Chapter 10
"No, no, my fine master," said the wolf; "you can tell me where it is, and if I find you are right then I'll let you out."
So Thumbkin told him a way to his father's farm, and guided him to a hole in the larder just big enough for the wolf to get through. When he got through there were two fine fat ducks and a noble goose hung up ready for the Sunday dinner. So Mr. Wolf set to work and ate the ducks and the goose while Thumbkin kept calling out:
"Don't want any duck or geese. Let me out! Let me out!"
And when the wolf would not he called out:
"Father! Father! Mother! Mother!"
And his father and mother heard him, and they came rushing towards the larder. Then the wolf tried to get through the hole he had come through before, but he had eaten so much that he stuck there, and the farmer and his wife came up and killed him.
Then they began to cut the wolf open and Thumbkin called out:
"Be careful! Be careful! I'm here, and you'll cut me up." And he had to dodge the knife as it was coming through the wolf.
But at last the paunch of the wolf was slit open, and Thumbkin jumped out and went to his mother. And she cleansed him and dressed him in new clothes, and they sat down to supper as happy as could be.
SNOWWHITE
There was once a queen who had no children, and it grieved her sorely. One winter's afternoon she was sitting by the window sewing when she pricked her finger, and three drops of blood fell on the snow. Then she thought to herself:
"Ah, what would I give to have a daughter with skin as white as snow and cheeks as red as blood."
After a while a little daughter came to her with skin as white as snow and cheeks as red as blood. So they called her Snowwhite.
But before Snowwhite had grown up, her mother, the Queen, died and her father married again, a most beautiful princess who was very vain of her beauty and jealous of all women who might be thought as beautiful as she was. And every morning she used to stand before her mirror and say:
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?"
And the mirror always used to reply:
"Queen, Queen, on thy throne, The greatest beauty is thine own."
But Snowwhite grew fairer and fairer every year, till at last one day when the Queen in the morning spoke to her mirror and said:
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?"
the mirror replied:
"Queen, Queen, on thy throne, Snowwhite's the fairest thou must own."
Then the Queen grew terribly jealous of Snowwhite and thought and thought how she could get rid of her, till at last she went to a hunter and engaged him for a large sum of money to take Snowwhite out into the forest and there kill her and bring back her heart.
But when the hunter had taken Snowwhite out into the forest and thought to kill her, she was so beautiful that his heart failed him, and he let her go, telling her she must not, for his sake and for her own, return to the King's palace. Then he killed a deer and took back the heart to the Queen, telling her that it was the heart of Snowwhite.
Snowwhite wandered on and on till she got through the forest and came to a mountain hut and knocked at the door, but she got no reply. She was so tired that she lifted up the latch and walked in, and there she saw three little beds and three little chairs and three little cupboards all ready for use. And she went up to the first bed and lay down upon it, but it was so hard that she couldn't rest; and then she went up to the second bed and lay down upon that, but that was so soft that she got too hot and couldn't go to sleep. So she tried the third bed, but that was neither too hard nor too soft, but suited her exactly; and she fell asleep there.
In the evening the owners of the hut, who were three little dwarfs who earned their living by digging coal in the hills, came back to their home. And when they came in, after they had washed themselves, they went to their beds, and the first of them said:
"Somebody has been sleeping in my bed!"
And then the second one said:
"And somebody's been sleeping in my bed!"
And the third one called out in a shrill voice, for he was so excited:
"Somebody is sleeping in my bed, just look how beautiful she is!"
So they waited till she woke up, and asked her how she had come there, and she told them all that the hunter had said to her about the Queen wanting to slay her.
Then the dwarfs asked her if she would be willing to stop with them and keep house for them; and she said that she would be delighted.
Next morning the Queen went up as usual to her mirror, and called out:
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?"
And the mirror answered as usual:
"Queen, Queen, on thy throne, Snowwhite's the fairest thou must own."
And the Queen knew that Snowwhite had not been slain. So she sent for the hunter and made him confess that he had let Snowwhite go; and she made him search about beyond the forest, till at last he brought back word to her that Snowwhite was dwelling in a little hut on the hill with some coal-miners.
Then the Queen dressed herself up like an old woman, and, taking a poisoned comb with her, went back the next day to the hut where Snowwhite was living. Now the dwarfs had warned her not to open the door to anybody lest evil might befall her; and she found it very lonesome keeping always within doors.
When the Queen, disguised as an old woman, came to the door of the house she knocked upon it with her stick, but Snowwhite called out from within:
"Who is there? Go away! I must not let anybody come in."
"All right," answered the Queen. "If you can come to the window we can have a little chat there, and I can show you my wares."
So when Snowwhite came to the window the Queen said:
"Oh, what beautiful black hair; you ought to have a comb to bind it up;" and she showed her the comb that she had brought with her.
But Snowwhite said:
"I have no money and cannot afford to buy so fine a comb."
Then the Queen said:
"That is no matter; perhaps you have something golden that you can give me in exchange."
And Snowwhite thought of a golden ring that her father had given to her, and offered to give it for the comb. The Queen took it and gave Snowwhite the comb and bade her good-bye, and went back to the palace.
Snowwhite lost no time in going to the mirror, and binding up her hair and putting the comb into it. But it had scarcely been in her hair a few minutes when she fell down as if she were dead, and all the blood left her cheeks, and she was Snowwhite indeed.
When the dwarfs came home that evening they were surprised to find that the table was not spread for them, and looking about they soon found Snowwhite lying upon the ground as if she were dead. But one of them listened to her heart and said: "She lives! She lives!"
And they began to consider what caused Snowwhite to fall into such a swoon. They soon found the comb, and when they took it out Snowwhite soon opened her eyes and became as lively as she ever was before.
Next morning the Queen went to the mirror on the wall and said to it:
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?"
Then the mirror said as before:
"Queen, Queen, on thy throne, Snowwhite's the fairest thou must own."
Then the Queen knew that something had happened to the comb and that Snowwhite was still alive. So she dressed herself once more as an old woman and took with her a poisoned ribbon and went to the hut of the three dwarfs. And when she got there she knocked at the door, but Snowwhite called out:
"You cannot enter; I must not open the door."
Then, as before, the Queen called out in reply:
"Then come to the window, and you can see my wares."
When Snowwhite came to the window the Queen said:
"You are looking more beautiful than ever, but how unbecomingly you arrange your hair. Did you use that comb I gave you yesterday?"
"Yes, indeed," said Snowwhite, "and I fell into a swoon because of it; I am afraid there is something the matter with it."
"No, no, that cannot be," said the Queen; "there must be some mistake. But if you cannot use the comb I will let you have this pretty ribbon instead," and she held out the poisoned ribbon. Snowwhite took it, and after the old woman, as she thought she was, had gone away, Snowwhite went to the mirror and tied up her hair with the piece of ribbon. But scarcely had she done so when she fell to the ground lifeless and lay there as if she were dead.
That evening the dwarfs came home and found Snowwhite lying on the ground as if dead, but soon discovered the poisoned ribbon and untied it; and almost as soon as this was done Snowwhite revived again.
Next morning the Queen went once more to the mirror on the wall, and called out:
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?"
to which the mirror replied, without any change:
"Queen, Queen, on thy throne, Snowwhite's the fairest thou must own."
And the Queen recognized that once again her plans had failed, and Snowwhite was still alive. So she dressed herself once more and took with her a poisoned apple, which was so arranged that only one half of it was poisoned and the rest of it was left as before. And when the Queen got to the hut of the dwarfs she tried to open the door, but Snowwhite called out:
"You can't come in!"
"Then I'll come to the window," said the Queen.
"Ah, you are the old lady that came twice before; you have not brought me good luck, each time something has befallen me."
But the Queen said:
"I do not know how that can be; I only brought you something for your hair; perhaps you tied it too tight. To show you that I have no ill-will against you I have brought you this beautiful apple."
"But my guardians," said Snowwhite, "told me that I must take nothing more from you."
"Oh, this is nothing to wear," said the Queen, "this is something to eat. To show you that there can be no harm in it I will take half of it myself and you shall eat the other half."
So she cut the apple in two and gave the poisoned half to Snowwhite. And the moment she had swallowed the first bite of it she fell down dead. Then the Queen slunk away and went back to the palace and went at once to her chamber and addressed the mirror on the wall:
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?"
And this time the mirror answered, as it used to do:
"Queen, Queen, on thy throne, The greatest beauty is thine own."
Then the Queen knew that Snowwhite was dead at last, and that she was without a rival in beauty.
When the dwarfs came home that night they found Snowwhite lying upon the ground quite dead, and could not find out what had happened or how they could cure her. But, though she seemed dead, Snowwhite kept her beautiful white skin and seemed more like a statue than a dead person. So the dwarfs had a glass coffer made, and put Snowwhite in and locked it up. And she remained there for days and days without changing the slightest, looking oh, so beautiful under the glass case.
Now a great prince of the neighbouring country happened to be hunting near the hill of the dwarfs and called at their hut to get a glass of water. And when he came in he found nobody there but Snowwhite lying in her crystal coffer. And he fell at once in love with her and sat by her side till the dwarfs came home, and he asked them who she was. Then they told him her history, and he begged that he might carry the coffer away so that he might always have her near him. At first they would not do so. But he showed how much he loved her, so that they at last yielded, and he called for his men to carry the coffer home to his palace.
And when the men commenced carrying the coffer down the mountain they jolted it so much that the piece of poisoned apple in Snowwhite's throat fell out, and she revived and opened her eyes and looked upon the Prince who was riding by her side. Then he ordered the coffer to be opened, and told her all that had happened. And he took her home to his castle and married her.
After this happened the Queen once more came to her room and spoke to the mirror on the wall and said:
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?"
And the mirror this time said again:
"Queen, Queen, on thy throne, Snowwhite's the fairest thou must own."
And the Queen was so enraged because she had not destroyed Snowwhite that she rushed to the window and threw herself out of it and died on the spot.
INTRODUCTION TO NOTES
Ever since the Brothers Grimm in 1812 made for the first time a fairly complete collection of the folk-tales of a definite local or national area in Europe, the resemblance of many of these tales, not alone in isolated incidents but in continuous plots, has struck inquirers into these delightful little novels for children, as the Italians call them (_Novelline_). Wilhelm Grimm, in the comparative notes which he added to successive editions of the _Maehrchen_ up to 1859, drew attention to many of these parallels and especially emphasized the resemblances of different incidents to similar ones in the Teutonic myths and sagas which he and his brother were investigating. Indeed it may be said that the very considerable amount of attention that was paid to the collection of folk tales throughout Europe for the half century between 1840 and 1890 was due to the hope that they would throw some light upon the origins of mythology. The stories and incidents common to all the European field were thought likely to be original mythopoeic productions of the Indo-European peoples just in the same manner as the common roots of the various Aryan languages indicated their original linguistic store.
In 1864 J. G. von Hahn, Austrian Consul for Eastern Greece, in the introduction to his collection of Greek and Albanian folk tales, made the first attempt to bring together in systematic form this common story-store of Europe and gave an analysis of forty folk-tale and saga "formulae," which outlined the plots of the stories found scattered through the German, Greek, Italian, Servian, Roumanian, Lithuanian, and Indian myth and folk-tale areas. These formulae were translated and adapted by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould in an appendix to Henderson's _Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England_ (London, 1866), and he expanded them into fifty-two formulae. Those were the days when Max Mueller's solar and lunar explanations of myths were in the ascendant and Mr. Baring-Gould applied his views to the explanation of folk tales. I have myself expanded Hahn's and Baring-Gould's formulae into a list of seventy-two given in the English Folk-Lore Society's _Hand-Book of Folk-Lore_, London, 1891 (repeated in the second edition, 1912).
Meanwhile the erudition of Theodor Benfey, in his introduction to the Indian story book, _Pantschatantra_ (Leipzig, 1859), had suggested another explanation of the similarities of European folk-tales. For many of the incidents and several of the complete tales Benfey showed Indian parallels, and suggested that the stories had originated in India and had been transferred by oral tradition to the different countries of Europe. This entirely undermined the mythological theories of the Grimms and Max Mueller and considerably reduced the importance of folk tales as throwing light upon the primitive psychology of the Aryan peoples. Benfey's researches were followed up by E. Cosquin who, in the elaborate notes to his _Contes de Lorraine_, Paris, 1886, largely increased the evidence both for the common European popularity of many of the tales and incidents as well as for the parallels to be found in Oriental collections.
Still a third theory to account for the similarity of folk-tale incidents was started by James A. Farrer and elaborated by Andrew Lang in connection with the general movement initiated by Sir Edward Tylor to explain mythology and superstition by the similar processes of savage psychology at definite stages of primitive culture. In introductions to Perrault and Grimm and elsewhere, Andrew Lang pointed out the similarity of some of the incidents of folk tales--speaking of animals, transference of human feeling to inanimate objects and the like--with the mental processes of contemporary savages. He drew the conclusion that the original composers of fairy tales were themselves in a savage state of mind and, by inference, explained the similarities found in folk tales as due to the similarity of the states of minds. In a rather elaborate controversy on the subject between Mr. Lang and myself, carried through the transactions of the Folk-Lore Congress of 1891, the introduction to Miss Roalfe Cox's "Cinderella," and in various numbers of "Folk-Lore," I urged the improbability of this explanation as applied to the _plots_ of fairy tales. Similar states of mind might account for similar incidents arising in different areas independently, but not for whole series of incidents artistically woven together to form a definite plot which must, I contended, arise in a single artist mind. The similarities in plot would thus be simply due to borrowing from one nation to another, though incidents or series of incidents might be inserted or omitted during the process. Mr. Lang ultimately yielded this point and indeed insisted that he had never denied the possibility of the transmission of complete folk-tale formulae from one nation and language to another.
During all this discussion as to the causes of the similarity of folk-tale plots no attempt has been made to reconstitute any of these formulae in their original shape. Inquirers have been content to point out the parallelisms to be found in the various folk-tale collections, and of course these parallelisms have bred and mustered with the growth of the collections. In some cases the parallels have run into the hundreds. (See "Reynard and Bruin.") In only one case have practically all the parallels been brought together in a single volume by Miss Roalfe Cox on Cinderella (Folk-Lore Society Publication for 1893; see notes on "Cinder-Maid"). These variants of incidents obviously resemble the _variae lectiones_ of MSS. and naturally suggest the possibility of getting what may be termed the original readings. In 1889 the following suggestion was made by Mr. (now Sir) James G. Frazer in an essay on the "Language of Animals," in the _Archaeological Review_, i., p. 84:
"In the case of authors who wrote before the invention of printing, scholars are familiar with the process of comparing the various MSS. of a single work in order from such a comparison to reconstruct the archetype or original MS., from which the various existing MSS. are derived. Similarly in Folk-Lore, by comparing the different versions of a single tale, it may be possible to arrive, with tolerable certainty, at the original story, of which the different versions are more or less imperfect and incorrect representations."
Independently of Sir James Frazer's suggestion, which I have only recently come across, I have endeavoured in the present book to carry it out as applied to a considerable number of the common formulas of European folk-tales, and I hope in a succeeding volume to complete the task and thus give to the students of the folk-tale as close approach as possible to the original form of the common folk-tales of Europe as the materials at our disposal permit.
My procedure has been entirely similar to that of an editor of a text. Having collected together all the variants, I have reduced them to families of types and from these families have conjectured the original concatenation of incidents into plot. I have assumed that the original teller of the tale was animated by the same artistic logic as the contemporary writers of _Contes_ (see notes on "Cinder-Maid," "Language of Animals"), and have thus occasionally introduced an incident which seemed vital to the plot, though it occurs only in some of the families of the variants. My procedure can only be justified by the success of my versions and their internal coherence. As regards the actual form of the narrative, this does not profess to be European but follows the general style of the English fairy tale, of which I have published two collections (_English Fairy Tales_, 1890; _More English Fairy Tales_, 1894).
In the following notes I have not wasted space on proving the European character of the various tales by enumerating the different variants, being content for the most part to give references to special discussions of the story where the requisite bibliography is given. With the more serious tales I have rather concerned myself with trying to restore the original formula and to establish its artistic coherence. Though I have occasionally discussed an incident of primitive character, I have not made a point of drawing attention to savage parallels, nor again have I systematically given references to the appearance of whole tales or separate incidents in mediaeval literature or in the Indian collections. For the time being I have concentrated myself on the task of getting back as near as possible to the original form of the fairy tales common to all Europe. Only when that has been done satisfactorily can we begin to argue as to the causes or origin of the separate items in these originals. It must, of course, always be remembered that, outside this common nucleus, each country or linguistic area has its own story-store, which is equally deserving of special investigation by the serious student of the folk-tale. I have myself dealt with some of these non-European or national folk-tales for the English, Celtic and Indian areas and hope in the near future to treat of other folk-tale districts, like the French, the Scandinavian, the Teutonic or the Slavonian.
I had gone through three-quarters of the tales and notes contained in the present book before I became acquainted with the modestly named _Anmerkungen zu Grimm's Maehrchen_, 2 vols., 1913-15, by J. Bolte and E. Polivka. This is one of those works of colossal erudition of which German savants alone seem to have the secret. It sums up the enormous amount of research that has been going on in Europe for the last hundred years, on the parallelism and provenance of the folk-tales of Europe, and in a measure does for all the Grimm stories what Miss Roalfe Cox did for Cinderella. Only two volumes have as yet appeared dealing with the first 120 numbers of the Grimm collection in over a thousand pages crammed with references and filled with details as to variants. The book has obviously been planned and worked out by Dr. Bolte, who had previously edited the collected works of his chief predecessor, R. Koehler. Dr. Polivka's contribution mainly consists in the collection and collation of the Slavonic variants, which are here made accessible for the first time. I therefore refer to the volume henceforth by Dr. Bolte's name. The book is indispensable for the serious students of the folk-tale, and would have saved me an immense amount of trouble if I had become acquainted with it earlier.
In thirty-eight or nearly a third of the tales Dr. Bolte gives a formula, or radicle, summing up the "common form" of the story, and I am happy to find that in those cases, which occur in the early part of the present volume, my own formulae, agree with his, though of course for the purposes of this book I have had to go into more detail. Dr. Bolte has not as yet expounded any theory of the origin of the Folk Tale, but, with true scientific caution, judges each case on its merits. But his whole treatment assumes the organic unity of each particular formula, and one cannot conceive him regarding the similarities of the tales as due to similar mental workings of the folk mind at a particular stage of social development.