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Tag Archives: the brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm’s “Ashenputten”

08 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by michelinewalker in Fairy Tales

≈ Comments Off on The Brothers Grimm’s “Ashenputten”

Tags

Alexander Zick, Charles Robinson, fairy tales, Folklore and National Identity, the brothers Grimm

Aschenputtel by Alexander Zick

Alexander Zick illustrated Cinderella with the doves, inspired by the Grimms’ version. (Caption and photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I mentioned in a post entitled “How the Bear lost its Tail,” published on 4 August 2015, I pressed the “Publish” button instead of the “Save Draft” button. As a result, I published an incomplete post. The above image was also published before the post was complete.

The Brothers Grimm

  • Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812)
  • Cinderella “the persecuted heroine” AT type 510
  • the lesser success of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812)

(Unless otherwise indicated, links refer to a Wikipedia entry.)

I reread my post and did not modify it substantially. However, I introduced the Brothers Grimm: Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859). In 1812, they published Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen) or Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the hope of finding cultural similarities between the inhabitants of German-language lands, a quest that did not prove altogether successfully, but created a discipline, first named folkloristics.

It is in this regard that mentioning the Brothers Grimm was essential. The Brothers Grimm’s goal was to find cultural similarities between the yet-to-be unified German-language lands, an undertaking which required them to go from town to town and hamlet to hamlet collecting folklore. As I wrote above, this huge effort proved a lesser achievement than they had anticipated. Grimm’s Fairy Tales was a bestseller, but it would eventually come to light that the tales of Germany had variants in other countries.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th century, a new discipline evolved, which could be called the above-noted folkloristics, and would lead to the development of related disciplines such as ethnology, linguistics, archaeology, all of which could be included under an umbrella discipline we know as anthropology: the “study of humanity,” to quote Wikipedia. (See Anthropology and History of Anthropology).

The Aarne-Thompson Classification System

In the case of the Brothers Grimm’s collection, it led to an international classification of types and motifs which was first published in 1910 by Finnish professor Antti Aarne and which would become the Aarne-Thompson Classification System. For instance, Cinderella had variants and different titles in various lands, but Cinderella is AT type 510: “the persecuted heroine.” There was universality to a large number of fairy tales, fables and other folktales. It was as though these had travelled from Europe to the Orient and vice versa as Venetian Marco Polo and other merchants traced the silk road.

As for their specificity, it resided in the variants, either the type (i.e. tail-fisher) or the motif (i.e. the severed tail).

Grimm's_Kinder-_und_Hausmärchen,_Erster_Theil_(1812)_cover

Kinder und Haus: Märchen, volume one of Grimm’s Fairy tales, 1812

Cinderella

  • http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/story012.pdf
  • Ashenputten, elements

Grimm’s Fairy Tales contains a Cinderella, entitled Ashenputten. We have a coarse stepmother, her two insensitive daughters who belittle Cinderella, a father who brings the two stepsisters the gifts they wish for, birds who provide Cinderella with the clothes she needs, three girls: the stepsisters and Cinderella, a three-day celebration, the slipper, and some mutilation, the removal of a toe and that of a heel. I doubt that mutilation would be allowed in a 17th-century French-language fairy tale, a time when bienséances (decorum) was observed in the literature, the theater in particular, of France.

In the German-language Ashenputten, we do not have a fairy godmother, nor a carriage, nor the fateful 12 o’clock, nor an extended search to find the owner of a glass or vair slipper, a mere slipper in German-language lands. Finally, the prince asks the father if perhaps he does not have a third daughter. The plot of Ashenputten is basically the same plot of as the 700 BCE story of Rhodopis “about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt” (see Cinderella, Wikipedia). However, Ashenputten differs from Charles Perrault‘s Cendrillon if only because it is a more intimate variant of Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon, which is not irrelevant, and because it features birds. So there is both specificity and universality between Cendrillon and Ashenputten. Fairy tales are “‘arrangements’ d’arrangements.”[1]

Origins: the oral and written tradition and Literature

We have just seen that the plot of Cinderella is rooted in Rhodopis, a 700 BCE written story. In more recent centuries, this ancient tale has been the story of Cenerentole, written by Neapolitan Giambattista Basile (1566 – 23 February 1632). (See Cinderella, Wikipedia). But the tale was also written by Charles Perrault in 1697, at the end of the Grand Siècle, the age of Louis XIV.

In France, Cenerentole became Cendrillon and it is one of Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Tales of Past Times), except that Giambattista Basile’s Cenerentole had already entered a “learned” tradition. Basile himself had introduced Cinderella into the “learned” (i.e. written) tradition. In Charles Perrault, however, Cendrillon was transformed into literature, a major transformation. Charles Perrault (12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703) was an affluent bourgeois, a perfect honnête homme (a gentleman), a frequent guest in the finest salons, and a writer.

A parallel can be drawn between Charles Perrault and La Fontaine, as both men transformed the material (the learned tradition) that constituted their sources into literary works of art and, in the case of La Fontaine, into masterpieces. I doubt, however, that Basile and Perrault knew Cinderella had been a work of literature as Rhodopis. It had perhaps returned to the oral tradition when Basile wrote his Cenerentole, in the early part of the 17th century.

The Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm were philologists who attempted to create a past for the nascent Germany. Most civilizations created a mythology, a pourquoi tale. This process is now known as anamnesis (anamnèse), remembering, but not the religious anamnesis. They retrieved the folklore of German-language lands believing these lands shared a national heritage. Their project did provide the German-language countries with a past of its own. Although the plot of their stories were basically the same as in other countries, there were variants and these variants could not be could not be considered as inconsequential. Variants matter.

Cenerentole, Cendrillon, Ashenputten and Cinderella are rags-to-riches narratives rooted in a story written as Rhodopis in 700 BCE and classified as AT type 510, “the persecuted heroine,” in the Aarne-Thompson Classification System. More than two thousand years had passed.

Conclusion

Yet, such is life. Humans have always hoped for salvation even though their fate seems inescapable. That wish is universal, so it is not in the least surprising that the people inhabiting German-language lands should have adopted and molded an Ashenputten. They needed her.

Charles Robinson illustrated Cinderella in the kitchen (1900), from

Charles Robinson illustrated (art nouveau) Cinderella in the kitchen (early 1900s), from “Tales of Passed Times” with stories by Charles Perrault.

Next

But let us return to our animals. We don’t know how a Reynard the Fox episode, the Tail-Fisher, went from Europe to the Black population of Georgia, US where Joel Chandler Harris wrote them down as Uncle Remus: his Songs and his Sayings (1881), using an eye dialect. I have suggested in an earlier post that deported Acadians, the Cajuns, told the Blacks of Georgia the tales they knew, before leaving for Louisiana, still a French colony in 1755, or before walking back north to the Atlantic provinces of Canada. Other tales, however, were brought to America by slaves packed like sardines in the hull of a ship.

RELATED ARTICLES

  • Koiné Languages and Créole Languages (19 January 2014)
  • Further Musings on “Puss in Boots” (27 March 2013)
  • Puss in Boots, revisited (24 March 2013)
  • Uncle Remus and Tar-Baby (21 August 2012)
  • A Reading of Perrault’s “Cinderella” (10 February 2012)
  • Fairy Tales & Fables (10 November 2011)
  • Magical Cats: “Puss in Boots” (9 November 2011)

Sources and Resources

  • Grimm’s Fairly Tales is Gutenberg [EBook #2592]
  • Giambattista Basile, Stories from Il Pentamerone is Gutenberg [EBook #2198]
  • Ashenputten is http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/story012.pdf:
  • Neuf contes de Perrault is http://www.cndp.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/CNDP/catalogues/perrault/files/contes_perrault.pdf

____________________

[1] Marc Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault, culture savante et traditions populaires (Paris : Gallimard, coll. ‘Tel’, 1977 [1968]), p.76.

Pletnev plays Tchaikovsky

Aschenputtel by Alexander Zick

Aschenputten by Alexander Zick

© Micheline Walker
8 August 2015
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A Reading of Perrault’s “Cinderella”

10 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Art, Fairy Tales, Folklore, Illustrations

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Cendrillon, Charles Perrault, Giambattista Basile, Gustave Doré, passivity, seventeenth-century France, sources, the brothers Grimm, William Morris

—  Cinderella by William Morris

For the English text of Charles Perrault‘s (12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703) fairy tales, beautifully illustrated by Gustave Doré, click on fairy tales.  For information on William Morris, click on Arts and Crafts or on William Morris. But if you click on this Cinderella, you will see that there are many retellings of Cinderella or Cendrillon.  The Brothers Grimm’s Cinderella does not feature a fairy godmother, but Cinderella prays on her mother’s tomb and is helped by all the animals, birds in particular.  They bring her the beautiful gowns she wears while dancing with the Prince.  However, she does lose a shoe because the prince has put pitch on the steps.  On the same website, you may also read that the story of Cinderella is almost as old as the world.

A Fairy tale

Cinderella is a fairy tale, so it belongs to a literary genre and genres share, to a lesser or greater extent, the same narrative structure.  With fairy tales, the “hero” goes from rags to riches and does so through the timely intervention of a fairy godmother, or a clever cat.  Therefore, the protagonist or hero, is at times rather passive, as is, for instance, Puss in Boots‘ disappointed master.  As I pointed out in an earlier post, were it not for his cat, the third son of the miller might not have become a prince.  It is the cat who takes him from rags to riches.

Traditionally, the protagonist of fairy tales, i.e. the third son or a Cinderella has a fairy godmother who appears at the opportune moment, i.e. kairos, to transform a Cinderella or some other character, into a beautiful person to whom the opportunity is given to be seen at his or her best.  This could suggest a lack of resourcefulness in the central character of a fairy tale, a point we will discuss after writing a summary of the plot.

Cendrillon by  Gustave Doré

The Plot: rejected girl needs a fairy godmother, but the shoe fits

This is how the rags-to-riches narrative of Cinderella unfolds.

A widower who has one daughter marries a widow who has two daughters.  In Charles Perrault’s version of the fairy tale, the widow’s two daughters are less attractive than Cinderella, so Cinderella is reduced to removing the ashes from chimneys and wears soiled clothes.

There is a ball to which the young women of the land are invited.  In fact, in some versions of Cinderella (the Brothers Grimm), there are three balls, or three days of festivities, the number three being the most important number in fairy tales.

When Cinderella arrives in the carriage her fairy godmother has magically fashioned out of a pumpkin, just as she has magically fashioned the horses, the coach, and the magnificent gown Cinderella wears, she is stunning, not to mention the beauty and uniqueness of the slippers she wears, translated as glass but perhaps otherwise crafted: “vair,” a  material, is pronounced the same way as “verre,” glass.  This matter is one scholars have studied without reaching a consensus.

During the last ball, Cinderella is so enjoying herself that she forgets that midnight is approaching and that, at midnight, she will return to her station as the girl who cleans the ashes out of chimneys.  She is running away so fast that she loses one of the slippers or shoes.

Cendrillon by Gustave Doré

So Cinderella may be Cinderella again, but the prince has picked up the shoe and wants all the young women of the land to try it on.  Whom will it fit?  In Perrault’s version, when her sisters try on the shoe, Cinderella is her shabby self, but the prince has noticed her and he suspects beauty behind deceptive appearances.  Cinderella is therefore asked to try on the shoe and the shoe fits.  Cinderella is once again transformed into the beautiful young woman she was at the balls and will be the prince’s bride.  Matters end the same way in the Brothers Grimm’s Cinderella except that birds blind her two sisters permanently, which is somewhat gruesome.

Origins of “Cinderella”

I will note later that Cinderella is rooted Rhodopis, 700 BCE, in which a slave girl marries the kind of Egypt, but tales often originate in India.  However, as we know, the five stories that make up the Pañcatantra, were written in Sanskrit, by Vishnu Sharma and then, in 750 CE, they were translated into Arabic, as Kalīlah wa Dimnah, by Persian scholar Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa’.  However there were other translations of the Pañcatantra, and other tales, before it was translated by Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa’. Furthermore, Vishnu Sharma may have taken his content, or subject matter, from an oral tradition. I will therefore be cautious as there may be a more ancient Cinderella, than Rhodopis.

Immediate sources

But Perrault did not draw his material directly from an ancient source.  Cinderella was part of the tales of Giambattista Basile (c. 1575 –  23 February 1632), the author of the Neapolitan Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille, later entitled Il Pentamerone.  Giovanni Francesco “Gianfrancesco” Straparola (c. 1480 – c. 1557) also wrote fairy tales, but he did not write a Cinderella. 

Pot by William Morris

Resourcefulness on Cinderella’s part

As stated above, the point that needs examination is the extent to which Cinderella participates in her transformation.  The short answer is that she needs help but is not as passive as she might seem.  She has gone to her father to ask for his help but her father, who loves his new wife, has refused to intervene on behalf of his daughter, which is not very fatherly.  However, had he intervened, he might have made matters more difficult for his daughter.  Cinderella’s stepmother has two daughters whose looks could jeopardize their ability to find a spouse and her daughters come first.

Other factors may be at play.  For instance, this is a fairy tale, not a comedy. Unlike the characters of comedies, Cinderella does not have a gentleman friend who can help her fight a heavy father, pater familias.  Nor does she have clever servants who would assist her and her gentleman friend. That happens in comedies, not in fairy tales. Perrault’s Cinderella truly needs a fairy godmother and she is fortunate that the prince happens to see beauty beneath deceptive appearances.  Despite their lovely gowns, the stepmother’s daughters have not been noticed by the prince who can see beauty in an unadorned Cinderella.

So I wonder whether Cinderella can do much for herself other than assist her fairy godmother by fetching a large pumpkin and helping her empty it of its contents so that it can be transformed into a princely carriage.  But, by an large, other than fetching the pumpkin and performing little task, Cinderella is very much in need of a fairy godmother, not to say a miracle.

The Perfect Candidate

However, destiny, the fates, have given Cinderella a fairy godmother.  But more importantly, destiny has given her beauty and grace.  Other than an opportunity to be seen by the prince, an opportunity which a fairy godmother orchestrates, it could be that Cinderella has all that is required of her.  Moreover, only she can wear the shoes, which is very much to her advantage. So the long answer may be that she cannot do much for herself, but that she has been so blessed by Lady Fortune that she really does not need to do much for herself.  In other words, although she needs and has a fairy godmother who arranges for her to meet the prince, her beauty and grace make her the perfect candidate for victory.  Besides, the prince notices her and the shoe fits.

So Cinderella does not rise from her own ashes, but she rises from ashes.

RELATED ARTICLE

  • The Brothers Grimm’s “Ashenputtel” (8 August 2015)

 

Mozart: 12 Variations sur ‘Ah ! vous dirai-je Maman’ en Ut Majeur, K.265, Aldo Ciccolini, piano (please click on title to hear the music

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