The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (Penguin Classics)

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

THE TURNIP PRINCESS

FRANZ XAVER VON SC
HÖNWERTH
(1810–1886) was born in Amberg, Bavaria. He had a successful career in law and the Bavarian royal court, rising to the post of personal secretary to the Crown Prince Maximilian. In the 1850s he began to explore the culture of the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria, recording his observations and the stories of the people he interviewed. Eventually he devoted himself full-time to his collection and, between 1857 and 1859, published
From the Upper Palatinate: Customs and Legends
, cataloging the customs and folktales of his homeland in unprecedented detail. This work contained only a fraction of his total research, the rest of which was eventually discovered in an archive, forming an important addition to the canon of classic fairy tales.

ERIKA EIC
HENSEER
discovered five hundred previously unknown fairy tales of Franz Xaver von Schönwerth in the municipal archive of Regensburg, Bavaria, in 2009. In 2010 she published a selection entitled
Prinz Roßzwifl
[Prince Dung Beetle]. She began her career as a teacher, then worked for the cultural department of the regional government of East Bavaria. An expert on fairy tales and on puppet theater, she has written numerous books on folk art and customs and has appeared on television, produced radio programs, and performed all over Bavaria as a storyteller. She is co-founder and director of the Schönwerth Society and initiator of the Schönwerth Fairytale Path in Sinzing, near Regensburg, and she wrote the libretto for a musical based on Schönwerth’s “The Flying Chest.” She has been awarded many honors for her services to Bavarian culture.

MARIA TATAR
chairs the program in folklore and mythology at Harvard. She is the author of many acclaimed books on folklore and fairy tales, as well as the editor and translator of
The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen
,
The Annotated Brothers Grimm
,
The Classic Fairy Tales: A Norton Critical Edition
, and
The Grimm Reader
. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ENGELBERT SÜSS
is a well-known sculptor, glass-artist, and illustrator who was born in 1949 in eastern Bavaria. He created the bronze statue
King of Dwarfs
for the Schönwerth Fairytale Path in Sinzing, Bavaria.

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First published in Penguin Books 2015

Selection and foreword copyright © 2015 by Erika Eichenseer

Translation, introduction and commentary copyright © 2015 by Maria Tatar

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Maria Tatar’s translation of “The Turnip Princess” was published in
The Guardian
, March 5, 2012. Ms. Tatar’s translation of “King Goldenlocks” appeared in
The New Yorker
, issue of April 2, 2012.

ISBN 978-0-698-14455-2

Foreword

“I’m here. Why do you keep rejecting me?”

“Just pull on the nail.”

—“
THE
TURNIP
PRINCESS
,”
P
. 4

Fairy tales are that simple. All you need is a rusty nail, and something that is hidden away, spellbound, and beautiful can be transformed, disenchanted, and reanimated. In real life no one hands us a nail that can lift away all our cares.

The fairy tales collected by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) seemed to have vanished into thin air. These tales from the Upper Palatinate, the eastern part of Bavaria, were hidden away for a long time.

In 2009, after searching for many years, I made the exhilarating discovery that there were about five hundred fairy tales among the Schönwerth papers stored almost like buried treasure in the municipal archive of the city of Regensburg. The enthusiastic nineteenth-century folklorist and collector of tales had recognized that his era was witnessing a rapid decline in oral storytelling traditions. For that reason, he and his friends made the rounds, asking for stories from plainspoken men and women within the confines of their native territory. At first there was some reluctance to tell tales, but that was followed by eagerness to share. This is oral history in the truest sense of the term.

The social standing of the tellers and the collectors varied widely. In the archival materials there are some linguistically sophisticated texts with romantic flourishes but also some terse and fragmentary drafts, and they all have proven valuable. The tales are particularly colorful and lively when told in the regional dialect.

This book will fill a gap in German-speaking countries and in the global fairy tales landscape, appealing to readers young and old. And it is also directed at scholars who will be able to evaluate, analyze, and honor this particular selection of tales from the archive of a collector and researcher who was something of a pioneer. The door has been unlocked, and now it can swing wide open.

“No one in Germany has gathered tales so thoughtfully and thoroughly and with such finesse.” This observation about Schönwerth made in 1858 by Jacob Grimm can be seen as a tribute, an acknowledgment, and a commitment to pay attention to an important message about nature and how it is animated by marvelous creatures as well as about how the magical and the natural blend into each other.

Let me close with one additional thought. Storytelling is an ancient art that rarely receives the respect it deserves. Is it even possible to find someone these days with the time to give something precious to listeners, who understands stories at a profound level and can tell them without a book or a page in hand?

“A world without fairy tales and myths would be as drab as life without music.”

—
GEORG
TRAKL

ERIKA E
ICHENSEER

Introduction

When the British press reported in 2012 that five hundred unknown fairy tales, languishing for more than a century in the municipal archive of Regensburg, Germany, had come to light, the news sent a flutter through the world of fairy-tale enthusiasts, their interest further piqued by the detail that the tales—which had been compiled in the mid-nineteenth century by a man named Franz Xaver von Schönwerth—had been kept under lock and key. Victoria Sussens-Messerer, the author of the article published in the
Guardian
, created an unanticipated sensation, reminding us of the powerful global and cross-generational reach of these tales. A fairy tale soon emerged about mysterious treasures locked up and released at last, but the tale of how Schönwerth’s fairy tales came to see the light of day has more to do with determination and detective work than with magic. Erika Eichenseer, a resident of the city, opened thirty dusty cardboard boxes of Schönwerth’s tales and turned them into fairy-tale gold by reading, sorting, transcribing, and providing context for them. She has labored tirelessly in the service of these tales to ensure that they find their place in the folkloric pantheon. And now, with this English translation, a broader audience will have access to tales that possess a uniquely local narrative energy and provide a strong comparative basis for understanding the quirks of stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, whose tales became the dominant player in the global fairy-tale market.

Franz Xaver von Schönwerth was inspired by the Grimms, less by their best-known compendium,
Children’s Stories and Household Tales,
than by their
German Mythology
, which a friend gave to him in 1835. Born in 1810 in the small Bavarian town of Amberg, Schönwerth studied architecture before settling into his legal studies and becoming a high-level civil servant, working first as a secretary to Maximilian II of Bavaria, and then in the Bavarian Finance Ministry. A man whom the Brothers Grimm praised for his “fine ear” and accuracy as a collector, he published three volumes of folk customs and legends in the mid-nineteenth century (
Aus der Oberpfalz: Sitten und Sagen
), but the books did little more than gather dust in bookshops. Like the Brothers Grimm, Schönwerth was an equal-opportunity collector, less intent on finding a source close to the soil, as it were, than a story with real zest. The task was challenging in many ways, for as Schönwerth noted, few took his project seriously.

Why would a high-level government official pay any attention to frivolous storytelling pursuits? How could he possibly take them seriously? Schönwerth found the trivialization of folk culture in his Munich surroundings discouraging: “I did not have an easy task . . . since I had to search out compatriots here in Munich and subject them to something of an inquisition. At home, women and weavers were easy to bribe with small gifts and treats, and they regaled me with stories, gladly in large part because I was the first one to talk with them in the regional dialect.”

Schönwerth needed vast amounts of patience to secure what he wanted from other informants: “These people can’t seem to get it through their heads that a scholar might actually be interested in their ‘stupidities’ [
Dummheiten
], and they begin to worry that you are just trying to make them look like fools.” Long before Disney, folktales were seen as lacking the kind of substance that might make them worthy of scholarly attention. They had already begun to make the great migration from the childhood of culture into the culture of childhood, now as tales of Mother Goose, old wives’ tales, or, worse yet, fairy tales—what the Grimms called
Kindermärchen.

Schönwerth’s tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, collectors who gave us relatively tame versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel.” Schönwerth gives us a harsher dose of reality. His Cinderella is a woodcutter’s daughter who uses golden slippers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun. His miller’s daughter wields an ax and uses it to disenchant a prince by whacking off the tail of a gigantic black cat. The stories remain untouched by literary sensibilities. No throat-clearing for Schönwerth, who begins in medias res, with “A princess was ill” or “A prince was lost in the woods,” rather than “Once upon a time.”

Though he was inspired by the Grimms, Schönwerth was more invested in the local than in the global. If the Grimms wanted to preserve remnants of a collective pagan past and to consolidate national identity by preserving in print rapidly fading cultural stories, Schönwerth was committed to documenting the oral traditions of his beloved Bavarian homeland. This explains the rough-hewn quality of his tales, many of which were written down in the native dialect. Not one to dress up a tale with literary flourishes or to make it more child friendly, Schönwerth kept the raw energy of the tales, resisting the temptation to motivate surreal plot twists or to smooth out inconsistencies. Oral narratives famously neglect psychology for plot, and these tales move with warp speed out of the castle and into the woods, generating multiple encounters with ogres, dragons, witches, and other villains, leaving almost no room for expressive asides or details explaining how or why things happen. The driving question is always “And then?”

Our own culture, under the spell of Grimm and Perrault, has favored fairy tales starring girls rather than boys, princesses rather than princes. But Schönwerth’s stories show us that once upon a time, Cinderfellas evidently suffered right alongside Cinderellas, and handsome young men fell into slumbers nearly as deep as Briar Rose’s hundred-year nap. Just as girls became domestic drudges and suffered under the curse of evil mothers and stepmothers, boys, too, served out terms as gardeners and servants, sometimes banished into the woods by hostile fathers. Like Snow White, they had to plead with a hunter for their lives. And they are as good as they are beautiful—Schönwerth uses the German term
schön
, or
beautiful
, for both male and female protagonists. And time and again they are required to prove their mettle by sleeping in a Gothic castle of horrors. Here, too, we suddenly find clustered together the giant-killers and dragon slayers missing from the Grimms. The rescue of sleeping beauties after slaying nine-headed dragons and outwitting giants is repeated with mantra-like faith in the possibility of the little guy triumphing over the colossus.

Why did we lose all those male counterparts to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and the girl who becomes the wife of the Frog King? Boy heroes clearly had a hard time surviving the nineteenth-century migration of fairy tales from the communal hearth into the nursery, when oral storytelling traditions, under the pressures of urbanization and industrialization, lost their cross-generational appeal. Once mothers, nannies, and domestics were in charge of telling stories at bedtime, they favored tales with heroines. Schönwerth’s collection may have appeared in print later than the Grimms’
Children’s Stories and Household Tales
, but it gives us in many ways a culture of oral storytelling that is pre-Grimm.

The Brothers Grimm may have been wary of telling stories of persecuted boys, having suffered much in their own early lives. It is no accident that we refer these days to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm almost as if they were a couple. The brothers lost their father at a young age and worked hard to educate themselves and to keep their fragile family intact. They studied law together and worked side by side for decades, taking notes, copying manuscripts, editing texts, and famously creating index card entries for their monumental dictionary of the German language. Is it any surprise that they might have found tales about quarreling brothers or male-sibling rivals less than congenial? Schönwerth’s collection reminds us that fathers are constantly sending no-account sons into the world to seek their fortune and that they are generally relieved to rid themselves of an extra mouth to feed. Brothers stand in a relationship of rivalry, fighting over farms or kingdoms and betraying each other in ways that hark back to the biblical cruelties of Joseph’s brothers. Schönwerth gives us unvarnished versions of these tales, uninhibited in their expression of parental indifference and cruelty and of fraternal rivalry and hatred.

The briskness of Schönwerth’s style becomes clear in a tale like “King Goldenlocks.” The adventures of the fair-haired prince bring together bits and pieces from “The Frog King,” “Snow White,” and “The Water of Life” to create kaleidoscopic wonders. The tale reminds us of the wizardry of words in fairy tales, and how those words create worlds of shimmering beauty and enchanting whimsy. Who can avoid feeling the shock effects of beauty when Prince Goldenhair enters “a magical garden awash in sunlight, full of flowers and branches with gold and silver leaves and fruits made of precious stones”? Or when a dung beetle turns into a prince after a girl spares his life and invites “creatures small and large, anything on legs” to dance and leap at the wedding? Equally charming is the story about Jodel, a boy who overcomes his revulsion to a female frog and, after bathing her, joins her under the covers. In the morning, he awakens to find himself in a sunlit castle with a wondrously beautiful princess. Here at last is a transformation that promises real change in our understanding of fairy-tale magic, for suddenly we discover that the divide between passive princesses and dragon-slaying heroes may be little more than a figment of the Grimm imagination.

The term
fairy tale
has not served the genre well. Often dismissed as an infantile confection, the fairy tale in fact rarely contains the sprightly supernatural creatures featured so prominently in its name. It was the French, more specifically Mme d’Aulnoy, who gave us the term
contes de fées
, leading us to frame the stories as if they turn on the lives of diminutive woodland folk (of which there are quite a few in Schönwerth’s collection) rather than ordinary people. In English, the term was first used in 1749, casually by Horace Walpole, and with self-conscious purpose when Sarah Fielding called a story embedded in
The Governess
, published in 1749, “The Princess Hebe: A Fairy Tale.” The German term
Märchen
points to the origins of the stories in the notion of news, reports, tall tales, rumors, and gossip—in short, of talk and social exchanges. Fairy tales hover somewhere between tall tale and high fantasy, anchored in the real world, but with embellishments and misrepresentations that turn their lies and confabulations into higher truths.

There is magic in these tall tales, and the presence of enchantment is perhaps the defining feature of the genre.
*
We are not so much in the realm of fairies as in the domain of what J. R. R. Tolkien referred to as
Faërie
, that “Perilous Realm” where anything can happen. A plain girl puts on a necklace and belt and turns into a beautiful young woman; a boy swims on the back of a golden fish and enters an enchanted castle; elves teach a girl how to keep house and heal the sick. Again and again we witness transformations that break down the divide between life and death, nature and culture, animal and human, or beauty and monstrosity. Fairy tales take up deep cultural contradictions, creating what Claude Lévi-Strauss called “miniature models”—stories that dispense with extraneous details to give us primal anxieties and desires, the raw rather than the cooked, as it were. They use magic, not to falsify or delude, but rather to enable counterfactuals, to move us to imagine what if or to wonder why. And that move, as both Plato and Aristotle assured us, marks the beginning of philosophy. While fairy-tale heroes and heroines wander, we track their moves and wonder, in both senses of the term, at their adventures. It is no surprise that the term
wonder-tale
has been proposed and embraced as an alternative to the misleading
fairy tale
.

Fairy tales, like myths, capitalize on the three concepts the Greeks captured in the term
kaleidoscope
: sparkling beauty, austere form, and visual power. Once told at the fireside or at the hearth, with adults and children sharing the storytelling space, they captured the play of light and shadow in their environment, creating special effects that yoked beauty with horror. Imagine a time before electronic entertainment, with long dark nights around campsites and other sources of heat and light, and it is not much of a challenge to realize that human beings, always quick to adapt, began exchanging information, trading wisdom, and reporting gossip. “Literature,” Vladimir Nabokov tells us, “was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf wolf, and there was no wolf behind him.”
*
And that boy’s story was no doubt both compact and vivid. Once the conversation started about that wolf, it was easy enough, in subsequent versions, to begin exaggerating, overstating, inflating, and doing all the things that make for lively entertainment. Fairy tales are always more interesting when something is added to them. Each new telling recharges the narrative, making it crackle and hiss with cultural energy.

At a time when some scholars have contested the vibrancy of oral storytelling traditions, claiming that fairy tales were literary confections, urban and urbane, rather than rooted in the popular culture of the unlettered, Schönwerth’s collection reveals just how comfortably the tales inhabit a world that values spontaneity, improvisation, rough edges, and lack of closure. Much as there may be lively traffic between the oral and the literary, these tales, unlike stories written down by the Brothers Grimm or that other prominent collector, Ludwig Bechstein, have few literary fingerprints on them. We cannot go back to nineteenth-century nooks and hearths to learn more about the tales that were told for entertainment, but we do have Schönwerth’s extraordinary archive, one that showed respect for oral storytelling traditions and did not work hard to turn hard-won fairy-tale silver into literary gold.

Schönwerth’s collection of tales may lack some of the charm of other nineteenth-century collections, but it gives us a crystal-clear window into the storytelling culture of its time. Earthy, scatological, and unvarnished, these tales give us primary process rather than edited and embellished narrative. Where else will we find a woman who moons a scoundrel of a tailor, or a fellow who relieves himself in the woods much to the dismay of his pals? Schönwerth recognized the value of remaining faithful to his sources and refused to pull punches.