Sommeils et Veilles dans le Conte Merveilleux Grec (review)

This work taps into two impressive sources of folktale scholarship. First, the main source of Greek collected material is the note cards of the G. A. Mégas archive of twenty-three thousand classified items. Gaining access to this archive is difficult, but fortunately FF Communications has agreed to publish an English version of A. Angelopoulos and A. Brouskou's catalog of Greek Magic Tales, based on the archive. Second, this is the revised version of a doctoral thesis written in 1997 at L'École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), under the supervision of Nicole Belmont, one of the most remarkable and inspired fairy-tale scholars in France. In Papachristophorou's bibliography (237–46) we find confirmation that her academic background is mainly grounded in Greek and French scholarship. This double legacy should stir the interest of the mainstream English-based community of folktale studies.

The main body of this book (55–234) deals with seven folktale types as they appear in Greece, more or less linked to the themes of sleep and vigil (sommeils et veilles; please note that from now on quotations are the reviewer's translation from French). The first part consists of two introductory chapters: a presentation of the themes of sleep and dream (the latter is discarded, as it does not seem to appear in fairy tales connected with sleep), and a work plan, as well as a general view of folktale studies and collecting in Europe, leading to the Aladdin's cave of Greek folktales. In the last section of this introduction the author offers the names of M. Lüthi, M. Eliade, and V. Propp of The Historical Roots of the Folktale as a panel grounding her purpose to study fairy tales from an initiatory perspective (50–52). The three remaining parts of this study—"Slumbers," "Leisure Vigils," and "Work Vigil"—are taken up by the analysis of seven fairy tales. In the first category we have "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty" for women's slumbers, and for men's slumbers we have two little-known subtypes of The Search for the Lost Husband: the Greek-Turkish ecotype of The Disenchanted Husband (AT 425B) and The False Bride Takes the Heroine's Place (AT 425G). "Leisure Vigils" include The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife (AT 400) and The Danced-Out Shoes (AT 306). Finally, a curious Greek ecotype, King Slumber (*514C), is the "Work Vigil."

The first two fairy tales are daunting because they have been the object of so much attention. The section dedicated to Snow White is named "la beauté ensommeillée." The transcribed version presented as a starting point for analysis was collected by the author. In it the stepmother addresses her mirror as "my sunshine," with the sunshine being addressed as a mirror in other versions also quoted and considered. In the forest the heroine takes refuge in the house of forty ogres. The prince who finds her shining coffin hanging over a stream hides it (with the girl inside) under his bed and spends most of the time looking at her. His intrigued mother finds her and brings her back to life.

Chionati, a name also connected with snow and appearing in many Greek versions, was selected to refer to the Greek Snow White. The motif of blood on snow as the origin of the heroine's beauty (following "a heedless wish from her mother" [61]) is interpreted as a fatal conjunction between the vital force of life with the whiteness and coldness of death. Chionati would then "be linked with Goodness absolute coming into contact with Evil, also absolute." She would "belong to a Manichaean world, becoming the victim of a series of fundamental contradictions" (62–63). The theme of blood is picked up again in a version in which the stepmother intends to drink the girl's blood: the stepmother would then be a "double-negative of the mother" (who had spilled her own...