Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter

fairytale and a legend? The Grimms themselves scrupulously differentiate in their own Foreword to the first German edition of 1816. A fairytale, they say, can ‘find its home anywhere’, it belongs to the timeless, international zone of poetry; but the legend – ah! the legend, securely attached to a specific place, often a specific date, is the folk spirit recreating its own history. Is distilled essence of folk spirit. Is, in short, essentially, gloriously and unpollutedly
German
. ‘Nothing is as edifying or as likely to bring more joy than the products of the Fatherland.’ H’m.
    Ironically, Donald Ward’s scholarly notes on individual legends suggest that many of the German legends aren’t so very German, after all – wild hunts, mermen, headless horsemen, dwarfs and giants distribute themselves throughout Europe and, indeed, the world with a grand disregard for frontiers.
    Volume One is composed of odd, fragmentary bits and pieces of pseudo-history and folk belief taken, mostly, directly from the mouths of the German folk themselves. It is a feast of snacks. The very inconsequentiality is enchanting. ‘There is a bridge outside of Haxthusen-Hofe near Paderborn. Beneath it lives a poor soul who sneezes from time to time.’ Who? Why? You can almost see the Grimms’ informant shrug. Who knows? Just take my word for it.
    Early nineteenth-century Germany was rife with such spooks;many of them seem to have fallen out of a household tale, folk motifs in search of a narrative. What of the ghostly girl, carrying a bunch of keys, often seen washing herself in a certain spring? And another girl, with long, golden hair, who frequents the mountainside on which she was burned to death – what
can
they be up to?
    The answer, usually, is nothing. Neither numinous nor ominous, they possess only the existential validity of being there, part of the imaginative furniture of the place, ubiquitous and homely as the village idiot.
    Sometimes the legends are uncanny just because they are so enigmatic:
Once a man was riding through a forest late in the evening when he saw two children sitting next to each other. He admonished them to go home and not to tarry any longer. But the two began laughing loudly. The man rode on and after a while he encountered the same two children, who began laughing again.
    The pointlessness of it is the whole point; it is a free-form apparition, awaiting a random injection of significance, or the formal shaping of the storyteller’s craft.
    I wonder if the method of the collectors differed when they were out after
real
pseudo-history, serious German essence rather than frivolous invented narrative? How much did they themselves want their informants actually to believe in the things the informants were relating? The almost lunatic precision of dating and locating material – ‘in 1398 . . . near Eisenach, in Thuringia . . .’; ‘In 1519, just before the plague killed many people in the city of Hof . . .’ – gives a specious appearance of authenticity to many a tall tale, though, indeed, some of these references come from old books to back up the memories of old people. All the same, these legends occupy a curious grey area between fact and fiction.
    There are anecdotes, old-wives tales, tales of saints and miracles, marvellous lies designed to test the gullibility of the listener – most of them designed to be neither believed nor disbelieved, designed to court no more positive response than ‘Well, fancy that!’ It is a loose-jointed, easy-going way of decorating thereal world with imaginative detail. As Lévi-Strauss says about such benign and cheering superstitions, they make the world ‘more tasty’. It was a tasty old world that the Grimms found, all right.
    Mermen are just the same as we are except for their green teeth. The edges of the petticoats of water-pixies are always sopping wet. The devil, a constant