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200 Th Reorientatio of The Donkey Tale (ca. 1200) The first European fairy tale?1 Even less a part of the oral tradition of Europe is the story of The Ass (Type 430). It is really a retelling by the brothers Grimm of a fourteenth century Latin poem, Asinarius. The prince who has been transformed to an ass plays a lyre and is entertained at the king’s court. A princess disenchants him and becomes his wife.2 It is a lucky circumstance that a wonder tale passed on in oral transmission has also been preserved in the form of a courtly adaptation from the time around 1200.3 [T]here can be no doubt that here a popular tale was transformed just as tales transmitted five hundred years later at the court of Versailles were developed into stylized “book tales” according to the understanding of a fantastic, fairy-oriented Romanticism.4 Whoever says “fairy tale” thinks first of all of princes and princesses.5 introducing    n this chapter, I will focus on the medieval background of a story that goes by the title “Das Eselein” (which means “The Donkey” or “The Little Ass”) in the famous fairy tale collection of the Brothers Grimm (app. 5C).6 At the heart of the tale lies the motif of a man transformed into a donkey, which also appears in such famous ancient stories as Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, or The Golden chapter six L I Ass (from the second half of the second century CE), and “Lucius, or The Ass” (which is among the pseudoepigrapha of Lucian), neither of which was readily available in the Latin Middle Ages.7 The similarities between the ancient stories and the Grimms’ “The Donkey,” though initially striking, are not extensive. In the Grimms’ tale, the central figure is not a picaresque character whose metamorphosis occurs as the result of his own lust and curiosity (like the protagonist Lucius in both Apuleius and pseudo-Lucian) but a wellmannered prince with an improbable, unfortunate, and ultimately remediable birth defect: he is born an ass. He exits permanently from his animal form not when he eats roses, which brings about the resolution in the two ancient stories, but after marrying a princess, when his father-in-law snatches and burns the hide that the donkey prince doffs by night. In looking at this tale, I have four objectives. The first is to explore the meanings that reside in the story in its earliest European version, a Medieval Latin poem entitled Asinarius (which is far less likely to translate into English as The Donkey Man than as The Donkey [Book] or The Donkey Tale).8 To fulfill this aim, I will examine how what had been an orally transmitted tale could have been modified as it became a written Latin poem in the Middle Ages. This part of the study will suggest the suitability of the Latin poem as a male-oriented equivalent to the tale “Beauty and the Beast” (ATU 425C): in both tales, a man in beast form first becomes the bridegroom of a beautiful young woman and then attains human form, although the protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” is the female character (the beauty), whereas that of The Donkey Tale is the male (the beast). My second aim is to delve into an association that seems to have become encoded in the story as it wended its way westward. On the basis of internal evidence from The Donkey Tale—which, to reiterate its chief claim to fame, is the earliest European version of the tale—I will advance the hypotheses that this tale of a musically talented man in an animal’s body could have held a special appeal and place in the repertoire of medieval entertainers and that the salience of music as a theme within it may hint that the story was carried into Europe by traveling mime players. My third objective is to put forward the notion that the story reached Europe from somewhere in the East and, in at least one earlier guise, was not a fairy tale or folktale but a myth. In so doing, I revive and modify for application to this one particular story (which was not investigated by any of the scholars who are cataloged in the remainder of this paragraph)9 the nineteenth -century Indianist or migrational theory of the German Sanskritist and philologist Theodor Benfey (1809–81), who contended that collections of very old Indian tales were...

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