Understanding Fairy Mythology - Preview

Understanding Fairy Mythology

Just on the Tip of Your Tongue

Remnants of a magical past

Like a word stuck on the tip of your tongue that you can't quite remember, fairy tales aggravate us with deeper meanings we're almost certain we know, but can’t quite recall. For just enough of the old fairy faiths survive within them to tantalize us with their forgotten mysteries; teasing us with a hidden past filled with dark guardians to the underworld, bright and beautiful fairies[1], and long winters nights people feared would never end. There is still a mysterious heart to fairy tales, giving us a peek into a primal world, beckoning us to recall old traditions. This book will seek to explore these old traditions, to answer questions about the hidden origins of fairy tales.

Unfortunately, many of the most intriguing questions that would give us the answers we seek are heavily debated, such as; “what impact the Huns had on Germanic religious beliefs?” or “What is Stonehenge?” No one alive today can definitively know the answer too many of these questions, no matter how tantalizingly close they seem. Yet even if they can never be found, searching for the answers is still of value because, by searching we can come to a greater understanding of ancient society, religion, history, and perhaps, in a way, even a better understanding of ourselves.

When trying to understand the origins of and meanings behind fairy tales, it’s important to understand that almost no fairy tale is a single story.  Rather, they are typically made up of the pieces of many stories and ideas which all came together over time to create the stories we know today. Fairy tales, after all, don't belong to a single era or a single culture, but instead are an odd soupy mixture of different times and places, as they were handed down from one generation to the next, and from one land to another.

The multi-cultural origins of fairy tales leads us to an interesting question; to whom do fairy tales belong? Were they a product of the generation which last told them, even if that generation didn't create them? For example, does the story of “Hansel and Gretel” belong to 1812, when the Grimm Brothers published it? Or does it belong to the era of the Great Famine of 1315-1317 when parents began to abandon their children in the woods and from whence the story may have originated? Does the story belong to Germany where it was collected, or does it belong to the peoples of North Eastern Europe where the idea of a protagonist using a chicken bone to trick a witch into thinking they were too skinny to eat may have originated?

Because they have so many origins, and have been altered so many times, it's nearly impossible to discuss a single meaning for any one fairy tale. Instead, fairy tales have multiple meanings and multiple purposes, to the point that the people telling them to the Brothers Grimm or other folklorists may not have fully understood them. Olive Tolley states that “It is therefore clear that any poem may have served one purpose at the time of its composition and another at its recording.” Indeed, “Stories do not belong to storytellers and story listeners because all stories are “reassembles of fragments on loan” and “depend on shared narrative sources” (Zipes, Jack.)

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Folk Religion in Fairy Tales

Perhaps the most interesting origins of fairy tales, and the ones this book will focus on, are the many fairy tales built on the remnants of older folk religions. These fairy faiths in many places effectively remained the beliefs of the peasants’ right up into the modern era, such that even until the beginning of the 20^th century:

The cunning folk of the English countryside were the leaders and practitioners of the people’s religion as well as their folk medicine. The medical, divinatory, and other religious services provided by these wise women and men possessed of special supernatural powers and religious techniques were far more important in the lives of the people than the official religion (Horsley)

In fairy tales these cunning folk appeared as advice givers, as a hen wife who told people how to rescue the moon when she was captured by monsters in one fairy tale from Lincolnshire, or as wise women who told a knight how to slay dragons in a tale from Essex. This is similar to their role outside of fairy tales as well, in which they advised people by telling them about the fairies that humans believed shared their world. Thus for thousands of years they influenced the way people thought about the spirit world, and the stories they told.

These cunning folk and their kin in countries across the world didn’t have official political power. Instead, like the shamans of the past, they gained power through influence. People trusted them and were afraid to go against what they said. In many ways this is far more important than any official title, in so far as fairy tales are concerned, because it means people believed the stories they told, and were likely to share those stories with others. Because of this, folk religions were able to exist side by side with the official state religion for thousands of years, and sometimes prove themselves more important to the lives of the lower classes, and at times even the nobility, who would secretly seek the cunning folk’s advice. To understand fairy tales, then, one must understand the folk religion of the people who told them:

Unlike codified religions, folk belief is extremely diverse in character and difficult to define precisely.” It is made up of vague magico-religous beliefs, many of which are survivals or successors of archaic and primitive elements; these beliefs or primitive elements themselves remain systematized theoretically and ecclesiastically, but in many ways have penetrated and become interrelated with institutionalized religions.” (Ichiro Hori)

In other words, like fairy tales, folk religions are made up of pieces of many religions from many places and times. This makes them difficult to understand because they don’t generally have a single coherent cosmology, but rather they are made up of the remnants of many different religions and systems of thinking (Horsley). The cunning folk of England, for example, used ideas from multiple sources of previous English Paganism, from Roman Paganism, from books

that were based on Middle Eastern Ideas, from Catholicism, and the Church of England in order to explain and cure illness.

Because folk religions are made up of so many ideas they tend to be a series of ideas about how to deal with the spirit world, such as leaving clean water out for fairies to bath in, or throwing salt over ones shoulder to keep away evil spirits, wishing upon a star with a rhyme, or knocking on wood for luck. In other words, it could be argued that folk religions are a series of superstitions rather than a cannon of laws; superstitions which people believed were extremely important to their survival, which is why they were passed on from parent to child for thousands of years.

Unlike state religions which focus on creating a single coherent cosmology to explain the metaphysical/philosophical world and the larger social structure of a nation or group of nations, folk religions typically focus on surviving from one day to the next. More than this, however, folk religions are about building and maintaining relationships between people, and with the spirit world (Bock). This is why social morality is an important part of many folk religions and therefore fairy tales. It is also largely why folk religions persist over time, because they are centered on specific social norms, often of a subgroup within the larger culture, although such social moralities don’t always resemble the morals we might think of today. Indeed, the morals of the past are often shocking to modern ideas. To certain groups such acts as kidnapping women, stealing from neighboring villages and more were all perfectly acceptable, given the right set of circumstances. Today parents often view stories, such as “Jack and the Beanstalk” as being immoral, because this story is about a thief:

Then Jack crept out on tiptoe from his oven, and as he was passing the ogre he took one of the bags of gold under his arm, and off he pelters till he came to the beanstalk, and then he threw down the bag of gold which of course fell in to his mother's garden, and then he climbed down and climbed down till at last he got home and told his mother and showed her the gold and said: "Well, mother, wasn't I right about the beans. They are really magical, you see."

In lore theft was oftentimes not only acceptable, it could at times be considered a heroic act. This wasn't just a primitive idea, however; we still have heist movies in the modern day such as “Oceans 11.” To a certain extent the need to be cunning is one of the morals of fairy tales, and indeed thieves and bandits were often glorified in England. During the Victorian Era a thief named Jack Sheppard came to be so famous that the greatest boxer of the time shared a drink with him and priests even used stories of his exploits in their sermons. Much of this comes from the fact that theft of various forms was important to the survival of many villages and peasants, which is perhaps why so many house hold deities, such as the domovoi of Russia and the tomte of Sweden, help their chosen families by stealing from the neighbors. The importance of stealing from neighbors in general can be seen in one of the most wide spread Indo-European mythological motifs is that of the cattle raid:

In early Ireland the Tana cattle raids were a recognized narrative category and in a society where wealth was reckoned in cattle, cattle-rustling was regarded as the most appropriate activity for young male warriors. (Adams)

It's true of course that in the tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk” Jack is stealing gold rather than cattle, but as the definition of wealth changed one would expect the items stolen by these heroes to transform as well. For example, early Indo-European Cattle raiding myths included the well-known theme of slaying a dragon or giant, a combination which exists in the myths of India, Germany, Rome, Greece, Slavic, and Baltic mythology (Lincoln); while later Germanic tales of heroes slaying dragons had the beasts as guardians of gold.

The different morality of past cultures often makes it difficult to understand the message behind fairy tales, because in the modern world we frequently consider certain behaviors as immoral which were once celebrated. What’s important to keep in mind is that the moralities of folk religions are primarily concerned with the harsh realities of daily life. Thus, I would argue that folk religion is the religion of people who must constantly worry about whether they will have enough food to eat, if their children will survive the long cold winter, and about the potentially disastrous effects of getting sick. This means that, while the religion of the nobility and priests of a nation, aka, the official religion, might influence the folk religion, and the folk religion might influence the official religion, the two were separate. What’s more, many of the ideas within folk religions were more stable, because the needs of the people who followed them were less likely to change than the philosophical ideas which drove the nobility.

Still, the fact that religions, and especially folk religions, are centered on human survival means that they will adapt to new situations. Thus new religions come into being when there are significant changes to the political, environmental, social, or economic environment in which people have to live. Often during this process of transformation, many new religions will form and many new myths will be developed, but only a few of the existing religions will survive (Bulbulia and Slingerland, 2012). The myths, however, can continue on even after the religion which believed it has faded away. Everyone loves a good story after all. What we see then is that the things people of the past believed in were made up of many ideas, both from their own past and from neighboring peoples. Indeed any idea which allowed people to maintain their unique relationship with each other, other peoples, and the spirit world could be adopted.

The building of a network of support, both spiritual and human, was critical to people’s survival, and so it is one of the primary focuses of folk religions. This can be seen in the pre-Christian belief system of the Sami, for whom balance has been maintained “through rituals, by following normative patterns of behavior, and established practices, by showing respect, and through a dialogue on both an individual and collective level.” For them normative patterns of behavior was more than social morality, such patterns of behavior were essentially magico-religious ideas, which impacted their chances of survival in the world. Similarly, the Sami’s relationship with the spirit world could be said to have been based on a similar set of social behaviors:

The relationship with nature and its forces is not submissive but active. Humans can, when necessary, influence the powers of nature by giving, offering, sharing, asking, promising, taking care of, showing respect to, or assuming the shapes of animals. Offerings were made to the natural spirits only when necessary: for example, when a spirit was known to be angry because people had broken some rule. One did not ask spirits for help, but for goodwill and patience while one stayed in their area. Every geographical place was considered an entity in which the physical dimension was in balance with the spiritual one. (Delos Initiative)

People could plead with nature and its spirits throughout Europe, asking them for help. Consider, for example, the Romanian who would call out to the moon:

"O luminous moon, luminous moon, come and take away the spell and the desolation, and the hatred from the world, and from my house, and from my table, and from my garden, and from my vineyard, and from my craft, and from my trade, and from my purse, and drive it away to wild mountains and forests , and us and our children and those who shall be born unto us hereafter, leave us clean and pure like refined gold and like the sun that shines brilliantly in the skies!"

As with many such chants there is a lot more going on here, than is readily apparent. Certainly it’s quickly obvious that this prayer to the moon is asking it to drive away unclean forces. It’s interesting to note, however, that this chant doesn’t ask the moon to destroy unclean forces, and that it specifically asked to drive those unclean forces into the “wild mountains and forests.” It was common in Slavic lore, for shamanistic figures, such as the “Living Saints” to drive evil to distant wildernesses, strange places without sound, without humanity. It was also common in lore, to view the forest as an otherworld, as a dark place filled with strange beings. The wilderness was also, however, the place where shaman figures, from saints to cunning went to receive their training. This duality of thinking about things as being both a pure and impure, as we’ll see further, was extremely important to myth and fairy tales.

Perhaps, more important than the behaviors necessary to achieve a positive outcome, in so far as a discussion on fairy tales is concerned, are the behaviors required to avoid a negative outcome, in other words the taboos, the violation of which often carried serious consequences. For example, in Russian lore an angered spirit known as the bunnik might flay the flesh from someone’s bones for entering the bathhouse at night. Further, those who whistled in the home would offend the domovoi, the house spirit which kept them safe and blessed their house. To offend him was to risk having one's household lose its prosperity. Thus many fairy tales include certain prohibitions, about not complaining, about not throwing ones sewage immediately out ones door where the house fairy might be standing, etc. These taboos very often end up in horror stories, in which the violator is punished by the magical being.

Perhaps, the most important and common taboo however, was that one should never directly talk about or discuss certain sacred things. This is the reason the Finnish people would avoid directly saying the name of bears, the Celts and English avoided calling fairies by their real name and instead called them by names such as; Good Folk, Greencoaties, the Strangers, The Tiddy Ones, and more. Further, people were often forbidden from directly discussing their relationship with the spirit world, or the metaphysical nature of the spirit world. Indeed, there are a number of Celtic Fairy Tales in which this need for secrecy about the fairy world is clearly spelled out. In “Kaddy's Luck,” for example, the fairies come into Kaddy's home through the keyhole in order to dance the night away, and they always leave her a little money. After getting married she eventually tells her husband the secret origins of her money, and because of this violation of the taboo she soon “found her child had been changed in the night, and there was a very little baby in the cradle. And the child never grew big, for the fairies had changed her child for spite.” The obvious message of this tale is that those who spoke of the magical world would be punished.

Cunning, witches, and shamans were also forbidden from sharing their secrets, according to Kira Van Deusen (2001), “It's dangerous to speak directly about the inner lives of shamans” which is why they discussed these using stories. Many of the pieces of fairy tales come from this need to discuss the spirit world in stories as well as from the magical beliefs people held about how the world functioned.”

There were, of course, many other purposes to fairy tales which could serve as a form of entertainment, a way of bragging, teaching moral values, as warning tales, etc. According to Jean-Marie Déguignet people would often gossip about encounters they or people they knew had with the spirit world. For example, in one tale a young girl encounters a frisky little fairy in Dartmoor. In order to prevent the being from pixy leading her or causing her any misfortune she walks boldly on:

The pixy had now reached the bridge, and remained jumping from side to side and performing a variety of antics upon it, as if to prevent her from crossing. But the dame's courage did not fail her, and having made up her mind not to be deterred from pursuing her way, she stepped fearlessly towards the spot where the pixy was, who continued his grotesque movements, leaping about with the greatest agility. As the stout-hearted women gained the bridge, the little fellow hopped towards her, when suddenly stooping down, she seized the pixy in her hand, popped him into the basket she was carrying, and secured the cover, resolving that instead of running any risk of being pixy-led she would turn the tables, and lead the pixy.

The fairy disappears before she can get home, but as the tale says “the good dame was always able to boast that she had had the courage to capture a pixy.” In other tales people would beat boggarts with sticks, chase away witches, etc. People's inherent need to both brag and gossip in many cultures would explain how these stories got passed around Yet even stories which come from people bragging about encountering the spirit world are often based on previous folk religious ideas, such as the nature of fairies. People after all tend to get the ideas for their stories from their beliefs, or from the beliefs and stories of others.

“The Corpse Watchers” Analyzed.

One if my favorite examples of a fairy tale with many ancient origins is the Irish tale of “The Corpse Watchers;”

There was once a poor woman that had three daughters, and one day the eldest said, “Mother, bake my cake and kill my cock, till I go seek my fortune.” So she did, and when all was ready, says her mother to her, “Which will you have–half of these with my blessing, or the whole with my curse?” “Curse or no curse,” says she, “the whole is little enough.” So away she set, and if the mother didn’t give her her curse, she didn’t give her her blessing.

 

Poverty is often the greatest villain in fairy tales; it's poverty that causes children to cry with starvation, its poverty which left Europe desolate for over a thousand years. And as with “The Corpse Watches” it’ is poverty which caused the mothers to fight with their children for food as happens in so many fairy tales. Consider for a moment the intense emotions involved in the opening to this fairy tale, emotions which the story doesn't explain, but which the people who lived with poverty knew all too well. The eldest daughter in this story is preparing to step out the door, to strike out on her own, leaving her family behind, and what happens? She and her mother begin to fight over a tiny amount of food. At the time of these fairy tales a person’s greatest concern wasn't just that there were no guarantees that fortunes would be made, their greatest concern was that starvation was a very real possibility. Indeed many cities, and the countryside itself was filled with the starving and destitute. The danger of starvation is an important part of many fairy tales, for example, in the tale of the “The Two Travelers” a man runs out of bread so that:

 Hunger made itself felt again, and gnawed him almost to the heart. In the evening he fell down by a tree, and on the seventh morning he could not raise himself up for faintness, and death was close at hand. 

This is why “The Corpse Watches,” begins with a mother and her daughter fighting over food, with the mother essentially threatening to curse her daughter if she takes any more than a single meals worth of food for her long trip.

In addition to the social dimension of this tale, however, there is also an interesting magico-religious moral in the opening of this story as well: Which is that children need to seek after their parents blessing, for their relationship with their parents isn't just important socially, it's supernaturally important as well. There was magic in a parents blessing as well as their curse. The magical nature of the mother’s blessing is all the more clear in the Scottish fairy tale of “Maol a Chliobain,” which like this tale begins with the eldest daughters taking the food rather than their mother’s blessing, leaving only the youngest child to take the blessing. After this; “they went away, but the two eldest did not want the youngest to be with them, and they tied her to a rock of stone. They went on, but her mother's blessing came and freed her.” In this story “the mother’s blessing” seems to be a physical being, which has the power to help her children.

The elder sisters’ failure to take their mother’s supernatural blessing in place of material food is a clear sign that she is unprepared to enter the supernatural world people believed was all around them, a supernatural world that in fairy tales children were likely to encounter when they left home for the first time. Indeed, just as it is in “The Corpse Watchers” a child's first job in fairy tales was often with some supernatural being. For example, in the Cornish story “A Maiden from Zennor” the protagonist, a young girl, sets out on her own. At first she's optimistic about her future, but after she walks for some time the reality sets in that she is truly alone, that she may never see her family again. Overwhelmed with fear and sorrow, uncertain what to do she sits down and begins sobbing, that is until she encounters a fairy man willing to hire her to act as nanny for his child. In the case of the “Maiden of Zennor” the moral of the fairy tale is perhaps less mystical then it is in “The Corpse Bride,” however, as the girl soon falls in love with her master who “steals kisses” from her on occasion, only to discover that he's cheating on her with another and is fired when she confronts him about it. The message here at least should be clear, that children leaving home were in a precarious situation and had to be cautious. The message of “The Corpse Watchers” as we'll see, however, is that one needs to be prepared to live in a supernatural world when they leave home.

 

“The Corpse Watchers” Continued...

 

She (the eldest sister) walked and she walked till she was tired and hungry, and then she sat down to take her dinner. While she was eating it, a poor woman came up, and asked for a bit. “The dickens a bit you’ll get from me,” says she; “it’s all too little for myself;” and the poor woman walked away very sorrowful. At nightfall she got lodging at a farmer’s, and the woman of the house told her that she’d give her a spade-full of gold and a shovel-full of silver if she’d only sit up and watch her son’s corpse that was waking in the next room. She said she’d do that; and so, when the family were in their bed, she sat by the fire, and cast an eye from time to time on the corpse that was lying under the table.

 

All at once the dead man got up in his shroud, and stood before her, and said, “All alone, fair maid!” She gave him no answer, and when he said it the third time, he struck her with a switch, and she became a grey flag.

 

Here again, the eldest daughter’s failure to share her food with an old woman is further evidence that she isn't ready to deal with the supernatural world, which prizes generosity and hospitality above nearly anything else. This is true throughout Eurasian lore. On the Steppes and in Siberia, for example, hospitality was so important that husbands would divorce their wives if they didn't show hospitality to everyone who came by (Siikala, Napolskikh, and Hoppal, 2007). Even hated enemies might at times be given a meal on the Steppes, although once the meal was over and the guest had left, they and the host would be enemies once more. Europe, at least Medieval Europe, might not have been so extreme, but hospitality was still very important to people who would often share their homes with travelers. In fairy tales the beggar or advice giver was often a deity[4] in disguise, as magical beings such as Odin often wandered the earth in human form, and those who failed to be generous with them were almost always punished. In one tale from Switzerland a young girl begs a wealthy man to help her sick mother, but is sent away empty handed. A dwarf appears and gives her both gold and a magical herb to cure her mother, while at the same time causing a rock slide which buries the home of the person who wouldn't help the young girl. Similarly, in East Prussia there was a village which mocked a sick beggar woman, so she cursed the village that the earth would swallow it up. and soon the village sank into a lake. In the story of “The Three Little Men in the Wood” a young girl is asked to share her meal with three fairy-like beings, and when she does so they bless her to grow beautiful, rich and marry well. However, her stepsister who is rude and refuses to share her food with the three men is cursed by them to suffer growing uglier, having frogs hop out of her mouth whenever she speaks, and to die badly.

Such stories are connected both to the moral imperative to give alms and the fact that in many lands it was believed that beggars had magical powers; that to refuse them alms was to risk being cursed. This isn’t to say that people always gave alms, for just as people often go against their own moral and religious beliefs today, there were likely always people who weren’t as generous as their culture said they should have been in the past. However, in the folk religious tales generosity is one of the most important moral lessons, and often times is the only real means of surviving the wrath of the supernatural.

The elder sister’s lack of generosity in “The Corpse Watchers,” is a sign that she's unprepared to deal with the magical world which she is now about to face. So it shouldn't be surprising that she's completely alone and unprepared when she finally does encounter the magical world in the form of the walking corpse. She should have been prepared, however, as the fact that the girls in this story were hired to 'watch' over a corpse that could still move around suggests that they were perhaps more than just ordinary girls, that they were a form of fairy doctor (which were a remnant of older shamanistic traditions). In other words, it was specifically their job to deal with the spirit world, and in order to do this they had to act in certain ways and undergo specific preparations. This means that the eldest sister failed not only as a moral person, but as a shaman as well.

 

“The Corpse Watchers” Continued...

 

About a week after, the second daughter went to seek her fortune, and she didn’t care for her mother’s blessing no more nor her sister, and the very same thing happened to her. She was left a grey flag by the side of the other.

 

At last the youngest went off in search of the other two, and she took care to carry her mother’s blessing with her. She shared her dinner with the poor woman on the road, and she told her that she would watch over her.

 

Well, she got lodging in the same place as the others, and agreed to mind the corpse. She sat up by the fire with the dog and cat, and amused herself with some apples and nuts the mistress gave her. She thought it a pity that the man under the table was a corpse, he was so handsome.

 

But at last he got up, and says he, “All alone, fair maid!” and she wasn’t long about an answer:–

 

“All alone I am not,

I’ve little dog Dog and Pussy, my cat;

I’ve apples to roast, and nuts to crack,

And all alone I am not.”

The third and youngest daughter succeeds where her elder sisters failed, because she is kinder, cleverer, and perhaps braver than they are. She agrees to let her mother have half the food in return for her mother’s blessing, then later shares some more food with the poor old lady she encounters on the road. She watches over the corpse with a cat, dog, nuts, and apples. The presence of each of these items is likely significant, as cats and dogs were the most common familiar spirits of witches in Great Britain and Ireland. Dogs especially seem to have some connection with death in Eurasian Lore, either as a Grimm Reaper figure, as a guardian to the realm of the dead, or as a companion to a deity of the dead.

It's well known that in Greece and Rome the dog Cerberus was the guardian to the underworld. Similarly,

In India the path to the underworld is guarded by a pair of dogs,.. "In stanza 10 the two dogs are conceived as ill-disposed creatures, standing guard to keep the departed souls out of bliss. The soul on its way to heaven is addressed as follows: "Run past straight away the two four-eyed dogs, the spotted and (the dark), the brood of Sarama; enter in among the propitious fathers who hold high feast with Yama. (Bloomfield)

 

 Yet in some stanza's the two dogs appear to act in a Grim Reaper type role in which they choose who is destined to become a companion of Yama.

In Britain spirit dogs would in various places; guard the graves of those who had died by violence, help hunt down the ghosts of wicked men, and act as a premonition of death. W. P. Witcutt claims that the black dogs of Britain, and presumably Ireland as well, are folk memories of a deity which appeared in the form of a dog. Further, the Celtic Deity Dispater, the Gaulish lord of the dead, appears with a small dog totem. On the Steppes, Erlik, the lord of the underworld, has dogs guarding his realm as well.

As you can see from the map, the dogs’ connection to the spirits of the dead is one of the most pervasive ideas across Eurasia, and indeed in the America’s as well; however, I decided not to include the Americas in this map, with the exception of Alaska because of size constraints.

It’s interesting to note that throughout most of Eurasia the Dog is either a guardian to the realm of the dead, a companion to the deity of the dead, or else is a helpful spirit which farriers people across the river to the Realm of the Dead or guides them to it. Yet in Western Europe the dog has to hunt down the spirits of the dead, which given the danger of vampires isn’t always a bad thing, and is a death omen. We can’t be certain why Western Europe is different in this regard, however, the people of far Western Europe have a different genetic origin than the rest of the people in Europe, though there is some debate as to the exact nature of this origin which I’ll discuss further in my chapter on “Migrations.”

While the importance of dogs to the deity of the underworld may be an accident, given how common dogs were as pets, dogs were almost never found in the heavens or as companions to deities that have nothing to do with the underworld. So the fact that there's a dog watching a corpse with the youngest girl in “The Corpse Watchers” does seem to be significant.

 

 

The Cat

Cats are also a magical being, one which is still most often associated with witches, such as the youngest sister from “The Corpse Watchers.” Cats, after all, as Briggs points out in “Fairies in Tradition and Literature,” are often considered to be fairies in their own right, and they certainly have a strong connection with witches. Indeed in Ireland one of the most common familiar spirits for witches to have was in the form of a cat, something we are still aware of today. As familiar spirits they would act as mediators between the witch and the fairy world, though in this case the witch wasn't their master; the Queen or King of the Fairies or Underworld was. In Breton Lore a person would at times make a deal with a cat or their master in which the cat would make them wealthy for a number of years, after which the person would serve the fairies. (Fairies were always looking for servants to clean for them, cook for them, play music, act as nursemaids for their children, watch their cattle, etc.). In this role the cat was often deceived by the cunning peasant, as there were tales of peasants making the deal with a cat, than waiting until their time of wealth was almost over, at which point they would have the priest or some witch banish the cat for them, so that they could keep the wealth and not have to work for it. In Germany, and Celtic lands it seems likely that many house fairies and spirits lived in the form of a cat. Indeed, Jacob Grimm believed that Puss in Boots was such a household family fairy.

 

Sometimes such household spirits were clearly related to the people whose home they shared, after all many people's spirits became fairies when they died. Yet other times the cat would live with a person because they had been banished from the fairy court. In one common Celtic tale a man discovers that his cat is the successor to the King of the Cats, when the current king of the cats dies.

 

In more modern times cats came to be thought of as more demonic than other fairies, but that doesn't seem to have been the case in ancient times. Certainly like all fairies there were good and evil ones, or the same one had both good and evil traits; meaning they could become vindictive and cruel at the drop of a hat. In one case, when a woman failed to feed a cat at the table because her friends were visiting, it ripped up her throat and eventually she died from the infection. (Wilde) Yet others, like Puss in Boots, could also be forgiving and helpful.

 

It's also interesting to note that some of the oldest enemies of the fairies/deities of Celtic lands were called dog heads and or cat heads. Other than the obvious, it's difficult to say what the exact nature of these beings was. Being enemies to the deities, however, doesn't make these beings evil per say. In Greek lore the enemies of the gods were often allies of humanity, and in Japanese lore many of the enemies of the Heavenly Kami (Kami is a term for any being which can supernaturally aid humans) became fertility spirits of the land. So it's hard to say what people thought of the god’s enemies in ancient Ireland, given how few records we actually have of this.

 

 

Nuts

 

The nuts were also an important object for the girl to have, as in Ireland, as in other Celtic Lands, meals were given to the spirits of the dead in the form of nuts which were often placed in the burial coffin. So it would seem then that nuts may have been a way to placate the dead spirits. (MacCulloch) Hazel nuts specifically were considered magical. Callirisu was a deity whose name perhaps meant “hazel wood:”

 

Hazel once had a powerful reputation for magic. In Ireland it was a tree of healing, in English folklore it was guarded by demons, in Scotland its nut was thrown at witches (Breeze).

 

So by having the nuts, the dog, and the cat, the youngest daughter in “The Corpse Watchers” is able to state that she was most certainly not alone, and so survive her initial encounter with the spirit world.

 

There is one more interesting tidbit about the girl’s statement that she has a dog, cat and hazelnut, which is that another girl in Devonshire said it as well;

 

A pixy looked into a house and said:

All alone fair maid?

No, here am I with a dog and cat,

and Apples to eat and nuts to crack.' (Wentz)

 

Unfortunately the source for this bit of lore doesn’t recall the story it comes from, so we have no way of knowing what lead to this or what happened next. Pixies are such strange and interesting little fairies it’s difficult to know if this story of a pixie relates to something good or bad, a spirit of the dead or of nature. Because pixies were well known for causing mischief and at times even kidnapping women, this might be a good response to prevent spirits from doing bad things to people.

 

 

 

“The Corpse Watchers” Continued...

 

“Ho, ho!” says he, you’re a girl of courage, though you wouldn’t have enough to follow me. I am now going to cross the quaking bog, and go through the burning forest. I must then enter the cave of terror, and climb the hill of glass, and drop from the top of it into the Dead Sea.” “I’ll follow you,” says she, “for I engaged to mind you.” He thought to prevent her, but she was as stiff as he was stout.

 

Out he sprang through the window, and she followed him till they came to the “Green Hills,” and then says he:–

 

Open, open, Green Hills, and let the Light of the Green Hills through;”

Aye,” says the girl, “and let the fair maid, too.”

 

They opened, and the man and woman passed through, and there they were, on the edge of a bog.

 

Hills in Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic Lore are the gateway to fairy land, and the realm of the dead. According to the “Fairy Faith in the Celtic Countries;”

 

The Sidhe or Tuatha De Danann were a people like ourselves who inhabited the hills—not as a rule the highest and most salient eminences, but I think more usually the pleasant undulating slopes or gentle hill-sides—and who lived there a life of their own, marrying or giving in marriage, banqueting or making war, and leading there just as real a life as is our own...

 

Knock Ma, which you see over there, is said to contain excavated passages and a palace where the fairies live, and with them the people they have taken. And from the inside of the hill there is believed to be an entrance to an underground world. It is a common opinion that after consumptives die they are there with the fairies in good health.

 

What’s more “sidhe,” one of the Irish words for fairy, comes from the word ‘sid’, which is a term for hills or mounds, within which the old pagan gods were imagined to dwell (Patricia Monaghan). Within the Indo-European conception of the world there is a common division between the deities of the sky (divine beings) and the deities of the underworld (chthonian deities). The Rig Veda had a threefold division between earth, heaven and water (Griswold), an idea which was carried over into the primary deities of Greece (Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon). It’s interesting to note at this point that in Europe deities which blessed the fertility of the field were often connected with the underworld, with the spirits of the dead. This is something we see very clearly in Celtic lore where the existence of the fairies which dwell in the hills are often associated with the spirits of the dead, and create the fertility of the land. These spirits of the dead, and the agricultural deities who were connected to the earth, as this story has shown, could be very dangerous:

 

Agricultural gods, too were easily roused to anger – for the crops often failed…. The Homeric Hymn dwells at length on the anger of Demeter. It is not the mild mother goddess who makes the whole world suffer because she feels she has been wronged. In fact, it would seem that the mildness which we attribute to Demeter was not her’s in virtue of her being an agricultural goddess; it is a developed trait, due first to the fact that she was elevated from the position of a spirit of the grain to the rank of an Olympian divinity, and secondly to the striking development of the mother idea in connection with the story of the rape of Persephone. (Fairbanks)

 

The connection with fairies and hills in Ireland specifically means that after entering the hill the corpse and girl following him are in reality in the “otherworld” and that they remain there for most of the rest of the fairy tale. It also means that the protagonist is most likely a shaman, as one of the shaman’s primary jobs was to bring back the souls of the sick and dying from the Underworld. Her journeying into the hills also means that she’s in great danger, which is why it’s a good thing she’s already won favor with the supernatural world.

 

 

“The Corpse Watchers” Continued...

 

He trod lightly over the shaky bits of moss and sod; and while she was thinking of how she’d get across, the old beggar appeared to her, but much nicer dressed, touched her shoes with her stick, and the soles spread a foot on each side. So she easily got over the shaky marsh. The burning wood was at the edge of the bog, and there the good fairy flung a damp, thick cloak over her, and through the flames she went, and a hair of her head was not singed. Then they passed through the dark cavern of horrors, where she’d have heard the most horrible yells, only that the fairy stopped her ears with wax. She saw frightful things, with blue vapours round them, and felt the sharp rocks, and the slimy backs of frogs and snakes.

 

Here's where the youngest daughter’s generosity truly pays off, for good fairies were far more likely to help the generous on their quests into the other world; and the help of spirits was important to a shaman’s success and even their survival in the spirit world. This is because the spirit world was often made up of a series of horrors, as is highlighted in this tales “Cavern of Horrors,” and flame filled lands.

 

 

“The Corpse Watchers” Continued...

 

When they got out of the cavern, they were at the mountain of glass; and then the fairy made her slippers so sticky with a tap of her rod, that she followed the young corpse easily to the top. There was the deep sea a quarter of a mile under them, and so the corpse said to her, “Go home to my mother, and tell her how far you came to do her bidding: farewell.” He sprung head foremost down into the sea, and after him she plunged, without stopping a moment to think about it.

 

Like entering the hill, the glass mountain is a clear sign that the girl has entered the spirit world, as glass, crystal, or ice objects were a sign of the otherworld (Patch):

 

In fact the glass mountain is oftentimes so far in the spirit realm that even the inhabitants of the otherworld don't know where it is. In the tale of “The Three Lemons” for example, a witch/fairy tells a prince that his wife is on the glass hill. After traveling over forests, deserts, and more the prince finds no sign of the glass hill. At last he comes to the home of winter (Jezibaba), who despite being the goddess of a major season hasn't ever heard of the glass hill, though she thinks that maybe her son, a cannibalistic monster has. Though even with his great knowledge, he also hasn't heard of the hill either, so he sends the prince on to see his brother, who also hasn’t heard of the glass mountain and who, again, sends the prince on to his other brother. (Clara Vostrovsky Winlow)

 

The ocean too is often equated with the realm of the dead, as great bodies of water, such as the river Styx in Greek lore, were the barrier between the human realm and the realm of the dead.

 

 

“The Corpse Watchers” Continued...

 

She was stupefied at first, but when they reached the waters she recovered her thoughts. After piercing down a great depth, they saw a green light towards the bottom. At last they were below the sea, that seemed a green sky above them; and sitting in a beautiful meadow, she half asleep, and her head resting against his side. She couldn’t keep her eyes open, and she couldn’t tell how long she slept: but when she woke, she was in bed at his house, and he and his mother sitting by her bedside, and watching her.

 

It was a witch that had a spite to the young man, because he wouldn’t marry her, and so she got power to keep him in a state between life’ and death till a young woman would rescue him by doing what she had just done. So at her request, her sisters got their own shape again, and were sent back to their mother, with their spades of gold and shovels of silver. Maybe they were better after that, but I doubt it much. The youngest got the young gentleman for her husband. I’m sure she deserved him, and, if they didn’t live happy, THAT WE MAY

 

Bringing peoples’ souls back from the land of the dead was one of the most important jobs of the shaman. So within “The Corpse Watchers” are pieces of what are likely a shaman’s journey to recover the spirit of a dying person from the realm of the dead, mixed with what are likely later motifs about happy marriages and children striking out to seek their fortunes. Part of the challenge to understanding supernatural fairy tales is that they are often populated by old shamans, witches, fairies, and deities whose names have been changed over time. Thus it's sometimes difficult to know who a story might have originally been about. Europe, after all, is filled with forgotten or nearly forgotten deities, for as each wave of people moved through Europe they often altered the religion of the place they moved into, or at times lost some of their own deities. This means that many of the pieces that make up fairy tales come from earlier ideas about ancient deities. In Russia for example;

 

Perun, the god of thunder and lightning, became Ilya the Prophet; Volos the guardian of herds and flocks became St Vlasia; Kupalnitsa, goddess of rivers and lakes became St Agrippina... Nevertheless, the memory of local gods persisted and the fear of them degenerated into superstition. At this stage of disorganization of local custom, the magic of folktales became half-fantastic, half-conventional; transmitted as they were, orally and under the ban of the Church, the tales became diluted with faint memories of real history, lost folk songs, and laments, Christian legend and superstitions dating back to earlier times. (Davidson and Chaudhri)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stitching Tales Together

 

Perhaps the easiest place to see the transformation of gods into mere fairy tale characters, the piecing together of ancient divine myths with other tales is Greece, because here we know many (though not all) of the ancient myths about their deities. So when we see that God in Greek fairy tales uses lighting to smite the wicked and to battle a rebellion of giants who try to climb up a mountain to reach him, we are able to understand that this comes from myths about Zeus battling the titans to keep them from climbing up mount Olympus.

 

Perhaps even more interesting is the fairy tale about the Turk Magician who kidnaps the daughter of St. Demetra, a clear remnant of the Greek myth “The Rape of Persephone” in which Hades, the lord of the , kidnaps the daughter of the Greek fertility goddess, Demeter. In this story St. Demetra is a clear continuation of the goddess Demeter, with places in Greece even continuing the give offerings to the statue of the goddess Demeter while merely calling it an icon of St. Demetra, a saint who was never recognized by the Church and is unknown elsewhere. In tales St. Demetra was a kind and good old woman, devoted to feeding the poor. She had a daughter who was the most beautiful woman since Lady Aphrodite. A Turkish Lord of Souli (Souli is significant because it is a region with one of the mythological descents into the underworld, and is a place where one version of the “Rape of Persephone” by Hades took place), who was well versed in magic decided to kidnap her. One Christmas night, while St. Demetra was at church the Turkish lord seized the girl and carried her off on his black horse which breathed flames from his nostrils.

 

So far the story tracks fairly closely to the ancient Greek myth of Hades kidnapping the daughter of Demeter; with Hades and his black horses being replaced by a Turkish Magician with a black horse, and Demeter being replaced by a kindly saint. This, however, is where the stories begin to diverge, for in the ancient myth we know that the sun is the one who tells Demeter what happened to her daughter. In this later fairy tale however, St. Demetra asks the sun, but he tells her nothing, and so it's ultimately a stork, which is her friend, who tells her what happened to her daughter. The stork then offers to guide her on a journey to find her daughter. This element seems to come from some form of shamanistic story which has pushed its way into the old myth, as birds were frequently guides of shamans into the spirit world. It gets more complicated however, for unlike the previous myth in which Zeus ordered Hades to free Demeter's daughter Persephone, St. Demetra must travel through the cold winter to find her daughter, all while being mocked by the people she encounters. At last she finds a kindly family which takes her in. In return for their kindness she blesses their fields with rich fertility. The son of this family then takes up St. Demetra's cause and travels in her stead to find her kidnapped daughter.

                                                                                                                  

So once more we've switched the type of tale this is, and have moved from an ancient myth about a deity, to a story about a shaman, to a tale about a hero who must free the damsel in distress. In this story the young man encounters some dragons resting around a giant cauldron. The young man lifts this cauldron and the dragons are so impressed with his display of strength that they crowd around him and say;

 

"You who can lift with one hand a cauldron which we by our united efforts can scarcely carry, you alone are capable of carrying off a maiden whom we have long been trying to lay our hands on, and whom we cannot seize because of the height of the tower wherein a magician keeps her shut up."

 

Not certain how to escape the, he opts to kill them one by one as they crawl through the window of the Turks tower after him.  At last he finds St. Demetra's daughter when;

 

Suddenly the magician appeared, and in a fury of anger threw himself upon the young man, who met him bravely. The former was of superhuman strength, but Nicolas' son was not inferior to him. The magician had the power to transform himself into anything he might choose; he changed successively into a lion, into a serpent, into a bird of prey, into fire — hoping under some one of these forms to wear his adversary out; but nothing could shake the courage of the young man. For three days the combat continued. The first day the magician seemed beaten, but the next he regained his advantage ; at the end of the day's struggle he killed his young opponent, and cut his body into four quarters, which he hung on the four sides of the tower. Then elated by his victory, he did violence to Demetra's daughter, whose chastity he had hitherto respected. But in the night the stork flew away to a great distance to fetch a magic herb which it knew, brought it back in its beak, and rubbed with it the young man's lips. At once the pieces of his body came together again and he revived. Great was his despair when he learnt what had taken place after his defeat; but he only threw himself upon the magician with the greater fury the third day, to punish him for his crime. (Cuthburt)

 

Here again we return to the notion of the stork as the shamanistic helper spirit, bringing the hero back to life so that he may continue his battle.  

 

Like many fairy tales, this Greek fairy tale isn't a single story, rather it's potentially three different stories stitched together. It's common for fairy tales to be made up of many elements from other stories or superstitions which are placed into the plot but don't necessarily seem to fit with the original idea of the tale. So as you can see. the challenge to understanding the original meaning behind fairy tales isn't just that they have long complex histories, but that they are made up of various unrelated pieces which are often puzzled together over time. Each of these pieces may have its own meaning, its own history, and so when they are put together to make a single story, that story can become extremely confusing.  Take “Hansel and Gretel” for example:

 

 

Analysis of “Hansel and Gretel”

 

Next to a great forest there lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and his two children. The boy's name was Hansel and the girl's name was Gretel. He had but little to eat, and once, when a great famine came to the land, he could no longer provide even their daily bread.

One evening as he was lying in bed worrying about his problems, he sighed and said to his wife, "”What is to become of us? How can we feed our children when we have nothing for ourselves?"

"”Man, do you know what?" answered the woman. "”Early tomorrow morning we will take the two children out into the thickest part of the woods, make a fire for them, and give each of them a little piece of bread, then leave them by themselves and go off to our work. They will not find their way back home, and we will be rid of them."

 

This beginning likely comes from a cluster of Western European tales where children are abandoned by their parents, which may have originated with medieval famine. In addition to “Hansel and Gretel,” these stories include “Mollie Whoopie” and “Little Thumb”. Within these stories we see a much more shockingly horrifying picture of poverty than that portrayed in “The Corpse Watches.” Indeed the poverty in “Hansel and Gretel” is so stunningly extreme that it's haunted the nightmares of people and delighted the pens of philosophers for two centuries. Poverty in general is likely one of the most important forces involved in shaping fairy tales. In the original version of “Hansel and Gretel,” as with similar tales, it wasn't some step mother who banished Hansel and Gretel into the forest for want of food, it was their own mother. Unable to bear the thought that the children's own mother would send them off into the woods to die, the Grimm brothers changed the story. But in some ways Hansel and Gretel were lucky; in other lesser known stories, as well as one Biblical story, desperate parents seek to eat their children (and are punished for it).

 

Perhaps one of the harshest and most stunning tales of famine comes from Japan. This, however, isn't a fairy tale; instead it's part of a village record from little more than a hundred years ago. In this story a reed cutter was unable to sell his goods, so with no food to feed his starving family he made his way home. Unable to bear telling his children that he had no food for them, he snuck into the house and went to bed. When he awoke he was horrified to see his two little children sharpening his ax. When he asked them what they were doing, they told him that they wanted him to cut off their heads in order to end their hunger.

 

Starvation causes insanity. As the body begins searching desperately for a way to stay to keep the heart and lungs alive it breaks down a person’s muscles. They begin to suffer anemia, rashes, and diarrhea, but without food what they are defecating is the broken down pieces of their own body. It gets worse, however, as those who are starving suffer depression and anxiety. They become unable to think and obsessed with food; all common elements found in fairy tale characters. The wish of many in fairy tales, it seems, is to eat their fill; to gain food, for which they will sacrifice nearly anything, even selling their soul to the devil in order to eat.

 

 

“Hansel and Gretel” Analysis continued…

 

Hansel and Gretel are too hungry to sleep while their parents are planning to leave them in the forest to die, so they overhear everything. Hansel, being clever, fills his pockets with white stones so that he can make a trail to lead him and his sister back home after their father abandons them in the forest. The Little Thumb does the same in his fairy tale. However, Molly Whuppie doesn't do this in her fairy tale, and neither do most characters in such abandonment tales, so this element seems to be German/French specific.

 

It's interesting to note that despite having been so desperate that they left their children in the woods to die, the parents are able to live with them for some time after they make it back home; until another famine strikes, when once again the children's mother gets their father to leave them in the forest. This may be due to later influence on the story, as the upper class people who got a hold of it may have viewed such abandonment as a result of the poor being wasteful whenever they got lucky enough to have plenty.

 

After being lead into the woods a number of times, Hansel and Gretel finally get lost as their mother wanted them to.

 

They started walking again, but managed only to go deeper and deeper into the woods. If help did not come soon, they would perish. At midday they saw a little snow-white bird sitting on a branch. It sang so beautifully that they stopped to listen. When it was finished it stretched its wings and flew in front of them. They followed it until they came to a little house. The bird sat on the roof, and when they came closer, they saw that the little house was built entirely from bread with a roof made of cake, and the windows were made of clear sugar.

 

And here's where the second story enters in, for in “Molly Whuppie” and similar tales the journey in the woods is barely mentioned, the details of the forest being irrelevant to the story. This lack of information is fairly common in fairy tales where details, such as the journey across seven whole kingdoms, are suppressed into a single statement of fact, that the journey took place. Even in “Little Thumb,” which mentions how scary the woods are, the children simply wander blindly through the darkness. In “Hansel and Gretel,” however, the journey has an interesting element that isn't present in most other variations of this tale; that of following the little snow white bird from branch to branch. The bird is important because birds are often the guides of shamans into the spirit world, and were at times the form that the souls of the dead took (Schaefer). In an Irish tale a monk hears a bird singing so beautifully he follows it into the woods as it flies from tree to tree. Then when he returns home he finds that he's been gone for decades, as the bird had led him into the spirit world.

 

So the fact that Hansel and Gretel follow a bird is likely taken from an element which in the past had signaled that the characters are in the “Other World;” that they have reached the point in their starvation where they are on the verge of death and are now on their first shamanistic journey. In folk religion it was common for many shamans to starve themselves in the wilderness in order to enter the spirit world, bringing themselves to the edge of death in order to enter a liminal state between the world of the living and the world of the dead (Kelly and Thomas). Further, as I'll discuss later, such starvation can also lead people to have near death experiences, which are likely responsible for many of the shamanistic traditions and fairy tale elements humans had.

 

It is of course questionable if anyone at the time of the Grimm Brothers was aware of the shamans journey motifs inherent in the story, but the bird guiding the children into the spirit world isn't the only aspect of this tale that indicates the two children are in the spirit world. So it seems probable that the story of “Hansel and Gretel” was merged with a similar tale about children being taken captive by an otherworldly monster.

 

 

“Hansel And Gretel” Continued...

 

After gorging themselves on the house of bread for a while, Hansel and Gretel meet what at first seems to be the kindly old lady who lives inside it.

 

She took them by the hand and led them into her house. Then she served them a good meal: milk and pancakes with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterward she made two nice beds for them, decked in white. Hansel and Gretel went to bed, thinking they were in heaven. But the old woman had only pretended to be friendly. She was a wicked witch who was lying in wait there for children. She had built her house of bread only in order to lure them to her, and if she captured one, she would kill him, cook him, and eat him; and for her that was a day to celebrate.

 

The witch in this story seems to be similar in nature to Baba Yaga, who is a guardian to the realm of the dead. In “Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale” it's claimed that Baba Yaga herself is identical to the Germanic figures of Holda, Frau Holle, and Bertha. These figures cause the snow and the rain, but also care for the souls of unborn children until sending them to earth when they are ready. But perhaps most important for this story, they also receive the souls of dead children. (As an interesting side note, a connection is also made between Baba Yaga and mice who are the messengers of Death, and the Germanic tooth fairy, with the custom being that children will give their baby teeth to mice and ask for an iron tooth in return).

 

Like Baba Yaga, the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” can't really see the children, she can only smell or feel them. Propp saw this as further evidence that Baba Yaga was the guardian of the dead, for she couldn't see the living but only smell them. This idea is fairly common throughout Greek lore. The ghosts in the Odyssey, for example, had difficulty seeing the living, while the guardians to the realm of the dead in one Celtic tale of King Arthur couldn't see him very well either (Green, 2007). This is interesting because once again we have a symbol which places Hansel and Gretel in the realm of the dead.

 

 

“Hansel and Gretel” continued

 

After the witch captures them she stuffs Hansel with food and forces Gretel to work as a slave. This enslavement of the protagonist in the spirit world is such a common theme in fairy lore that it's even the subject of the film “Spirited Away.” As with this film, it’s very often a witch, such as Baba Yaga who does the enslaving, though some form of “forest king” will also buy peoples’ souls to make them into slaves as well. In general the spirits of lore crave slaves, servants, or helpers to do their menial labor for them.

 

In the witches desire to fatten up Hansel we begin to truly see a completely different motif than is present in most of the other Western stories of this type. In stories such as “Molly Whuppie” the protagonist and her sisters are put to bed by a wicked giant who plans to murder them in their sleep. There is no cleaning the house, no caging the children to make them grow fatter, the story is fairly strait forward, with the giant simply planning to murder and eat the children in their sleep so that his kindly wife can't object. (This kindly wife of the lord of the dead will be the subject of a later study, however, suffice it to say that it's also a common theme in fairy tales). With Hansel locked away the witch begins waiting anxiously for the day that she can eat them.

 

Every morning the old woman crept out to the stall and shouted, "”Hansel, stick out your finger, so I can feel if you are fat yet."

But Hansel stuck out a little bone, and the old woman, who had bad eyes and could not see the bone, thought it was Hansel's finger, and she wondered why he didn't get fat.

 

The use of a bone to trick the witch into thinking the protagonist is too skinny to eat is interesting here, because this motif likely has its origin much further east, as there are a number of other places where this trick is used, including Mari-El (which is on the border between Europe and Asia in Russia), among the Sami to the North, and Poland.

 

Of these stories The Mari-El Tale is of special interest because it involves a witch called the Vuver, which also locks the children away in order to fatten them up for eating. According to Valery Petrov, Vuver spirits are serpent like witches that come from the souls of the dead or the souls of sleeping humans whose spirits have left their bodies to go on a spirit journey. The Vuver flies about at night in order to spread illness, spoil crops, and do many other things which are associated with witches. A witch based on the Vuver is an interesting enemy for Hansel and Gretel to face, because she could also explain why their mother is dead when they return home; because the Vuver were the spirits of astral travelers who sent their souls out of their bodies in their sleep. Thus the Vuver could have been the children's own mother seeking to devour them, and when they killed this witch, their mother died as well.

 

Here again we have sort of a conundrum: the Vuver is an evil spirit that dwelt in the folklore of a land which is nearly a thousand miles from Germany, where “Hansel and Gretel” was collected. Further, the tale of the Vuver in Mari-El that I know of doesn't have a Wicked Mother character, nor are the children abandoned by their parents, but instead are simply captured by the Vuver while they are gathering berries in the forest. This begs the question; could the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” be a witch who sends her soul out of her body? The answer is that it's certainly possible. as the German's believed in the idea of witches sending their souls from their bodies at one time. In fact there are stories of men capturing the souls of witches who had left their bodies, and forcing these souls to marry them. In one of these German tales, the witch herself was from England, and she eventually returned to her body there. Such stories show an obvious link to the idea that a witch, or other evil being could send their souls out of their body, an idea which exists all over Europe. Of course, whether the witch that Hansel and Gretel encounter is their own mother or not is entirely speculative, but often such beings would attack their family members first. A male Vuver, for example, is most likely to drain the life out of their wives before moving on to the rest of their family.

 

 

 

“Hansel and Gretel” continued

 

Frustrated by the fact that Hansel doesn't seem to be getting any fatter, and at last unable to wait any longe,r the witch decides to cook Hansel and Gretel despite how skinny they are;

 

She pushed poor Gretel outside to the oven, from which fiery flames were leaping. "  Climb in,"  said the witch, " and see if it is hot enough to put the bread in yet."  And when Gretel was inside, she intended to close the oven, and bake her, and eat her as well.

But Gretel saw what she had in mind, so she said, "  I don't know how to do that. How can I get inside?"

"  Stupid goose,"  said the old woman. “The opening is big enough. See, I myself could get in."  And she crawled up and stuck her head into the oven.

Then Gretel gave her a shove, causing her to fall in. Then she closed the iron door and secured it with a bar. The old woman began to howl frightfully. But Gretel ran away, and the godless witch burned up miserably. Gretel ran straight to Hansel, unlocked his stall, and cried, "  Hansel, we are saved. The old witch is dead."

Then Hansel jumped out, like a bird from its cage when someone opens its door. How happy they were! They threw their arms around each other's necks, jumped with joy, and kissed one another. Because they now had nothing to fear, they went into the witch's house. In every corner were chests of pearls and precious stones.

 

With the witch killed and Hansel and Gretel as wealthy as kings you might think that the story is over, but it isn't quite yet. Remember that Hansel and Gretel were led into the spirit world by the bird and so defeating the witch wasn’t enough; they now have to find their way out of this magical realm.

 

"  But now we must leave,"  said Hansel, “ and get out of these witch-woods."

After walking a few hours they arrived at a large body of water. "  We cannot get across,"  said Hansel. "  I cannot see a walkway or a bridge."

"  There are no boats here,"  answered Gretel, "  but there is a white duck swimming. If I ask it, it will help us across."

Then she called out:

 

“Duckling, duckling,

Here stand Gretel and Hansel.

Neither a walkway nor a bridge,

Take us onto your white back”.

The duckling came up to them, and Hansel climbed onto it, then asked his little sister to sit down next to him.

 

Despite having been able to walk to the witch’s house, Hansel and Gretel are suddenly confronted with an uncrossable barrier of water on their way home. Water often acts as a barrier between the human and spirit world, a fact which is likely the reason characters such as the Headless Horsemen cannot cross it. In order to cross these barriers shamans had to pay a boatman, turn into an animal which could cross, or ride on a goose, swan or duck. Water fowl were often considered be travelers between the spirit world because that they could fly into the sky, or dive under the water, while nesting on the land, allowing them to exist in all three worlds.

 

The story of “Hansel and Gretel” then is made up of pieces from many different stories, containing both the Western elements of starvation and the defeat of a wicked being, and the Eastern element of a blind otherworldly guardian which is deceived through the use of a bone. It also potentially contains multiple elements involving witches, magical birds, and journeys into the land of the dead.

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