How does the Arabian Snow White differ from the German, and the Chinese Cinderella - from the French

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Some tales from different nations seem remarkably similar. Only sometimes the fact is that in the nineteenth century the official storytellers liked to grab plots from each other, slightly changing the characters to the desired folklore. More often we are talking about wandering stories - such that they are born similar themselves or easily and imperceptibly disperse among the nations, because they are in demand. However, fairy tales with wandering plots will never be quite alike.

The tale of the girl who played in the box

The most famous version of this tale is the German one about Snow White. The beautiful queen constantly talks to the mirror about her beauty and about her stepdaughter even more beautiful than she, and decides to kill her somewhere in the forest. But the girl survives. She is helped by fabulous creatures - seven dwarfs.

Alas, but the stepmother manages to kill Snow White, and the dwarfs put her in a crystal coffin. In this coffin, the prince sees her, falls in love and takes it for himself. When the coffin is transported, the porters stumble, the girl is shaken, and she comes to life, because a piece of a poisoned apple flies out of her mouth. She and the prince are getting married.

There is a very similar plot among Arab fairy tales, and it differs, of course, in realities. A beautiful woman asks the moon who will be more beautiful, she or the daughter who is now in her womb, and the moon warns that if the daughter is more beautiful than the mother, she will have to be killed (otherwise she herself will bring death to the mother). While the girl is growing, the woman continually asks the moon if it's time to kill her, but only when the daughter is blooming does the moon say that the time has come.

A woman takes her daughter into the forest under the pretext of collecting brushwood, throws such a heavy bundle of dead wood on her back that she cannot move, and runs away. Having wandered through the woods, the girl meets a magical creature, but not a gnome, but something like a goblin man-eater. It does not keep the girl at home for a short time out of pity, and then puts it in a chest (not crystal at all) and takes it to the Sultan's palace, where it arranges the chest to work - to graze camels. The prince accidentally notices that a very beautiful girl is hiding in the chest, and demands from his parents to arrange a wedding for him with the chest. At the wedding, the girl comes out, surprising the prince's parents.

The tale of marriage to a monster

Usually the French fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" is compared with "The Scarlet Flower" by Aksakov. According to the writer, he heard the plot itself from his nanny, a master storyteller. However, there is a possibility that the nanny had previously heard a retelling of a foreign story with a rose, a girl and a monster - after all, she moved in circles where children were eagerly reading French literature. But this does not mean that in Russian folklore there is no motive for a girl who married a monster - for example, there is a fairy tale about a forest goat or a snotty goat.

If in European versions the monster lives in a castle, which determines his manners and predetermines the fact that he will turn out to be an enchanted prince, then in a Russian fairy tale a goat who asked for a girl in marriage lives in a lonely forest hut, in some versions - surrounded by a tynom, decorated with heads previous wives. The goat not only does not hide from the eyes of the girls, but also requires her to leave - to constantly wipe his snot. Sometimes he also demands the fulfillment of a conjugal duty.

This tale has several possible endings. One by one, the girl, having come to visit her parents, will complain about her husband. As it turns out, the goat was listening under the window at that time and was insulted - he would kill her and decorate his tyn with her head. According to another, a woman will find an opportunity to burn the skin of a goat, which he throws off, turning around as a man. After the skin disappears in the fire, her husband will become completely ordinary. In general, in any case, it is not love that wins, but ingenuity.

The tale of the girl in the witch's house

In a Russian fairy tale that takes place at school, the stepmother forces the girl Vasilisa to go into the forest to look for a fire for the stove. She in the forest stumbles upon Baba Yaga's hut - similar to a goddess in her ability to command the moon and the sun - and gets a job with her as a student. Then she learns all sorts of tricks, cleaning up the hut as a payment, until it comes time to go home. With him Baba Yaga gives her a skull with luminous eye sockets. The rays from these eye sockets kill the evil stepmother.

There is a similar plot in German fairy tales - with some differences. Instead of Baba Yaga, there is Mrs. Blizzard, she controls not the lights, but the weather. The girl finds herself in her service, jumping into the well at the insistence of her evil stepmother. After a while, the girl decides to return home. When she passes the gate, her clothes look like gold and the spindle, after which she jumped into the well, becomes gold.

And in the end it is not the stepmother who is punished, but her own daughter - the stepmother also sends her to the well, but the girl turns out to be so lazy that she leaves the Blizzard with an inverted kettle with resin on her head, which stained her all over and which cannot be removed. Baba Yaga with her deadly weapon seems harsher - or fairer, given the fact that, in fact, both the Russian and the German girl were sent to their death.

The tale of a girl who is looking for a shoe

Another very popular tale is the story of Cinderella, a noble girl who is forced to work as a servant. She manages to get married after the prince is looking for her on the crystal slipper lost at the ball.

This plot is often compared with the Egyptian tale of the ancient period about the pharaoh and the beauty Rodopis - but the tale about the Rodopis is clearly author's, it is rather piquant, because Rodopis is a hetaira, and the sandal that the pharaoh finds and which cannot fit any female leg hints at the fact that that the Greek getters wore special sandals that fit the shape of the mistress's foot and therefore are divided into right and left. The soles of these sandals often featured enticing inscriptions. In general, this tale is more like an anecdote than the usual story about Cinderella.

More like a European Cinderella, a Chinese girl, who was also found by a shoe. But her shoes were not crystal - they were made of solid gold. However, in one of the versions of Cinderella, she also flaunts gold shoes at the ball, but in the Venetian version they are diamond. And only the Danes allowed Cinderella to wear silk shoes, which, however, kills all the intrigue - after all, shoes made of a hard material, such as metal, crystal or diamond, are exactly designed for only one leg with all its bends, and silk shoes will fit any foot with such the same size.

That is why the version put forward by Balzac is considered untenable that in the old days Cinderella's shoes were not crystal at all, but fur (these two words are very similar in French) - a fur shoe would fit more than one girl, it could even be stretched a little.

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