Beautiful
Medieval castles, princes and princesses, decent farmers and village
women… These are the things which people
usually have in mind when they are thinking of fairy tales.
While
usually Hong Kong people, like other Asians, simply know that fairy tales are
originated in Europe, these beloved bed-time stories are actually folk tales
from Germany. Being the most
popular literature genre for children, fairy tales are not only serves as
children’s entertainment, but also signifies many culture fingerprints of
Medieval German.
These seemingly simple
stories of remote times characterize in some common way. When one recalls some of these stories,
he or she can easily figure out some frequently appeared ingredients in fairy
tales: stepmothers
and stepfathers (e.g. Snow White and Cinderella); abandoned
children (e.g. Hänsel und Gretel); witches and mystic power (e.g. Sleeping
Beauty) and solid social hierarchy (e.g. The Goose Girl). These similarities are not
coincidents. Rather, each of them
owns the piece of puzzle of the picture of Medieval society.
In
the Middle Ages, due to the poor standard of hygiene condition and the lacking
of effective scientific medical care, the life expectancy at that time is
rather short. For royalties the
life expectancy was only around 50; for common people was, even shorter, around
30. With such a short life span
it’s not difficult to understand why there are so many stepmothers and
stepfathers in the fairy tales – just because people usually get remarried
after the death of their spouse.
Middle
Ages was a time of poverty for common people. Living standard was low for them. While on the other hand, with absolutely no knowledge in
family planning, and the low birth rate at that time, family would like to have
more children then they want. With
too many people in a family but not enough to feed the mouths, children became
great financial burdens. Some
parents really had no choice and abandoned their children, hoping they can
survive somehow. This kind of
believe was, in German, ‘Himmellassen’.
(‘Himmel’ – heaven; ‘lassen’ – to leave). That’s the reason of why the poor little brother and sister
Hänsel and Gretel walked in the dark forest and met the witch’s candy house
without adults’ guidance.
Witches
and fairies are sort of the ‘trade marks’ of fairy tales. The popularity of involvements of
mystic powers in fairy tales was related to the 15th to 18th
Centuries’ people’s believe in supernatural power. They regard the ‘witches’ as somebody who have magical
power, who can communicate with the supernatural spirits, and who can create
disasters. Actually the favour of
taking mystic and supernatural power as subject matter is one of the
characteristic of Romantic Arts, which relationship with fairy tales will be
discussed later.
The
solidity of the hierarchy of the Medieval times was projected into the folk
stories and transmitted to centuries later. For example, Jewish men were always bad rich men; peasants
were always the poorest; the royal family always had the most superiority in
all aspect in society. In this
sense, these folk tales are tools for common Medieval people to release them
form the solid unchangeable social system by imagination and fantasy – to
change their social status by marriage with princes and princesses, which was a
thing hardly be seen in the Medieval reality. (Indeed the thought of breaking the old feudal class system
was one of the trends in the second of 18th century, which again
related to the rise of Romanticism.)
The existence of these lovely
fairy tales was again no a coincident or by luck. They are product of tremendous hard work of the two great
German scholars – Jacob Grimm (1785-1860) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1863), i.e.
the ‘Brothers Grimm’. The
‘Brothers Grimm’, influenced by the folk poetry collection of Clemens Brentano
and Achim von Arnim, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, began to collect folktales
(in German, ‘Märchen’) in the year 1806.
Six years later the Grimm brothers publish the first volume of Kinder
und Hausmärchen (Children and Household Tales), an unpretentious
book containing 86 numbered folktales, while the second volume was published in
the year 1814, adding 70 stories to the previous collection. This famous work would see six
additional editions during the Grimms’ lifetime. It’s final version contains 200 numbered stories plus 10
‘children’s legends’. Kinder
und Hausmärchen became the best known and most influential book ever
created in the German language, and the Grimms receive honorary doctorates from
the University of Marburg, where they studied as law students there.
The act of collecting folk
culture is not a thing comes from nowhere. It’s indeed related to the rise of Romantic thoughts of the
late 18th century. In
the second half of the 18th century society faced the deterioration
of the old feudal class system in which people were categorized and treated as
units in an artificial social hierarchy.
The term ‘Romantic’, derives from the literary ‘romance’. It there fore suggests a style that is
‘romancelike’ or novelistic, concentrating on emotional conflict and
climax. In the late 18th
century writers on aesthetics made an important distinction between the two
qualities they called the beautiful and the sublime. The appeal of the beautiful is objective, controlled, and ultimately
satisfying to the Apollonian, classical taste. The sublime depends on the power of the effect and the
absence of control and has a subjective appeal. Romantic art generally inclines to the sublime rather then
the beautiful; the aim is not aesthetic satisfaction but stimulation. One characteristic of Romantic art is a
preoccupation with longing or yearning.
Sometimes this is directed toward a future object, but
characteristically the object is inherently unattainable. Often the longing is manifested in
nostalgia for the past, which is, of course, ultimately out of reach. The collection of folktales suites the
Romantic taste perfectly and thus became a very popular genre in the Grimms’
time.
One of the results of the
Romantic fairy tales is the effort of actualizing them in reality. One of the famous example is the
‘fairytale castle’ of the Bavarian King Ludwig II, built between 1869 and 1886
in ‘neo-Romanesque’ style imitates a medieval German knight’s castle; but in a
very extravagant way – the interior rooms are ornately decorated with scenes
depicting the medieval world.
Another result is the
profitable opportunity in the traveling industry for Germany. The ‘Fairy Tale Route’, starts from
Bremen, linking to Minden, Hamein, Bodenwerder, Bad Karishafen, Göttingen,
Kassel, Fritzlar, Alsfeld, Marburg, Schlüchtern, and finishes at Hanau, was
designed for tourists who seeks the famous castle scenes in Germany.
The German fairy tales
also have huge influence in other kinds of literature genre and arts
forms. Roald Dahl, a modern
English writer, the very same author of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’,
inspired by Grimms’ fairy tales, wrote ‘Revolting Rhymes’, in which the stories
were based on the Grimms’ fairy tales.
The Disney animations uses many of the Grimms’ fairy tales, such as Snow
White, The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc. In dance, the Pick of the Crop Dance
group performs the story of Hänsel und Gretel as modern ballet. These
fairy tales are also popular theme for motion pictures and films.
References:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html
http://www.edupaperback.org/authorbios/Dahl_Roald.html
http://www.deutschland-tourismus.de/e/2954.html