragmatist.
In some versions of this tale, the young man is turned into an animal, but occasionally he simply befriends a foal, a horse, or, in this case, a mare. It is the mother, through her connection to nature, who enables the boy to carry out household chores expertly and to develop a green thumb.
Also known as “The Brave Little Tailor,” this story features a hero who decorates himself for a trivial accomplishment. He seems to stand as the very incarnation of foolishness. Yet the bravado and naïveté of the tailor are exactly what enable him to slay giants, defeat a treacherous unicorn, and win an armed battle. The initial victory over the seven flies gives an unvarnished picture of village life. In the Grimms’ version of this story, flies land on jam that the tailor has just spread on a piece of bread. Here, the red flies on the dung heap make for a different picture, one less child-friendly than the Grimms’ version, repulsive rather than charming and whimsical.
The tailor is something of a trickster figure, particularly in his ability to use language to vanquish his enemies. The phrase “Seven with one blow!” reveals that he knows how to use words, and when he “talks in his sleep,” he also cleverly recites the story of his various feats to the conspirators. Even when he runs up against class barriers, he manages to triumph, earning not only the hand of the princess but also her love and devotion. He is a winning figure in many ways—even willing to forgive a wife who hires men to murder him.
Inanimate objects occasionally play a key role in fairy tales, creating surreal effects. We never learn exactly why the prince was transformed, first into a dwarf, then into a kneading trough, the exact translation for the German
Backtrog
, in the tale’s title. As in
“Beauty and the Beast” and “The Maiden without Hands,” a father makes a deal that imperils his daughters. In this tale,
however, the daughters are not at all shocked by the father’s bargain, but accept it as a just price in exchange for the exquisite meals they will be eating.
In this story, a young man is the fairest of them all, and he courts the daughter of a nobleman. That the two become intimate before marrying is unusual in edited collections of fairy tales. Like Jack or Thumbling, the young man wins over the wife of the monster, and she serves as mediator, acquiring for him not only the three feathers of a dragon or three hairs from the devil’s head but also the answers to the mysterious questions. Why is she so magnanimous? Perhaps her role is that of a maternal facilitator, who takes the obstacles placed by the young woman’s father out of his path. The king’s bodyguard is not as benevolent. His revenge on the nobleman feels gratuitous—why smash the dishes of a man who is down on his luck? Perhaps we have here an example of preposterous violence, an episode that can be told with vigorous expressions and lively gestures.
Of the three soldiers in this tale, one is unnamed, a second is a miller’s son, and the third is Fortunatus, named after the hero of a chapbook that was first printed in Augsburg, Germany, in 1509 and circulated in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A native of Cyprus, Fortunatus receives from the goddess of Fortune a purse that replenishes itself as soon as it is emptied. In the chapbook, Fortunatus steals a hat that enables him to travel anywhere he desires. He returns from Cairo to Cyprus, where he settles down and leaves the magical objects to his sons Ampedo and Andelosia, who fall on hard times because they are jealous of each other.
The tale begins with what appear to be small acts of kindness, but ends in an almost unimaginably brutal fashion. What initially appears to be a playful fairy-tale flirtation turns deadly, with a hero who lives happily ever after by getting even and exacting revenge.
THE TALKING BIRD, THE SINGING TREE, AND THE SPARKLING STREAM
The enchanted bird, tree, and stream—the forces of nature in shorthand form—reunite orphans with their parents in a popular tale that can be found the world over. Most folklore collections are short on curious men, but in this tale one of the brothers suffers the fate of Lot’s wife, who is turned into a pillar (of salt) when she looks back at the city of Sodom, despite the warnings of angels. In some versions of the story, it is the water of life that the son brings back to heal his father. Nature proves to be a powerful healer, undoing the evil of the king’s mother and her confidante—double forms of trouble—and dark retribution is paired with the light of redemption.
Weasels, as small, active predators, make unlikely candidates for fairy-tale heroes, particularly since they pose a threat to those who depend on eggs from a hen, as does the heroine of this tale. But there has never been much logic in fairy tales about animal grooms, and the beasts range from small-toothed dogs and snotty-faced goats to the more traditional bear and frog. The princess’s act of compassion, her protective instincts in the face of bullies torturing an animal, singles her out as a champion worthy of marriage.
Although this story gives us purely pagan magic, with flames bursting from eggs that turn into castles and princes metamorphosed into weasels, there is a Christian inflection that manifests itself through the consecrated Easter egg, a talisman that rights wrongs and restores the weasel to his human state.
Wicked stepmothers who persecute their daughters are part of a teeming population of disruptive, scheming, evil women in fairy tales. Tales in which mothers persecute their sons are rare in the Western canon, but they are not as unusual as we once thought. “The Faithless Mother” (ATU 590) can be found in variant forms
in Estonian lore, in British collections, and in tales recorded in Puerto Rico, Algeria, Sudan, and Croatia, among other places.
Animals, along with those outside the kinship unit, become the natural partners and allies of the hero, while his own family members, whom he seeks to protect and help, turn into adversaries. The most ferocious of all beasts takes immediately to Hans, serving not only as a donor but also as a guide and the most loyal of companions. If tales like Cinderella give us a good (dead) biological mother and an evil stepmother, this tale type also sets up two rival mothers: the good maternal lion who provides a gift in the form of healing milk and an evil biological mother who seeks to undo her son’s strength and serves to mediate the giant’s own hostility to his stepson. The giant, like many fairy-tale fathers, seems less murderously hostile than the boy’s mother, who is determined to rid herself of a son who has shown her nothing but love and devotion.
Instead of a miller with three sons, we have a miller with three daughters, each of whom is adventurous about seeking out the mysteries behind a wandering cow. The youngest of the three sisters is also the most modest, preferring to look at the beautiful clothes and objects in the castle, rather than making off with them. Unlike the myth of Zeus and Europa, in which a girl is abducted by a bull, this story features a benevolent cow who serves as something of a matchmaker.
THE CALL OF THE SHEPHERD’S HORN
This tale is unusual in taking up a theme found in Shakespeare’s
The
Winter’s Tale
, reuniting a king and queen who were separated by a false denunciation. The king’s betrayal of the shepherd repeats the errors of his youth, and somehow he has the good fortune to recover his wife and celebrate his daughter’s marriage. The exact lineage of the shepherd is not entirely clear in the story, but the mysterious elevation to an aristocratic rank quickly solves the problem of his social status.
THE MARK OF THE DOG, PIG, AND CAT
The anthropologist Ruth Benedict once pointed out that Zuni culture, which has only the rarest instances of child abandonment, is filled with stories about the evils of the practice. One can only hope that the same is true for the many tales in Schönwerth’s collection about mischievous mothers-in-law, evil women who substitute animals for newborns in a plot to divide their sons from their wives. The tale type appears in collections ranging from
The Thousand and One Nights
to Straparola’s seventeenth-century Italian collection,
The Facetious Nights
.
Much in this tale remains cryptic, from the three-legged goats to the seven candlesticks and the woman in black. Instead of three sons, we have three young men who enter a castle and are tested. What distinguishes this tale from the many variations on the theme of disenchanting a princess is the moral at the end, with a princess who asks her father’s advice about whether to stay with her husband or remarry. Her choice of metaphor—the husband as a broom—makes her even more unlikable than before, when she showed disdain for her husband’s social standing. Class distinctions often disappear at the end of fairy tales, but the Schönwerth collection reveals that they are crucial to resolve in explicit terms before there can be a happily-ever-after ending.
Using their wits and physical strength, the six nomadic animals in this story create a comfortable retirement home for themselves, a place where they are no longer required to wear themselves out by earning a living for their masters. Humans are represented as torturers and thieves: They exploit the capabilities and strengths of animals, and they also try to do each other in. The animals, by contrast, form an alliance—pragmatic, to be sure, but effective in ensuring that they find a safe house.
Extreme disappointment is enacted in this tale, with a shepherd who loses his chance at a fortune, along with a snake still desperately seeking disenchantment. Resolution, revelation, and salvation—the classic features of fairy-tale endings—are all missing. The aged shepherd succumbs to fear and greed, and the snake must wait for her liberation. The tale turns on the notion of an innocent child trumping a culpable old man as an agent of deliverance.
With its epic sweep and maelstrom of dark deeds, the story of the girl pushed into a lake by her stepmother and transformed into a snake can seem baggy and hard to follow at times. Yet the trajectories of the two children meet and resolve themselves into a neat happily-ever-after. Stories belonging to the “Black and the White Bride” tale type do not ordinarily include the journey of the true bride’s brother. Like many other characters, he is required to chop the person he loves into bits in order to bring about her transformation in a mysterious allegory about the healing power and renewing energy of destructive actions. Redemption is born from pain and suffering.
A tale initially about sibling rivalry shades into a story about the production of beauty from what appears disgusting and repulsive. The reluctant bridegroom becomes the recipient of wealth and happiness through the intervention of a toad, who is the bearer of beauty notwithstanding her appearance. Note that the son overcomes his sense of repulsion and treats the toad with compassion, remaining obedient to its commands, unlike the princess in the Grimms’ “Frog King,” who hurls the frog against the wall when it wants to sleep in her bed.
Out of the least promising materials imaginable—flax, toads, and spindles—presto! A fairy tale emerges. Reading canonical fairy tales can leave us with the mistaken impression that only young women and crones spun flax in times past. In this tale, boys compete to produce the finest possible thread from flax, and the toad in this case is not a prince in disguise but a lovely princess.
One morning, a young man wakes up and finds himself turned into a dung beetle—that might be the kind of anti–fairy tale that inspired Kafka’s story about Gregor Samsa. But in this case, the transformation is clearly motivated. Those who torture and inflict pain on animals will suffer like the creatures they’ve killed. Melding fairy-tale motifs with the cautionary tale that was making its way into the nursery, this story ends with the dissolution of the boundary dividing humans from animals—everyone sings and dances at the wedding, including the lowliest of animals.
Few of the Grimms’ fairy tales actually have fairies in them, but many of Schönwerth’s do, reflecting a fascination with woodland creatures and lore. This tale also reflects how stories were used to navigate problems that arose in everyday life. Heroines who run into trouble at home and are persecuted by evil stepmothers or proposed to by their fathers often find shelter in nature, using trees as places to sleep and finding accomplices in the creatures who inhabit forests.
This tale pits what is described as a “beautiful” girl against an “ugly” and “nasty-looking” one. It gives us extreme polarization, in ways that ring false to contemporary readers. My translation substitutes
pretty
and
plain
for
beautiful
and
ugly
, making the
contrast less stark yet preserving the narrative energy and pathos of Schönwerth’s tale. In a story like this one, we see a grim process of socialization at work. Singing while you work is frivolous—best to mind those seeds and weeds or you might end up like the pretty girl, the target of insults. Never mind the promotion of superstitions about a revenge-seeking goddess who demands sacrifices (however small). The fantasy of social mobility encapsulated in the story is somewhat preposterous, even for a fairy tale, for the arrival of the prince and his cult of fine fabrics is completely unmotivated by any events in the tale.
