The tailor feared for his life. The needles had turned his body into one big sponge, and the scissors had torn his garments to shreds. He suddenly remembered that he had a heavy iron with him, and he used it to force his way through the onslaught and pass through the wall. He crawled out and fell straight down, this time into a thicket of thorny shrubs. Worse yet, a storm was on the way, and suddenly it began pouring—but not in raindrops. Big, heavy irons were falling down all over the place.
The tailor was black and blue from the irons that had hit him. He pulled himself out of the thorny underbrush and crawled into a hollow tree, where he was hoping to recover from the barrage.
All at once thousands of tiny red ants started marching in his direction, and they bit and stung the miserable young man. He groaned and moaned, sneezed and wheezed, and he would have hightailed it out of there, but outside the irons were still falling from the sky. They would have killed him. And so the tailor hopped around, scratching and scraping the bites. He swore to high heaven that he would never again do anything to harm a leaf on a tree, let alone the entire tree, as long as he survived this time around.
Suddenly the rain came to a stop. The tailor tore off and got out of those woods as fast as he could.
Commentary
THE TURNIP PRINCESS
Combining the ordinary with the extraordinary even in its title, this tale works magic with rusty nails and turnips, turning metals and plants into fairy-tale gold. The prince faces numerous mysterious ordeals, and even when he follows instructions, he finds himself in trouble. Pulling a rusty nail from the wall of a cave seems an odd, somewhat surreal means of lifting a curse, but that is the action that leads to the final disenchantment of the old woman and the bear.
THE ENCHANTED QUILL
“Pull one of my feathers out, and if you use it to write down a wish, the wish will come true,” a crow tells the youngest of three sisters in Schönwerth’s “The Enchanted Quill.” The girl reluctantly plucks the feather, uses it as a pen, and what does she do first but write down the names of the very finest dishes. The food promptly appears in bowls that sparkle and glow. This microdrama packs wisdom about fairy tales into a small golden nugget. Wish fulfillment often takes the form of enough food to eat, and in this case it means that the heroine, who lacks culinary skills and burns all the dishes she tries to prepare, will no longer be the target of ridicule. In fairy tales, the highest good, whatever it may be, is always bathed in an aura of golden light, luminous and radiant, yet also contained and framed with metallic substantiality. And finally, in a self-reflexive gesture, the crow’s magical writing instrument reveals the power of words to build fairy-tale worlds, sites that remove us from reality and enable us to feel the power of what-if in a way that is palpably real. You can almost see and smell the dishes, even if you can’t necessarily touch and taste them.
The German title can be translated as “The Enchanted Feather” or as “The Enchanted Quill.” The crow’s feather turns out to operate as a writing instrument, and this tale gives us a rare instance of wishes written down in order to make them come true, reminding us that there is magic in language, in the dramatic shorthand of curses, spells, and charms. With the magic quill, an instrument that signals the power of the pen over the sword, the youngest of the three sisters succeeds in duping the trio of would-be suitors and inflicting bodily punishments on them and the monarchs in the tale.
Closely related to “Cupid and Psyche,” as well as to “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon,” in addition to Beauty and the Beast tales, this story gives us a beast less ferocious and slimy than most. Although crows and ravens are part of the same family of birds, the crow is smaller than the raven. In Norse mythology, Odin was often represented as accompanied by two black birds, Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory. The bird in this tale may be regal in some instances, but he seems less divine emissary than understated symbol for an ordinary man awaiting transformation back into human shape.
THE IRON SHOES
“The Search for the Lost Husband” (ATU 425) is a familiar tale in Western culture, and it includes such classic stories as “Beauty and the Beast” and “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon.” Less well known is “The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife” (ATU 400), in which a boy leaves home, liberates a bewitched princess, loses her by boasting about her beauty, and sets out in search of his wife, enduring a series of tests to win her back. Note that folklorists describe the wife’s efforts as a mere search, while the husband has set out on a quest, even though both endure similar hardships.
Hans’s tenacity is captured in the iron shoes he uses to reach his wife, footwear rarely seen on the male protagonists of fairy tales. This dim-witted numbskull quickly becomes a fleet-footed trickster.
THE WOLVES
Many fairy tales begin with a childless couple, but few demonize so powerfully the woman in the couple. Often a couple can be so desperate to have a child that they will settle for a hedgehog, as in the Grimms’ “Hans My Hedgehog.” In this case, the princess’s decision to abandon her seven boys and throw them to the wolves turns her into the most wicked of them all. The red-hot iron shoes that are fitted on the princess appear in the Grimms’ “Snow White,” and it is in that tale that the evil queen dances to death after seeking to murder her stepdaughter. The magic mirror that reveals Snow White to be the fairest of them all finds an analogue in the revelatory mirror, which shows the true nature of the evil princess.
In “The Wolves,” the main conflict is less generational than class based, with high-spirited peasants pitted against mean-spirited royalty. Naming the boys “wolves” suggests a disavowal of the princess’s maternal title and emphasizes that even wild beasts can make better parents than some biological progenitors. Class resentment and anxieties about infidelity place this tale decisively in the category of adult fare.
THE FLYING TRUNK
Cinderella and the magic slipper are so familiar to us that it is hard to imagine a story in which there is a search for a young man whose foot fits a boot. Flying trunks will be familiar from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale about a merchant’s son whose adventures end with an abandoned princess and a hero who is left without bride or trunk and has only stories to tell.
KING GOLDENLOCKS
Blond beauties may appear to be overrepresented in fairy tales, but their male counterparts—young men who conceal their standing by covering up their golden tresses—turn up with some frequency as well. The term blond(e) is most likely related to the Latin blandus, which means “charming,” making the word all the more apt for fairy-tale princes. As fairy-tale scholar Marina Warner has pointed out, the term has a “double resonance,” signifying both light coloring and beauty and thereby overlapping with the English usage of fairy as beautiful or pleasing: “Blondeness and beauty have provided a conceptual rhyme in visual and literary imagery ever since the goddess of Love’s tresses were described as xanthe, golden, by Homer.”
Although not a part of the European canon, this tale seems to kaleidoscopically reassemble bits and pieces of it. The opening episode, with the boy and the wild man, evokes the beginning of the Grimms’ “The Frog King,” with its lost ball and bargain for the return of it. And the king’s decision to have his son killed closely resembles the scene in “Snow White,” with the wicked queen demanding the lungs and liver of her beautiful stepdaughter. This tale reminds us that fair-haired princes, like sleeping princes and Cinderfellas, can play as prominent a role in fairy tales as their female counterparts do today. Part two of the story modulates into another canonical tale, one that is also in the Grimms’ collection: “The Water of Life.” In this second part, we learn about the medieval practice of branding criminals with an image of the gallows or the rack.
THE BEAUTIFUL SLAVE GIRL
The slave girl as heroine is something of a novelty in Schönwerth’s collection. Both the princess’s writing of letters and Karl�
��s painting of landscapes are unusual motifs for a fairy tale, where there is generally not much writing or art. Karl is described as a young man of few words, but he loves beauty, dwelling in a lovely garden and falling in love with the slave girl because of her attractiveness. That he becomes a painter seems not entirely accidental. Both protagonists engineer scenes of recognition, showing that they are evenly matched when it comes to wits.
THREE FLOWERS
The rapid-fire narrative pace suggests that the storyteller hoped to keep his audience engaged and alert, with surprise twists and turns throughout, along with mysterious figures and events. The woman in the woods, for example, remains enigmatic, a helper who warms up milk in a thimble, understands the language of the flowers, and disappears, perhaps living on as the chirping cricket under the hearthstone.
THE FIGS
The figs in the title are native to Mediterranean regions, and they appear frequently in myth and folklore as a source of strength and nourishment. A tale that displays the rewards of compassion and generosity is oddly also full of class resentment and revenge plots. The first two of the hero’s three tasks figure prominently in other tales. Fetching a ring from the ocean and sorting grains are conventional “impossible tasks.” By contrast, retrieving a flower from heaven and acquiring a burning torch from hell are unusual assignments, with the flower representing beauty and fire standing for its destruction.
THE ENCHANTED MUSKET
The heroic youngest son is a bundle of contradictions in many ways. On the one hand he is a kind fellow who gives alms to beggars, but he also does not hesitate to slay giants and appropriate their property. Despite the sensitivity he shows when it comes to beggars, he is thick-skinned and indestructible in the castle when ghosts try to torture him. And, oddly, he makes no effort to prove his family identity, waiting instead for the princess to liberate him from the Cinderfella role to which he has been consigned. His serial adventures seem designed to show his humility, strength, endurance, as well as his good fortune—he seems always to be in the right place at the right time.
THE THREE ABDUCTED DAUGHTERS
This story is closely related to the biblical narrative about Joseph and his brothers, in which Joseph’s half brothers betray him and throw him into an empty cistern. As in “Cinderella,” two same-sex siblings gang up on the principal character and are punished or forgiven in the end.
Ferocious animals in the form of lions and snakes threaten the hero with death, but in the end it is a grateful animal that enables the hero to outwit his treacherous companions and triumph.
THE PORTRAIT
The portrait of the sister and the mirror to which she speaks remind us of the importance of appearance in fairy tales. When the squire falls in love, it is with the portrait rather than the sister herself. And when the boy is thrown into prison, his sister’s portrait is kept on display by the hearth. The girl in turn uses the mirror as an apotropaic device, intended to break the witch’s spell by speaking truth to power in an indirect fashion. In typical fairy-tale fashion, the sister makes three visits to the mirror, and it is only on the third, when the squire is present, that the spell is mysteriously broken. In variants of the tale type, the act of speaking the truth has the same magical power, modeling how to do things with words without using spells. In the end, the family is reconstituted as a new kind of nuclear unit, with sister and squire “adopting” the boy and treating him like a son.
ASHFEATHERS
Ashfeathers is more assertive than many of her folkloric cousins. While it is true that she receives a “modest” gift, she is insistent that her father finally bring her a gift when he returns from one of his many journeys. And yet, the gentleman suitor who pursues her does not seem to need her consent. He falls in love, woos her, and whisks her off to his castle, without a word from her. Consent is coded through the display of beauty she puts on in church. We learn almost nothing about Ashfeathers’ mother, and Ashfeathers plays a pious Cinderella, going to church rather than to a ball.
Everything seems scaled down in this version of the tale, with an innkeeper father, a nobleman in place of a prince, and a dwarf instead of Perrault’s fairy godmother. Schönwerth’s story does not dwell in detail on the amputations of the toe and heel and instead presents the mutilations in a matter-of-fact tone. The stepsisters escape the fate of the Grimms’ version, in which doves peck out their eyes, first the left one and then the right one.
TWELVE TORTOISES
“The Princess on the Glass Mountain” has a long and venerable history, charting the trials and tribulations of a young man who must reach an inaccessible, remote place to break a curse that keeps a beautiful princess bound to a castle. The tale begins with abandonment, but the two children get into real trouble when Elias curses Caroline and his words prove to be transformative. Magical thinking, the fear that words can change reality (wishing someone dead will make it so), takes hold of many young children, and this tale enacts that anxiety.
Kissing the tortoises, the last act required of Elias, proves to be the easiest of all the tasks assigned—not at all “impossible” in the usual sense of fairy-tale challenges. “Twelve Tortoises” gives us a kaleidoscopic swirl of demands made of heroes, revealing that there is no real logic or order to the transformative energy of tasks carried out and deeds done.
THUMBNICKEL
Whether called Tom Thumb, Thumbling, Petit Poucet, Svend Tomling, or Pulgarcito, the diminutive hero found in this tale plays his pranks, revealing that size does not always matter. Standard features of the tale include the supernatural birth to a childless couple, the child’s survival skills on a farm, and the outsmarting of thieves or of the wealthy. A distant ancestor of Pinocchio, Tom Thumb is something of a miniature picaresque hero, moving from one adventure to the next, putting his survival skills to the test. His size often seems to work in his favor, for he can hide in unlikely places (the ear of an animal), but it works against him too, for he is often swallowed by larger creatures, though inevitably regurgitated or excreted.
Tom’s origins can be traced to English folklore, and in 1621 his deeds were celebrated in a publication titled The History of Tom Thumbe, the Little, for his small stature surnamed, King Arthur’s Dwarfe: whose Life and adventures containe many strange and wonderfull accidents, published for the delight of merry Time-spenders, by Richard Johnson. In Germany, Tom Thumb was known as Däumling or Daumesdick, and he was frequently associated with the numbskull figure known as Dümmling, a full-grown man, but one seen as a simpleton until he outwits everyone around him.
HANS THE STRONG MAN
Most folkloric heroes triumph by keeping their wits about them, but Hans succeeds with brawn rather than brains. His literal-mindedness, on the other hand, creates difficulties for his masters, who are at their wit’s end when they discover that strength and stupidity do not necessarily yield positive results for them. What is striking about Hans is that he seeks and makes no allies—even his own brother turns on him, irritated by his overbearing strength.
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.
LOUSEHEAD
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 d
evelop a green thumb.
SEVEN WITH ONE BLOW!
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.
THE BURNING TROUGH
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.
The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (Penguin Classics) Page 19