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4. True Lies and the Growth of Wonder: An Eleventh-Century “Little Claus and Great Claus”
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125 Tru Lies and th Growth of Wonde An Eleventh-Century “Little Claus and Great Claus” In “Big Claus and Little Claus” Hans Christian Andersen succeeded in writing one of the most popular of his stories without making any significant changes in the tradition as he had learned it.1 t may be true that Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “Little Claus and Great Claus” (“Lille Claus og store Claus” in Danish) has not come close to attaining the hallowed Walt Disney status of “The Little Mermaid.” Indeed, it has not even achieved the name recognition of “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Emperor ’s New Clothes,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Little Match Girl,” or any of a half-dozen other fairy tales and stories among the more than 150 published by Andersen that have become widely known even to the general public. But if not in the mass media of the New World, then at least in the northern climes of the Old World, the tale won a definite pride of place from being the second tale in Andersen’s first pamphlet of four fairy tales (the others were “The Tinder-Box,” “The Princess and the Pea,” and “Little Ida’s Flowers”) published in 1835 under the title Tales, Told for Children (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn); and in Denmark and Germany, it has not lost its attractions in the intervening 160 years. “Little Claus and Great chapter four L I Claus” has been reprinted repeatedly, often illustrated with engravings, in children’s books in Danish, German, English, and other languages.2 Despite the frequency with which the story has appeared in print, the separateness of Danish children’s literature and Medieval Latin literature, or of literary folklore and Medieval Latin literature, has meant that the provocative similarities (and equally arresting dissimilarities) between “Little Claus and Great Claus” and the eleventh-century Latin Verses about One-Ox (Versus de Unibove) have gone underremarked, if not altogether unremarked.3 Even if One-Ox were not affiliated with Andersen’s tale, the former would richly repay close examination . It has rightly been called “one of the chefs-d’oeuvre of popular literature , in Latin, of the Middle Ages.”4 introducing - One-Ox is extant in a single manuscript (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier, MS 10078–10095 [formerly 8176]). In its present form the codex comprises 116 folios, of which there are fourteen quaternions (fols. 1–112) and one binio (fols. 113–16). The text of One-Ox is written on folios 38v– 42v. The poem could not have been composed any later than the end of the eleventh century, the terminus for when its text was copied. Furthermore, the manuscript we have is hardly the original, although it is not likely to have been written very long after the original. It contains mistakes corrected by the hand that wrote it, in addition to mistakes or perceived mistakes corrected by a second hand. A date in the second half of the eleventh century seems to fit the social circumstances depicted in the poem, such as the fact that the priest who plays a leading role in it is married. One editor has dated the poem in the third quarter of the eleventh century, while another thinks it not inconceivable that the manuscript should be dated in the first half of the eleventh century; other scholars have speculated that the poem could even have been composed in the last quarter of the eleventh century.5 Not too long after being copied, the manuscript of the poem probably belonged, in the first decade of the twelfth century, to the library of St. Peter’s, the Benedictine abbey in Gembloux. It is often impossible to determine exactly who consulted any given manuscript text. In the case of OneOx , we know that Sigebert of Gembloux used it in the composition of On Ecclesiastic Authors (De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis), composed around 1111–12.6 The unique Latin manuscript, located in what was then the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Brussels, came somehow to the attention of Jacob Grimm. Shortly after obtaining a transcription from J. F. Willems in 1837, Grimm published the editio princeps of the text in the book Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. Jahrhunderts (Latin Poems of the Tenth and Eleventh Cen126 Fairy Tales from Befor Fairy Tales [3.224.147.211] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:41 GMT) turies), produced in collaboration with (Johann) Andreas Schmeller (1785– 1852) in 1838.7 The poem, 2...