Read Online From the Forest by Sara Maitland - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Sara Maitland
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and a good deal was known about them biographically. But others distinctly lacked plausibility. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in northern Europe (judging by the number of Church dedications to her); did her devotees really believe that she was swallowed by a dragon, but that her purity disgusted the monster so much that he opened his mouth and let her walk out through his throat – thus making her an appropriate patron of women in childbirth? Did the women who certainly did seek the prayers of St Uncumber believe, in our contemporary sense, that this Spanish princess of no known historical period got out of her marriage by growing a miraculous beard overnight – and that she would, in exchange for a handful of oats, get rid of other women’s unsatisfactory husbands too? Certainly European hagiography shares an extraordinary number of themes and scenes with fairy stories. Are these legends, or fictions, or something in between that we lost a sense of with the rationalism of the Enlightenment?
A great deal of work has been put in over the last two centuries trying to work out exactly what we have got with the body of fairy stories; but the results are surprisingly meagre and unsatisfactory. Folklorists and anthropologists have come up with various ways of taxonomising fairy stories and their parallels in other cultures. The two most popular analyses at present are the Aarne-Thompson system, which tries to organise fairy stories according to specific motifs in their plots, and Vladimir Propp’s morphological approach, which analyses the stories by the function that various character types and actions perform. Both systems are extremely complex (the Aarne-Thompson system ends up with 2,399 different types of fairy story, which hardly seems terribly useful, although, to be fair, this does include a range of stories that might not immediately meet some criteria of a ‘fairy story’) and, more problematically for me, they inevitably look for what is common to the diverse, worldwide stories, as opposed to what is specific to any particular story. In fact, neither system has even come up with a working definition of a fairy story.
One problem, which brings our fairy stories at least back within the shades of the woods, is that we have no ‘virgin stories’, or true fairy wildwood. Once a story has been recorded in any form at all, it moves out of the oral space in which it originally evolved. Throughout the historical era fairy stories have always existed in two forms – the oral stories, and the literary versions of them. What is unclear is how much the literary versions affected the oral versions, as well as, more obviously, the reverse. Just as beech trees and, for totally different reasons, Norwegian spruce were inserted into already existing woods, so literary retellings of fairy stories may well have fed back into the existing tales, altering them in ways we do not fully understand. In her wonderful book The Forest of Mediaeval Romance , 17 Corinne Saunders examines the magical forests of high literary culture that shares so many elements with the fairy story, but is completely different. And not just different in tone and style – in the romances there are virtually no children (never mind children as protagonists); in the fairy stories, there are virtually no sword fights or battles. The heroes of romance have names and ‘back story’; in fairy stories, even the principal characters seldom have names, and when they do, they are often simply descriptive (Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood) or generic (John, Gretel, etc.). In the Grimms’ stories, practically no one goes mad; in the romances from Merlin to Orlando Furioso , madness is a regular occurrence. In fairy stories there is, ultimately, no such thing as unrequited love and remarkably little infidelity; in the romances, both of these are almost a necessity. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the two forms have affected each other. By
A great deal of work has been put in over the last two centuries trying to work out exactly what we have got with the body of fairy stories; but the results are surprisingly meagre and unsatisfactory. Folklorists and anthropologists have come up with various ways of taxonomising fairy stories and their parallels in other cultures. The two most popular analyses at present are the Aarne-Thompson system, which tries to organise fairy stories according to specific motifs in their plots, and Vladimir Propp’s morphological approach, which analyses the stories by the function that various character types and actions perform. Both systems are extremely complex (the Aarne-Thompson system ends up with 2,399 different types of fairy story, which hardly seems terribly useful, although, to be fair, this does include a range of stories that might not immediately meet some criteria of a ‘fairy story’) and, more problematically for me, they inevitably look for what is common to the diverse, worldwide stories, as opposed to what is specific to any particular story. In fact, neither system has even come up with a working definition of a fairy story.
One problem, which brings our fairy stories at least back within the shades of the woods, is that we have no ‘virgin stories’, or true fairy wildwood. Once a story has been recorded in any form at all, it moves out of the oral space in which it originally evolved. Throughout the historical era fairy stories have always existed in two forms – the oral stories, and the literary versions of them. What is unclear is how much the literary versions affected the oral versions, as well as, more obviously, the reverse. Just as beech trees and, for totally different reasons, Norwegian spruce were inserted into already existing woods, so literary retellings of fairy stories may well have fed back into the existing tales, altering them in ways we do not fully understand. In her wonderful book The Forest of Mediaeval Romance , 17 Corinne Saunders examines the magical forests of high literary culture that shares so many elements with the fairy story, but is completely different. And not just different in tone and style – in the romances there are virtually no children (never mind children as protagonists); in the fairy stories, there are virtually no sword fights or battles. The heroes of romance have names and ‘back story’; in fairy stories, even the principal characters seldom have names, and when they do, they are often simply descriptive (Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood) or generic (John, Gretel, etc.). In the Grimms’ stories, practically no one goes mad; in the romances from Merlin to Orlando Furioso , madness is a regular occurrence. In fairy stories there is, ultimately, no such thing as unrequited love and remarkably little infidelity; in the romances, both of these are almost a necessity. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the two forms have affected each other. By
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