A Study of Fairy Tales

by Laura Fry Kready

Repetition and rhythm have grown out of communal conditions. The old stories are measured utterances. At first there was the spontaneous expression of a little community, with its gesture, action, sound, and dance, and the word, the shout, to help out. There was the group which repeated, which acted as a chorus, and the leader who added his individual variation. From these developed the folk-tale with the dialogue in place of the chorus.

Of the accumulative tales, The House that Jack Built illustrates the first class of tales of simple repetition. This tale takes on a new interest as a remarkable study of phonics. If any one were so happy as to discover the phonic law which governs the euphony produced by the succession of vowels in the lines of Milton's poetry, he would enjoy the same law worked out in The House that Jack Built. The original, as given by Halliwell in his Nursery Rhymes of England, is said to be a Hebrew hymn, at first written in Chaldaic. To the Hebrews of the Middle Ages it was called the Haggadah, and was sung to a rude chant as part of the Passover service. It first appeared in print in 1590, at Prague. Later, in Leipzig, it was published by the German scholar, Liebrecht. It begins:—

A kid, a kid, my father bought
For two pieces of money:
A kid, a kid,
Then came the cat and ate the kid, etc.

Then follow the various repetitive stanzas, the last one turning back and reacting on all the others:—

Then came the Holy One, blessed be He,
And killed the angel of death,
That killed the butcher,
That slew the ox,
That drank the water,
That quenched the fire,
That burned the staff,
That beat the dog,
That bit the cat,
That ate the kid,
That my father bought
For two pieces of money:
A kid, a kid.

The remarkable similarity to The Old Woman, and Her Pig[8] at once proclaims the origin of that tale also. The interpretation of this tale is as follows: The kid is the Hebrews; the father by whom it was purchased, is Jehovah; the two pieces of money are Aaron and Moses; the cat is the Assyrians; the dog is the Babylonians; the staff is the Persians; the fire is the Greek Empire and Alexander; the water is the Romans; the ox is the Saracens; the butcher is the Crusaders; and the angel of death is the Turkish Power. The message of this tale is that God will take vengeance over the Turks and the Hebrews will be restored to their own land.

Another tale of simple repetition, whose fairy element is the magic key, is The Key of the Kingdom, also found in Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England:—

This is the key of the kingdom.
In that kingdom there is a city,
In that city there is a town,
In that town there is a street,
In that street there is a lane,
In that lane there is a yard,
In that yard there is a house,
In that house there is a room,
In that room there is a bed,
On that bed there is a basket,
In that basket there are some flowers.
Flowers in the basket, basket on the bed,
bed in the room, etc.

The Old Woman and Her Pig illustrates the second class of accumulative tale, where there is an addition, and like Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse, where the end turns back on the beginning and changes all that precedes. Here there is a more marked plot. This same tale occurs in Shropshire Folk-Lore, in the Scotch Wife and Her Bush of Berries, in Club-Fist, an American folk-game described by Newell, in Cossack fairy tales, and in the Danish, Spanish, and Italian. In the Scandinavian, it is Nanny, Who Wouldn't Go Home to Supper, and in the Punjab, The Grain of Corn, also given in Tales of Laughter. I have never seen a child who did not like it or who was not pleased with himself for accomplishing its telling. It lends itself most happily to illustration. Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse pleases because of the liveliness of its images, and because of the catastrophe at the end, which affects the child just as the tumble of his huge pile of blocks—the crash and general upheaval delight him. This tale has so many variants that it illustrates well the diffusion of fairy tales. It is Grimm's The Spider and the Flea, which as we have seen, is appealing in its simplicity; the Norse The Cock Who Fell into the Brewing Vat; and the Indian The Death and Burial of Poor Hen. The curious succession of incidents may have been invented once for all at some definite time, and from thence spread to all the world.

Johnny Cake and The Gingerbread Man also represent the second class of accumulative tale, but show a more definite plot; there is more story-stuff and a more decided introduction and conclusion. How Jack Went to Seek His Fortune also shows more plot. It contains a theme similar to that of The Bremen Town Musicians, which is distinctly a beast tale where the element of repetition remains to sustain the interest and to preserve unity, but where a full-fledged short-story which is structurally complete, has developed. A fine accumulative tale belonging to this second class is the Cossack Straw Ox, which has been described under "The Short-Story." Here we have a single line of sequence which gets wound up to a climax and then unwinds itself to the conclusion, giving the child, in the plot, something of that pleasure which he feels in winding up his toy animals to watch them perform in the unwinding.