Magic Tales and Fairy Tale Magic: From Ancient Egypt to the Italian Renaissance by Ruth B. Bottigheimer (review)

Ruth Bottigheimer’s provocative new study of fairy tales starts from the premise that for thousands of years, supernatural beings in brief narratives used magic primarily in their own interest. “Changing that paradigm,” she notes, “required a changed vision of the human condition vis-à-vis the world of demons and divinities [and] a new belief in the importance, desirability, and legitimacy of earthly well-being” (p. 183), a reorientation simultaneous with and aided by the ready availability of mid-sixteenth-century printed works that spread the new concepts. The result was “the phenomenon of fairy tale magic” (p. 183). In the ancient and medieval worlds, we are told, “magic often posed a maleficent threat to human beings, with happy endings reserved for … a heavenly afterlife [but] in Renaissance magic tales, magic becomes a narrative motor that can bring about a heaven on earth happy ending for its heroes and heroines” (pp. 1–2). Variations in the ways that characters perceive and experience magic in magic tales suggest that a “different prehistory for fairy tales” (p. 1) should be considered.

Bottigheimer, who teaches comparative literature at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, circumscribes most of the terms she employs in the book. The two types of brief narratives that fit her definition of fairy tale are “restoration fairy tales” and “rise fairy tales.” The tales selected for inclusion in her study had to be short and capable of being told or performed in a single sitting; they are linear and typically lack “subplots that would retard their forward motion” (p. 4); and they had to have syntax and style “suitable for oral delivery and aural comprehension” (p. 4). Genres longer than tales (e.g., novels, novellas, and dramas) were excluded because they contain “particularizations” about characters and situations, in sharp contrast to tales, which rely on “shared assumptions” and “shorthand character descriptions” to facilitate listeners’ understanding of “fast moving plots” (p. 5). The source material consulted by Bottigheimer is described as “specialized secondary literature” (p. viii); she relied on English translations when examining ancient hieroglyphic, Greek, Hebrew, or Arabic writings. Because texts always “absorb something of the age in which they were translated” (p. 6), she consulted two translations of each to get as close as possible to the original meanings.

The book’s first chapter postulates that “the nature of magic in its relationship to protagonists in magical tales has been little regarded, as have the changes over time in the nature of magic” (p. 2). Subsequent chapters explore the shifting balance between magic’s harmful and beneficial effects on human protagonists and “the allocation of agency among supernaturals and human beings” (p. 2). Included in the survey and analysis are Egyptian, Greek, and Roman magic tales, Jewish tales, tales from Medieval Christian Europe, and Muslim tales. Chapter 7 deals with what the author deems to be the threshold of fairy-tale magic in 16th-century Venice, and chapter 8 follows the evolution of fairy-tale magic from Giovan Francesco Straparola to Giambattista Basile to Charles Perrault. The concept of fairy-tale magic emerged gradually near the end of the Middle Ages and came together coherently and enduringly in the tales that Straparola reworked for The Pleasant Nights in the 1550s. Thereafter, the “idea of a magically mediated happy ending [grew] steadily in imaginative power, paradigmatic strength, and literary influence” (pp. 183–84).

While affirming the soundness of her observations and inferences, Bottigheimer cautions that her conclusions do not apply to every tale, but are rather based on “overall tendencies” (p. 3) discerned in dozens of tales from each of the cultural traditions included in her study. She acknowledges “exceptions” to what she sees as an “overall direction of development” (p. 3) and reminds skeptics that, although some of her interpretations may seem unusual, “historical sources are never perfect and history cannot be written without at...