Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies

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University of Michigan Press, Feb 15, 2007 - Literary Collections - 512 pages

When did fairy tales begin? What qualifies as a fairy tale? Is a true fairy tale oral or literary? Or is a fairy tale determined not by style but by content? To answer these and other questions, Jan M. Ziolkowski not only provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical debates about fairy tale origins but includes an extensive discussion of the relationship of the fairy tale to both the written and oral sources. Ziolkowski offers interpretations of a sampling of the tales in order to sketch the complex connections that existed in the Middle Ages between oral folktales and their written equivalents, the variety of uses to which the writers applied the stories, and the diverse relationships between the medieval texts and the expressions of the same tales in the "classic" fairy tale collections of the nineteenth century. In so doing, Ziolkowski explores stories that survive in both versions associated with, on the one hand, such standards of the nineteenth-century fairy tale as the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Carlo Collodi and, on the other, medieval Latin, demonstrating that the literary fairy tale owes a great debt to the Latin literature of the medieval period.

Jan M. Ziolkowski is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University.
 

Contents

List of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgments xi
1
THREE
2
Folktales in Medieval Latin Poetry
16
TWO Between Sacred Legend and Folktale
65
THREE A Cautionary Tale
93
FOUR True Lies and the Growth of Wonder
125
SIX The Reorientation of The Donkey Tale ca 1200
200
APPENDIX
232
Modus florum or The Song to the Flowers Tune Carmina
260
A The Turnip Tale 1 Rapularius frivola
322
Brothers Grimm The Turnip Die Rübe KHM 146
339
B The Story of Vikramadityas Birth
350
E Brothers Grimm Hans My Hedgehog Hans Mein Igel
361
Notes
367
Bibliography
445
Copyright

ONE Man Swallowed by Fish ATU 1889G
241

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