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<i>Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies</i> (review)

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.0.0009

1080-6563

Gillian Adams,

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

Reviewed by: Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies Gillian Adams (bio) Jan M. Ziolkowski . Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 2007. It is gratifying to find the claims that I began making in 1998 for the existence of medieval children's literature confirmed by so eminent a medievalist as Jan M. Ziolkowski.1 It is also interesting that Ziolkowski takes a while to make a connection to children of the five Medieval Latin works that he discusses, although ultimately he is careful to note the ways in which they reached them, "combining education with a prominent dose of entertainment" (233). The tales are the tenth-century About a Certain Fisherman Whom a Whale Swallowed (De quodam piscatore quem ballena absorbuit) by Letaldus of Le Mans; Little Red Cap and the Young Wolves (De puella a lupellis servata) from the ca. 1024 verse school book The Richly Laden Ship (Fecunda Ratis) composed by Egbert of Liege for his pupils; the anonymous eleventh-century One-Ox (Unibos), a precursor of "Little Claus and Great Claus"; three versions of The Turnip Tale (Raparius), ca. 1200; The Donkey Tale (Asinarius), ca. 1200, and its versions. Ziolkowski's main interest is in these works as precursors of what we now think of as fairy tales, and his method is "first, to study each work in context; second to know the social position of the teller, and finally to understand the social circumstances in which the telling of the tale became relevant" (5). He claims to locate his analyses of the tales between the extremes of "pursu[ing] one meaning immanent in the tale" (14) and "deny[ing] that any constant meaning or band of meanings resides in a given tale type" (15). This "compromise" also "posits that no single theory (Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, feminist, or the like) will account for all elements of all fairy tales" (14). Throughout, I find Ziolkowski's discussions of these tales well-written, wide-ranging, sensible, interesting, and original. Before the tales themselves, however, as well as a helpful "Introduction," there is chapter 1, "Folktales in Medieval Latin Poetry." Some may find this chapter heavy going, as Ziolkowski reviews the major controversies about the origins and nature of the folktale and "the Babel of terms meaning 'Fairy Tale'" (45), beginning with the work of the Brothers Grimm and covering such claims for origin as Indo-European myths transmitted by the Volk, stories from India and the East, polygenesis (similar tales arising in different places), individual creators, and early Christian and [End Page 216] classical material. He also covers analytical methods such as Propp's and motif-indexes. Ziolkowski concentrates on the presence of these tales in the Middle Ages in Latin and the national languages, and he draws on sources now not easily available, especially in English. Overall, he prefers the term "wonder tale" but concludes by recommending the Latin fabula, which may cover many narrative forms but particularly "the sorts of tales under discussion here, folktales in general and wonder tales in particular (58)." In subsequent chapters, Ziolkowski addresses each of the five tales in turn in the context of its predecessors and successors, including Walt Disney. Chapter 2, "Between Sacred Legend and Folktale," discusses the man swallowed by a whale story, ranging from the biblical Jonah to Pinocchio; chapter 3, "A Cautionary Tale," deals with the Red Riding Hood story; chapter 4, "True Lies and the Growth of Wonder," covers tales of a poor man outwitting a rich man, including Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Claus and Great Claus"; and chapter 5, "The Wonder of the Turnip Tale," is on an amusing story about a poor peasant who grows a giant turnip and gives it to the king. Ziolkowski here explores "the relationships in form, context, and text" (164) between the early version and what the Grimms made of it six hundred years later, as an illustration of their "platonic, or rather Napoleonic, idea of fairy tale (Marchen)" (164). In his discussion of "One-Ox" and the "Turnip," I found Ziolkowski's observations on social context particularly...