Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies

Conclusion: Sadly Never After

231 Conclusio Sadly Never After The transcription of a folktale can seem, at first glance, a very simple thing that can be done by anyone, without requiring a special background . Is it possible then to speak of a historical development in the collection of folktales?1 ne simple but sophisticated definition holds that “[t]he fairy tale is a form of artistic narrative using marvellous motifs in addition to motifs referring to social reality in a way that influences the development of the plot.”2 Both The Turnip Tale and The Donkey Tale meet this definition, but they have two features that have impeded their acknowledgment as fairy tales. Although the definition makes no mention of style, the tales of the Brothers Grimm, their predecessors, and their successors have characteristics that relate to both oral traditional storytelling and literary narration. Because The Turnip Tale and The Donkey Tale are in Latin, which fulfilled the function of the father tongue in the diglossia of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, they give the impression automatically of being irrecuperably distant from the orality of popular culture.3 Beyond the question of style lies that of transmission. Because the two Latin poems are separate tales that circulated by themselves, they have not been hallowed as fairy tales. Had they been recorded in a vernacular language O (which would have facilitated recognition of their fairy tale style) and had they formed part of collections (which would have helped to certify their content as qualifying as a fairy tale), they would have been acknowledged as fairy tales long ago and universally. Instead, they have been trapped in a limbo, certified as fairy tales by none other than the Brothers Grimm, but either ignored or denied the same status by most literary historians and folklorists who study fairy tales. In the first anthology that sought to assemble medieval Märchen as translated into a modern European language, the German folklorist Tegethoff referred to “the dark beginnings of European fairy tale telling.”4 Like Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood before the happy outcomes of their respective tales, we may still be at risk in a murky forest, but I hope at least to have put down blazes to signal part of the path that leads out. One of the marks to help in pathfinding takes the form of the interpretations I have offered in the six preceding chapters, where I attempted to construct an argument about the development of wonder tales over more than two centuries. Another comes in the appendix that follows, where the reader will find gathered five clusters of material, all of them in Modern English translation. These mini-sourcebooks will allow independent analysis and interpretation of the tales, as well as at least preliminary testing of my arguments. Before stepping back to allow the tales to speak for themselves (and they are often the most eloquent witnesses on their own behalf), I will draw together two of the most important implications that have emerged from the interpretations of the individual tales. One of these pertains to wonder and helps to show why it is justified to consider the last of these tales as fairy tales. The other relates to the history of tale collecting and explains why uncollected medieval folktales, even wonder tales, failed to achieve recognition as fairy tales, even after the Brothers Grimm drew on them directly and Hans Christian Andersen did so indirectly. Between the late tenth and early thirteenth centuries, Latin authors bear witness to an increasing openness to the literary recording of tales in which wonder plays a central role.5 Although initially they strove to coordinate these wonders with miracles of a religious sort, later they became receptive to the portrayal of the nonreligious wonder that distinguishes many fairy tales, especially the ones known as wonder tales. In accord with this progression , we find at the early end of the chronological spectrum the poem of Letaldus, with its fisherman protagonist and his unsettlingly Jonah-like and un-Jonah-like vicissitudes, and the lines by Egbert of Liège about the little girl spared by the wolves, in which baptism and God are given prominent places. In the middle we encounter One-Ox, the hero or antihero of which 232 Fairy Tales from Befor
Fairy Tales employs credulity about miracles and wonders in order to foil his opponents . At the end come The...