Abstract
Hanna Dyâb’s characterisation of a witch figure as a magicienne in his 1709 story ‘Prince Ahmed and Pari Banou’ typifies early modern depictions of evil females in magic tales. Institutional censorship, individual awareness of accusations of witchcraft and authorial writing practices all contribute to the various ways of depicting wicked women as something other than witches. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s editing of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1807–1857) witchified evil women in the collection’s best known tales; their collection’s powerful influence on genre expectations about fairy tales displaced earlier visions of evil in fairy tales and created an assumption that witches were integral to traditional fairy tales.
This chapter celebrates Willem de Blécourt’s magisterial command of European tale repertoires and his nuanced contributions to modern scholarship.
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Notes
- 1.
The storyteller’s name has been transliterated variously. I use the transliteration in his memoir, Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, Bernard Heyberger, and Jérôme Lentin (trans. and eds.), d’Alep à Paris: Les pérégrinations d’un jeune Syrien au temp de Louis XIV (Paris, 2015).
- 2.
The narratives analysed in this article cluster around two stories, as classified in Hans-Jörg Uther, Types of International Folktales (Helsinki, 2004). The first is ‘Prince Ahmed and Pari Banou’, which combines ATU 653A, ‘The Rarest Thing in the World’, and ATU 465, ‘The Man Persecuted Because of his Beautiful Wife’. See Ulrich Marzolph, Richard van Leuwen, Hassan Wassouf (eds.), Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, 2004), 81; the second comprises a range of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ variants, which include ATU 327A. 327B and ATU 511.
- 3.
Reiniger’s designs were closely related to silhouette fairy tale illustrations by the English illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867–1939). Rackham’s Cinderella (1919) and his Sleeping Beauty (1920), both with silhouette illustrations, preceded Reiniger’s Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. It has been stated that Reiniger’s inspiration for silhouette animation derived from Chinese theatre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotte_Reiniger), but the design similarities with Rackham’s oeuvre make it reasonable to consider his work as well in the development of her style.
- 4.
Reiniger may well have known of Raoul Walsh’s 1924 Thief of Baghdad, which adapted Arabian Nights material for the screen.
- 5.
The precise date was Wednesday, May 22, 1709. See Frédéric Bauden and Richard Waller (eds.), Le Journal d’Antoine Galland (1646–1715): La période parisienne (Leuven, 2011), 1: 343–6. In Uther, Types, it is listed as ATU 653A, ‘The Rarest Thing in the World’, and ATU 465, ‘The Wise Brothers’.
- 6.
I don’t include in the principal discussion of Mme d’Aulnoy’s term conte des fées, which allowed her to compliment members of the aristocratic circle surrounding her dedicatée by associating them with members of the fairy kingdom.
- 7.
Galland renamed Bedr al-Bodour ‘Nourounnihar’. For Galland’s text, I have used Jean-Paul Sermain and Aboubakr Chraïbi (eds.), Les Mille et Une Nuits, 3 vols. (Paris, 2004).
- 8.
The motif of the princes’ father also entertaining an interest in marrying his niece is unrelated to the theme of this essay, and so I do not pursue that element here.
- 9.
The amount (which Dyâb also gives as ‘forty’) echoes the sum paid to Judas for betraying Jesus, with which Dyâb, as a Christian, would have been familiar. This provides an(other) instance of image-by-association in Dyâb’s storytelling repertoire. Here, he links an amount of money (thirty pieces of silver) with a faithless person (the sultan his father).
- 10.
The carpet of ‘Prince Ahmed and Pari Banou’ would appear to mark the point at which a flying carpet enters the world of fairy tales, a theme addressed in Ruth Bottigheimer, ‘Flying Carpets in the Arabian Nights: Disney, Dyâb … and d’Aulnoy?’ (forthcoming).
- 11.
In this section, Pari Banou gives him a ball of string (peloton) that he is to follow on horseback, while a second horse, bearing a sheep cut into quarters, accompanies him. The rolling ball leads him to the four lion guardians, whom he distracts with the quarters of mutton, enabling him to get the water and return with it to his father. Two of the lions accompany him to the court, one before and one behind him. Thus he returns to his father and presents him with the water. One notes here that the specialised term ‘peloton’ appears in d’Aulnoy’s ‘Finette Cendron’, where the fairy Merluche gives Finette a ‘peloton’ to pursue the opposite direction, that is, to unwind on her outward journey in order to find her way home. This constitutes yet another testimony to Dyâb’s familiarity with d’Aulnoy’s text. See [Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy] Nadine Jasmin (ed.), Contes des Fées, suivis des Contes nouveaus ou Les Fées à la mode (Paris, 2004), 441.
- 12.
With a specified height of only one and a half foot lengths and a standard foot measurement of about 10 inches or approximately 25 cm, the little man’s height would be approximately 15 inches or 37 cm.
- 13.
The beard, measuring thirty footlengths, is equivalent to 450 inches or 1010 cm, which is about 37 feet, or more than 10 metres long, nearly ten times the little man’s height.
- 14.
[Galland], Journal, 1: 345: ‘La Magicienne l’assure que le Prince Ahmed n’est pas mort mais qu’elle ne scait pas precisement ou il estoit.’
- 15.
The fact that Dyâb makes one sibling a jinn and the other a fairy exemplifies the co-existence of two storytelling cultures in his imaginary.
- 16.
Readers will note that I specify the conte de fée as composed by Parisian conteuses. Note the use of ‘predominantly’ and ‘generally’, since dystopic tales such as ‘Le Nain jaune’ (The Yellow Dwarf) and ‘Le Mouton’ (The Ram) provide counterexamples. They are, however, in the minority. In plot, style and structure Galland, like Dyâb, wrote in the mode of the conteuses, rather than in the style of Perrault, whose ‘Cendrillon’, for instance, allowed Cinderella’s taunting stepsisters to be rewarded rather than punished for their cruel behaviour.
- 17.
Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale (Paris, 1697).
- 18.
Sylvette Larzul, ‘Further Considerations on Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits: a study of the tales told by Hanna’, Marvels and Tales, 18.2 (2004), 258–71, at 259.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid., 264.
- 21.
Ibid., 265.
- 22.
For a discussion of the constraints and complexities of depicting a witch in a magic tale meant for popular consumption, see Ruth Bottigheimer, ‘The Problematics of Magic on the Threshold of Fairy Tale Magic: Straparola’s Pleasant Nights’ in Magic Tales and Fairy Tale Magic from Ancient Egypt to the Italian Renaisance (Basingstoke, 2014), 148–67, esp. 163–5.
- 23.
See Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Age: Morgiane et Mélusine: la naissance des fées (Geneva, 1984); Maren Clausen-Stolzenburg, Märchen und mittelalterliche Literaturtradition (Heidelberg, 1995); Martine Hennard de la Rochère and Véronique Dasen, ‘Des Fata aux fées: regards croisés de l’Antiquité à nos jours’ in eid. (eds.), Des Fata aux fées: regards croisés à nos jours (Revue Études de lettres, Lausanne, 2011), 15–34.
- 24.
For instance, Straparola’s ‘Ancilotto’ (Night 4, Story 3) provided both plot and characters for Dyâb’s ‘Two Jealous Sisters’ (the concluding tale in Galland’s collection), while ‘La Chatte blanche’ (‘The White Cat’) by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (c. 1650–1705) underlay Hanna Dyâb’s ‘Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Pari Banou’, the next to last tale there. See Ruth Bottigheimer, ‘East Meets West in Thousand and One Nights’, Marvels & Tales, 28.2 (2014), 302–24 and id., ‘Hannâ Diyâb, Antoine Galland, and Hannâ Diyâb’s Tales: I. On-the-Spot Recordings, Later Summaries, and One Translation; II. Western Sources in Eastern Texts’ in Mémoires de l’Association pour la Promotion de l’Histoire et de l’Archéologie Orientales (Leuven, 2018).
- 25.
The relevant passages can be examined in Louveau and Larivey’s French translation in which Hanna Dyâb would have read Straprola’s tales. See Joël Gayraud (trans. and ed.), Les Nuits facétieuses (Paris, 1999), 412, 414–19. It is interesting to note that Louveau and Larivey seem to be actively avoiding the satanic arts, because the Straparolean text from which they translated called Lactantio’s nécromancie a science, rather than the result of a compact with Satan (Straparola [1553] 1999, 411). The original Italian wording, nigromanzia, identifies Latanzio’s magic skill with one of the two arti of which he is master, the other being tailoring (sartoria). See Donato Pirovano (ed.), Le piacevoli notti, 2 vols. (Rome, 2000), 2: 2552–3.
- 26.
Straparola also composed tales in which charlatans pretend to have magic abilities in order to gull the credulous: Night 5, Story 4; Night 6, Story 1; and Night 10, Story 1.
- 27.
In Basile’s tales the greatest sources of personal danger to heroes’ and heroines’ happiness remain their nearest and dearest: a lecherously incestuous father in ‘The She-Bear’ (Day 1, Story 6), in which a mother-in-law is not a witch in disguise, but a well-meaning mother who wants to restore her son to health by uniting him with the woman he loves.
- 28.
The sultan’s three sons are in love (amoueux) with their cousin; the sultan doesn’t wish to show partiality for one son over another (afin de ne pas marquer plus de partialité pour l’un que pour l’autre); Prince Ali, noticeably upset (avec des marques d’une douleur excessive), tells his brothers of their cousin’s illness; Prince Ahmed is not less afflicted (affligé) than his brothers at this bad news; Prince Hussein similarly suffers (sa part de l’affliction) at the bad news; and the sultan cannot escape from his indecision (son incertitude).
- 29.
The sultan suffers from anxiety (l’inquietude) over Prince Ahmed's long absence; Pari Banou harbors suspicions (soupçons) about their ‘sick’ guest; the sultan becomes jealous (jaloux) of Prince Ahmed; Prince Ahmed, very sad (fort triste), returns to the underground palace; there he can hardly explain his sadness (il a de la peine a declarer le suiet de sa tristesse); the prince believes that Pari Banou is making fun of him (se moque de lui); the prince returns to the palace just as sad (aussi triste) as before; the presence of two lions, one fore and one aft, astonished him and plunged him into great fear (fort estonné et dans une grande fraieur); and townspeople and dogs alike were overwhelmed by fear at Schaïbar’s appearance (prit la fuite des qu’on le vit paroistre).
- 30.
Jérôme Lentin, ‘Note sur la langue de Hanna Dyâb’ in Fahmé-Thiéry, Heyberger and Lentin (eds.), d’Alep a Paris, 48–51 (here 50), 99, 162.
- 31.
The Witch Craze. Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven and London, 2004), 160–78. See also Roper, The Witch in the European Imagination (Charlottesville, 2012).
- 32.
Donato Pirovano, ‘Per l’edizione de ‘Le Piacevoli notti’ di Giovan Francesco Strawparola’, Filologia critica, 26 (2001), 60–93; Brendan Dooley, Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy (2016), 29–40.
- 33.
My chronology begins with the 1551 publication of Straparola’s Piacevoli Notti in Venice and continues to the first edition of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812.
- 34.
Perrault’s restoration fairy tales include ‘Donkeyskin’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, with ‘Cinderella’ as a quasi-restoration fairy tale. His rise tales are ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The Fairies’, and ‘Little Thumbling’. ‘Ricky of the Tuft’ is a complicated morality tale with magic; ‘Blue Beard’, a quasi-rise tale, but without magic, is not a fairy tale. ‘Griselda’ is a classic novella; ‘The Ridiculous Wishes’ is a folk tale and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ a warning tale. I use texts in Jacques Barchilon (ed.), Contes de Perrault (Geneva, 1980).
- 35.
It is often argued that ‘Dick Whittington’ was England’s equivalent to Straparola’s ‘Costantino Fortunato’, Basile’s ‘Cagliuso’, and Perrault’s ‘Puss in Boots’. Dick Whittington’s cat, however, did not embody magic and was not fatata (enchanted), as were Straparola’s, Basile’s and Perrault’s cats. Moreover, its appetite for rats and mice was prodigious, but not unnatural or magical. That absence of magic removes Dick Whittington from consideration as a rise fairy tale, in which magic plays an essential part.
- 36.
This narrative migration of French fairy tales and fairyland fictions has been laid out by Gonthier-Louis Fink in Naissance et apogée du conte merveilleux en Allemagne (1740–1800) (Paris, 1966) and minutely detailed by Manfred Grätz in Märchen in der deutschen Aufklärung: Vom Feenmärchen zum Volksmärchen (Stuttgart, 1988).
- 37.
Over the fifty years of editing Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Wilhelm’s editorial reshaping of the collection moved stories told by fellow Reformed Protestants steadily away from the eighteenth-century gender liberalism of Reformed Protestantism towards the more restrictive and punitive gender views reigning in nineteenth-century Europe as a whole and in Germany in particular.
- 38.
Wilhelm Grimm’s editing contrasts sharply with that of his younger contemporary Ludwig Bechstein, who sought and achieved parity between wicked women (witches) and men (sorcerers) in his Deutsche Märchen (1845 et seq.). See Ruth Bottigheimer, ‘Ludwig Bechstein’s Fairy Tales: Nineteenth-Century Bestsellers and Bürgerlichkeit’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschicht-e der deutschen Literatur, 15.2 (1990), 55–88, at 67.
- 39.
I would note in passing that Hansel and Gretel’s implied social rise, as presented in the text of the tale, hinges on the relocation of precious goods (from the witch’s hut to their paternal house) rather than on the wealth and comfort attendant on a poor person’s marrying royalty. In this regard, the plot of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ is a variation on the rise fairy tale model introduced by Straparola.
- 40.
Montanus, Martin, Das Ander theyl der Gartegesellschaft ([Strassburg, late1550s] Hildesheim, 1972). Most of the text appears in modern German in Max Lüthi, Es war einmal: vom Wesen des Volksmärchens (Göttingen, 1983), 43–51. Note Roper’s discussion of the same material in the Epilogue (247–252) of Witch Craze.
- 41.
A definition or description of this supernatural figure is elusive.
- 42.
German literary history is full of instances of tales in Romance languages moving into Germanic languages. The movement of Montanus’s tale from Strasbourg to Naples is a relatively rare instance of a German tale moving into the Romance tradition.
- 43.
Nancy Canepa (trans. and ed.), Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for the Little Ones (Detroit, 2001), 427–32.
- 44.
Michaele Rak (trans. and ed.), Giambattista Basile. Lo cunti de li cunto (Milan, 1981), 968–81.
- 45.
de Blécourt, ‘On the Origin’, 30.
- 46.
Christine A. Jones, Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales (Detroit, 2016), 162.
- 47.
d’Aulnoy, Contes, 439–57.
- 48.
Heinz Rölleke (ed.), Die Älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm (Geneva, 1975), 76.
- 49.
Later in the tale’s editorial history, in the 1840s, Wilhelm changed the mother into a stepmother.
- 50.
Heinz Rölleke (ed.), Kinder- und Hausmärchen Gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm [hereafter KHM] (Göttingen, 1986), 75.
- 51.
Ibid., 77.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Ibid., 79.
- 54.
Wilhelm Grimm’s frequent use of ‘die Alte’ in ‘Hänsel und Gretel’ is consistent with Roper’s observations about age in Chap. 7 of Witch Craze (‘Crones’, 160–78) and contrasts notably with his single use of the term in ‘Frau Holle’ (KHM 24). Instead he calls this elderly female moral arbiter (and therefore a representative of goodness) by her proper name, Frau Holle. Hildegard Gerlach notes: ‘Die Synthese Alte Frau/H[exe] findet für die d[eutsche] Märchen ihre volle Ausprägung im 19. Jh. in den S[ammlungen] der Brüder Grimm und bes[onders] L. Bechstein’. Gerlach gives many instances from the Grimms’ tales, but her Bechstein reference must have derived more narrowly from Bechstein’s writings specifically about witches rather than from his Deutsche Märchen and Neue Deutsche Märchen, which are remarkably gender-neutral in evil-incarnated-as-witch-or-sorcerer. See Gerlach, ‘Hexe’, Enzyklopädie des Märchens (Berlin, 1990), 6: cols. 960–92 at 965.
- 55.
Rudolph Schenda, ‘Alte Leute’, Enzyklopädie des Märchens (Berlin, 1977), 1: cols. 373–80.
- 56.
Roper, Witch Craze, 251.
- 57.
Ibid., 252.
- 58.
Perrault’s fairy tales were widely available in German translation from the 1790s onwards in the Bleue Bibliothek aller Nationen published in Leipzig.
- 59.
Bottigheimer, ‘Ludwig Bechstein’s Fairy Tales’.
- 60.
Id., ‘The Publishing History of Grimms’ Tales: Reception at the Cash Register’ in Donald P. Haase (ed.), The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reaction, Revisions (Detroit, 1993), 77–101.
- 61.
Hermann Bausinger, ‘Gut und Böse’, Enzyklopädie des Märchens, 6: 316–23; Katalin Horn, ‘Polarität’, Enzyklopädie des Märchens (Berlin, 2002), 10: 1111–16.
- 62.
Walter Scherf, Lexikon der Zaubermärchen (Stuttgart, 1982), 102 (seine rechte Mutter in Tiergestalt), 103 (die rechte Mutter); id., Das Märchen Lexikon, 2 vols. (Munich, 1995), 1: 271–2, identical wording).
- 63.
Beuno Bettelheim, ‘Hänsel und Gretel, mein Lieblingsmärchen’, Psychotherapie—Psychosomatik—Medizini-sche—Psy-ch-ologie, 37 (1987), 1–9. Bettelheim previously made the equation in The Uses of Enchantment (New York, 1977), 163. For an alternative interpretation, see Ruth Bottigheimer, ‘Bettelheims Hexe: Die fragwürdige Beziehung zwischen Märchen und Psy-choanalyse’ Psychotherapie—Psychosomatik—Medizini-sche—Psy-ch-ologie, 39 (1989), 294–9.
- 64.
Gerlach, ‘Hexe’, col. 966.
- 65.
Gerlach also understands the Stiefmutterhexe (stepmother-witch) in fairy tales (‘Hexe’, col. 966) as a historical product of families newly formed after a mother’s death, although she doesn’t deal with the fact that this figure only began to appear in large numbers in the modern era.
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Bottigheimer, R.B. (2018). Hanna Dyâb’s Witch and the Great Witch Shift. In: Barry, J., Davies, O., Usborne, C. (eds) Cultures of Witchcraft in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present . Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63784-6_3
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