The Fairy Tellers

by Nicholas Jubber

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

The surprising origins and people behind the world's most influential magical tales: the people who told and re-shaped them, the landscapes that forged them, and the cultures that formed them and were in turn formed by them.

Fairy-Tales are not just fairy-tales: they are records of historical phenomena, telling us something about how Western civilisation was formed. In The Fairy-Tellers' Trail, award-winning travel-writer Nick Jubber explores their secret history of fairy-tales: the people who told them, the landscapes that forged them, and the cultures that formed them.

While there are certain names inextricably entwined with the concept of a fairy-tale, such as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, the most significant tellers are long buried under the more celebrated figures who have taken the credit for their stories - people like the Syrian storyteller Youhenna Diab and the Wild Sisters of Cassel. Without them we would never have heard of Aladdin, his Magic Lamp or the adventures of Hansel and Gretel.

Tracking these stories to their sources carries us through the steaming cities of Southern Italy and across the Mediterranean to the dust-clogged alleys of the Maghreb, under the fretting leaves of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy hills of Lapland.

From North Africa and Siberia, this audiobook illuminates the complicated relationship between Western civilisation and the 'Eastern' cultures it borrowed from, and the strange lives of our long lost fairy-tellers.

(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: May 3, 2022

Publisher: Quercus

Print pages: 336

Sample

Acknowledgements

 

 

 

 

 

I’m indebted to the many people who helped me in the research and writing of this book.

One of the most daunting aspects of researching The Fairy Tellers was attempting to breach the citadel of fairy tale scholarship, and I am grateful to the many experts who responded kindly to my questions and requests, helping me to better understand the lives and work of the fairy tellers who feature in this book.

I am particularly grateful to Nancy Canepa, who was always very encouraging and full of insights, exchanging material and thoughts about Giambattista Basile. In Italy, thank you to the members of the Accademia dei Dogliosi for welcoming me in Avellino, especially their president Dr Fiorentino Vecchiarelli. Also thank you to the actors Salvatore d’Onofrio and Carmine Maringola for talking to me about their brilliant performance of La Scortecata.

In France, thanks to Thierry Vincent for talking to me about his production of Beauty and the Beast and sending me the play script. In Denmark, thank you to Dr Anne Klara Bom and Dr Ejnar Stig Askgaard. Thanks also to everyone at the Tivoli Theatre in Copenhagen, especially Peter Bo Bendixen and Peer. Thank you to the cast of Snedronningen for talking to me about Andersen’s tale and their roles in it, and to the staff of the Tivoli Theatre for additional support.

In Finland, thank you to my amazing host in Tampere, Ville Noroila, and his family (and thanks Larissa for the intro!), also thanks to everyone I met in Lapland. A huge thank you to Noora Barria at the SnowCastle in Kemi, and everyone there who answered my questions and gave me such an interesting experience, including a night at a snow hotel.

In Germany, thanks to Mirko Zapp and everyone at Grimmwelt in Kassel, the guild of the Hexensabbat in Waldkirch and the opera house in Giessen, in particular the opera director Moritz Gogg.

Among the many experts who gave me their time, I am grateful to Chirine el-Ansari, Hanan al-Shaykh, Gayathri Prabhu, Arshia Sattar, Brian Stableford, Bernhard Lauer, Sibelan Forrester, Robert Chandler and Jack Zipes.

I was fortunate to be given a month’s residency at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, which was a great place to spend some time writing and thinking. I am very grateful to Vera Michalski-Hoffmann, Guillaume Dollmann, Chantal Buffet and everybody at the JMF, and also to my fellow writers Piotr, Ania, Jenny, Isabelle and Marina, whose company was always such a joy.

Thanks to Neil Walker for refreshing my memory of our lawn play from long ago (and for arranging the marvellous fairy tale tower on the college lawns!).

For help with translations, I am grateful to Marine Boussac-Maltby (French), Gerlinde Schermer-Rauwolf (German), Marina Skalova (Russian) and Nancy Canepa (Neapolitan).

For their suggestions and advice on early drafts of the book, I am very grateful for the feedback I received from Poppy Maltby, Jennifer Croft, Carrie Plitt, Nancy Canepa, Kate Forsyth, Gayathri Prabhu, Arshia Sattar, Sibelan Forrester and Ejnar Stig Askgaard.

This is my third book with John Murray and I’d like to salute everyone for their work on it, including those whose endeavours will only become apparent after the book has gone to press. My editor, Joe Zigmond, has been an incisive and wonderfully challenging collaborator throughout this project, and I greatly appreciate his rigorous editorial input. Thanks also to Kate Craigie, to Rosie Collins for the design work, to Sara Marafini and the cover team, Rachael Duncan for publicity, and to Caroline Westmore and Hilary Hammond for their thorough and detailed work on the copy-edit, and to Judy Spours for her proofreading. Thanks also to my agent, Carrie Plitt, and everybody at Felicity Bryan Associates, who I hope will be giving this book lots of support as it goes out into the world.

Writing during a global pandemic was of course something of a challenge, but I couldn’t have wished for a more supportive family, and I’m grateful to my wife Poppy for all the encouragement she gives me, and to Milo and Rafe for everything they’ve taught me, especially about dinosaur fossils, apparating spells and the technical specifications of Lego spaceships.

This book is dedicated to my brother and sister, Anne-Marie and Christopher, with whom I shared my first experiences of fairy tales and my first adventures into imaginary worlds. Thank you for every step we took together, and I’m sorry if my love of such stories made my grip on the real world a little blurry at times.

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Chapter 1

Giambattista Basile

Back, back, back . . . seek out the roots of the fairy tale and we’re hacking one thorny hedge after another, all the way back to the Stone Age. We could climb out in North Africa in the second century ad, which is where the Latin-writing high priest and philosopher Lucius Apuleius scribbled down ‘Cupid and Psyche’, the oldest-known literary Western fairy tale, about a beautiful princess in an enchanted palace who scalds her mysterious lover with a drop of oil and sets out on a troubled journey to find him again, performing arduous chores to appease her vindictive mother-in-law, helped by an entire district’s population of ants, a kindly talking reed and an eagle.

Or we could leap out in medieval India, where we find hundreds of tales of magical doings, lovers separated by twists of fate, people and gods transformed into animals, in the wonderfully titled The Ocean of the Streams of Story (written circa 1070 ad), a collection to which we’ll be turning our attention before this trail is done.

Or how about a trip to sixteenth-century Venice? There we’d encounter Giovanni Francesco Straparola, whose Facetious Nights (published 1551–5) contained around fifteen fairy tales (in a collection of seventy-five), including the earliest written version of ‘Puss in Boots’ as well as forerunners to ‘The Golden Goose’ and ‘Donkey-Skin’.

But this trail starts with a collection penned in southern Italy in the seventeenth century, notable for its direct connection to many of our most popular tales. It was entitled Lo cunto de li cunti – The Tale of Tales – and its author went by the pen name ‘Gian Alesio Abbattutis’ – the surname translating as ‘the dejected one’.

Which turned out to be a misdirection. Giambattista Basile was known, to quote a contemporary, for ‘his perpetual cheerfulness of spirit, for which he was deemed the life of conversations’. Like Princess Zoza, the melancholy heroine whose tale frames his story collection, he lit up the people around him; and like his heroine, he roamed far and wide in search of his dream. But he returned to his home shores around Naples and lived out his life at the Italian courts. Giambattista was a prolific author, although only a moderately successful one. Nothing published in his lifetime would be remembered. His legacy rests, instead, on the posthumous collection of tales, published shortly after his death, in 1634–6.

Venture into this four-hundred-year-old cavern of narrative and you’ll meet storytelling at its most sumptuous and strange: where a childless queen is impregnated by the cooked heart of a sea dragon, a man prevails on a kingdom of mice to help him reclaim his lost fortune (as long as he pays them enough cheese) and a cockroach burrows inside the rectum of its master’s lordly rival, turning itself into a suppository to make him shit all over his bride. But you will also encounter some of our most familiar childhood tales.

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.

Although fairy tales can be found in the aforementioned collections, Giambattista’s was the first to be devoted entirely to fairy tales, ‘the sort that old women usually entertain the little ones with’, as he defines them near the beginning of his book. It’s in The Tale of Tales that we find recognisable versions of our classic fairy tales for the first time; where the stories are driven not by the machinations of gods but by the antics of ogres and witches; where fingers are pricked on spinning-wheels and princesses are locked in towers; stepmothers are routinely cast as villains and forests as amphitheatres for magical goings-on. It is from Giambattista’s collection, in some cases very specifically, that we can trace a path to the beloved tales we know today.

Asylum in Crete

So who was the man who put these tales together? He was born around 1575, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Cervantes: a figure of the Renaissance, living through the Counter-Reformation and Age of Discovery when Europe wrestled with new ideas in science and religion, its cities enriched by precious goods and people pulled out of faraway lands. All of these elements would find their way into his tales.

Growing up in the pleasant resort of Posillipo, on the fringe of the court of Naples, Giambattista passed a comfortable youth, but an unfruitful one. Without a noble patron, a life of letters was unthinkable. So he travelled across Italy and charmed his way into the graces of a Venetian nobleman called Andrea Cornaro.

The Venetian Republic had interests in Crete, and Giambattista made his way to the embattled island as part of Cornaro’s entourage. Squint hard and we can visualise him: manning the Lazaretto battery, setting out in pursuit of corsairs, in a galleon loaded with powder and the contraband arquebuses captured from unlicensed ships, even taking part in a battle against the galleys of the Ottoman Turks. But soldiering, as Giambattista wrote in his Tales, is a hazardous enterprise: you’re liable to be ‘completely destroyed, or crippled’ with nothing to show but ‘the subsidy of a pair of crutches, or a treatment for scabies, or – and it’s the lesser evil – a pension plan in the hospital’.

A surviving portrait shows the gentle expression of a man more likely to pour witticisms in your ear than bellow across the plaza. Smooth waves of hair flow above dark gleaming eyes, which peer at the viewer with humorous scepticism. His curling whisk collar and his beaded doublet hold him to the age, along with the sword pommel peeking out from a curled hand; but something in that wry expression speaks across the centuries, inviting us to share the joke with him.

Described by a contemporary as ‘the true epitome of an exquisitely refined gentleman’, Giambattista was better suited to swapping tales in noblemen’s salons than holding off mortar-pieces from hastily erected siege towers. In Crete he found himself in Cornaro’s Academia degli Stravaganti, ‘Academy of the Eccentrics’. The heyday of the literary gentlemen’s club had begun: members sat around delicately carved tables, fooling around with satires or dazzling each other with the latest scientific formulae. Every member had a code name: Giambattista’s was Il Pigro (‘The Lazy One’). Whether or not this was a comment on his disinclination for fighting, we have firmer proof that he wasn’t cut out for a soldier’s life: within a year he’d resigned his commission and decided to return to Naples. The ‘ungrateful shores’ he called them. They may have spurned him in his youth, but now he was older and better connected, a talented scribbler with a knack for making friends. All he needed was a bit of fairy dust. Or, to use its more workaday name: luck.

Megalopolis

One of the most exhilarating views in Naples is from the belvedere outside Saint Martin’s Charterhouse on the Vomero Hill. Wandering around the old city, trying not to get squashed by the motorcycles or flattened against walls of crumbling plaster, you pop out of the labyrinth like a cork out of a bottle of Prosecco, flying up wide stone steps crackling with broken glass, and lean into the classic Neapolitan panorama.

Above, the hexagonal ramparts of Saint Elmo’s Castle claw the crest of the Vomero, forming a giant star of volcanic tufa. Behind, the charterhouse facade is dazzling white, a sun-kissed screen for the mosaic-work, handcrafted nativity scenes and Baroque paintings inside. If it weren’t for Mount Vesuvius, bristling across the valley, this formidable assembly would preen triumphant over the Bay of Naples. As it is, wedged between the volcano and the smoking craters of the Phlegraean Fields, Naples exists in a state of dramatic tension: commanding the sea but cowering under the deadliest lava spewer on mainland Europe.

Giambattista would have climbed these steps if he joined his literary friends on their regular visits to the prisoner Tommaso Campanella, who was chained in the castle dungeon throughout the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Languishing in his dank confinement, Campanella was composing a groundbreaking utopian philosophy, The City of the Sun, in which he challenged prevailing wisdom with a radical reimagining of social structures – a society where ‘all things are common’ and ‘both sexes are instructed in all the arts together’.

Although Campanella was derided by the authorities and most of his contemporaries, he was admired by many, including the aristocrat Giovanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa, and founder of a literary academy (the Academy of Idlers) in which Giambattista became an early member. Campanella’s radical philosophy reflected the questing anxieties of the age. While Giambattista was re-establishing himself in Naples, another acquaintance of the Marquis of Villa was making his first telescopic observations in Padua. Galileo Galilei’s study of the phases of Venus, proving that the planets orbit the Sun, would underpin a radical shift in European science and philosophy, changing not only the way the universe was seen but also our place within it. The Inquisition would condemn the scientist a year before The Tale of Tales was published.

Wrestling cosmology free of theology was fractious and at times violent, and it engaged the minds of many of Giambattista’s acquaintances, like the natural philosopher Giambattista della Porta (who, amongst many achievements, perfected the camera obscura, developed the power of steam and printed a crucial proof – smashing a widespread belief of the time – that magnets couldn’t be disempowered by garlic). Despite the menace of papal inquisitions, scientists were illuminating the universe. If the cosmos was vaster than had previously been appreciated, and humanity’s place less central, what other certainties were starting to wobble? A feeling of displacement rippled through intellectual society. We find it expressed not only in the work of Giambattista’s scientific contemporaries but also in that of his fellow artists