The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

"The Doctor and His Pupil" contains a motif common to many folk tales—that of one character pursuing another through a series of magical metamorphoses. The hunted turns into a hare, whereupon the hunter turns into a dog, where­upon the hare becomes a lark, whereupon the dog becomes an eagle, and so on. The primal source of this idea is probably a ritual fertility dance in which the twelve months were symbolically mimed. In such a rite, if it existed, the symbolical animals would be fixed in number and kind and the worshipers would know in advance what they were, but a tale that makes use of the notion can use any beasts, and any number of them it pleases, provided that the pairs logically match. If the story­teller makes the hunted one a hare, he cannot make the hunter a donkey; if he wants the hunter to be a donkey, then he must make the hunted something like a carrot. The pleasure of the audience is that of suspense, pattern and surprise, so that at each transformation it wonders, "How will the hunted get out of that one?" Similarly, the motif of the Virgin and the Seven-Headed Dragon in "The Three Dogs and the Dragon" and "The Miller's Three Sons" may well be derived from the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, but there is no apparent attempt to relate these tales to any historical event or person. Questions of religion and history, however interesting and important, are not the business of the literary critic. He can only ask the questions he would ask of any work of literature, e.g., what kind of writing is this, as compared with other kinds? What are its special virtues and its special limitations? Judged by its own intentions, what makes one tale or one version of a tale better or worse than another?

One characteristic that clearly differentiates the fairy tale from other kinds of narrative is the nature of the fairy-tale hero. The epic hero is one who, thanks to his exceptional gifts, is able to perform great deeds of which the average man is incapable. He is of noble (often

divine) descent, stronger, braver, better looking, more skillful than everybody else. A stranger meeting him in the street would immediately recog­nize him as a hero. Some of his adventures may be sexual, he may marry, but such matters are incidental to his main object, which is to win immortal fame. Even when he is transformed into the knight-errant in whose life the ladies play a great role, his honor is still more important than his love.

Like the epic hero, the fairy story hero performs great and seemingly impossible deeds, but there the resemblance ends. He may be by birth a prince, but, if so, he is, as it were, a prince of the first generation, for he never possesses, as the epic hero always does, a genealogical tree. More commonly, however, he is the child of poor parents and starts his life at the very bottom of the social scale. He is not recognizable as a hero except in the negative sense—that he is the one who to the outward eye appears, of all people, the least likely to succeed. Often he is a child, lacking even the strength and wit of the ordinary adult, and nearly always his relatives and neighbors consider him stupid and lacking in ambition. The virtue by which he succeeds when others fail is the very un- militant virtue of humble good nature. He is the one who stops to share his crust with the old beggar woman or free the trapped beast, thereby securing magical aid, when his proud and impatient rivals pass by and in consequence come to grief. The fairy-story world is purely Calvinist. That is to say, the hero's deeds cannot be called his;

without magical assistance he would be totally helpless. Officially, he is a lover, not a warrior, who desires glory and treasure only in order that he may deserve the hand of the princess, but no fairy-story char­acter, either in speech or in behavior, shows real erotic feeling. We find neither outright sexual passion nor sentimental Frauendienst.

Fairy-story "love" is not an emotion but a formal principle, one of the rules by which the story game is played. If the fairy-story hero differs from the epic hero in having no visible arete, he differs also from the hero of the modern novel in that he has no hidden qualities that are in time revealed. As a character, he is the same person at the end that he was at the beginning; all that has changed is his status. Nothing that happens to him can be called personally significant in the sense that, thanks to it, his awareness of himself is altered.