Fairy Tales

Did you know that you can find podcasts on any subject? I can type in marginalia or fairy tales  or anything, and it will point me to podcasts which covered that topic! (It’s entirely possible that all other sentient beings already know this, but, hey, I’m excited). This means that while I was sewing away at Malleus, and waiting for Marginalia to be shipped, I was listening to information on my next subject - fairy tales.

Which is how I came to hear Jamshid J. Tehrani being interviewed about his book “The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood” .  I knew that the original fairy tales were generally much more bawdy, gory, sexual and violent than what Disney served up. But I wasn’t aware of the incest, rape and cannibalism involved - or that these stories are truly ANCIENT. Really - according to David Schultz at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/some-fairy-tales-may-be-6000-years-old?r3f_986=http://www.pookpress.co.uk/project/fairy-tales-from-around-the-world/ the oldest fairy tales still in circulation today are between 2500 and 6000 years old.   One titled The Smith and the Devil seems to be the oldest. You can read one version here: http://scienceheathen.com/2016/11/24/smith-death-smith-devil-story/

After reading & listening for many days, this seems to be the sequence:

1. Without going into the exact difference between fairy tales and fables,  a slave named Aesop is credited with inventing fables sometime between 620 and 564 BCE

2. Ancient fairy tales- which were meant for adults and children - were first collected and written down by Giambattista Basile in 1634 in a book titled The Pentamerone  (below)

3. In 1697, Charles Perrault published the same stories in Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals, subtitled Tales of Mother Goose. (below)

“The 1695 frontispiece to the manuscript pages which, in 1697, were to become the first edition of Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. On the door, behind the old woman telling the tales, is written “Contes de ma mère l’Oye”, Tales of Mother Goose, a subtitle which was to take prominence in the first English translations”   copied from :  https://publicdomainreview.org/2013/05/29/mother-gooses-french-birth-1697-and-british-afterlife-1729/ 

4. The Grimm Brothers’ retelling was published in 1812. Their first edition (which still had most of the gore and sex) didn’t sell, so their second edition (1814) was presented as a cleaned up version for kids, and it became the classic we know (below) 

from the early 1900’s

5. Hans Christian Andersen did NOT compile ancient stories, he wrote new fairy tales (The Emperor’s New Clothes, Little Mermaid, Ugly Duckling, the Little Match Girl, Thumbelina, etc) in the 1800’s (below)

6. John Newbury was the first commercial publisher of children’s books in the 1700’s, including A History of Goody Two Shoes in 1765. The Newbury Award is named for him.

7. Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886)  invented the modern picture book. His art was not merely illustration for the text, but a juxtaposition of picture and word.  (below) On the left, a story with accompanying pictures. On the right, a Caldecott illustration, with text being a minor part of the page. The Caldecott Award is named for him. 

So….. there we have a working order of the main characters.  But the phylogeny of these tales makes me think  that Jamshid  Tehrani must be a genius, because searching for original Basile and Perrault images feels like digging through noodles. Every time I think I have one, it slips into the minutia of copies, editions and questions of which translation or illustrator was involved. For example, the image I have with Perrault (scroll up a bit) says that it’s the 1695 frontispiece to his manuscript, but it’s in English (Perrault was French), so what about this only known copy of the first English edition, 1729??? (below). 

And how about this Perrault  frontpiece  from the early 1800’s (below)

The bottom panel (above) shows an early image from the Cinderella story (detail below)

Is THIS the earliest Cinderella image? (in French, she was Cendrillon)

>sigh<

 OK, folks - if this was a dissertation, I would need complete accuracy. How about we all agree that I’ll do my best to keep things in order, but make no guarantees. If you see obvious errors, lemme know. 

Next week, I’m going to try sorting through the illustrators, which will have wonderful images and maybe make sense. Contact me at dianesavona@aol.com