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Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Tales

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 135; Issue: 538 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.135.538.09

1535-1882

Christine Shojaei Kawan,

Themes in Literature Analysis

With the present selection of narratives, Jack Zipes pays tribute to Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), an American publisher and journalist, translator of German poets Heinrich Heine and Joseph von Eichendorff, and the forefather of the Neo-Pagan movement through his book Aradia: Or, The Gospel of the Witches (D. Nutt, 1899). In the field of folklore, Leland was a pioneer collector of Native American and Romani narratives. Zipes’ title characterizes the tales as “magical,” which might suggest to folklorists that they are tales of magic, that is, Märchen or wonder tales. In fact, the stories chosen from five of Leland's books fall into three different categories: traditional Micmac and Passamaquoddy narratives, Italian folktales and legends, and short Romani texts. In many or most of them, supernatural powers and/or the practice of magic play a prominent part.We do not get details about how Leland obtained the Native American tales. The informants were, according to the editor, “several acculturated Algonquin Indians” (p. 11), only two of whom are named: the Passamaquoddy Tomah Josephs and Mrs. W. Wallace Brown (apparently a collector). In the words of the religious scholar Thomas C. Parkhill, cited in the introduction, Leland's motivation to publish Algonquin tales was not so much a concern to preserve Native American cultural heritage than “to call Place into being,” and “to forge a connection” between a nation of immigrants “to the natural landscape it had come to inhabit through the vehicle of ‘Indian’ stories” (p. 12).Among the stories taken from Leland's Algonquin Legends of New England (1884), we find a number of themes and motifs that are clearly international. The tale about the partridge-witch is a variation on the ancient theme of the secret housekeeper (Motif N831.1), which is both a tale-type and an episode in traditional narrative all over the world. “The Three Strong Men” combines a bear's son tale (Motif B631) with the themes of the strong companions who turn traitors (ATU 301), the forgotten bride (Motif D2003), and the mistaken reflection in the water (Motif J1791.6.1). Another story relates how a young man saves a young woman from a monster (Motif B11.10), followed by a magic flight (ATU 313) Native American style.Probably more immediate than with Native Americans were Leland's contacts with Romani culture. He had studied the Romani language and was a member and the first president of the Gypsy Lore Society. According to Zipes, Leland's collecting “depended on the serendipitous meeting of unusual people who would help him” (p. 9). He would “always try to impress his informants by speaking in their language or demonstrating knowledge of their culture” (p. 9); in the example cited (pp. 8–9), this comes close to intimidation. But it can also be assumed that Leland acted according to his own recommendations for fellow collectors: namely, to make a catalog of questions for superstitions found in seventeenth-century compilations, such as the Anthropodemus Plutonicus (1666) by Johannes Prätorius, and then ask the informants for them one by one, as Leland notes in “Die alten Folkloristen,” Ethnologische Mitteilungen aus Ungarn 2 (1892/1893). The 14 Romani texts that conclude Zipes’ selection are all brief, six not even filling half a page. Seven of them, mostly humorous, bear no relationship to magic. Of the others, only two evoke magical practices, and the rest correspond to the usual supernatural realm as found in myth and folk narrative; as a compelling tale, the story of the love between the sorcerer Merlin and the witch Trinali should be mentioned. In one text, a poor Gypsy takes revenge and uses supernatural power to make the house of a pitiless gentleman fall down; in other stories, gypsies are shown to be drinkers, cowards, liars, thieves, poachers, and to have access to occult powers. As a result, half of the Romani texts published here confirm the common prejudice against the group (thus falling in line with the usual collections of Gypsy folklore). Add to this Leland's footnote stating, like the “Eskimo Shamans and the Indian boo-oin,” “a very few old gypsies” knew ways of “gradually inciting insanity and death” (p. 41). The perception of the Romani as beggars, thieves, and sorcerers eclipses social reality in traditional society where the Romani had their place as peddlers, basket makers, knife and scissors sharpeners, tinkers, cobblers, seasonal farm workers, musicians, horsemen, horse dealers, and only to a minor extent healers and fortune tellers.While the Native American and the Romani parts are in line with usual folklore collections, the middle section, consisting of Florentine tales and legends and tales about the magician Virgil, is different. According to Leland, his foremost informant for these Italian tales was Maddalena, a young woman in whose face he recognized “the antique Etruscan” and who was “of a witch family . . . whose members had, from time immemorial, told fortunes, repeated ancient legends, gathered incantations and learned how to intone them, prepared enchanted medicines, philtres, or spells” (p. 14). Assertions of this type may have been a source of inspiration for Margaret Murray's and Gerald Gardner's witch-cult theories and may have later influenced the more recent Italo-American Stregheria movement. The alleged link to the Etruscans makes the witch background even more intriguing and indeed venerable. Maddalena appears to be a condensation of Leland's ideal of the popular storyteller-informant-sorceress; if she actually existed as a person much in the way he depicts her, I would suppose she was a Romani.Several tales feature the beautiful, eloquent, and haughty Fairy Bellaria, who is more reminiscent of the French courtly contes de fées and literary fairy queens than of the supernatural helpers in folk narrative. Virgil as sorcerer is a figure known from medieval literature and later from folk tradition. In Leland's Italian tales, he is mostly a wise helper and magician. Together with his wife, the witch, he appears, exceptionally, as a villain in a magnificent Märchen from the Sabine mountains that combines The Maiden in the Tower (Rapunzel, ATU 310) with The Magic Flight (ATU 313) and the motif of the forgotten bride (Motif D2003). Another remarkable story is an unusual version of the foundation of Rome, mixing the Genoveva legend with the werewolf theme. Many other narratives in this Italian section appear to be literary reworkings, often interspersed with verses that are sometimes rather lengthy, sometimes banal. The editor confesses to have altered Leland's “somewhat anachronistic” grammar and style, especially the “thees” and “thous” (p. 16). In brief, while there are a number of remarkable folk narratives in this selection, many more are nineteenth-century literary elaborations that cannot compete with the tales of Romantic poets such as those that Leland translated; and the portrayal of witches as villains in some of the tales contradicts Leland's claim that witches were his foremost informants.