Preface to the Special Issue on Fairy Tales, Printed Texts, and Oral Tellings

This special issue showcases contemporary explorations of fairy tales’ origins and transmission, introduces one seminal work previously unavailable in English, and reproduces a long-inaccessible tale from the Thousand and One Nights tradition. Throughout the essays, questions of fairy-tale origins and transmission blur boundaries between the categories of “oral” and “literary” and illuminate the origins and transmission of fairy tales.

The traditional history provided for fairy tales largely originated from successive forewords to editions of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). Nearly all nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholars and commentators accepted Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s assertions that the fairy tales included in their collection had had a long oral existence before being committed to paper, despite the fact that—as the Grimms themselves tacitly acknowledged—they had no firm evidence for their declaration.¹

Nonetheless, a respectably long and scholarly tradition of, mostly German-language, research has asserted a heterodox history of European fairy tales. One early, cautiously voiced hypothesis for modifying the Grimms’ position arose in an 1867 Göttingen dissertation by F. W. J. Brakelmann, who proposed that Giovan Francesco Straparola’s tales were part of a written tradition. Others who opposed the general belief that fairy tales originated in oral tradition among the folk aired their views in the 1880s and 1890s in conjunction with the emergence and organization of national societies for the study of folklore (which at that time meant, in effect, the study of folktales and fairy tales). By and large, however, their conceptualizations of the history of European fairy tales were rejected by larger, more traditional, and more nationalistic forces in the study of folklore.

Doubt persisted, however. In the 1920s the German folklorist Hans Naumann offered a two-culture vision of society in which fairy tales were first created by an elite and later trickled down to the people. At approximately the same time, the Czech comparatist Albert Wesselski, the first to argue in exten-so the primacy of literacy and print in the history of Europe’s fairy tales, published a global account of the origins and a lengthy description of the dissemination of fairy tales based on print culture. Wesselski had the misfortune to live and work in the same period in which National Socialism was emerging as a potent force in Germany. Its celebration of the folk resulted in an effective silencing of Wesselski’s cogently argued views, which have since then attracted little interest among literary scholars in non–German speaking areas, aside from one study by Emma Emily Kiefer and another by Kathrin Pöge-Alder.²

Nearly two generations passed before evidence supporting the literary origins of fairy tales and their print dissemination was again investigated. Between 1970 and his death in 2000, Rudolf Schenda studied relationships between the oral and the literary, taking as his field of study the enormous and sometimes overlapping folk narrative repertoires of Italy, France, and Germany. His work resulted in two works, both of which affirmed the importance of print culture for studying popular narrative: Volk ohne Buch [A People without Books] (1970 et seq.) and Die Lesestoffe der kleinen Leute [The Reading Materials of the Common Man] (1976). His lifelong study of European oral culture convinced him of the primacy of print for the origins of oral narratives, and with hundreds of examples he fashioned Vom Mund zu Ohr [From Mouth to Ear: Foundation for a Cultural History of Everyday Narration in Europe] (1993). Schenda’s studies led him to conclude that print was the single most important instrument for the dissemination of the genre of fairy tales. In 1988 Schenda’s doctoral student Manfred Grätz produced a monumental study of fairy tales and tales about fairies in the German Enlightenment that further demonstrated the power of print processes, with a stunning documentation of the wholesale movement of French fairy tales to Germany in the course of the eighteenth century. One of most significant secondary works of the 1980s on the history of European fairy tales, it remains largely unknown in...