BACK TO GRIMMS: PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE

by Julie Della Torre

Hansel and Gretel by Otto Ligner (1857-1917)

Jack, Paula and I have been telling stories at a program in Paterson that helps women and children with food, shelter, education and anything else they may need. We tell stories to students on Friday afternoons, presently to fifth graders. It seems as if it would be a struggle, horrible time, end of week, end of day, but the kids are enthusiastic and engaged. They fizzle out before 6:00, but they love the stories and the activities we do.

This week Jack and I told ‘Hansel and Gretel’ in tandem. Together we discussed different images in the story and certain symbolism. At one point we focused on the body of water and the duck at the end. He had told ‘Water of Life’ previously and we noticed that the heroes often have to travel over water on the way home from an adventure. When did this body of water enter the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’?  Looking in New Tales For Old (De Vos, 1999) we learned it was added in the second addition. 

Our activity following the telling of the tale was illustration. Many articles contemplate the idea of illustrations informing the text of the story.  Bottiehiemer notes a letter that Wilhelm Grimm wrote to his bother Ludwig who was illustrating their famous collection of stories. Ludwig had portrayed Gretel proudly pushing the old witch into the oven and releasing her brother from the cage. Wilhelm was not happy. He wanted Ludwig to instead show Gretel helplessly weeping near Hansel. Here is yet another example of Jacob and Wilhelm manipulating the tales.

 We brought in multiple copies of numerous illustrated versions of ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ After telling the story we listed the images the students hoped to see in the books.  The students worked in small groups examining the illustrations of the tale. We had to start them off, giving examples of differences to look for, but once they got the idea we didn’t need to do a thing except exclaim over the discoveries they made. They traded books, went from one table to another to share their examples.  As an aside, I was amazed that the bread/candy house was fourth or fifth down their list of images. First and foremost they wanted to see the children abandoned in the dark forest by the fire. The second image they all asked for was the mother and father fighting in the bed. Third was the witch herself... was she the mother? They spent much more time than I would have imagined poring over these pictures, examining all of the details. 

5th grade tableau of H&G lost in the forest

We passed out paper and crayons and they didn’t need any urging to start drawing.  Showing so many different types of illustrations freed the students to create their own images.

5th grade rendering of the forest in H&G

All of the reading and reflecting I’ve been immersed in this month has truly informed my telling and my look at illustrations of fairy tales. I believe it has enthused the work I am doing with colleagues and students.

COLLECTING FOLKTALES

by Julie Della Torre

It is often said that the late 18th and early 19th centuries was the ‘Golden Age’ of collecting folk and fairy tales. As seen in the previous post, the Grimm brothers popularized the gathering of oral folk literature, and the immediacy of this type of collecting continued and the study of folklore and society became a part of academia.

Harold Courlander, a noted collector of folktales from the world, worked in the following era.  I happened on a biography of Courlander written by Nina Jaffe, A Voice for the People: The Life and Work of Harold Courlander,1997.  It was extremely interesting to discover the similarities and the differences between the stories, the collecting and the rational for preserving stories between Courlander and the Grimms. 

Jaffe is a prominent storyteller and compiler of folklore. Her works include, Patakin: World Tales of Drums and Drummers and The Cow of No Color. A Voice for the People was gleaned from Courlander’s writings and interviews Jaffe held with the man himself.  Because the book is written for children, the writing is not as smooth as Paradiz (see previous post). The language is sometimes stilted and the ‘lessons’ Jaffe wants us to leave us with can be blatant. 

Both Courlander and the Grimms were influenced by the country and the times in which they lived. But, where the Grimms wanted to build and preserve German nationality, language and cultural identity, Courlander had a different view. He never romanticized the past or the stories. He grew up in Detroit between WW I and WW II. He was surrounded by immigrants speaking different languages, eating different foods and telling different stories. Detroit was a destination during the Great Migration of African Americans from the South.  All the adults worked together and the children went to school together. To Courlander this diversity was America and was to be celebrated.

Harold Courlander

Right after college Courlander went to Haiti. He lived among the people there and began to gather songs, rhythms and musical instruments. With these came stories.  Folk music was his first work, just as it was for the Grimm brothers. By this time a number of developments changed the way of collecting folklore. For one, technology made it possible to audio record musical and storytelling sessions. Another was the many fields of academic study that became interested. Anthropology, ethnography, philology, musicology, all had criteria for collecting from social settings in cultures. Courlander was curios, a good listener, and patient. He learned to ask questions to better understand the setting of the story/song, the teller/singer, the occasion for the story or song.  He noted all of this and these notes can be found in his collections of stories and his collections of folk music. (He worked for Folkway Records and has many recordings on Ethnic Folkways Library.) One area of interest for Courlander was the similarity of stories and the idea that stories from the Afro-American culture might have direct roots to those stories of Africa. Like the Grimm brothers, he edited the folktales for language and ease of understanding for modern readers.

Like many of you, I rely on Courlander’s many books. I trust his scholarly research, though he never worked at a university. His Treasury of African Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Myths, Legends, Epics, Recollections, Wisdom Sayings, and Humor of Africa. (1995.) and Treasury of Afro-American Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Reflections, Legends, Tales, Songs, Religious Beliefs, Customs, Sayings and Humor of Peo0ple of African Descent in the Americas. (1995) have been fundamental in helping me put programs together and to tell these stories with a deeper understanding. His list of books is too long to include here, but other well-known titles include: The Cow Tail Switch, The Piece of Fire Terrapin’s Pot of Sense and People of the Short Blue Corn. He spent years traveling; gaining the trust of people in the society he was studying and learning the ways and culture of that community.

Uncomfortable issues can arise while reading biographies. Just as issues of German nationalism and the lack of attribution to the female sources brought up in Paradiz’s book, so too, thoughts came to mind while reading this biography. Harold Courlander was a white man collecting stories in African countries, in African American communities of the Caribbean and the Deep South and on Hopi reservations. Unlike the Grimms, he credits all of the help he received in each of these communities, in background knowledge, stories and songs. However, it was noticeable how Jaffe goes out of her way to frequently mention and quote letters from prominent black writers and scholars who were Courlander’s contemporaries, friends and admirers.  Henry Louis Gates Jr. , in his new book,  The Annotated African American Folktales, (2018) notes that The Folklore Society of America had begun in the late 1800s and had already established a branch to gather African American folklore and explore the connection of these tales to those of countries in Africa. Nora Zeale Hurston was collecting stories and she and Courlander met in Haiti. Though I do believe that Courlander was able to gain the trust of the musicians and storytellers in these diverse cultures, I wonder how different it would have been had he been an American black scholar.

Another issue that arose for me was the fact that Courlander was male. Of course, the whole time I was reading this book I was thinking of Diane Wolkstein. She also went to Haiti with a tape recorder to gather stories. She also went to the storytelling sessions on site, recorded, took notes and published her work. (The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales. 978).  Somewhere there is an interview Wolkstein did with Courlander. How interesting that would be to hear two scholars talk about their work and the stories they heard. I have no answers, and I’m sure it wasn’t discussed in their conversation, but I wonder how different it is for a white woman to be traveling, living and learning about a black culture and where, when and how stories are told.  Would a woman collector be included or excluded in different kinds of ceremonies? Would women in the culture have different obligations and tell different stories? Would a female collector ask different questions, be interested in different aspects of society, in different stories? How did such life work impact the families of the male/female collectors?

Due to new technologies, few cultures or societies have not been touched by modernity. New collections of world folktales are being published every day. Are these compilations of previously printed tales or stories newly collected? Personally, I will pay more attention to who compiled/collected the tales and how and even why these new collections came to be.

Clever Maids

by Julie Della Torre

I came across a pile of books I have always meant to read and have moved from one spot to another for years. This summer I decided to start at the top and work my way down. The first book I picked up was Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Valerie Pradiz, 2004. 

Reading the title closely, I should have known what the book was a bout, but, I opened the book expecting an analysis of Grimm’s stories featuring clever maids. Not this book! This was more of a biography of the Grimm’s brothers and their world of collecting. The clever maids referred to in the title are the clever young women from whom they collected their stories. The book also paints a historical and social picture of the Germanic world at this time.

AUTHOR

Valerie Paradiz is a German feminist, activist and author. Her scholarly research of the historical and social culture of the time and her analysis of the tales allows for some interesting connections between the life lived by the Grimm brothers and the tales they collected.

FAMILY

The Grimm’s family (5 boys and one girl) lived a good, middle-class life until the father died, the children still quite young. The mother suffered from what was called melancholia, became dependent on her father and then on offerings from her own siblings. Paradiz portrays the dire straits for women of the time, both monetarily and socially.  She sites tales that feature such women setting the collecting into the social climate and women’s place in it.

HISTORY

The Grimm brothers lived a significant part of their lives during the Napoleonic Wars. Germany had never known a nationalistic unity like France and England due to the many nation states that made up Germany.  The brothers chaffed under the rule of the French in their city and never lost their zeal for furthering the German language, literature, cultural identity and national pride.

COLLECTING

It was the beginning of the Romantic period.  In philosophy and literature there was longing for simplicity, of nature and natural feelings. The brothers yearned for a simpler time, a time of their young childhood in the German countryside. They built the romantic illusion that they collected these old fairy tales from peasant women throughout the German countryside. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The brothers fondly remembered their aunt telling them stories when they were young, but they began their collecting by compiling and cataloguing folk songs for their benefactor/mentor, Brentano.  This collecting grew dissatisfying, for it entailed gathering from written sources. It wasn’t long before the brothers began collecting stories in a new and different way. Their sister, Lotte befriended a family in the neighborhood, a family of six sisters. The Wild family was a middle class family and the girls well educated.  The girls knew many stories and delighted each other in the telling of them. Soon weekly gatherings occurred in which stories were told round; the brothers jotting down the stories as they were told. Soon they began soliciting these stories. The girls would write them down and send them to Jacob and Wilhelm. Some of the stories the girls had heard, some they made up and some were a combination of the two. 

The brothers collected from these girls for many years. When the girls married and moved off Wilhelm discovered a new source of stories, the girls in the Hassenphlug family. Like the first, this family consisted of well educated, middle class girls who delighted in stories, were well-read and had leisure time.  The Brothers Grimm found a number of such families, gathering and soliciting from these young women. Many of these women went on to become the first well-known German female authors. Later the two brothers happened on their ‘ideal’ source. Dorothy Viehamann, an older, illiterate German woman 

The Grimm brothers offered only one story from their childhood for their collected edition Children’s and Household Fairy Tales. All of the other stories came from these ‘clever maids’. The brothers collected the stories, selected the ones they liked, chose and consolidated the most salient parts of similar stories and edited them all.  The Brothers Grimm were surrounded by and influenced by women all their lives. The women who lived their stories and the clever maids who told them were never given any credit by the two brothers. This book strives to right that wrong.