Spatial Representation in European Popular Fairy Tale

Using selected examples, this article investigates the problem of spatial representation in European fairy tales and brings together a number of elements for a systematic analysis of its significance for narration. Aesthetic space, which Ernst Cassirer (30) distinguishes from mythical and theoretical space, constitutes in a general sense an artistically presented reality. The virtual space in narrative art, particularly in the folktale, can be regarded as such an aesthetic space, but one that is not independent of the narrators personality and context (i.e., the narrator's performance), of the story's narrative perspective, of national or regional variants, or of oral and written adaptations. The European fairy tale creates two nonhomeomorphic worlds-a magical world of supernatural beings from the beyond, and a nonmagical one of normal human beings-worlds that are divided from one another through occasionally fluid but sometimes also inflexible boundaries and frontier regions. With this first structure a second coexists in that for the narrator and the listener both worlds belong in any case to the same "magic" virtual world of the fairy tale, which is clearly separated from their own real one. Between the areas of the here and the beyond there are crossings and frontier regions such as a bridge, river, pond, seashore, well or spring, stone, forest, thorns, and so on. The forest is a passage-way of particular importance. Its name alone ("forest," "wood") seems to characterize a scenic court (Meder 123). It is regarded, in both the real and metaphorical sense, as a place of mortal danger and forbidden desires (140).1 It is represented negatively as an antithesis of courtly urban society and linked to the stereotypical adjectives "dark," "huge," and "lonely." And yet it is not always possible to distinguish, in the Euclidian sense, the spatial areas of the real and the other world. On the contrary, we are confronted with a fabled shifting of spheres. For example, when the hardworking daughter in the fairy tale "Frau Holle" (AT 480) is down in the underworld making the bed and energetically shaking out the bolster so "that the feathers fly, then it is snowing in the world."2 And the vertical movement of the daughter's jump into the well is at variance with the horizontal movement of her homecoming, which "happens not by arduous climbing up out of the depths, but simply by stepping out of the otherworld" (Heindrichs 64). While the printed fairy tale relies solely upon linguistic means for spatial construction, the oral storyteller, who performs the tale and uses the additional elements made possible by performance, is able to transform the narrative space (composed of the narrator and the audience) into the narrated scene of the fairy-tale action, to make it visual. He does this by employing not only linguistic means of narration3 but also gestures and significant movements, and by using props or models to illustrate and visualize the story being told: the wine glass that he moves back and forth across the table is at one moment the ship on which the hero sails the seas, at another an animal. In this way the space surrounding the storyteller is re-created as the world of adventure (Karlinger 266). At the beginning and end of the fairy tale the two worlds are at variance, and their synthesizing has to be established by narrative or by formula. A Breton storyteller, for example, achieves this in an amusing way at the end of his narrative by asserting that he had never had a share of the wedding feast; instead, he had been given a kick that sent him flying through the air to land in the chair he was now sitting in.4 His rhyming conclusion draws attention away from the fairy tale to the teller of tales, from the world that was being described to the world of the narrator. Whereas the formulas at the beginning set the narrated fairy-tale world in a faraway place and a far-distant time in the past, the formulas at the end serve, among other things, to collate this narrated world with the world of the storyteller, the narrated space with the narrating space (Koll 3). …