Little Thumbnail
Tom Thumb is a fairy tale that on its in Europe the most widespread version Kunstmärchen Le Petit Poucet by the French writer Charles Perrault back, which in 1697 as part of its collection of fairy tales of my Mother Goose (Les Contes de ma mère l'Oye) appeared . In the 19th century it was popularized especially through adaptations by Ludwig Bechstein and Carlo Collodi . Little Tom Thumb is in Bechstein's German Fairy Tale Book 1845 as No. 39, later as No. 34.
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A poor wood chopper and his wife have seven sons, the youngest of whom is no bigger than a thumb when he was born and who is called " Thumbsling ". Even in his later years he hardly grows and does not speak much, so that he is often mistakenly mistaken for stupid. When he was just seven years old, there was a famine and the parents decided to leave their sons in the forest, as they were too much of a burden for them. But Tom Thumb overhears the conversation, and when the parents lead the children into the dark forest the next day, he lets small pebbles fall unnoticed on the way. When the seven are finally left alone, the older brothers begin to cry, but Tom Thumb leads them back home on the path marked with the pebbles.
Meanwhile, the landlord has sent the parents ten écus , with which they can buy plenty of food when the children return to the house. The parents' joy only lasts as long as this money lasts, and soon they decide again to leave the children in the darkest part of the forest. Since he has no pebbles this time, Tom Thumb drops crumbs on the way into the forest , but these are eaten by birds. After the seven brothers have strayed through the forest for some time, they come to a lonely house in which an ogre lives with his wife and seven daughters.
The ogre's kind-hearted wife takes in the children, feeds them and hides them under her husband's bed, who loves to eat small children. When the ogre comes home, he smells the human flesh in his house (Je sens la chair fraîche) and discovers the children in their hiding place. Only the good persuasion of his wife prevents him from immediately slaughtering the seven brothers. Instead, he agrees to fatten the seven a little more and not eat them until the next day, in a good sauce. The seven brothers spend the night in the same room where the ogre's seven man-eating daughters are already sleeping in a large bed, each of whom wears a golden crown. When his brothers fell asleep, Tom Thumb exchanged the crowns of his monstrous daughters for his brothers' nightcaps. When the ogre decides at night to slaughter the children immediately, he feels the headgear of the sleepers in the pitch-dark bedroom and thus cuts his own daughters' throats.
Tom Thumb wakes his brothers and flees the house with them. When the ogre discovers the ruse the next morning, he puts on his seven-mile boots and goes in pursuit. When, exhausted, he falls asleep on the rock under which the seven children are hiding, Thumble steals his boots. Then he makes his way to the house of the ogre and persuades his wife under the pretext that the ogre has fallen into the hands of robbers and has instructed him to get the ransom with the seven-league boots as quickly as possible and to hand over all her treasures. Loaded with these riches, he returns to his father's house.
In his fairy tale, Perrault gives an alternative ending to the story. “A lot of people say,” writes Perrault, that Tom Thumb first goes to the royal court in his seven-mile boots. The king promises him rich reward in case Tom Thumb brings him news of an army in the field two hundred miles away before the end of the day. After the mission has been completed, he carries out other courier services for the king and also as a messenger of love for rich ladies. Finally, he returns to his parents' home and shares his wealth with his family.
The fairy tale ends, like all eight contes in the fairy tale collection, with a rhyming morality that shows that the most inconspicuous of the children can turn out to be a blessing for the family.
Narrative research
In this fairy tale, narrative research primarily poses the problem of how faithfully Perrault followed the requirements of orally transmitted folk tales in “Little Thumbling” . The judgment of the Brothers Grimm in the preface to their Children's and Household Tales (1812) that Perrault's merit lies in the fact that he did not add anything and left the things as such , including small things, unchanged , is already confirmed by research in the later 19th century partially refuted. In fact, Perrault mixed at least two originally independent motifs in “Little Thumbling” .
The early popularization of Perrault's fairy tales in large parts of Europe also had a lasting influence on the oral tradition of these materials. Because of this mutual influence between oral and written tradition, and because the folklore-oriented recording of oral narrative traditions did not wake up until the later 18th century, the proportions of oral substrate and literary processing are difficult to distinguish afterwards, especially since Perrault has no information about his Working method and sources. For this reason, Antti Aarne Perrault's Petit Poucet, despite belonging to the art fairy tale genre, also included it as an archetype in his index of popular narrative materials in 1910, although the objective of this index was actually to catalog fairy tale materials in their pure, uncontaminated form.
In the Aarne-Thompson-Index, which has been continuously expanded since then, the fairy tale has been assigned the abbreviation AaTh 327 B. It thus represents a subtype of the fairy tale type AaTh 327, “The children and the ogre” . The Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel as AaTh327 A is counted as another subtype for this type . The type-forming motif AaTh 327 is the overnight stay of the children in the ogre's house (also with a giant or a witch). The combination of this action element with the swapping of the headgear makes up the subtype AaTh 327 B. While Stith Thompson in 1946 still interpreted AaTh 327 as generic pan-European material, to which Perrault had added the motif of substitution, recent ethnographic research indicates that AaTh 327 B is a very old type of fairy tale widespread on all three continents of the old world acts. Variations have been documented from West Africa through Nubia and the Middle East, Persia and India to Japan.
The title of the story took Perrault from one of AAth completely different 327 fairytale, which in Aarne-Thompson Index as AAth 700, "The Tom Thumb," is indexed and in the Grimm's Fairy Tales by KHM 37, Tom Thumb , is represented . In most of the versions attested to in France, the name of this fairy tale refers to the protagonist's short stature ; While in southern France it is mostly known under the name " millet grain " or "peppercorn" (grain de millet / grain de poivre) , in the northern French-speaking area it is generally described as the size of a thumb, i.e. as a "thumbling" (poucet, pouçot, poucelot, petit poucet) . In this original Thumbling Tale, which enjoys great popularity in England under the name Tom Thumb , the protagonist is so microscopic that he is eaten by a cow and in some versions dies a heroic death fighting a spider. In Perrault's fairy tale the smallness of the hero is prominently introduced at the beginning of the fairy tale (Thumbling overhears his parents by hiding under his father's stool), but in the further course it does not carry the plot and is ultimately irrelevant.
Possible literary role models
In addition to analogies in other fairy tales, which can be read as relics of a common primordial myth (especially in the 19th century) or in the Jungian sense as universal archetypes of the human soul, there are also several literary models that could have directly influenced Perrault . It seems certain that such a model for the "Little Thumble" was Nennello e Nennella , which is included as the penultimate fairy tale in Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone (1634–36). However, it only coincides with Perrault's Däumling in the opening motif of the “lost” children and develops in the further course of the plot roughly analogous to the Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel and Little Brothers and Sisters (KHM 15, AaTh 450).
Gaston Paris speculated in 1875 that the figure of Thumbnail was the descendant of an Aryan deity, equated with the Vedic Vishnu and Hermes of Greek mythology. However, according to Yvette Saupé, existing similarities with Hermes could be at least as plausibly the result of Perrault's reading as a presumed Aryan origin myth. It refers to the parallels in the fairy tale to the Homeric Hermes' hymn , in which Hermes, hardly born, steals cattle consecrated to Apollo , rewarded for his cunning by the father of the gods Zeus with winged shoes (an obvious analogy to the seven-mile boots) and the speed that is so bestowed on him is called to be a messenger of the gods (just as the thumbling at the end of Perrault's fairy tale advanced to the courier in royal and love services). Homer, the alleged author of the hymn, was in the focus of French literature for years as part of Perrault's 1687 querelle des anciens et des modern . Perrault himself criticized Homer in the third volume of his Parallèles des anciens et des modern en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences , published in 1692, for his excessiveness in dealing with hyperbolas and compared them explicitly with the seven-league boots of the French folk tales, which seemed more meaningful to him there Children can think of them "as a kind of stilt that ogres can use to cover long distances in a short time . "
interpretation
The question of how freely Perrault dealt with his model also makes it difficult to interpret it in the sense of a search for the author's intention, and so a large part of the secondary literature deals more with folklore research, while the literary character of the work has received comparatively little critical attention. The Petit Poucet is often read as a poetological commentary on the writing of fairy tales, also because it is the last of the eight fairy tales in Perrault's collection . Such an interpretation is mainly supported by the end of the fairy tale, in which the author offers two different outcomes to choose from and thus brings in a metafictional moment that prompts the reader to reflect on the plausibility of the story and the process of writing fairy tales.
The plot of the fairy tale is not driven by the hero's wondrous smallness, but rather by his cunning, his peasant cunning . This fact can be read as an expression of Perrault's ideas of the nature and appropriateness of the wonderful (le merveilleux) or of the sublime in fairy tales, which he explained in the Parallèles and with which he explicitly turned against Boileau's poetics, which were oriented towards Greco-Roman antiquity ; For Perrault, the sublime, as can be seen in the comment on Homer mentioned above, can be experienced by the intellect, as actually imaginable, which is expressed in the course of action in the moderate handling of fantastic elements in fairy tales. In the Petit Poucet there is a turn to the resources of the human understanding, as it is formulated in the French philosophy of the time in the Cartesian cogito , and at least one critic has read the fairy tale as an “allegory of the spirit”.
Edition history
The quoted passage in the Parallèles is an indication that Perrault was already familiar with the fairy tale in 1692. However, the fairy tale is missing in the manuscript version of the Contes, which was only discovered in 1953 and which is dated to the year 1695, so that it also seems possible that Perrault did not use the material until between 1695 and 1697, the date of publication of the Contes. written down. As with all eight of Perrault's prose tales, the question of authorship has not been conclusively clarified. The first edition appeared under the name of his son Pierre Perrault d'Armancour, and the question of whether this could actually have been at least co-author, if not the main author of the Contes , is being discussed.
In some of the later editions of the Contes the “Little Thumble” is missing , apparently because the story was judged to be unsuitable for children due to its extraordinary cruelty, for example in the 1920 edition for the Flammarion publishing house that Pierre Noury provided .
Adaptations
Like the other fairy tales of Perrault, Little Thumble found its way into oral tradition not only in France, even before the first German translation of the Contes appeared in 1745 . When the Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales in the German-speaking world after 1800, they found versions of Perrault's fairy tales that were more or less true to the text in many places. In contrast to other Perrault fairy tales, such as Sleeping Beauty , Puss in Boots or Little Red Riding Hood , they did not include "Little Thumble" in their children's and household tales because its motifs were too similar to the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel , which the Grimms recorded in the Hessian area and, as they were well aware, may have been directly influenced by Perrault's Däumling.
To greater awareness came Tom Thumb in Germany with the transfer of Ludwig Bechstein (1847). Bechstein's version differs from Perrault's version not only in details. So the poor wood chopper became a basket-tie; Bechstein translated the little ogre figure on the right bank of the Rhine as " ogre ". The description of the seven monstrous ogre daughters at Bechstein also appears noticeably defused. In addition, Bechstein did not accept either of the two outcomes suggested by Perrault:
"Now he took one of his brothers by each hand, and they took each other's hands again, and that is how it went, you have not seen, with seven-mile boot strides home. They were all welcome, Thumbling recommended that his parents keep a careful eye on their brothers, he wanted to see to his progress himself with the help of the boots and when he hardly said that he took a step and he was already far away, another, and he stood on a mountain for over half an hour, another, and he was out of sight of his parents and brothers. "
In the retelling by Moritz Hartmann (in Märchen nach Perrault , Stuttgart 1867) the ogre is translated as " giant ", and the two resolutions are not presented as alternatives, but follow one another in time: Thumbling first swindles himself into the giant's treasure and then goes into the service of the king. Instead of Perrault's morality, Hartmann's fairy tale closes with a platitude:
"So little Thumble had become a great man, and in his coat of arms were the words in golden Gothic letters: Himself is the man!"
The engravings that Gustave Doré published as an illustration for Perrault's Contes by Hetzel in 1867 and that also graced the Stuttgart first edition of Hartmann's transmissions became very popular . In Germany, the material illustrated, among others, Theodor Hosemann (16 pen drawings, 1841), Ludwig Richter (illustrations for the individual edition of Bechstein's Der kleine Däumling , 1851), Oswald Sickert ( Munich picture sheet no.64 , 1851) and Oskar Herrfurth (six-part postcard series), in England George Cruikshank (illustrations for Hop o 'my Thumb and the Seven-League Boots , 1853) and Gordon Browne ( Hop o' my Thumb , 1886).
In France, the iconic character of the Petit Poucet became a popular motif among political cartoonists as early as Napoleonic times. The fairy tale was also used for political purposes in the First World War after the invasion of France by German troops; the Lorraine writer Émile Moselly rewrote the fairy tale in 1918 as a propaganda fable in which the cruel ogre stands for Germany, while the thumbling stands for France.
An ironic reversal of the fairy tale can be found in Michel Tournier's short story La fugue du Petit Poucet (1972), in which the protagonist Pierre, who comes from a good family, is taken in on the run from his strict father by a meek hippie named Logre and his seven hash-smoking daughters. When the runaway was taken home by the police, the Logre gave him his gold-plated suede boots so that he could always find the right path to a self-determined, countercultural life.
Maurice Ravel was inspired by Perrault's fairy tales to write his composition Ma mere l'oye , the second movement of which is entitled Petit poucet . ( Ma Mère l'Oye ; pieces for piano four hands based on fables by Perrault and Mme. D'Aulnoy, 1908–1910). Hans Werner Henze's children 's opera Pollicino was premiered in 1980 and follows the title of Carlo Collodi's Italian translation of Perrault's fairy tales into Italian ( Racconti delle fate, 1876).
The material was filmed several times, for the first time in 1903, most recently in 2001 as a full-length feature film directed by Olivier Dahan , and as a television film (ARTE), most recently in 2011 under the title Im sinsteren Walde . In 1923 a puppet show based on the fairy tale is also attested in Paris.
George Pal filmed the material in 1958 under the same title as a music film.
Film adaptations
- 1958: Little Tom Thumb (film) , Oscar-winning film (original title: Tom Thumb ), directed by George Pal ,
- 1986: The Tale of Tom Thumb , Latvian-Czechoslovakian feature film (original title Pohádka o Malíčkovi ), DEFA dubbing, directed by Gunars Piesis
- 1999: The Tom Thumb, cartoon, second episode of the KIKA TV series SimsalaGrimm
literature
- Calvin Claudel: A Study of Two French Tales from Louisiana. In: Southern Folklore Quarterly. 7, 1943, pp. 223-231.
- Charles Delain: Les Contes de ma mère l'Oye avant Perrault . Dentu, Paris 1878.
- Paul Delarue, Marie-Louise Ténèze: Le conte populaire français, éd. en un seul volume et en fac-sim. des quatre tomes publiés entre 1976 et 1985 . Maisonneuve et Larose, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-7068-1572-8 .
- Christine Goldberg: "The Dwarf and the Giant" (AT 327B) in Africa and the Middle East. In: Journal of American Folklore. 116, 2003, pp. 339-350.
- Lois Marin: L'ogre de Charles Perrault ou le portrait inversé du roi. In: L'Ogre. Mélanges pour Jacques Le Goff . Gallimard, Paris 1992.
- Gaston Paris: Le petit poucet et le grande ourse . Franck, Paris 1875 (digitized version)
- Judith K. Proud: Children and Propaganda. Il était une fois ...: Fiction and Fairy Tale in Vichy France , Oxford 1995.
- Yvette Saupé: Les Contes de Perrault et la mythologie . Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Seattle, Tübingen and Paris 1997.
- Marc Soriano: Les Contes de Perrault. Culture savante et traditions populaires . Gallimard, Paris 1968.
Web links
- Charles Perrault: Little Thumb in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Ludwig Uhland: Romance from little Thumble in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Ludwig Bechstein : Little Thumbling, on maerchen.org
- Little Thumb by Charles Perrault and Ludwig Bechstein. With a series of postcards by Oskar Herrfurth
Remarks
- ^ Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Children's and house fairy tales . Berlin, 1812/15. Volume 1, p. XVI.
- ↑ Hans-Jörg Uther: The Types of International Folktales. A Classification and Bibliography. Volume I: Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, and Realistic Tales, with an Introduction. Folklore Fellows' Communications No. 284, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Helsinki 2004, pp. 213-214.
- ↑ Michael Meraklis: Thumbnail and ogre . In: Kurt Ranke , Lotte Baumann (ed.): Encyclopedia of fairy tales Concise dictionary for historical and comparative narrative research . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1993.
- ↑ Goldberg, pp. 347-348.
- ^ Paul Delarue: The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales. Arno Press, New York 1980.
- ^ Gaston Paris, Le petit poucet et le grande ourse , Paris: Franck, 1875. passim (digitized version)
- ↑ Saupé, pp. 217-222.
- ↑ Marin, p. 283.
- ^ Soriano, p. 181 ff.
- ↑ Lewis, p. 37ff.
- ^ Jacques Barchilon, Peter Flinders: Charles Perrault . (= Twayne's World Author Series 639). Boston 1981, p. 81.
- ↑ Barchillon and Flinders, pp. 84ff.
- ↑ Harry Velten: The Influence of Charles Perrault's Contes de ma Mère l'Oie on German Folklore. In: Germanic Review. 5, 1930, pp. 4-5.
- ^ J. Bolte, G. Polivka: Notes on the children's and house fairy tales of the Brother Grimm. Volume 1, Leipzig 1913, p. 115.
- ↑ Illustrations de Les Contes de Perrault at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
- ↑ Ulf Diederichs: Who's Who in fairy tales . dtv, Munich 1995, p. 181.
- ^ Judith K. Proud: Children and Propaganda . Intellect, Oxford 1995, pp. 28f.
- ↑ imdb.com
- ↑ German title: Im finsteren Wald, original title: Le petit Poucet (ARTE program) ( Memento from November 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Pierre Albert-Birot: Le Petit Poucet. In: Arlette Albert-Birot: Théâtre. Rougerie, Mortemart 1980.
