by Jacob Grimm
† Benfey, op. cit., p. XXVI. On the basis of a garbled story from the East, the Buddha was canonized by the medieval Church as Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, Abbots; Feastday, November 27. Following the work of the nineteenth century folklorists, these names were expunged from the calendar.
* Friedrich von der Leyen, Das Märchen, Leipzig, 3rd edition, 1925, pp. 147–148.
* Archer Taylor, The Black Ox Folklore Fellows Communications, Vol. XXIII, No. 70, Helsinki, 1927, p. 4.
† Adapted from Antti Aarne, Leitfaden der vergleichenden Märchenforschung, FFC., II, 13, 1913, pp. 23–29. Cf. also, Taylor, op. cit., p. 9, for a translation of the original list as given by Kaarle Krohn in Mann und Fuchs, Helsingfors, 1891, pp. 8–9.
‡ The technique was perfected by the Finnish School, but was independently developed by scholars in several quarters; for example, in America, Franz Boas, in Denmark, Axel Olrik, in France, Gaston Paris, E. Cosquin, in Germany, Johannes Bolte, Wilhelm Herz, Ernst Kuhn, Theodor Zachatiae, in Russia L. Kolmachevski.
* A second edition, improved and enlarged, appeared in 1849. Translated into German (1852), it came under the eyes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was inspired to attempt a similar deed in the same meter for the American Indian; result: “The Song of Hiawatha.”
* Kaarle Krohn, Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode, Instituttet for Semmenlignende Kulturforskning, Oslo, 1926, pp. 13–14.
† Ibid., p. 13.
* Cf. Kaarle Krohn, Bär (Wolf) und Fuchs, Helsingfors, 1888; also, Mann und Fuchs, Helsingfors, 1891.
† Antti Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, Folklore Fellows Communications, Vol. I, No. 3, Helsingfors, 1910. This work was re-edited and brought up to date in 1928 by the American folklorist, Stith Thompson (Aarne and Thompson, The Types of the Folk-Tale, FFC., XXV, 74, 1928), and in 1929 by the Russian, N. P. Andrejev (Ukazateli skazochnych syuzhetov po sistem Aarne, 1929). Professor Thompson has since prepared a gigantic index of motifs, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Indiana University Studies, Vols. XIX-XXIII, Bloomington, Ind., 1932–1936.
* Walter Anderson, in Lutz Mackensen, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Märchens, Berlin and Leipzig, 1934 ff., Vol. II, article: “Geographisch-historische Methode.”—A good example of such a monograph is the above noticed work of Archer Taylor, The Black Ox, FFC., XXIII, 70.
† Friedrich von der Leyen, op. cit., p. 36.
† P. 846 ff. supra.
FOUR
The Question of Meaning
THE GRIMM BROTHERS, Max Müller, Andrew Lang, and others, have pointed out that folk tales are “monstrous, irrational and unnatural,” both as to the elements of which they are composed, and as to the plots that unify these elements. Since a tale may have a different origin from its elements, two questions propose themselves: What is the origin and meaning of the motifs? What is the origin and meaning of the tales?
a) The Motifs.
Many of the incidents of the merry tales, jokes, yarns, tall stories and anecdotes are simply comical and clever inventions spun from life. These offer no problem.
The “monstrous, irrational and unnatural” incidents, however, are of a kind with those of myth; indeed, they are frequently derived from myth. They must be explained as myth is explained. But then, how is myth explained?
The reply varies according to the authority:
Euhemerus, a Greek writer of the fourth century B.C., noting that Alexander the Great, shortly after his death, was already appearing in legend as a demi-god, propounded the view that the gods are only great mortals, deified. Snorri Sturleson (1179–1241), in the preface to his Prose Edda, explained in the same way the pagan divinities of the Norse. This theory, called “Euhemerism,” has its advocates to this day.
Among the Indo-Germanic philologists in the period of the ascendancy of Max Müller, it was believed that myths were originally sentimental descriptions of nature. Man half consciously read the tragedy of his own life in the birth of the sun, its “kissing of the dew to death,” its culmination, descent, and disappearance into the arms of night. Due to the fact that Indo-European nouns are either masculine or feminine, the descriptions tended to personify their objects. And due to the fact that the language was evolving, the original references of the personifying nouns were presently forgotten, so that the words were finally taken to be personal names.* For example, such a metaphorical name for the sun as Kephalos, the “Head” (of light), presently lost its meaning and was thought to refer to a human youth; and correspondingly, the fading dew, Prokris, bride of the “Head,” became a mortal girl of tragical demise. One more step: the names might become confused with those of actual historical heroes, whereupon the myth would be transformed into a legend.†
Müller’s theory was the most elaborate attempt to account for the mechanics of personification. Among the “Anthropologists” it was, more easily, simply assumed that savages and poets tend to attribute souls to things and to personify.‡ The childlike fantasy of primitive man, his poetic feeling and morbid, dream-ridden imagination, played into his attempts to describe and explain the world around him, and thus produced a phantasmagoric counter-world. But the savage’s effort, at the core, was to discover the causes of things, and then, through spells, prayer, sacrifice, and sacrament, to control them. Mythology, therefore, was only a false etiology; ceremonial a misguided technology. With the gradual, unmethodical, but nevertheless inevitable recognition of error upon error, man progressed through the labyrinth of wonder to the clearer headed stand of to-day.*
Another view (and it rather supplemented than contradicted the descriptive-etiological theory) represented primitive man as terrified by the presences of the grave, hence ever anxious to propitiate and turn them away. The roots of myth and ritual went down to the black subsoil of the grave-cult and fear of death.†
A fourth viewpoint was propounded by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. He argued that the collective superexcitation (surexcitation) of clan, tribal, and intertribal gatherings was experienced by every participating member of the group as an impersonal, infectious power (mana); and this power would be thought to emanate from the clan or tribal emblem (totem); and this emblem, therefore, would be set apart from all other objects as filled with mana (sacred vs. profane). This totem, this first cult object, would then infect with mana all associated objects, and through this contagion there would come into being a system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, uniting in a single moral community all believers.‡ The great contribution of Durkheim’s theory, and what set it apart from all that had gone before, was that it represented religion not as a morbid exaggeration, false hypothesis, or unenlightened fear, but as a truth emotionally experienced, the truth of the relationship of the individual to the group.
This recognition by Durkheim of a kind of truth at the root of the image-world of myth is supported, expanded, and deepened, by the demonstration of the psychoanalysts that dreams are precipitations of unconscious desires, ideals, and fears, and furthermore, that the images of dream resemble—broadly, but then frequently to the detail—the motifs of folk tale and myth. Having selected for their study the symbol-inventing, myth-motif-producing level of the psyche—source of all those universal themes (“Elementary Ideas”) which men have read into the phenomena of nature, into the shadows of the tomb, the lives of the heroes, and the emblems of society—, the psychoanalysts have undoubtedly touched the central moment of the multifarious problem. In the light of their discussion, theories which before seemed mutually contradictory become easily coordinated. Man, nature, death, society—these have served simply as fields into which dream-meanings have been projected. Hence the references of the wild motifs are not really (no matter what the rationalizing consciousness may believe) to the sun, the moon, the stars—the wind and thunder—the grave—the hero—or even the power of the group, but through these, back again to a state of the psyche. Mythology is psychology, misread as cosmology, history, and biography.
A still further step
can and must be taken, however, before we shall have reached the bounds of the problem. Myth, as the psychoanalysts declare, is not a mess of errors; myth is a picture language. But the language has to be studied to be read. In the first place, this language is the native speech of dream. But in the second place, it has been studied, clarified, and enriched by the poets, prophets, and visionaries of untold millenniums. Dante, Aquinas and Augustine, al-Ghazali and Mahomet, Zarathustra, Shankārachārya, Nāgārjuna, and T’ai Tsung, were not bad scientists making misstatements about the weather, or neurotics reading dreams into the stars, but masters of the human spirit teaching a wisdom of death and life. And the thesaurus of the myth-motifs was their vocabulary. They brooded on the state and way of man, and through their broodings came to wisdom; then teaching, with the aid of the picture-language of myth, they worked changes on the pattern of their inherited iconographies.
But not only in the higher cultures, even among the so-called primitives, priests, wizards, and visionaries interpret and re-interpret myth as symbolic of “the Way”: “the Pollen Path of Beauty,” as it is called, for example, among the Navaho. And this Way, congenial to the wholeness of man, is understood as the little portion of the great Way that binds the cosmos; for, as among the Babylonians, so everywhere, the crux of mythological teaching has always been that “an everlasting reiteration of unchanging principles and events takes place both in space and in time, in large as in small.”* The Way of the individual is the microcosmic reiteration of the Way of the All and of each. In this sense the reasonings of the sages are not only psychological but metaphysical. They are not easily grasped. And yet they are the subtle arguments that inform the iconographies of the world.
Myths, therefore, as they now come to us, and as they break up to let their pregnant motifs scatter and settle into the materials of popular tale, are the purveyors of a wisdom that has borne the race of man through the long vicissitudes of his career. “The content of folklore,” writes Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “is metaphysics. Our inability to see this is due primarily to our abysmal ignorance of metaphysics and its technical terms.”†
Therefore, in sum: The “monstrous, irrational and unnatural” motifs of folk tale and myth are derived from the reservoirs of dream and vision. On the dream level such images represent the total state of the individual dreaming psyche. But clarified of personal distortions and profounded—by poets, prophets, visionaries—, they become symbolic of the spiritual norm for Man the Microcosm. They are thus phrases from an image-language, expressive of metaphysical, psychological, and sociological truth. And in the primitive, oriental, archaic, and medieval societies this vocabulary was pondered and more or less understood. Only in the wake of the Enlightenment has it suddenly lost its meaning and been pronounced insane.
b) The Tales.
The folk tale, in contrast to the myth, is a form of entertainment. The story teller fails or succeeds in proportion to the amusement he affords. His motifs may be plucked from the tree of myth, but his craft is never precisely of the mythological order. His productions have to be judged, at last, not as science, sociology, psychology, or metaphysics, but as art—and specifically, art produced by individuals at discoverable periods, in discoverable lands. We have to ask: What principles of craftsmanship inspired the narrators who gave shape to these stories in the long reaches of the past?
The Indian, Celtic, Arabian, and Medieval masters of narrative to whom we owe the most exquisite of our European tales were the practitioners of a craft that strove to reveal through mortal things the brilliance of eternal forms.* The quality of their work was not a naturalistical, but a spiritual precision, and their power, “Instructive Wonder.” To us there may seem to be little distinction between such a craft and metaphysics; for we have enlarged the connotation of our term, “metaphysical,” to include everything untranslatable into positivistic discourse. But peoples of the pre-modern type, whether gothic, oriental, archaic, totemistic, or primitive, typically took for granted the operation of a transcendent energy in the forms of space and time. It was required of every artist, no matter what his craft, that his product should show its sign of the spirit, as well as serve its mechanical end. The function of the craft of the tale, therefore, was not simply to fill the vacant hour, but to fill it with symbolic fare. And since symbolization is the characteristic pleasure of the human mind, the fascination of the tale increased in proportion to the richness of its symbolic content.
By an ironic paradox of time, the playful symbolism of the folk tale—a product of the vacant hour—today seems to us more true, more powerful to survive, than the might and weight of myth. For, whereas the symbolic figures of mythology were regarded (by all except the most sophisticated of the metaphysicians) not as symbolic figures at all but as actual divinities to be invoked, placated, loved and feared, the personages of the tale were comparatively unsubstantial. They were cherished primarily for their fascination. Hence, when the acids of the modern spirit dissolved the kingdoms of the gods, the tales in their essence were hardly touched. The elves were less real than before; but the tales, by the same token, the more alive. So that we may say that out of the whole symbol-building achievement of the past, what survives to us today (hardly altered in efficiency or in function) is the tale of wonder.
The tale survives, furthermore, not simply as a quaint relic of days childlike in belief. Its world of magic is symptomatic of fevers deeply burning in the psyche: permanent presences, desires, fears, ideals, potentialities, that have glowed in the nerves, hummed in the blood, baffled the senses, since the beginning. The one psyche is operative in both the figments of this vision-world and the deeds of human life. In some manner, then, the latter must stand prefigured in the former. History is the promise of Märchen realized through, and against the obstacles of, space and time. Playful and unpretentious as the archetypes of fairy tale may appear to be, they are the heroes and villains who have built the world for us. The debutante combing her hair before the glass, the mother pondering the future of a son, the laborer in the mines, the merchant vessel full of cargo, the ambassador with portfolio, the soldier in the field of war—all are working in order that the ungainsayable specifications of effective fantasy, the permanent patterns of the tale of wonder, shall be clothed in flesh and known as life.
And so we find that in those masterworks of the modern day which are of a visionary, rather than of a descriptive order, the forms long known from the nursery tale reappear, but now in adult maturity. While the Frazers and the Müllers were scratching their necks to invent some rational explanation for the irrational patterns of fairy lore, Wagner was composing his Ring of the Nibelung, Strindberg and Ibsen their symbolical plays, Nietzsche his Zarathustra, Melville his Moby Dick. Goethe had long completed the Faust, Spenser his Faerie Queene. To-day the novels of James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and many another, as well as the poems of every season, tell us that the gastric fires of human fantasy still are potent to digest raw experience and assimilate it to the creative genius of man. In these productions again, as in the story world of the past which they continue and in essence duplicate, the denotation of the symbols is human destiny: destiny recognized, for all its cannibal horrors, as a marvelous, wild, “monstrous, irrational and unnatural” wondertale to fill the void. This is the story our spirit asked for; this is the story we receive.
Through the vogues of literary history, the folk tale has survived. Told and retold, losing here a detail, gaining there a new hero, disintegrating gradually in outline, but re-created occasionally by some narrator of the folk, the little masterpiece transports into the living present a long inheritance of story-skill, coming down from the romancers of the Middle Ages, the strictly disciplined poets of the Celts, the professional story-men of Islam, and the exquisite, fertile, brilliant fabulists of Hindu and Buddhist India. This little mare that we are reading has the touch on it of Somadeva, Shahrazad, Taliesin and Boccaccio, as well as the accent of the story-wife of Niederzwehren. If ever ther
e was an art on which the whole community of mankind has worked—seasoned with the philosophy of the codger on the wharf and singing with the music of the spheres—it is this of the ageless tale.
The folk tale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.
Joseph Campbell.
* Müller always stressed descriptions of the sunset and sunrise. Other scholars, following his lead, cogitated on the lunar phases and the interplay of sun and moon (E. Siecke, Die Liebesgeschichte des Himmels, 1892; Die Urreligion der Indogermanen, 1897), or on the terror of storms and winds (A. Kuhn, Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks, 1859, 1886; W. Schwarz, Die poetischen Naturerscheinungen der Griechen, Römer und Deutschen, 1864–1879), or on the wonder of the stars (E. Stucken, Astralmythen der Hebräer, Babylonier und Aegypter, 1896–1907). For Müller’s celebrated interpretation of “The Frog-King,” (Grimm 1.) as a sun-personification, see Chips from a German Workshop, London, 1880, Vol. II, pp. 249–252.
† F. Max Müller, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 1–146 (“Comparative Mythology,” 1856).
‡ Cf. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, London, 1920, Chapters VIII-X.
* “Reflection and enquiry should satisfy us that to our [savage] predecessors we are indebted for much of what we thought most of our own, and that their errors were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were propounded, but which a further experience has proved to be inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited.” (Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, one volume edition, New York and London, 1922, etc., p. 264.)
† Cf. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, 1922.
‡ Emile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris, 1912; English translation, New York and London, 1915, Book I, chapter 1; Book II, chapters 5–6.