A Study of Fairy Tales Part 15

The origin of the word "fairy," as given by Thomas Keightley in his _Fairy Mythology_, and later in the Appendix of his _Tales and Popular Fictions_, is the Latin _fatum_, "to enchant." The word was derived directly from the French form of the root. The various forms of the root were:--

Latin _fatum_, "to enchant."

French _fee, feerie_, "illusion."

Italian _fata_.

Provencal _fada_.

In old French romance, _fee_ was a "woman skilled in magic." "All those women were called Fays who had to do with enchantment and charms and knew the power and virtue of words, of stones, and of herbs, by which they were kept in youth and in great beauty and in great riches." This was true also of the Italian _fata_.

The word "fairy" was used in four senses. _Fairy_ represented:--

(1) Illusion, or enchantment.

(2) Abode of the Faes, the country of the Fays.

(3) Inhabitants collectively, the people of Fairyland.

(4) The individual in Fairyland, the fairy Knight, or Elf.

The word was used in the fourth sense before the time of Chaucer.

After the appearance of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ distinctions became confused, and the name of the real fairies was transferred to "the little beings who made the green, sour ringlets whereof the ewe not bites." The change adopted by the poets gained currency among the people. Fairies were identified with nymphs and elves. Shakespeare was the princ.i.p.al means of effecting this revolution, and in his _Midsummer Night's Dream_ he has incorporated most of the fairy lore known in England at his time. But the tales are older than their name.

The origin of fairy tales is a question which has kept many very able scholars busy and which has not yet been settled to the satisfaction of many. What has been discovered resolves itself mainly into four different origins of fairy tales:--

I. Fairy tales are detritus of myth, surviving echoes of G.o.ds and heroes. Against this theory it may be said that, when popular tales have incidents similar to Greek heroic myths, the tales are not detritus of myth, but both have a more ancient tale as their original source. There was:--

(1) A popular tale which reflected the condition of a rude people, a tale full of the monstrous and the miraculous.

(2) The same tale, a series of incidents and plot, with the monstrous element modified, which survived in the oral traditions of illiterate peasantry.

(3) The same plot and incidents, as they existed in heroic epics of cultivated people. A local and historical character was given by the introduction of known places and native heroes. Tone and manners were refined by literary workmans.h.i.+p, in the _Rig Veda_, the Persian _King-book_, the _Homeric Epics_, etc.

The Grimms noted that the evolution of the tale was from a strongly marked, even ugly, but highly expressive form of its earlier stages, to that which possessed external beauty of mold. The origin is in the fancy of a primitive people, the survival is through _Marchen_ of peasantry, and the transfiguration into epics is by literary artists.

Therefore, one and the same tale may be the source of Perrault's _Sleeping Beauty_, also of a _Greek myth_, and also of an _old tale of illiterate peasantry_. This was the opinion held by Lang, who said, "For the roots of stories, we must look, not in the clouds but upon the earth, not in the various aspects of nature but in the daily occurrences and surroundings, in the current opinions and ideas of savage life."

In the savage _Marchen_ of to-day, the ideas and incidents are the inevitable result of the mental habits and beliefs of savages. We gain an idea of the savage mind through Leviticus, in the Bible, through Herodotus, Greek and Roman geographers, Aristotle, Plutarch, Pliny, etc., through voyagers, missionaries, and travelers, and through present savage peoples. Savage existence is based on two great inst.i.tutions:--

(a) The division of society into clans.--Marriage laws depend on the conception that these clans descend from certain plants, animals, or inorganic objects. There was the belief in human descent from animals and kins.h.i.+p and personal intercourse with them.

(b) Belief in magic and medicine-men, which resulted in powers of metamorphosis, the effect of incantation, and communion with the dead.--To the savage all nature was animated, all things were persons.

The leading ideas of savage peoples have already been referred to in the list of motifs which appear in the different fairy tales, as given by Lang, mentioned under the "Preparation of the Teacher," in _The Telling of the Tale_.

II. Fairy tales are myths of Sun, Dawn, Thunder, Rain, etc.

This is sometimes called the Sun-Myth Theory or the Aryan Theory, and it is the one advocated by Max Muller and by Grimm.

The fairy tales were primitive man's experience with nature in days when he could not distinguish between nature and his own personality, when there was no supernatural because everything was endowed with a personal life. They were the poetic fancies of light and dark, cloud and rain, day and night; and underneath them were the same fanciful meanings. These became changed by time, circ.u.mstances in different countries, and the fancy of the tellers, so that they became sunny and many-colored in the South, sterner and wilder in the North, and more home-like in the Middle and West. To the Bushmen the wind was a bird, and to the Egyptian fire was a living beast. Even _The Song of Six-Pence_ has been explained as a nature-myth, the pie being the earth and sky, the birds the twenty-four hours, the king the sun, the queen the moon, and the opening of the pie, day-break.

Every word or phrase became a new story as soon as the first meaning of the original name was lost. Andrew Lang tells how Kephalos the sun loved Prokris the dew, and slew her by his arrows. Then when the first meaning of the names for sun, dew, and rays was lost, Kephalos, a shepherd, loved Prokris, a nymph, and we have a second tale which, by a folk-etymology, became the _Story of Apollo, the Wolf_. Tales were told of the sun under his frog name; later people forgot that _frog_ meant "sun," and the result was the popular tale, _A Frog, He Would A-Wooing Go_.

In regard to this theory, "It is well to remember," says Tylor in his _Primitive Culture_, "that rash inferences which, on the strength of mere resemblances, derive episodes of myth from episodes of nature, must be regarded with utter distrust; for the student who has no more stringent criterion than this for his myths of sun and sky and dawn will find them wherever it pleases him to seek them." There is a danger of being carried away by false a.n.a.logies. But all scholars agree that some tales are evidently myths of sun and dawn. If we examine the natural history of savages, we do find summer feasts, winter feasts, rituals of sorrow for the going of summer and of rejoicing for its return, anxious interest in the sun, interest in the motion of the heavenly bodies, the custom of naming men and women from the phenomena of nature, and interest in making love, making war, making fun, and making dinner.

III. Fairy tales all arose in India, they are part of the common Aryan heritage and are to be traced by the remains of their language.

They were first written in the _Vedas_, the sacred Sanskrit books of Buddhism. This theory is somewhat allied to the Sun-Myth Theory. This theory was followed by Max Muller and by Sir George c.o.x.

The theory of a common source in India will not answer entirely for the origin of tales because many similar tales have existed in non-Aryan countries. Old tales were current in Egypt, 2000 B.C., and were brought from there by Crusaders, Mongol missionaries, the Hebrews, and Gypsies.

The idea of connecting a number of disconnected stories, as we find in _Arabian Nights_, _The Canterbury Tales_, and the _Decameron_, is traced to the idea of making Buddha the central figure in the folk-literature of India. And Jacobs says that at least one-third of all the stories common to the children of Europe are derived from India, and by far the majority of the drolls. He also says that generally, so far as incidents are marvelous and of true fairy-like character, India is the probable source, because of the vitality of animism and transformation in India in all time. Moreover, as a people, the Hindus had spread among their numbers enough literary training and mental grip to invent plots.

And again, there is an accepted connection in myth and language between all Aryan languages and Sanskrit. According to Sir George Dasent, "The whole human race has sprung from one stock planted in the East, which has stretched its boughs and branches laden with the fruit of language and bright with the bloom of song and story, by successive offshoots to the utmost parts of the earth." Dasent tells how the Aryans who went west, who went out to _do_, were distinguished from the nations of the world by their common sense, by their power of adapting themselves to circ.u.mstances, by making the best of their position, by being ready to receive impressions, and by being able to develop impressions. They became the Greeks, the Latins, the Teutons, the Celts, and the Slavonians. The Aryans who stayed at home, remained to _reflect_, and were distinguished by their power of thought. They became a nation of philosophers and gave to the world the Sanskrit language as the basis of comparative philology. Dasent shows how legends, such as the _Story of William Tell_ and _Dog Gellert_, which have appeared in many Aryan peoples were common in germ to the Aryan tribes before migration. Joseph Jacobs has more recently settled the travels of _Gellert_, tracing its literary route from the Indian _Vinaya Pitaka_, through the _Fables of Bidpai, Sindibad, Seven Sages of Rome, Gesta Romanorum_, and the Welsh _Fables of Cottwg_, until the legend became localized in Wales.

IV. Fairy tales owe their origin to the ident.i.ty of early fancy.

Just as an individual, after thinking along certain lines, is surprised to come upon the exact sequence of his thought in a book he had never seen, so primitive peoples in remote parts of the world, up against similar situations, would express experience in tales containing similar motifs. A limited set of experiences was presented to the inventive faculty, and the limited combinations possible would result in similar combinations. The Aryan Jackal, the Mediaeval Reynard, the Southern Brer Rabbit, and the Weasel of Africa, are near relations. Dasent said, "In all mythology and tradition there are natural resemblances, parallelisms, suggested to the senses of each race by natural objects and everyday events; and these might spring up spontaneously all over the earth as home-growths, neither derived by imitation from other tribes, nor from the tradition of a common stock."

It is probable that all four theories of the origin of fairy tales are correct and that fairy tales owe their origin not to any one cause but to all four.

II. THE TRANSMISSION OF FAIRY TALES

Oral transmission. The tale, having originated, may have been transmitted in many ways: by women compelled to marry into alien tribes; by slaves from Africa to America; by soldiers returning from the Crusades; by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land or from Mecca; by knights gathering at tournaments; by sailors and travelers; and by commercial exchange between southern Europe and the East--Venice trading with Egypt and Spain with Syria. Ancient tales of Persia spread along the Mediterranean sh.o.r.es. In this way the Moors of Spain learned many a tale which they transmitted to the French. _Jack the Giant-Killer_ and _Thomas Thumb_, according to Sir Walter Scott, landed in England from the very same keels and wars.h.i.+ps which conveyed Hengist and Horsa and Ebba the Saxon. A recent report of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution of the United States expressed the opinion that the _Uncle Remus Tales_ have an Indian origin. Slaves had a.s.sociated with Indian tribes such as the Cherokees, and had heard the story of the Rabbit who was so clever that no one could fool him. Gradually the Southern negroes had adopted the Indian tales and changed them. Joseph Jacobs claims to have found the original of the "Tar Baby" in the _Jataka Tales_. A tale, once having originated, could travel as easily as the wind. Certainly a good type when once hit upon was diffused widely. Sir Walter Scott has said: "A work of great interest might be compiled from the origin of popular fiction and the transmission of similar tales from age to age and from country to country. The mythology of one period would then appear to pa.s.s into the romance of the next century, and that into the nursery tales of subsequent ages. Such an investigation would show that these fictions, however wild and childish, possess such charms for the populace as to enable them to penetrate into countries unconnected by manners and language, and having no apparent intercourse to afford the means of transmission."

Thomas Keightley, in _Tales and Popular Fictions_, has given interesting examples of the transmission of tales. Selecting _Jack the Giant-Killer_, he has shown that it is the same tale as Grimm's _The Brave Tailor_, and _Thor's Journey to Utgard_ in the Scandinavian _Edda_. Similar motifs occur also in a Persian tale, _Ameen of Isfahan and the Ghool_, and in the _Goat and the Lion_, a tale from the _Panchatantra_. Selecting the _Story of d.i.c.k Whittington_ he has shown that in England it was current in the reign of Elizabeth; that two similar tales, Danish legends, were told by Thiele; that a similar Italian tale existed at the time of Amerigo Vespucci, which was a legend told by Arlotto in 1396-1483; that another similar Italian tale was connected with the origin of Venice, in 1175; and that a similar tale existed in Persia in 1300, before 1360, when Whittington of England was born. He also pointed out that the _Odyssey_ must have traveled east as well as west, from Greece, for Sindbad's adventure with the Black Giant is similar to that of Ulysses with the Cyclops.

Another interesting set of parallels shown by him is connected with the _Pentamerone_ tale, _Peruonto_. This is the Straparola _Peter the Fool_, the Russian _Emelyan the Fool_, the Esthonian tale by Laboulaye, _The Fairy Craw-Fish_, and the Grimm _The Fisherman and his Wife_. The theme of a peasant being rewarded by the fish he had thrown back into the water takes on a delightful varied form in the tale of different countries. The magic words of Emelyan, "Up and away! At the pike's command, and at my request, go home, sledge!" in each variant take an interesting new form.

Literary transmission. The travels of a tale through oral tradition are to be attempted with great difficulty and by only the most careful scholars.h.i.+p. One may follow the transmission of tales through literary collections with somewhat greater ease and exactness. Popular tales have a literature of their own. The following list seeks to mention the most noteworthy collections:--

No date. _Vedas_. Sanskrit.

No date. _Zend Avesta_. Persian.

Fifth century, B.C. _Jatakas_. Probably the oldest literature. It was written at Ceylon and has been translated into 38 languages, in 112 editions. Recently the Cambridge edition has been translated from the Pali, edited by E.B.

Cowell, published by Putnam, New York, 1895-1907.

4000 B.C. _Tales of Ancient Egypt_. These were the tales of magicians, recorded on papyrus.

600 B.C. (about). _Homeric Legends_.