From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Christ’s love of children and his injunctions to imitate them were highlighted during the mystical enthusiasm at court which coincided with the rediscovery of fairy tales. (After Pieter van Borcht, ‘Whoever desires to serve must be a child again’, seventeenth century.)

  Speak as a daughter, speak as a good child … If you can follow me in this, begin to become little. Tell daddy, and then you will call God your daddy, and not only My Lord; both titles belong to him. But the Apostle Paul tells us that the Spirit of God that is in us cries out, ‘Abba, Pater,’ which is a tender name that little children use to their father.23

  The family of God was intimate, human, Christian souls were Jesus’ siblings, and his mother and grandmother were as mummy and granny to them as well.

  The literary historian Yvan Loskoutoff, in a fine study of the exchanges between mysticism and literature in Louis XIV’s court, points out that it was in the royal nursery that the king’s grandson’s fervent tutor Fénelon, who was appointed in 1689, inaugurated the use of fairy tales as moral exempla for the young, alongside more traditional lessons from the scriptures. Fénelon’s stories were inspired by classical myth, by Aesop and La Fontaine, and they are, for the most part, rather flavourless, since they sedulously keep under control heterodox fancies about hobgoblins and fairies, luck and magic. But they do precede in date the great vogue of storytelling in the next decade, and, even more significantly, their context reveals the interconnections of fairy tale as a genre with piety and with education. For the benefit of the young Duke of Burgundy, the royal tutor focussed with apparent ingenuousness on the dangers of despotism, the evils of greed and ambition, the need to be content with one’s given station in life, as well as the risks of eating too many sweets – on the Ile des Plaisirs, where mountains of jam swim in rivers of syrup, excessive gratification leads, perforce, to the calamity of rule by women.24

  When Fénelon’s mentor, Mme Guyon, was disgraced in 1695, her enemies were provoked to particular scorn by the ‘profane’ reading materials found in the rooms of this self-styled living saint: the blue-wrappered volumes of popular stories, like Don Quixote and La Belle Hélène and Perrault’s earliest tales, of ‘Peau d’Ane’ and ‘Patient Griselda’, the ultimate type of suffering, childlike victim who surrenders herself wholly to the tutelage of authority, however brutal. But however much the moral of such fairy tales promoted self-abnegation, Mme Guyon’s accusers found them frivolous, bawdy, and unworthy and herself tarred by implication. This conflict over the character of fairy tale mirrors the conflict about the origin of oracles, as we saw in Chapter Five, and it continues throughout its period of intense growth, and profoundly affects the perception of women involved in its production.

  When the written fairy tale began to emerge at court, when the practice of telling such stories aloud caught the courtiers’ imagination and began to be cultivated as an art of polite society, the cult of Saint Anne and the Christ child was flourishing simultaneously, and it shed its benign beams on the notion of storytelling. Just as the grandmotherly figure of Anne could provide a model of female teaching for the new orders of missionaries and nuns like the Ursulines, so she also offered an unimpeachable, unthreatening model for the storyteller posited by the writers of tales: the perception of grandmotherly wisdom, and of the older female generation’s role in passing on knowledge to the young in the seventeenth-century cult colours the character of the archetypal narrator who begins to appear in text as well as illustration in printed volumes of fairy stories. Anne and Mary (and Jesus) also represented the communion of women and children from different social spheres and the possibilities their experience held out to more sophisticated minds. Cult and iconography responded, affirming an unexpected yearning for suppleness in social relations: the court tutor Fénelon accepted instruction from the inspired Mme Guyon; the Dauphin was considered greater than his mother. Old age and infancy, nobles and bourgeois and even nurses met on the territory of holy simplicity. A child’s unadulterated vision is granted the crone, and this faculty of innocent insight produces the power of fantasy they share in common, and its product, the wonder tale.

  The intimate meditations on the infancy of Mary by Jerome Wierix, one of the Dutch engraver family working in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, depict Saint Anne after her daughter’s birth, in a contemporary Lowlands domestic setting, with lattice windows, potted plants on a runner laid on the sideboard, and the newborn baby lying in a wooden cradle, attended by angels, who are playing the lute and singing a lullaby while one rocks the crib (here).25 As this choir of angels performs, Saint Anne, a bundled old woman in simple dress, sits by the hearth warming herself at a blazing fire. The gusts of smoke, curling out from under the chimneypiece, add another unforced touch of authenticity to this nativity scene, authorizing the resemblance to the role of women in the frontispiece of Perrault’s Contes du temps passé, for instance (here). The Wierix printshop disseminated imagery in small scale. Their domestic, sometimes sentimental holy pictures travelled along the missionary network of the Counter-Reformation Church: their original compositions became patternbooks for the faithful, and reworkings and variations can still be recognized in popular holy pictures, handed out at Mass today in Mexico as well as London.

  The origin of fairy tale itself forms a fairy tale, and the search for the nature of the teller, for the character of Mother Goose itself, takes on the character of a fairytale quest. The image of Saint Anne, the good wise grandmother, exerted a benevolent influence on the related figures of women with occult or even forbidden knowledge. But deeper in the story chest of the European past, the Queen of Sheba, a legendary figure compounded of fantasy and scripture, seriousness and comedy, lies hidden; she mixes the fairy godmother and the fool, the enchantress and the houri, the wise woman and the witch, the Sibyl and the granny, and overlaps in a significant fashion with the proverbial storyteller of later nursery tradition.

  A Moorish Queen of Sheba pays tribute to the wisest man in the world. The inscription says, ‘In the gifts the queen secretly intimates her faith’, for her acts in the Bible were compared to the later coming of the Three Kings, who recognized the truth of the Christian Saviour (Nicholas of Verdun, altar, enamel. 1181.)

  CHAPTER 7

  The Magic of the Cross: The Queen of Sheba I

  They felled us all.

  We crashed to the ground, cruel Weird,

  and they delved for us a deep pit.

  The Lord’s men heard of it,

  His friends found me …

  it was they who girt me with gold and silver1

  ‘The Dream of the Rood’

  THE QUEEN OF Sheba comes to see Solomon in the Bible (1 Kings 10: 1–13; 2 Chr. 9: 1–12); the description is famous, but scanty: she hears of his fame, and wishes to ‘prove’ him with ‘hard questions’. For his part, he gives her ‘all her desire’ and answers all her questions; in response to this, she is winded (‘breathless’), recognizes the truth of his god, Yahweh, and gives him handsome tribute, gold and spices – ‘there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the queen of Sheba gave to king Solomon’.

  From these biblical beginnings, the Queen of Sheba inspires a rich body of folklore, religious and secular, European and Asian, Christian and Muslim. She also embodies – as a seeker after wisdom, as a putter of hard questions, as a woman who learns and passes on what she has learned – the multiple roles of fairy tales and their tellers from the seventeenth century onwards. Moreover, she is marked by heterodoxy, a marginal woman, like the Sibyls, who never quite belongs in the fold, yet exercises power; this remains crucial to the pleasure, the excitement and the ambiguous status of the fairy tale as a genre. The fairy tale in which she herself moves may in itself provide a lost key to the last but most important meaning of the Mother Goose figure.

  The suggestion that the king granted ‘the queen of the south’ all her desire inspired much speculative, amorous development later, including the birth of a son Menyelek (or Mene
lek), who founds the Ethiopian Christian Church.2 But the queen also functions, in Western Christian thought, as an official witness of the true God in Heaven, not only of bliss on earth: in the New Testament, Jesus invokes her as one of the just who will rise up to condemn unbelievers (Matt. 12: 42; Luke 11: 31), implicitly identifying himself with Solomon, and ‘the queen of the south’ with the Church, his beloved spouse.

  Christian writers were consequently able to assimilate Sheba into the tradition of the Sibyls, a pagan with foreknowledge of the Redemption. As she remains anonymous in the Old Testament, she is often known by the name of her kingdom (like Cleopatra, sometimes called ‘Egypt’). But various scholars offered evidence in support of her Sibylline character by giving her other names: Pausanias reported that there was a Jewish Sibyl called Sabbe, for instance, and the Byzantine scholar George Monachos strengthened the identification when he reported in his Chronicle that the Queen of Sheba’s real name was Sibylla.3, 4, 5 A booklet filled with dire threats, published in Augsburg in 1515, names her on the title page as author: ‘The thirteenth Sibyl / A Queen of Sheba who long ago gave [us] future events to be recognized’.6 The tiny six-page document then prophesied doom to the world through the actions of unbelievers and Jews and their monstrous progeny, the Antichrist. It incorporated, in particular, the warnings given by the Hellespontine Sibyl that Christ would hang from a high tree, and ascribed them to the Queen of Sheba. Other, similar anthologies of anti-semitic and apocalyptic fire and brimstone also feature the Queen of Sheba, in company with the twelve Sibyls, foreseeing the Crucifixion, and with it the end of the evils of the unbelievers, heathen and Jew.7

  The prophecies of death to the infidel, which strike contemporary ears as so offensive and despicable, were enmeshed in a web of Christian lore which grew throughout the middle ages. Beginning amid the earliest Christian communities in Syria, different authors developed a symbolic and fantastic tale to provide a mythological aetiology for the relics of the true cross, linking their discovery in the Holy Land with the original prohibited tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden.8 This legend intersected with the rich literature of Sibylline oracles and introduced the Queen of Sheba into the story, as one of the prophets with an oblique part to play in the establishment of the Christian faith. Dozens of versions exist of this highly popular, picaresque legend, in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Bulgarian and Icelandic; the plot was itself constantly sprouting new branches and shooting new foliage as it recounted the adventures of the cross-tree, the instrument of God’s plan of salvation from the beginning of time to Judgement Day, tracing the loss of the relic at the time of Christ’s death to its rediscovery and subsequent dispersal. Splinters were enshrined all over the Christian world, and the cult inspired extraordinary works of metaphysical intensity, like the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’ in the eighth century. The legend was mentioned towards the end of the twelfth century by the encyclopedic Petrus Comestor (d. 1178). (He was given this nickname – Peter the Eater – because of his omnivorous mind.)9 But the story subsequently travelled far from scholastic circles, and was much relished, told, and illustrated in medieval and Renaissance materials, in a range of media and a variety of forms, from Books of Hours, to Piero della Francesca’s fresco cycle in Arezzo, to Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, written c. 1470, only a little after Piero was painting.10 In oral literature of all kinds as well – from plays to sermons – the Queen of Sheba plays a part in this story, and one which conveys the all-encompassing embrace of the catholic or universal Church on earth, which promises to enfold pagan and Jew, male and female, past and present, and make them all one in Christ Jesus.

  But it is the Legenda aurea, or Golden Legend, compiled in the mid-thirteenth century by the proselytizing Dominican, Jacobus de Voragine, that became the most widely used source. This anthology related material about Jesus, Mary and the saints which was circulating in other forms, and arranged the stories as a day book following the liturgical year; many of the tales share the conventions of fairy tales, with grisly horrors and heavenly wonders, happy resolutions (of a sort) and not a shred of anxiety about the implausibility of the contents. The thesaurus was a tiebeam in the edifice of Christian culture; it would be difficult to overestimate the uses to which artists and sermon-writers put Jacobus’ fantastic, spirited, violent and often bigoted work.

  On 3 May, the feast day of the Invention, or Finding of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, The Golden Legend relates how Adam’s son, Seth, plucked a branch of the tree in the Garden of Eden and planted it in the mouth of his dead father (here).11 (This feast, no longer of much consequence in the Catholic calendar, was such a holy day then that the Muslim rulers of the holy places agreed to allow Christian pilgrims to enter Jerusalem freely to worship for a space of twenty-four hours.)12 The branch grows – from the Old Adam who foreshadows the Second Adam, Christ – until one day, many centuries later, King Solomon orders the tree to be cut down for the building of the Temple. But the workmen find that the wood refuses to comply with their tools or their measurements, and so they throw it away, and it falls into the stream of Kidron, which flows below the Temple mount, and becomes a footbridge for passers by.

  It is at this point that the Queen of Sheba enters the story. As in the Bible, she is on her way to meet the famous and wise king Solomon; her own wisdom includes foreknowledge of the cross-tree. She recognizes there and then that the footbridge is made of the tree which will prove the future instrument of salvation – the same wood that will become the cross of the Crucifixion. She therefore draws back from desecrating it by setting her idolater’s foot upon it, and wades the stream instead (here), prophesying that this same piece of wood will bring about an end to the Kingdom of the Jews: ‘And when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon’, translates Caxton, ‘she worshipped this tree because she said that the Saviour of all the world should be hanged thereon, by whom the realm of the Jews shall be defaced and cease.’13

  Solomon, fearing for his future, has the bridge destroyed and the wood thrown away, into a pond. But it has miraculous powers of healing, and so the pool where it has been cast becomes the ‘piscina [which] … has such virtue that the angels descended and moved the water, and the first sick man that descended into the water after the moving was made whole of whatsoever sickness he was sick of’.14 Here, Jacobus de Voragine is synthesizing folk materials with the Gospel accounts of the miracles at Bethesda in Jerusalem. The place was known to pilgrims: in 1483, when the Dominican friar Felix Faber visited the pool, he recalled, ‘Solomon caused the wood which the Sibyl showed him, and whereon she prophesied that Christ should suffer, to be plunged into the depths of the cistern.’15 It is worth noting that, for this pilgrim, there was no doubt that the Sibyl and Sheba were one and the same figure.

  When the time comes for Christ’s death, the wooden beam rises from the bottom of the pool and floats there – ‘and of this piece of timber made the Jews the cross of our Lord,’ writes Jacobus.16

  Visual interpretations of the story are almost more important to understanding the narrative than any verbal account, as more people would have absorbed the story from wall paintings and prints produced by shrines in which relics of the true cross were venerated. The most notable and surprising interpreter of Jacobus’ narrative scheme turns out to be Piero della Francesca.17

  In the chancel of the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, painted in 1452–66, Piero faithfully interpreted the tale as reported in the The Golden Legend, although the intellectual geometry of his style obscures the Christian triumphalism and prejudice of his source; his serene perspectives and controlled arrangement of the sequence belie the occasional cruelty and coarseness of the stories being told. Yet the same observation could also be put differently: that Piero’s graphic calm, his poise and lucidity, match the message, the import, of the tale he tells. His fresco cycle tells the story of the triumph of the true cross; Sheba has a crucial role to play in its unfolding. Piero is setting to rights
disorder and deformity, in the same way as the history of the Church has straightened the deviant and enlightened the darkness; he is rounding off jaggedness and incoherence. The Queen of Sheba is only one of a series of outsiders in the cycle who becomes an insider through the power of grace, working through the wood of the cross. The idea that Sheba was, like the Sibyls, an outsider who gained an insider’s understanding is crucial to Piero’s representation, as it is to the role of storytellers, who point out paths to inclusion, acceptance, success for their hearers. The Legend of the True Cross relates to fairy tale on account of its fantastic character, but even more because it shows a way to belong, and the fairy tale as a genre reveals the common values and desires of the group – in this case, the dominant Christian scheme of things. Like many other popular narratives, it diagnoses the beasts, the pariahs. But in this case, through the figures of salvation, like Sheba, it offers the promise of metamorphosis, of becoming ‘one of us’.

  Piero interpreted Adam’s death as a naked return to the naked earth, with an old and shrunken Eve beside him, and their sons and daughters around; Seth is seen in the background collecting the branch of the tree from an angel at the gates of Eden, and, again, planting the tree in the mouth of his shrouded father (here). Below this scene, the Queen of Sheba makes her approach towards Jerusalem, and comes to the plank across the stream (Pl. 8). Granted her prophetic insight into the wood’s future role as the instrument of salvation, Piero’s queen kneels gravely in worship on the bank, her hands joined in prayer, her head slightly bowed, her mantle a cerulean blue that looks forward to the Madonna’s livery, as does her fervent pose. The bridge can only be glimpsed in the corner, but the story was familiar to spectators, and did not need emphasis. In the adjoining fresco, Solomon and Sheba meet, they clasp right hands in the gesture of a pact between equals, but she bows her head while he remains upright.