Storytelling had an important place in this community. Tales were told to entertain the dead as they lay in state. And there was a taboo against telling stories in the daytime, because, if you did so, death would come and sit beside you, and you would die, too.
(Suriname Folklore, collected by Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits [New York, Columbia University Press, 1936], p. 351.
7. Rolando and Brunilde
This type of industrious spinner or seamstress is often rewarded with an illustrious lover simply for sitting at her window sewing or singing. (See ‘The Greenish Bird’, this volume p. 275.) Here though, she attracts an evil magician who abducts and thereafter deactivates her. Quite unusually, it is her mother who embarks on the Path of Trials as a sort of trickster-heroine. A fairy-hag is her helper and Rolando her assistant. The tale includes some interesting images of the two old women humping heavy bags over a garden wall and breaking into the castle – activities generally reserved for the young.
8. The Greenish Bird
A Mexican variant of the story most familiar in the beautiful Norwegian form, ‘East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon’, in Peter Christan Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe’s collection (see this volume, p. 129).
Like the last tale, this Mexican one begins with an industrious spinner at a window. Luisa is swiftly won over by her bird-wooer and begins an indeterminate sexual relationship. Like the Greek love god, hero of Apuleius’s third-century Latin novella ‘Cupid and Psyche’ contained in the Golden Ass, the greenish bird is magical, generous and wonderful in bed. Luisa knows nothing about him, which does not particularly bother her. Like Psyche’s sisters Luisa’s too are jealous, and mar the relationship, causing the severely wounded prince to abandon her with an injunction to come in search of him. The iron shoe clad heroine who visits the sun and the moon in search of her offended lover occurs in Eastern Europe too, most notably attempting to redeem a Pig-prince. The Cap O’ Rushes ending to this tale is similar to the Egyptian Cinderella story ‘The Princess in the Suit of Leather’, (this volume, p. 43), when the Prince, having realized his sweetheart is a servant in his palace, demands that she bring his meals to him. (Folktales of Mexico, by Americo Paredes [Chicago, 1970], p. 95.)
9. The Crafty Woman
From the Baltic state of Lithuania, again from C. Fillingham-Coxwell’s collection. He quotes a Russian variation, from around Moscow, in which the part of the old woman is played by a young Jew.
PART NINE: UP TO SOMETHING – BLACK ARTS AND DIRTY TRICKS
1. Pretty Maid Ibronka
This popular Hungarian story has been narrated in almost every village in the country in fairly similar form. It is also known in Lithuania and Yugoslavia. Hungarian popular belief has a particular dread of a revived corpse but the terrible lover, with his hat ‘graced with a crane’s feather’ and his cloven hoof is reminiscent of the demon lover who returns to claim his faithless mistress in the great Scots ballad, ‘The House Carpenter’ (in Francis Child’s collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 3 vols., New York, 1957). The demon takes the Scotswoman away on shipboard and destroys her: but Ibronka gets away with it.
This story was narrated by Mihály Fédics, an illiterate day-labourer, in 1938, when he was eighty-six years old. He had gone to the United States at the time of the First World War and worked as a labourer there but soon returned to Hungary. He learned his stories during the long winter evenings, in the village houses where people went to spin together. Later, working as a lumberjack, his stories were the principal source of entertainment in the forest camp. ‘It was his custom to interrupt his own story, by calling out “Bones” to his listeners, to see whether they had gone to sleep: if the encouraging answer “tiles” came, he went on with the story, but if there was no answer, he knew that his companions had dropped off, and the tale was to be continued the following day’ (p. 130 Folktales of Hungary).
This information, together with the story, comes from Folktales of Hungary, edited by Linda Degh and translated by Judith Halasz (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).
Copyright University of Chicago, 1965. In the series ‘Folktales of the World’, edited by Richard M. Dorson.
2. Enchanter and Enchantress
A witch duel, or transformation contest, tale from tribal Russia. For more about transformation contests see notes to ‘Keep Your Secrets’ in this volume, p. 459. This story comes from a Finno-Turkish people called the Mordvins, who lived between the rivers Volga and Oka in the heart of Russia when this story was collected in the nineteenth century. The Mordvinian idea of the cosmos was that of the beehive.
Fillingham-Coxwell, p. 568.
3. The Telltale Lilac Bush
As told to Keith Ketchum in 1963 by Mrs Sarah Dadisman of Union, Monroe Country, West Virginia. (From The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginian Ghost Tales, collected by Ruth Ann Musick [University of Kentucky Press, 1965], p. 12.)
4. Tatterhood
A Norwegian story from Asbjørnsen and Moe, in George Webb Darsent’s translation.
5. The Witchball
An old-fashioned farting story from rural America, as told by seventy-six-year-old V. Ledford, of Clay County, Kentucky. This text is reprinted from Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States, edited and collected by Richard M. Dorson (University of Chicago Press, 1964).
Vance Randolph found another wise woman with access to farting powder in the Ozark mountains in Arkansas; this story may be found in this volume p. 73.
6. The Werefox
From Chinese Ghouls and Goblins, edited by G. Willoughby-Meade (London, 1928), p. 123.
7. The Witches’ Piper
Narrated by Mihály Bertok, aged sixty-seven, a herdsman of Kishartyan, Nograd County, Hungary, and collected by Linda Degh in 1951.
Once upon a time, the bagpiper provided the music for the Shrove Tuesday dance. Witches would force the piper to play for them and then pay him back with a dirty trick.
8. Vasilissa the Fair
The heroine Vasilissa is as familiar in Russian folklore as the European Ella i.e. Cinderella. (See this volume, ‘Vasilissa the Priest’s Daughter’, p. 61 and ‘The Baba Yaga’, p. 158.) The tale contains powerful indicators that the Baba Yaga’s origins are probably in the Mother goddess of various mythologies. She refers to the morning, day and night as her ‘own’ and her mortar and pestle are reminiscent of corn and wheat grinding. In addition, she possesses fire, a basic element. (A more obscure tale tells how she stole fire.) She is stern and harsh in her judgement but just and not devoid of ethics, conforming to the deathly aspect of the Mother goddess. The skulls surrounding her home represent the dead in general, though ‘The Witch and her Servants’ (The Yellow Story Book, ed. Andrew Lang) contains a more specific explanation. When the ubiquitous Iwanich of Russian tales goes to work for a witch, she delivers the following warning:
If you look after them both for a year I will give you anything you like to ask; but if, on the other hand, you let any of the animals escape you, your last hour is come, and your head shall be stuck on the last spike of my fence. The other spikes, as you see, are already adorned, and the skulls are all those of different servants I have had who have failed to do what I demanded (p. 161).
The remaining riddle is that of the invisible pairs of hands. It is clear that the hag is alluding to the secrecy of women’s mysteries when she expresses approval that Vasilissa has stopped short of asking the question that would force her to reveal what is inside her house. Her aversion to blessings may well represent the fear of a pagan goddess being driven out by Christianity. Fillingham-Coxwell’s note referring to Russian society at the time of collection, says: ‘The priest has a difficult, ill-paid and not very exalted position. So superstition and a belief in witchcraft abound, though the efforts of the orthodox church to suppress pagan practices and traditions have not been without a large measure of success’ (p. 671 Siberian and Other Folktales). A poem entitled ‘Russian Folk-Tales’ includes
the lines:
Cannibal witches will scarcely attack or make ready to eat us
Easily, quickly we conquer if enemies dare approach us.
For details of the Baba Yaga herself, see Angela Carter’s note to ‘The Baba Yaga’ (this volume, p. 463). C. Fillingham-Coxwell, p. 680.)
9. The Midwife and the Frog
This story, set in the Magyar Mountains not far from the banks of the Szuscava, was collected by Gyula Orlutory from thirty-three-year-old Mrs Gergely Tamas in 1943. The gyivak of this story is glossed in the book as ‘a minor devil’.
This tale-type counts as a legend the world over since it continues to be believed. A Middle Eastern variant, in which a midwife delivers a djinn’s wife, is always told as if it occurred to an acquaintance of the teller. There the terrified woman accepts a handful of stones which turn to gold when she returns home. A Norse version appears in Folktales of Norway edited by Reidar Christiansen (translated by Pat Shaw Iversen, The University of Chicago Press, 1964, p. 105). Numerous variants exist in the British Isles. According to Katharine Briggs, ‘the earliest version is from Gervase of Tilbury in the 13th C’, Folktales of England, The University of Chicago Press, 1965. See ‘The Fairy Midwife’, p. 38 and ‘The Midwife’, in The Best-Loved Folktales of the World, edited by Joanna Cole, Anchor, Doubleday, New York, 1983, p. 280.
(Degh, p. 296.)
PART TEN: BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE
1. Fair, Brown and Trembling
This Irish Cinderella was collected by Jeremiah Curtin in 1887 in Galway. The unkind sisters here are Trembling’s own. The henwife is the Celtic equivalent of the fairy godmother. Storytellers sometimes preferred to avoid the use of the word ‘witch’ in Ireland and Scotland. It was too much like ‘tempting fate’ so they tended to call her a bird-woman or a henwife. Though henwives are usually good (see Duncan Williams’s collections, where the henwife is Jack’s greatest helper in the Jack tales) they do occasionally let slip a remark that triggers a sequence of malign events (see Frank McKenna, The Steed of the Bells [cassette], selected from the archives of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum). The henwife asks Trembling to stay outside the church rather than going in, perhaps suggesting practices outside the approval of the Church. Magic good, bad or indifferent had the status of the Devil’s work in Christianity so magical practices such as the use of the cloak of darkness would have been frowned on. Trembling’s husband is the son of the King of the ancient city of Emania in Ulster, called Omania here. He changed his loyalties from Fair to Trembling after seeing her magical regalia. Another story in Curtin’s repertoire has the King of Greece marrying an Irish king’s eldest daughter then falling in love with the younger, Gil an Og. He curses them both turning Gil an Og into a ‘cat within her castle’ and her sister into a serpent in the bay. Gil an Og consults a druid and initiates a series of fights in order to free them both (Myths and Folktales of Ireland, Jeremiah Curtin, [reprinted from the 1890 Little, Brown and Co. edition by Dover Publications Inc.,] Toronto, London, 1975, p. 212).
The golden hair cut adrift occurs as far afield as India (cf. Prince Lionheart, in ‘There Was Once a King’ [in Folk Tales of Pakistan, retold by Sayyid Fayyaz Mahmud, Lok Virsa (Pakistan, undated), p. 117]. Strands of Princess Yasmin’s golden hair are seen floating downstream by a king, who determines to marry the owner of the hair.
The willingness of the King and Trembling to allow their daughter to marry the cow-herd may have something to do with this statement in Curtin’s telling of Kil Arthur: ‘In that time there was a law in the world that if a young man came to woo a young woman and her people wouldn’t give her to him, the young woman should get her death by law’ (Curtin, p. 113).
(Irish Folk-Tales, edited by Henry Glassie, Penguin Folklore Library [Harmondsworth, UK, 1985], p. 257.)
2. Diirawac and Her Incestuous Brother
This story was told by a twenty-year-old man (who was not a member of editor, Francis Mading Deng’s family).
Angela Carter notes that the Dinka are cattle herders and subsistence farmers of the Sudan. Their land – about 10 per cent of the Sudan – is crossed by the Nile and its tributaries, making communications difficult. ‘The main goal of a Dinka is to marry and have children’ (p. 166).
Adults and children sleep together in huts. One person is asked to tell a story, then people tell stories in succession, notes Angela Carter, then quotes from Francis Mading Deng: ‘As the storytelling progresses, people begin to fall asleep one by one. Sometimes they fall asleep, wake up in the middle of a story, and then fall asleep again . . . People who wake up in the middle of a story are usually brought up to date briefly. As time passes and some people begin to sleep and perhaps snore, the storyteller starts to ask from time to time: Are you asleep? . . . As long as there are people still awake, storytelling continues. The last storyteller is quite likely to be the last person awake and so the final story will be left incomplete’ (p. 29).
The lions in most Dinka stories are clearly not real lions but represent a wild, untamed side of human nature. Neither are the puppies, who according to a footnote, symbolise wildness and therefore merit such brutal treatment in folk tales. The victim is subdued by severe beating and ‘teasing’. The animal’s partiality to raw meat indicates his wildness and its selection of cooked meat signifies it has been tamed (see ‘Duang and His Wild Wife’, p. 411 of the present book).
It is mostly women and young people who tell the stories. Stories tend to be associated with bedtime and are geared towards the children, the primary educators of childhood (p. 198).
It is likely that the sibling incest taboo is powerfully reinforced not only from the community but the most insignificant sources, because of the children’s communal sleeping environment. It is for the heroine Diirawac who killed her brother that the village mourns, the elderly allowing their hair to grow matted and the young abandoning their beads to signify disaster. Violation of the incest taboo is considered more unnatural than murder. No single entity in the tale disputes the validity of the taboo.
(Dinka Folktales: African Stories from the Sudan, edited by Francis Mading Deng [New York and London, 1974], p. 78.)
3. The Mirror
Though this variant is poignant, even tragic, the motif of the mistaken mirror image is generally found in humorous tales. In one version a man quarrels with his wife after buying a mirror he mistakes for an image of his dead father. A nun mediates. This version of the tale is also found in India, China and Korea.
The Sun goddess of Japanese myth once took exile from the chaotic world in the Heavenly Rock Dwelling and was enticed back when the celestial smith fashioned a mirror of iron and told her that her reflection was a rival goddess. Beguiled by its beauty and brightness, she returned to light up the world.
(Willoughby-Meade p. 184.)
4. The Frog Maiden
The start of the tale, with its wicked stepmother and two stepsisters, is complemented by further echoes of the Cinderella story when the Frog Maiden arrives to see the prince in a carrot coach with mice for horses. Variations of this story are found all over the world. ‘The Three Feathers’ (Brothers Grimm), ‘The White Cat’ (France) and ‘The Monkey Princess’ (Pakistan) are all standard tales featuring the Dummling (simpleton) hero. In her Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairytales (Spring Publications Inc., Dallas, USA, 1970), Marie Louise von Franz says that ‘the bride is either a toad, a frog, a white cat, an ape, a lizard, puppet, rat, a stocking or a hopping nightcap – not even living objects – and sometimes a turtle’. A few lines down she explains that
The main action is concerned with the finding of the right female, upon which depends the inheritance of the female and further, that the hero does not perform any masculine deeds. He is not a hero in the proper sense of the word. He is helped all the time by the feminine element, which solves the whole problem for him . . . The story ends with a marriage – a balanced union of the male and female elements. So the general structure seems to point to a problem in which the
re is a dominating male attitude, a situation which lacks the feminine element, and the story tells us how the missing feminine is brought up and restored (p. 36).
(Burmese Folktales, edited and collected by Maung Htin Aung [Calcutta, 1948], p. 137.)
5. The Sleeping Prince
The motive for the princess’s journey is provided by the sight of horses’ blood on the grass and her comment about its beauty. This seems a strange sentiment except that the blood and the beauty of it on the grass is probably connected with menstrual initiation and fertility. This is borne out by the invisible voice guiding the princess to go in search of a mate. The voice also mentions sticks and the sprinkling of water – elements that never actually materialise in the story – suggesting a sexual initiation which comes to pass only much later. The gory use to which the princess puts the witch’s remnants could again be related to puberty – the pain and trauma of sexual deprivation and isolation represented by the witch are now objects of access to womanhood and sexual fruition, particularly the ladder which leads to her bed.
This tale is found in India too, beginning like the famous British tale ‘Cap O’Rushes’ with the expulsion of the youngest princess who gives an unacceptable response to her king-father’s question. The princess asks the prince for some puppets and he overhears her enacting the incidents of her life. The impostor, her maid, is buried to the waist and trampled by horses.
(Herskovits and Herskovits p. 381.)
6. The Orphan
The motif of the mother feeding her daughter from beyond the grave occurs the world over. An almost exact parallel with this aspect of the tale is the Grimm Brothers’ ‘One Eye, Two Eye and Three Eye’. Treasure associated with the tree is also a feature of both, focusing primarily on the heroine’s imminent rise in social status. She is not a conjurer though her stepmother proves to have access to spells and enchantment. The heroine’s own inner magic emanates from her innocence. The second common motif here is the type found in ‘The Goose Girl’, where an envious woman deceitfully takes the place of the true bride. See ‘The Woman Who Married Her Son’ and ‘The Sleeping Prince’ in this volume (pp. 408 and 357). A third standard element in fairy tales is the metamorphosis of women into birds, either at will or by enchantment – for example, ‘The White Duck’ (European), ‘The Crane Wife’ (Japanese). See also ‘Story of a Bird Woman’, included in this collection (p. 391). A more exciting parallel is found in ‘Devil Woman’, in Tales of the Cochiti Indians, collected by Ruth Benedict (Smithsonian Institution, 1930). Here a demon transforms a new mother into a bird – a dove in this instance – by sticking a pin in her head. The removal of the pin ends the enchantment.
Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales Page 44