Wednesday, January 27, 2010
An "Adventure of the German Student" paper idea
One of y'all should go into the university's humanities databases, either at Gorgas or via the Gorgas online port, to see whether any scholars have identified any precursors to Washington Irving's "Adventures of the German Student." A number of popular writers have guessed that Irving's story is the first occurrence anywhere of the venerable "then her head fell off" folktale we discussed last week -- for example, Donna Bowman at The Onion A.V. Club calls Irving's "Probably the original version of this scary tale" -- but since Irving was much inspired by European folktales in all his work, I suspect the "then her head fell off" motif shows up even earlier, maybe in the Brothers Grimm?
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I found a story in the Brothers Grimm that almost shares this motif, only it's a boy's head that falls off. I'll try to keep it short. In "The Juniper Tree" a woman wants to kill her step-son so her daughter will inherit her husband's fortune. She slams the lid of a chest on her step-son's head, cutting it off. She then puts his head back on his body with a bandage and tells her daughter to ask him for an apple. If he refuses to give her an apple, the she should box his ears. The girl asks him for the apple, he doesn't give it to her, and she boxes his ears and knocks his head off. Pretty weird story. Anyway, this is just one that I came across. There might be a better example of the motif in another story from the Brothers Grimm.
ReplyDelete"The Juniper Tree" certainly will do, Kent, until something better comes along! Thanks for reminding me of that one. Here's an English translation of the story at the invaluable site of Grimm scholar D.L. Ashliman -- who notes that the Grimms themselves got the story from Philipp Otto Runge. His version was published in 1808, clearly earlier than Irving's story.
ReplyDeleteA crucial difference, of course, is that Irving's "ravishingly beautiful" guillotine victim, as in all the later versions, initially seems alive and normal, however impossible that proves to be. In the earlier Grimm/Runge version, the brother is merely a propped-up corpose, obviously dead to any observer less naive (i.e., older) than the sister.
But maybe that's how we're to read the later stories: The eventually headless woman was obviously dead all along; only her beauty enabled her suitor to overlook, for a time, the incovenient truth behind his "corpse bride." In short, maybe the later cycle, beginning with Irving -- who introduces a sexual element not found in Runge/Grimm -- is all about necrophilia.