Abstract
Donald Haase has hailed “a concept of textuality that views each tale … as a component in a larger web of texts that are linked to each other in multiple ways and have equal claim to our attention.” In this essay I take up this matter, mutatis mutandis, in the realm of folklore. I argue that folktale variants can be treated as intertexts insofar as they rely on shared meanings. As an example, I ask why in oral folktales Cinderella’s mother becomes a cow. The answer draws on folktales and related folk materials from both ends of Europe.
Highlights
/25/ In an inspiring essay, “Hypertextual Gutenberg: The Textual and Hypertextual Life of Folktales and Fairy Tales in English-Language Popular Print Editions,” Donald Haase hails “a concept of textuality that views each tale not as a text assigned to a permanent place in a linear succession or hierarchy that takes us back to an original or primary form, but as a component in a larger web of texts that are linked to each other in multiple ways and have equal claim to our attention” [225]
In the particular case of Cinderella’s mother, it may be relevant that cows and women are linked in connection with the moon, as pregnancy in both cases lasts ten moons (280 days); and, milk cows aptly symbolize the nurturing aspect of motherhood
This may be, the main point of this exercise is to suggest that a comparative outlook is a precondition for grasping thematic patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed and unexplained
Summary
Published in Marvels & Tales 28.1 (2014): 25–37. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol28/iss1/3/. As Alan Dundes (“Fairy Tales,” 261) insisted, oral narratives convey themes through multiple variations; folklorists face the problem of “the remarkable stability of the essential story in the midst of continually shifting details,” as Stith Thompson [437] put it. Jakobson and Bogatyrev argued, the creations of individual taletellers will endure only insofar as they are accepted and retold—insofar as they survive the “preventive censorship of the community,” which tends to prune away anything not in line with the community-shared values and norms [38] Given this cumulative mechanism of selective appropriations by the community in oral settings, materials in the traditional chain will tend to comply with the extant norm. From the Iberian Peninsula to Greece and Turkey, folktales present Cinderella’s dead mother as a horned animal—most often a cow, sometimes a sheep The stability of this oral trait across Europe is remarkable. Is its raison d’être? To discover a nexus of shared assumptions that might explain this persistent image, I examine a number of “Cinderella” oral variants and some related folk materials across Europe
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