Goldilocks and the three bears
Goldilocks and the Three Bears (in the English original The Story of the Three Bears, The Three Bears, Goldilocks and the Three Bears or simply Goldilocks ) is a fairy tale that was first recorded in narrative form by the English poet and author Robert Southey and published anonymously in 1837 has been. In the same year, George Nicol published a rhymed version based on Southey's prose. Both versions are about three bears in whose habitat an old woman invades.
The story was already in circulation before Southey's publication in 1837. For example, in 1831 Eleanor Mure created a hand-made booklet about the three bears on her nephew's birthday and as early as 1813 Southey mentioned the story to friends. In 1894 the narrative researcher Joseph Jacobs discovered the fable Scrapefoot , in which a fox is the antagonist and the story of Southeys is amazingly similar. This fable may have existed orally before Southey's version. Southey may have heard of scrapefoot , but confused the term vixen (vixen) with a homonym for cunning old women. According to other authors, however, the old woman was Southey's own invention.
In the first few years after The Story of the Three Bears was published , there were two major changes in content: On the one hand, the intruder, an old woman at Southey, first became a little girl in 1849, whose name referred to her hair in various forms and has been Goldilocks (Goldilocks) since the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, the three male bachelor bears developed over the course of several years into a bear family with father bear, mother bear and baby bear. The original horror story turned into a nice family tale with only a hint of threat. The story has given rise to numerous interpretations and has been adapted as a film and opera, among other things. All in all, it is one of the most popular fairy tales in the English-speaking world.
action
In Southey's story, three male bears - a small, a medium and a large bear - live together in a house in the woods. Southey describes them as good-natured, trusting, harmless, clean and hospitable. Each bear has its own porridge bowl, chair and bed. One day they are wandering through the forest while their hot pulp is supposed to cool down. An old woman (who is described in the course of the story as being outrageous, angry, cursing, ugly, dirty and a vagabond who belongs in a reformatory ) discovers the home of the bears. She looks through the window and the keyhole, opens the door latch and enters after she is sure no one is home. The old woman eats the porridge from the smallest bear, then sits down in his chair, which breaks as a result. On her further foray through the house, she finds the bears' beds and goes to sleep in the smallest. When the bears return home, the story reaches its climax. The smallest bear finds the old woman in his bed and calls out: “Somebody has laid down in my bed - and there she is still!” The old woman startled, jumped out of the window, ran away and was never seen again.
Origins
Published in 1837 Robert Southey The Story of the Three Bears anonymously in a tower and Miszellen -Sammlung called The Doctor . The story did not come from Southey, but was the retelling of a story that had been around for a long time. Southey himself told the story to others in September 1813 and in 1831 Eleanor Mure gave the story in verse to her nephew Horace Broke for her birthday.
The versions of Southey and Mure differ in details. Southey's bears eat porridge, while Mures eats milk. Southey's old wife has no motive to enter the house; Mure is offended by the refusal of a friendship visit. When she is caught, she runs away from Southey, and from Mure the bears try to kill her in various ways: first they throw them into the fireplace to burn them, then into a lake to drown them. Eventually she is impaled on the steeple of St Paul's Cathedral .
Southey probably heard the story as a child from his uncle, William Tyler. Tyler may be telling a version with a vixen as an intruder, and Southey later mistook the English word vixen for a common name for a sly old woman. PM Zell writes in The Gothic Voice of Father Bear (1974)
“It was no trick for Southey, a consummate technician, to recreate the improvisational tone of an Uncle William through rhythmical reiteration, artful alliteration ('they walked into the woods, while'), even bardic interpolation ('She could not have been a good, honest Old Woman ') ”
"For Southey, a accomplished technician, it was no feat to recreate the improvisational tone of an Uncle William by means of rhythmic repetition , artistic alliteration [...], even bardic interpolation [...]"
Ultimately, however, it is not certain how Southey or his uncle knew the story from.
In the same year as Southey's publication, George Nicol published the story in verse form. He paid tribute to the anonymous author of The Doctor as the great thinker of the original story. Southey was delighted with Nicol's efforts to bring the narrative, which may not be found by children in The Doctor , to a wider audience. Nicol's version was illustrated with etchings by B. Hart and was reissued in 1948 - then with the indication of Southey as the original author.
In The Classic Fairy Tales (1992), the storytellers Iona and Peter Opie point to a “partial analogy” to Snow White : the lost princess enters the dwarf's house, tries her meal and sleeps in one of her beds. Similar to the three bears, the dwarfs ask: "Who was sitting on my chair?", "Who ate from my plate?" And "Who was lying in my bed?" The Opies also point out similarities with a Norwegian story, in which a princess seeks refuge in a cave inhabited by three Russian princes dressed in bearskins. She eats her food and hides under a bed.
In 1865, Charles Dickens referred to a similar story in Our Mutual Friend , but the house owned by goblins instead of bears. This suggests the existence of another previously undiscovered source. Hunting rituals and ceremonies have been suggested and discarded as possible origins.
In 1894 the illustrator John D. Batten reported a variant of the story that was at least 40 years old. In this one, the three bears live in a castle in the forest and are visited by a fox named Scrapefoot, who drinks their milk, sits in their chairs and rests in their beds. This version is one of the early fox and bear fables.
Later variants: Goldilocks
Twelve years after Southey's publication, Joseph Cundall changed the antagonist from an ugly old woman to a beautiful little girl in his Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children . In a foreword, originally a letter dedication to his children dated November 1849, he explains his reasons for this:
“The 'Story of the Three Bears' is a very old Nursery Tale, but it was never so well told as by the great poet Southey, whose version I have (with permission) given you, only I have made the intruder a little girl instead of an old woman. This I did because I found that the tale is better known with Silver-Hair , and because there are so many other stories of old women. "
“The 'Tale of the Three Bears' is a very old children's story, but it's never been told as well as by the great poet Southey, whose version I gave you (with permission), only made the intruder a little girl instead of an old woman. I did this because I thought the silver hair story was better known and because there are so many other stories about old women. "
Since the little girl was brought into the story, she's stayed there - children may prefer to hear a story about an attractive child rather than an ugly old woman. The young antagonist appeared under a number of different names: Silver Hair in the pantomime Harlequin and The Three Bears; or, Little Silver Hair and the Fairies by JB Buckstone (1853); Silver-Locks in Aunt Mavor's Nursery Tales (1858); Silverhair in George MacDonald's The Golden Key (1867); Golden Hair in Aunt Friendly's Nursery Book (circa 1868); various silver hair and golden locks; Little Golden-Hair (1889); and finally Goldilocks in Old Nursery Stories and Rhymes (1904). Tatar attributes the designation to Flora Annie Steel (1918).
Goldilocks fate varies in the numerous retellings: in some versions she runs into the forest, in some she promises to be a good child, and in some she returns home. In any case, Goldilocks is doing better than Southey's old vagabond, who in his opinion belongs in a reformatory, and even better than the old woman at Mure, who is impaled on a church tower.
Southey's all-male trio of bears has also not remained unchanged over the years. The group was re-cast as Father Bear, Mother Bear, and Baby Bear, but the date of that change is debatable. Tatar indicates that it had already appeared in 1852, while Katherine Briggs starts Mother Goose's Fairy Tales , published by Routledge in 1878. In the publication in Aunt Fanny 1852, the bears are shown as a family in the illustrations, but still as three bachelors in the text.
In Dulcken's version from 1858, the two bigger bears are brother and sister and the little bear is her friend. This constellation represents the transition of the bear trio from the traditional three male bears to the family of father, mother and child. In a publication around 1860, the bears finally became a family, both in text and illustration. In a Routledge publication around 1867, father Bear is called Rough Bruin in the text, his wife is Mammy Muff and their cub is called Tiny. In contrast to this, however, the illustrations show three male bears.
In publications after Aunt Fanny in 1852, Victorianism commanded editors to routinely and silently reword Southey's description of the antagonist landing on the seat of the chair so that no mention was made of the human buttocks. The cumulative effect of the various changes to the story since it was first published turned a horror tale into a cozy family tale with only a hint of the threat.
In addition to some other classics of English children's literature, Elizabeth Shaw also processed this story in its own version, under the title "The Bear House".
Interpretations
The Harvard -Professorin Maria Tatar noted in The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales at (2002) that Southey's narrative is sometimes viewed as a cautionary tale that is inherent in a lesson about the dangers of going away and exploring unknown territories. As with the Three Little Pigs , use repetition of the story to attract the child's attention and reinforce the aspect of protection and safety. Tatar shows that today history is typically brought up as a discovery of what is “just right”, while for previous generations it was about an intruder with no self-control or respect for someone else's property.
In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim describes Goldilocks as “poor, beautiful and enchanting” and notes that the story about her only describes the hair in a positive way. Bettelheim discusses the fairy tale mainly from the point of view of Goldilocks struggle to overcome the oedipal problems of confronting the identity crisis during adolescence.
In Bettelheim's view, the narrative fails to encourage children to make real efforts to solve the problems of growing up one by one, and it does not end, as a fairy tale should, with the promise of future happiness awaits those who have mastered their oedipal situation as a child. He says the story prevents the child reading it from attaining emotional maturity.
Tatar criticizes Bettelheim's views: His interpretation is perhaps too focused on instrumentalizing fairy tales, making them a means of transport that contain messages and perpetuate behavioral models for the child. While the story may not solve oedipal problems or sibling rivalries in the way Bettelheim believes Cinderella does, it does bring up the importance of respecting property and the consequences of 'just trying out' things that don't belong to you.
In the Handbook of Psychobiography , Alan C. Elms sees Southey's story not as one of the post-oedipal ego development in the Bettelheim sense, but as one of Freud's pre-oedipal anality . Elms argues that Bettelheim may have overlooked the anal aspect of the story, through which the story could be helpful for children's personal development. He believes the story is aimed primarily at preschoolers who were engaged in practicing cleanliness, maintaining order in surroundings and behavior, and worrying about disruptions to that order. His own experience and observation of others lead him to the realization that children identify with the neat, neat bear protagonist rather than the defiant, spoiled human antagonist. In Elm's view, the anality in The Story of the Three Bears can be traced back to Robert Southey's meticulous, cleanliness-loving aunt, who raised him and passed her obsession on to him in a milder form.
Dialectic of narrative
The number three plays a big role in the story: there are three chairs, three bowls, three beds and three bears. In three sequences, the bears in turn discover that someone ate their porridge, sat on their chairs and finally lay in their beds, at which point Goldilocks is discovered as the highlight. These correspond to three previous sequences in which Goldilocks tries out the porridge bowls, chairs and beds one after the other and only finds number three “just right”. The journalist and writer Christopher Booker characterizes this as the " dialectical three" where the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way, and only the third, the middle, is just right. Booker goes on to say that this idea that the way forward is to strike a balance between extremes is of paramount importance in storytelling.
The "Goldilocks principle" describes a situation in the English-speaking world that - as described in the story - represents the right median between two extremes. This catchphrase appears not only in literature, but also in astronomy and economics . A Goldilocks planet is a planet on which the environmental conditions are just right because it is neither too close nor too far from its central star to allow life, which is a habitable zone . The Goldilocks scenario ( Goldilocks economy ) is an economy with moderate growth and low inflation that allows a market-friendly financial policy .
Adaptations
Movie and TV
- Walt Disney in 1922 published a cartoon - Adaptation
- also Walt Disney and MGM 1939
- Coronet Films in 1958 published a short live action with real bear and a child
- Faerie Tale Theater aired a Goldilocks episode with Tatum O'Neal in 1984.
- In the series The Simpsons , a scene can be seen in the Halloween episode DD-The GG-Geister DD-Dad , which degenerates into the fact that Goldilocks is torn to pieces by the three bears.
theatre
Kurt Schwertsik's 35-minute opera Roald Dahl 's Goldilocks premiered at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in 1997 . The scene of the action is the forest jury, where Baby Bear is charged with assaulting Miss Goldilocks. Roles are swapped as the defender paints the trauma the bears suffered from this “cheeky little crook” Goldilocks.
Web links
- The Story of the Three Bears . Select Prose of Robert Southey
- The Story of the Three Bears . versified by George Nicol, 2nd edition, 1839
Individual evidence
- Alan C. Elms: “The Three Bears”: Four Interpretations . In: The Journal of American Folklore . tape 90 , no. 357 (July-September), 1977, ISSN 0021-8715 , pp. 257-273 (English).
- Warren U. Ober: The Story of the Three Bears . The evolution of an international classic: photoreproductions of fifteen versions of the tale. Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, Delmar NY 1981, ISBN 0-8201-1362-X .
- Iona Archibald Opie, Peter Opie: The classic fairy tales . Oxford University Press, London 1974, ISBN 0-19-211559-6 (English).
- Maria Tatar: The annotated classic fairy tales . WW Norton & Company, New York 2002, ISBN 0-393-05163-3 (English).
- Other
- ^ Richard Mercer Dorson: The British folklorists: a history . Routledge, London 1968, ISBN 0-415-20426-7 , pp. 94 .
- ^ A b Charles Madison Curry, Alder Elsworth Clippinger: Children's literature . a textbook of sources for teachers and teacher-training classes. Rand McNally , Chicago, New York 1921, pp. 65 (English, online text from Projekt Gutenberg [accessed on February 6, 2011]).
- ↑ a b c Katherine Mary Briggs: British folk tales and legends: a sample . Routledge, London, New York 2002, ISBN 0-415-28602-6 , pp. 128-129 (English).
- ↑ a b c Graham Seal: Encyclopedia of folk heroes . ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2001, ISBN 1-57607-216-9 , pp. 92 (English, online text from Google Books [accessed February 6, 2011]).
- ^ A b c Alan C. Elms: If the Glove Fits: The Art of Theoretical Choice in Psychobiography . In: William Todd Schultz (Ed.): Handbook of psychobiography . Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York 2005, ISBN 0-19-516827-5 , chap. 4 , p. 84-95 (English, p. 93).
- ↑ Christopher Booker: The Rule of Three (the rolled played in stories by numbers) . In: The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories . Continuum International Publishing Group, London, New York 2004, ISBN 0-8264-8037-3 , epilogue to Part I, pp. 229–235 (English, online text from Google Books [accessed February 6, 2011]).
- ↑ Disney: Goldilocks and the Three Bears . The Encyclopedia of Disney Animated Shorts. Archived from the original on February 23, 2009. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved February 21, 2009.
- ^ MGM: Goldilocks and the Three Bears . Retrieved November 12, 2010.
- ^ Coronet: Goldilocks and the Three Bears . Internet Archive . Retrieved February 21, 2009.
- ^ Roald Dahl's Goldilocks (1997). Boose & Hawkes, accessed February 6, 2011 .
