The Flea (Giambattista Basile)

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The flea ( Neapolitan original: Lo polene ) is a fairy tale ( AaTh 621, 513A, 653, 313). It is in Giambattista Basile 's Pentameron collection as the fifth story of the first day (I, 5).

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A king nurses a flea off his head the size of a sheep, pulls its skin off and promises his daughter to whoever can guess which animal she is from. This is then an ugly orco ( giant ) who takes them into the forest and, to their horror, puts human flesh in front of them. When he is gone, a beggar comes and sets her free with her seven wonderful sons. The orco follows. The first son hears it, the second spits out a lake, the third lets knives grow out of the ground, the fourth a forest, the fifth spits a river, so the orco has to turn back several times. The sixth makes a tower, there they lock themselves in, and the seventh shoots the rising orco. The king is glad to see his daughter again and gives her a handsome husband.

Remarks

As a giant, the Orco fits the opening theme of the monstrous flea. The princess complains: "... cruel father, you are certainly not born of human flesh" - "... Take a look at this stink from my ass, he wants to act like a man and dictate the law to his father!" magical escape cf. at Basile III, 8 The Dummling , V, 7 The five sons . The fairy tale ultimately goes back to oriental narrative books of the late Middle Ages and was particularly widespread in the Mediterranean region. The first German translation can be found in Eberhard Werner Happels Hungarian War Novel (1685), the second in Kletke's Märchensaal (1845), No. 5. Clemens Brentano adapted it as a fairy tale by Baron von Hüpfenstich in Italian Fairy Tales . Cf. Grimm's princess with the louse , the six servants , sixes come through the whole world , the water mermaid , and also Grimm's comment on King Thrushbeard for a fur test . Rudolf Schenda mentions a more recent, Sardinian version in Enrica Delitala's Fiabe e leggende nelle tradizioni popolari della Sardegna (1985), No. 13. For Walter Scherf , the father's demon is an incest fantasy, grotesquely circumscribed in the flea in the bottle and by his blood. Psychosomatically, the daughter is left with vomiting or the forgotten mother and sibling side. Scherf compares other fairy tales.

This fairy tale was also filmed with Matteo Garrone's film The Fairy Tale of Fairy Tales , which is based on the Pentameron . The king is played by Toby Jones , his daughter from Jessie Cave .

The motif of the flea appears in a large number of poems, satires , fables , grotesques and humoresques of the early modern period, so that one can speak of its own flea literature .

literature

  • Giambattista Basile: The fairy tale of fairy tales. The pentameron. Edited by Rudolf Schenda. CH Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46764-4 , pp. 56-62, 521-522, 579-580 (based on the Neapolitan text of 1634/36, completely and newly translated).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Giambattista Basile: The fairy tale of fairy tales. The pentameron. Edited by Rudolf Schenda. CH Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46764-4 , pp. 579-580 (based on the Neapolitan text of 1634/36, completely and newly translated).
  2. ↑ Walter Scherf: The fairy tale dictionary. Volume 1. CH Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 978-3-406-51995-6 , pp. 326-330.