Cinderfellas: The Long-Lost Fairy Tales
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/long-lost-fairy-tales.html
Bavarian fairy tales going viral? Last week, the Guardian reported that five hundred unknown fairy tales, languishing for over a century in the municipal archive of Regensburg, Germany, have come to light. The news sent a flutter through the world of fairy-tale enthusiasts, their interest further piqued by the detail that the taleswhich had been compiled in the mid-nineteenth century by an antiquarian named Franz Xaver von Schönwerthhad been kept under lock and key. How astonishing then to discover that many of those five hundred new tales are already in print and on the shelves at Widener Library at Harvard (where I teach literature, folklore and mythology) and at Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley.
Schönwertha man whom the Grimm brothers praised for his fine ear and accuracy as a collectorpublished three volumes of folk customs and legends in the mid-nineteenth century, but the books soon began gathering dust on library shelves. In 2010, over a hundred of the fairy tales culled from the archive were published by the Schönwerth champion Erika Eichenseer, under the title Prinz Rosszwifl. So the Guardians news wasnt exactly new. To be sure, those tales have not yet been translated into English, and many stories remain in manuscript form. But there are enough of them available now to satisfy our curiosity: are they radically different from the fairy tales we know?
Schönwerths tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, collectors who gave us relatively tame versions of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel. Schönwerth gives us a harsher dose of reality than most collections. His Cinderella is a woodcutters daughter who uses golden slippers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun. His millers daughter wields an ax and uses it to disenchant a prince by chopping off the tail of a gigantic black cat. The stories remain untouched by literary sensibilities. No throat-clearing for Schönwerth, who begins in medias res, with A princess was ill or A prince was lost in the woods, rather than Once upon a time
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