Introduction: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy

Abstract

In Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition Ruth Bottingheimer proposes to correct the historical narrative of the emergence of the fairy tale in Europe and to recognize "Straparola's role as an originator in the history of modern fairy tale" (Bottingheimer 2002:3). Giovanni Francesco Straparola (c. 1480-c. 1557) is not exactly an unknown figure in folktale history. 1 His book, Le piacevoli notti (Pleasant nights), which appeared in English as The Nights of Straparola (Straparola [1551-1553] 1894), was long recognized as a predecessor of Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti (The tale of tales; published 1634-1636; also known in its 1674 edition as Il Pentamerone) and Charles Perrault's Contes de ma mere l'Oye (Tales of Mother Goose; Perrault [1695-1697] 1956). As Bottingheimer (2002:2) points out, the Grimm brothers considered Straparola as their precursor, admiring him as an author who conscientiously drew upon oral tradition. Selections from Straparola's tales appeared in volumes published in Vienna in 1791, which included twenty-four tales, and in Berlin in 1817, which included eighteen tales and was accompanied by the copious notes of the editor and translator Friedrich Wilhelm Valentine Schmidt. In the mid-nineteenth century, Theodor Benfey found in the case of Straparola implicit support for his theory of the Indian origin of folktales. For him, the availability of Straparola's tales was felicitous evidence for the possible historical interdependence of oral and literature tales. Since the idea that oral tradition alone could sustain a global diffusion of tales was unfathomable in his days, he relied on the migration and translation of the Panchatantra, a classic Indian tale collection, as a support for his Indian origin hypothesis (Benfey 1859). The availability of a European tale collection that demonstrated the possibility of such historical interdependence provided him with further support for his theory.

Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales

“…The durability of the phylogenetic signatures returned by the D analysis and autologistic tests, highlighted by the ancestral state reconstructions, revealed the existence of shared ancestral traditions in each of the major clades of the Indo-European family ( figure 4 ). The results of these analyses have major implications for current debates concerning the origins of Tales of Magic [ 16 , 17 ]. Whereas most folklorists since Grimm believe that written versions of fairy tales were originally derived from oral tradition, some literary scholars [ 17 , 18 ] have claimed that there is very little evidence to support the precedence of oral traditions over literary ones and argued that it is unlikely that these stories could have been transmitted intact for so many generations without the support of written texts.…”

“…We focused on ‘Tales of Magic’ (ATU 300–ATU 749), a category of stories featuring beings and/or objects with supernatural powers. We concentrated on magic tales as they represent the largest and most widely shared group of tales, and because they include the canonical fairy tales, which have been the main focus of debates about the origins of folktales [ 16 ]. We recorded the presence/absence of each these tales ( n =275) in 50 Indo-European-speaking populations represented in the ATU Index (electronic supplementary material, table S1).…”

“…While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has led to intense debates about the presumed antiquity of traditional tales [ 16 ], with some researchers claiming that many canonical fairy tales may actually be relatively recent literary inventions [ 17 , 18 ].…”

Harvesting Context and Mining Emotions Related to Olfactory Cultural Heritage

“…This explains why their origin is one of the biggest mysteries in folktale studies. As scholars of the field widely acknowledge, its reconstruction is often frustrated not only by difficulties in defining the genre but also as a result of the rich interplay between oral and written traditions [101,102]. The German word märchen, usually translated into English as fairy tale or household tale, and to French as conte populaire, is the internationally established term associated with the genre [103].…”