Rewriting History

In the staid world of academia, the term "scholarly slugfest" is particularly oxymoronic, yet that seems to be exactly what Ruth Bottigheimer's theories about the history of fairy tales have precipitated in the last few years.¹ This latest book is not the first airing of her antiestablishment views; articles in scholarly journals over the last two decades mark her progress through the publishing history of Italy, France, Germany, and Great Britain as she traced the path of fairy tales in print in Europe, and her 2002 Fairy Godfather (University of Pennsylvania Press) postulates that a sixteenth-century Italian, Giovan Francesco Straparola, was the actual author of most of the tales that fall under this rubric today. In Fairy Tales: A New History Bottigheimer pulls those arguments together into a cohesive, well-argued, and, on the whole, plausible explanation of the evolution of these tales over the last five hundred years.

Bottigheimer's "new history" is a history of fairy tales in print form, based on years of meticulous literary detective work in a number of research libraries of Europe, combined with reasoned guesswork to fill in the blanks. While the guesswork makes some colleagues uneasy, it is her outright challenge to the theory of orality as the womb of fairy tales—an assumption that is an almost sacrosanct tenet of folktale history—that has provoked the above-mentioned slugfest. Bottigheimer eschews this theory wholesale, arguing that there is no tangible proof of it whatsoever, and that lack of such proof, combined with a great deal of evidence of a long and active print history and with historical facts about daily life in early modern Europe in general, leads to the conclusion that the kinds of folktales now commonly referred to as "fairy tales" did not originate in the oral tradition in Europe. Rather, "these stories were associated first with the literate classes and secondarily with the less-lettered folk" (103). In other words, Bottigheimer argues that these tales were not a part of the canon of stories of illiterate peasants hundreds of years ago, but instead entered the oral tradition by way of being read by, or to, literate or semi-literate people, as the early stories moved from the Italian reading public into the hands of the French, the Germans, and eventually the English.

First, some clarifications. Bottigheimer does not deny the historical existence of oral storytelling, of course, nor does she deny that the stories she has studied have been passed on orally at some point. She makes a clear distinction, however, between the kinds of narratives commonly told by "the folk," and what today are often lumped under the wholesale term "fairy tales"; she firmly believes that the origin of the latter was, for the most part, Straparola's print text, Pleasant Nights, published in Italy in 1551. The key to Bottigheimer's argument is the term "fairy tale" itself, and she takes pains to define this term and its implications before laying out her alternative history.

Fairy Tales: A New History is not a long book, nor a complicated one. Its five short chapters offer a step-by-step argument for rethinking the history of the genre. Chapter one, "Why a New History of Fairy Tales?," sums up Bottigheimer's investigative path toward her unorthodox conclusions and provides the two key definitions she uses to identify the kinds of tales she is speaking of—"restoration" and "rise" tales—while reiterating the difference between folk narrative in general and what is currently meant by the term "fairy tale."

As Bottigheimer notes, folktales "reflect the world and the belief systems of their audiences" and "deal with familiar aspects of the human condition" such as marital relationships, thievery, and the daily ins and outs of life, and they rarely contain magic as a plot device (4). On the other hand, fairy tales, as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale-type classification index notes and as any beginning scholar of the genre knows, are characterized by magic being an essential part of the plot—and moreover, a...