All of the storytellers in this book had enormous challenges to face, from poverty to political turmoil, from psychological afflictions to the horrors of war. Some succeeded in overcoming these challenges, but not all of them did. As we’ll discover, ‘happy ever after’ is a cliché often spurned by the tales themselves. Many of our most beloved stories end sadly, and so, unfortunately, did many of our fairy tellers. But all of them lived, and most of them loved; several of them travelled, experiencing many different shades of the world, and a couple of them succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Making the point early in The Fairy Tellers that many of the tales best known to us in the West can trace their roots back to the Bronze Age, travel writer Nicholas Jubber endeavoured to discover why so many of those tales seem to now be “time-locked inside a bubble of medieval Europe”. As Jubber travelled through France and Germany, India and Syria, Russia and Denmark — seeking out the former homes of both famous and lesser known fairy tellers and interviewing local literary experts — he was surprised to learn how many fairy tale themes and details seemed to repeat across time and cultures, and perhaps less surprised to discover that each teller would imprint the old stories with details from their own lives. As it turns out, these fairy tales, in the forms we know them today, have been “time-locked” thanks to those who had access to publication (generally: white European men), but they weren’t always the tellers of the tales, and Jubber does a genuine service to bring the uncredited fairy tellers themselves (generally: women and non-Europeans) out of the shadows. This book contains many shortened versions of fairy tales, the biographies of their tellers and collectors, and vivid geographical writing from Jubber’s travels; and while that’s a lot to pack into one volume, I found it all very interesting — perhaps lacking in insight and analysis, but Jubber has collected so much of interest here that I’m rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
From the global to the local: the most popular fairy tales are astonishingly agile at aping each other’s structures while transplanting themselves to new locales. As we’ll discover with some of the other tellers in this book, there’s an eerie parallel between the trajectories of disease and the pathways of stories: virulently contagious and cunningly adaptable.
From an early Cinderella-type story found in China (I suppose the impossibly tiny shoe does make the most sense in a foot-binding culture) to the long history of women telling stories about princesses being tricked into marrying beasts, Jubber learned that every time he found the “first” version of a fairy tale, he would later discover an earlier version of it in some other culture’s tradition. And because of that, the popular fairy tales that we know (like those attributed to the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault) can only properly be said to have been “collected” by them — except for those written by Hans Christian Andersen, which Jubber considers original creations (and the last true “fairy tales”). I picked out quite a few interesting tidbits about the fairy tellers behind the well known tales, and I’m putting it all here with apologies because it’s just. so. much.
The young woman forced to labour for her horrible stepsisters, whisked by magic to the ball, who simply can’t hold on to her shoe — for European readers, Giambattista got there first. The princess in the tower, whose hair becomes a ladder so her handsome lover can climb up to meet her — that’s one of Giambattista’s. He provided one of the earliest known versions of the comatose princess in the forgotten castle; and of the brother and sister, abandoned in the woods by their woodcutter father, who can’t make their way home because their trail’s been eaten.
Born around 1575 in Naples, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Giambattista Basile wrote The Tale of Tales: the first written collection of many familiar fairy tales. Giambattista wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, knew people who knew Galileo and the feminist painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and died from an air-poisoning eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 1631, catching the “fatal infection” at age fifty-six.
Genies and treasure caves, cities of sumptuous palaces and bustling markets, sorcerers disguised as wandering dervishes, cunning slavegirls outwitting thieves and cross-dressing princesses defeating viziers at chess: these were the tales pouring out of Europe’s fledgling bookshops. So it was perfect timing for a traveller from Syria to arrive in Paris with a heap of tales in his head. His name was ‘Abd al-Qari Antoun Youssef Youhenna Dyab — or Hanna for short — and he landed in the West like a rusty old oil lamp: modest on the surface, but harbouring magic.
By 1708, The Thousand and One Nights had already become “the literary phenomenon of the age”, but Hanna would be the one to add “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” to the canon (and despite French translator Antoine Galland becoming famous for his version of 1001 Nights that included Aladdin and Ali Baba, Hanna was not credited in the book and was only rediscovered in 2015).
Which brings us to the scandalous life of the Baroness d’Aulnoy — salonnière, spy and spinner of tales — and the mischievously imaginative members of her circle: a countess accused of lesbianism, a lady-in-waiting who disguised herself as a bear, the pipe -smoking princess to whom they dedicated their works, and the court secretary who outsold them all.
Before Hanna Dyab made it to Paris, fairy telling in France had already gone viral. Around ninety tales from the 1690s have survived, two-thirds of which were written by high society women. “Beauty and the Beast” was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve: an impoverished aristocrat, widowed young, who became the housekeeper and mistress of Crébillon (the age’s most famous playwright and the official Censor), but despite helping Crébillon with his literary duties, she was unable to get a licence to publish much of her own work. Writing about the Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast”, Jubber notes “the credits listed more than thirty writers for the storyline, script development and dialogue, but there wasn’t a single mention of the original author. It was as if the animators had invented the tale from scratch.”
It was no sugary idyll, with its fair share of family tragedies, including the early deaths of several siblings as well as of her first-born, and the loss of both her parents by the age of twenty-one. But Dortchen did live a kind of fairy tale. Not only did she narrate some of the tales that would count among the world’s most beloved (including ‘Rumpelstiltskin’,‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ and — probably — ‘Hansel and Gretel’), she ended up marrying the man who jotted down her tales, and lived with the brothers as the closest witness of their success. Long rendered voiceless like the nameless heroine of ‘The Six Swans ’, she is able, increasingly, to speak to us. And if we turn our ears towards her, we might just hear what she’s saying.
The Grimms might be the most recognisable name in fairy tales, but they didn’t invent stories — they collected them; particularly from the young women of their neighbourhood. The Wilds lived across the street, and not only would Dortchen Wild eventually marry Wilhelm Grimm, but she recited for him between 12 and 20 tales of his collection. The three Hassenpflug sisters — Marie, Jeanette and Amalie — who between them provided twenty-eight stories for the first edition (including “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow-White”), were Huguenots whose ancestors had fled France; it’s ironic that in an effort to preserve German folklore in the presence of the Napoleonic occupation, the Brothers Grimm would include so many stories that the Hassenpflugs adapted from their own French background. In a stark example of how fairy tellers’ personal circumstances coloured their tales, Jubber contrasts the type of stories told by Dortchen (whose homelife was one of drudgery and likely abuse) and those told by the more genteel Hassenpflugs:
In more than half of the tales attributed to Dortchen, the heroine’s hard work is key to the narrative — from Gretel preparing the witch’s oven to the bed-making drudge of ‘Mother Hölle’, from the uncomplaining travellers in ‘Sweetheart Roland’ and ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ to the miller’s daughter’s hopeless spinning in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’. In this respect, Dortchen’s tales are strikingly different from those of the storyteller who on the surface appears most similar to her: Marie Hassenpflug. The latter gives relatively little attention to work (Snow White, famous these days for keeping house for the dwarves, isn’t described in the original version carrying out any of her chores). Which is just as you’d expect from the well-off daughter of a government official.
Further afield, Jubber tells the story of a Brahmin called Somadeva Bhatta — a court poet in the valley of Kashmir around the year 1070 — who wrote a collection of tales (as long as the entire Lord of the Rings series) that would include the precursors to many of our most recognisable fairy tales: “To read these tales in Somadeva’s collection is to experience the free-wheeling vitality of stories younger than other versions we know, and older than we could possibly imagine.” And turning our attention further to the north and east, Jubber shares traditional stories of Baba Yaga in her hut perched on chicken legs, deep in a snow-covered birch forest:
It’s a cliché of nineteenth-century Russia: the young idealistic intellectual, trampled by the cruelty of the tsarist system, spat out to Siberia to die a gibbering wreck in a mental ward. But Ivan Khudiakov was more than that. He was a teenage prodigy who published, in 1860, his first and most significant collection, Great Russian Fairy Tales, at the age of just eighteen. As an example of the collision between fairy telling and tawdry political reality, Ivan is one of the most fascinating fairy tellers who ever lived. He was far from the only collector to gather tales from oral sources in the wake of the Grimms, but none lived as tempestuous a life. And none would connect their fairy telling as actively to the siren call of revolution.
And I feel like I should note something of Hans Christian Andersen but what most sticks with me is his self-made rise from crushing poverty and the underwhelming reactions he got from other writers: the Grimm Brothers having no idea of who he was when he knocked on their door, unannounced, in Berlin and the sign that Charles Dickens famously placed in the guest room where Andersen had stayed: “Hans Christian Andersen slept in this room which seemed to the family AGES”. Again, I wish there had been more of an analytical focus in this book because I’m not entirely certain why Jubber states that Andersen wrote the last of the “true” fairy tales, but it’s argued for, somewhat, in this:
He had been perfectly situated between the old world of preindustrial Odense and the commercial opportunities of prosperous Copenhagen. No later fairy teller would be able to harness that perfectly calibrated alignment of traditionalism and originality that made Hans so unique.
Obviously, fairy tales have something vital to relate or else our ancestors would not have been spinning the same basic tales for the past five thousand years. Based on his research for this book, Jubber concludes that to be considered “fairy tales” stories must include magic, appeal to children, and have an element of orality (even if printed). Ultimately, what makes fairy tales, and their tellers, so essential to the human experience is the journey they take us on “to the enlightenment at the heart of the forest”:
Some people come back with jewels pouring out of their mouths, some are covered in pitch or charred with fire. Whatever their experience, everybody returns from the forest knowing more about themselves than when they set out. Tales and trails intertwine, and every one of them is a magic mirror. Like the tellers, we can look into this mirror to see the world — in its splendour and madness and brutality — and if we look carefully enough, we see ourselves peering back.
