#By being made into an artificial beast man (bear edition)

[adarkrainbow]

Most people know Joseph Jacobs for his work of collecting and putting in a literary form the traditional fairy tales of England - he is the man that made famous tales such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, Tattercoats, The Buried Moon, and many others.

But what people tend to not know is that he was also the author of a very particular book called “European Folk and Fairy Tales” - sometimes shortened as Europa’s Fairy Book (in reference to the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang). Remember what I said before about the folklorist vs literary theories when it came to fairy tales? Well Joseph Jacobs lived in the full “folkloric fairytale” movement, fashion and study, and one of the main beliefs of this movement was that, beyond all the local and regional variations of a fairy tale, at the root of these similarly “cousin tales” found in numerous countries and eras, for each “fairy tale type”, there was an “ancestor-tale”. A “first” tale, a “primitive” tale, an “original” tale from which all the variants were born - a common ancestor that gave birth to all the different variations that formed together a “type”. It was the theory of evolution if you want, with each individual belonging to a larger group of species all coming from a common ancestor. 

And Joseph Jacobs, working on this theory and belief, decided to create his European Folk and Fairy Tales book. After collecting as many variants and variations of some fairy tale types across as much European countries as he could, he compared them, studied them, and tried to re-create the “original tale”, the “ancestor-fairytale”, the “original Europan story”. The result of this work was his “European Folk and Fairy Tales” book, a book contaned the supposed and believed reconstructed “original” tales that formed the “primordial” group of fairytales from which the ones collected by Grimm,  Asbjørnsen and Moe, Jacobs himself and others came from. 

Of course, this being a purely folklorist work that tried to ignore as much as it could all the literary side of fairytale history (for example Jacobs removed the fairy godmother from his Cinderella reconstruction due to it being an invention of Perrault), and a work of 1916 that was created with the resources and perceptions of the time, this is not at all considered to be a true scholar work today, and it mostly fell into obscurity as an entertaining project and an interesting piece of fairytale history. But it shouldn’t be forgotten by any means, since this book reflects the beliefs and theories of the folklorists and fairy tale critics of the 1910s Western Europe, and even today on the Internet you will see several illustrations created for this specific book reused for other fairytales (I was surprised to discover that a recurring illustration of Hansel and Gretel I saw everywhere was actually created for Jacobs’ reconstruction-tale). 

So if you ever want to check Jacobs’ Europa’s Fairy Book, you’ll find in it...

... The proto-”Snow White” fairytale, simply titled Snowwhite

... The proto-”Cinderella” story, Cinder-Maids

... “Beauty and the Beast”, which as you can guess is the reconstruction of the “original Beauty and the Beast”

... Thumbkin, the supposed “ancestor” of the Tom Thumb tales.

... The Unseen Bridegroom, the artificial ancestor of all “Cupid and Psyche” type of fairytales

... Johnnie and Grizzle, a synthesis of all Europan “Hansel and Gretel” stories

... The Earl of Cattenborough, the proto-”Puss in Boots”.

And many more artificial but fascinating wonders! 

(Though don’t get me wrong - I do not use “artificial” in a pejorative way. Many fairytales we know today are “artificial” in the eyes of folklorists - all literary fairytales for example, from Perrault to Andersen, are demmed “artificial” by their literary nature ; and even the folklorists have to admit that some of their own created artificial tales, such as those born of the Grimm’s editing of the collected folktales. So, considering all that, while Jacobs’ reconstruction are certainly not THE actual proto-fairytales - if such a thing even exists - it is not because they are artificial that they are less to be considered than literary works or the edited final Grimm stories)