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) (24 page)
The hero of this tale, half-human and half–wood sprite, has trouble adjusting to the rules of civilization, and he is so immersed in nature that others worry about his state of mind. Taken in by an impresario of adoption, the boy finds it challenging to embrace a work ethic and prefers the woods to the woodpile. Once his mother appears to help him carry out tasks and to proclaim his ancestry, he seems liberated to embrace his father’s values. The tale’s playful combination of chores involving chopping wood and a name that suggests a bird that drills into wood reveals the self-conscious use of language, telling a story yet also engaging in associative language games.
A classic formulation of a tale type that charts the encounter between mortals and creatures of the sea, this tale reminds us of the double face of nature, treacherous and grasping on the one hand, benevolent and generous on the other. The (unwitting) exchange of a child for material riches and prosperity is a theme frequently sounded in folktales, with tales such as “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rapunzel” reminding us of two extremes, in one case providing an exchange for untold wealth; in the other, the fulfillment of a frivolous wish. The human agents in the tale, faced with the seemingly uncompromising side of nature, learn how to settle disputes fairly and make their own bargains and exchanges, with Lucas dividing up the
carcass for the animals fair and square, and the princess discovering the value of exchanging material possessions for something far more valuable, thus reversing the curse brought on by the fisherman’s bargain.
The seductive power of mermaids is highlighted in this racy story about a young man who resembles Bluebeard in his lethal touch and serial marriages. Oddly he is rescued from the mermaids by the use of both magic and prayer, with one shrewd young bride who catches on that all those dead wives do not bode well. She consults a witch, who gives her good advice but also uses prayer to ward off evil spirits.
The plaintive sounds of the wind are explained here as the lamentations of a mother and her seven sons. As in Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” this sea creature is in search of a soul and just misses acquiring something that will remove her from her origins and settle her comfortably in the human world. As sirens and beauties that lure men to their death, mermaids not only bring danger to the mortal world but are also often driven to return to their origins.
With the most prosaic name possible, Hans carries out a series of extraordinary feats. Grateful animals and a magic mirror enable him to disenchant a princess and restore all the castle’s inhabitants to their human form. The trio of brothers behaves as scripted for fairy tales, but the golden fish as grateful animal adds an eye-popping decorative touch to the tale.
The heroine of this tale undergoes a startling transformation but one for which she pays a high price. Her high-stakes wager with the nixies, or mermaids, is made without a thought about
its consequences or about the deep divide between mortals and merfolk. Woods and water harbor creatures that can be both benevolent and compassionate, but also spiteful and wicked.
By turns ecstatic and elegiac, this tale about a mermaid and her union with a mortal is a reminder of the doomed nature of those marriages. To be sure, there is redemption of a kind for the mermaid, who is given another three hundred years of youthful beauty, but there is also loss and despair, with a husband and six children left behind once she returns to the sea.
George Macdonald, the author of many Victorian novels and fairy tales, was once asked to define fairy tales. His reply: “Read
Undine
; that is a fairy tale . . . of all the fairy tales I know, I think
Undine
the most beautiful.” Stories about star-crossed lovers, in this story as in
Undine
, have a certain seductive appeal, particularly those that pair a mortal with a wood nymph or sea creature. Much as “Anna Mayala” is rooted in pagan beliefs about supernatural forces in the waters and woods, it also carries a distinctly Christian message about transgression and redemption. Veri, the daydreamer, lives in his imagination and succumbs to the forces of beauty in an underworld realm, only to return and discover that where there was beauty there was also monstrosity and horror.
Legend rather than fairy tale, this story reveals how beauty is linked with sorcery and seduction. The beauty of the girls turns out to be too good to be true, and they are turned upon by the villagers with unprecedented savagery sanctioned by the legal system.
In this variant of “The Enchanted Castle Disenchanted,” the three brothers show their piety by going on a pilgrimage with their mother. The princess herself is a model of virtue, compassion, and hospitality. Building the inn, beyond its goal of attracting her beloved with a sign inviting the poor to stay for free, reveals her generosity and true noble spirit. There is more than a hint of waywardness, however, in the birth of a child nine months after the two meet, even though the brother stays in the princess’s arms for a “short time.”
The young beggars at the castle turn out to be the grooms of the missing princesses in this tale tracing a rise from rags to riches. Gnomes are both treacherous and beneficial, and the hero of the tale knows exactly how to exploit their powers. Not one to hold a grudge, he rewards his companions but not without insisting that they remain subservient to him. Much as this tale appears highly stylized and formulaic, it engages in some remarkable code switching, revealing that compassion and generosity are not always rewarded. The third in the trio is rewarded when he requires the gnomes to work for their supper, while the others are punished for sharing their food with them.
Who knew about the secret lives of children and how they manage to engineer happy endings for themselves, securing a fortune and leaving it to the grandparents to raise their child? This tale begins in a conventional manner, with two brothers and a conflict that arises between them. It then takes an abrupt turn, leading us into a world of mysterious transactions between the heroine and the elves that befriend her, teaching her reading, writing, and the domestic arts. The alliance enables the girl to
practice magic in ways that secure for her a companionate marriage rather than an arranged marriage. In the end, all generational conflicts are resolved and the mills remain in the family. The magic of the household elves proves successful.
Rather than giving us a weary retread of a story pitting two brothers against each other, this tale animates the action with whips and swords, lifesaving pets, and limbs that fly through the air. Evil resides purely in the old beggar woman, whose abject exterior conceals violence and aggression. The brothers can reconcile precisely because the blame for all evils—from petrifaction to delusional behavior—is placed on her shoulders.
The witch who kidnaps three princesses has trouble keeping secrets to herself. The clever trio learns how to work magic, and the youngest of the three uses it to keep the witch and her accomplices (the two sisters) at bay in a chase that has the frenzied, bolting energy of a cinematic sequence. The rose and rosebush, church and priest, lake and duck are standard features of the chase in similar tales, but the girl in this tale does not throw magic objects (combs, brushes, and mirrors) in the path of her pursuers, as she does in variants of the tale type known as “The Magic Flight.” Like Rapunzel, the three girls are kept captive by a witch or enchantress and liberate themselves when they come of age, in a plot that resonates with adolescent longings from times past as well as today.
Here is a tale that reminds us of the power of words. A mother’s words, spoken in anger, turn out to work magic, with unintended consequences. That tale type, “The Dance among the Thorns,” features a boy who is dismissed from work or driven away from home. He meets up with a helper/donor who grants him three
wishes, usually a musket with perfect aim and an enchanted fiddle. The third wish varies tremendously, with some fellows electing a place in heaven, others forcing their stepmothers to break wind whenever they sneeze. In this particular tale, dance is aligned more with the medieval dance of death than with festive celebrations. The fiddle becomes a diabolical instrument that may release the boy from his death sentence yet also becomes a means of torturing and killing others.
Zacharias’s name comes from the Greek “God has remembered” and thus exercises a certain protective quality over the boy. His adventures in the castle turn him into a superhero who conquers not just male giants but also a female giant, who is replaced by an enchanted young woman with the power to reanimate the castle and its inhabitants.
Closely related to “The Danced-Out Shoes,” this tale, belonging to the category of “The Dangerous Night-Watch,” presents us with the crafty youngest of three sons. When he meets a sleeping beauty, he does not awaken her with a kiss but slips away and returns home. The princess awakens and demonstrates her munificence by opening an inn that is free for the poor, thereby balancing the hunter’s brutal show of expert marksmanship and craft with compassion and beauty.
Coarse in its content yet also poetic in its language, this tale gives us a self-reflexive meditation on storytelling and language. The man who discovers buried treasure claims to his talkative partner that some kind of miracle has occurred, thus ensuring that the partner will lose credibility when boasting about the treasure to others. In this case, when the soldier begins to speak poetry and work magic, his wife’s prosaic words of warning break the spell and banish the little man and his
treasure. Left to his own devices, the soldier was able to animate the ruins and produce the copper pot filled with coins.
The devil makes frequent appearances in tales about earning a living through agricultural work. Often he is as much ally as adversary, unwittingly helping a poor farmhand with the mowing or haying and just as often sending a rich man to hell. Who is better suited than the devil for the duplicitous role of villain who enables the hero to gain worldly goods but who must also be tricked or banished in order for the hero to live happily ever after?
This tale offers a fine example of a myth transformed into a folktale, with characters based on the Norse gods Odin and Freyja. A fourteenth-century narrative in
Olaf’s Saga
recounts Freyja’s acquisition of a necklace. One day Freyja, one of Odin’s concubines, discovers dwarfs in a cave working on a golden necklace. Freyja offers to buy the necklace, but the dwarfs will give it to her only on the condition that she spend one night with each of them. Loki learns about Freyja’s actions and reports them to Odin, who then orders Loki to steal the necklace, which is returned to Freyja under Odin’s conditions. The teller of this tale has turned the story into one of transgression, remorse, and the renewal of devotion between husband and wife.
THE MOUSE CATCHER, OR THE BOY AND THE BEETLE
The Pied Piper of Hamelin is here transformed into a mouse catcher, with a whistle rather than a pipe or flute. The German legend refers back to the mysterious disappearance of children from the town of Hamelin in 1284, an event that may have had more to do with disease, a natural catastrophe, emigration, or the Children’s Crusade than with a rat catcher betrayed, if it happened at all. The tale was included in
German Legends
by the Brothers Grimm, and verse accounts by
Goethe and Browning have kept the story alive. Schönwerth adds a coda that gives the story a local flavor and transforms tragedy into “happily ever after.”
The girl in this tale functions as both martyr and saint, and she shows unparalleled fortitude in managing the tribulations that come her way, from the death of her mother to persecution at the hands of her stepmother, beatings from her stepbrothers, and exile after opening the door to a forbidden chamber. Especially remarkable is the use of motifs from multiple tale types: The pearls and roses are reminiscent of “The Kind and Unkind Girls,” which features a girl from whose mouth diamonds drop. The forbidden chamber is the central motif of Bluebeard tales, in which the husband forbids his wife to open the door to a single room in his castle. It is a short step from the domestic melodrama of fairy tales to the realm of Christian parable, with a heroine who moves from the hearth as classic innocent persecuted heroine of the fairy tale to a place of healing, where she is saintly in both life and death. Especially noteworthy is the scene of writing, in which God the Father and his Son shape human destinies by inscribing the course of lives into a book. The description suggests something sacred about writing down the story of a life and thereby enacts what the author of this particular tale is attempting in his account of the conversion of a fairy-tale figure into a saint.
Ending with a conciliatory message about the value of satisfaction with the status quo, this is a tale that endorses the work ethic and dutiful piety while renouncing the value of rebellious imagination. The worker does what few fairy-tale characters do: He dreams up a world driven by the work of his imagination, a world in which flour comes down from the heavens, making human labor unnecessary. He quickly learns that a worldly order ruled by the pleasure principle brings nothing
but un-pleasure and, relieved that the new order was nothing more than a fantasy, he ceases to grumble about his lot.