The Shoemaker's Apron: A Second Book of Czechoslovak Fairy Tales and Folk Tales. Fillmore Parker
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The Shoemaker's Apron: A Second Book of Czechoslovak Fairy Tales and Folk Tales
The stories in this volume are all of Czech, Moravian, and Slovak origin, and are to be found in many versions in the books of folk tales collected by Erben, Nemcova, Kulda, Dobsinsky, Rimavsky, Benes-Trebizsky, Miksicek. I got them first by word of mouth and afterwards hunted them out in the old books. My work has been that of retelling rather than translating since in most cases I have put myself in the place of a storyteller who knows several forms of the same story, equally authentic, and from them all fashions a version of his own. It is of course always the same story although told in one form to a group of children and in another form to a group of soldiers. The audience that I hope particularly to interest is the English-speaking child.
Some few of the stories – such as Nemcova's very beautiful Twelve Months and Erben's spirited Zlatovlaska and to a less degree Nemcova's hero tale, Vitazko– are already in such definitive form that it would be profanation to "edit" them. They – especially the first two – have been told once and for all. But the same cannot be said of most of the other stories. Nemcova's renderings are too often diffuse and inconsequential, Kulda's dry, pedantic, and homiletic. Erben, the scholarly old archivist of Prague, seems to me the greatest literary artist of them all. His chief interest in folklore was philological, but he was a poet as well as a scholar and he carried his versions of the old stories from the realm of crude folklore to the realm of art.
A small number of the present tales have appeared in earlier English collections coming, nearly always, by way of German or French translations. In the one case they have been squeezed dry of their Slavic exuberance and in the other somewhat dandified. So I make no apology for offering them afresh.
Variants of most of the tales are, of course, to be found in other countries. Grimm's The White Snake, for instance, is a variant of Zlatovlaska. My rule of selection has been to take stories that do not have well-known variants in other languages. I have to confess that The White Snake is very well known, but here I break my own rule on account of the greater beauty of the Slavic version.
In Grimm there are also to be found variants of A Gullible World (The Shrewd Farmer), The Devil's Little Brother-in-Law (Bearskin), Clever Manka (The Peasant's Clever Daughter), The Devil's Gifts (The Magic Gifts), The Candles of Life (The Strange Godfather and Godfather Death), The Shoemaker's Apron (Brother Jolly). In all these tales the same incidents are presented but with a difference in spirit and in background that instantly marks one variant Teutonic and its fellow Slavic. Moreover, as stories, the German versions of these particular tales are neither as interesting nor as important as the Slavic versions.
Both German and Slavic versions go back, in most cases, to some early common source. Take Clever Manka, for instance, and its German variant, The Farmer's Shrewd Daughter. Clever Manka is very popular among the Czechs and Slovaks and is considered by them especially typical of their own folk wisdom and folk humor. And they are right: it is. But it would be rash to say just how early or how late this story began to be told among the peoples of the earth. The catch at the end appears in a story in the Talmud and at that time it has all the marks of a long and honorable career. The story of the devil marrying a scold, another great favorite with the Slavs, also has its Talmudic parallel in the story of Azrael, the Angel of Death, marrying a woman. The Azrael story contains many of the incidents which are used in different combinations in some half-dozen of the folk tales in the present collection. And yet when comparative folklore has said all that it has to say about variants and versions the fact remains that every people puts its own mark upon the stories that it retells. The story that, in the Talmud, is told of Azrael is Hebrew. The same story passed on down the centuries from people to people appears finally as Gentle Dora or Katcha and the Devil or The Candles of Life and then it is essentially Slavic in background, humor, and imagination.
Besides its fairy tales and folk tales the present volume contains a cluster of charming little nursery tales and a group of rollicking devil tales. It is intended as a companion volume to my earlier collection, Czechoslovak Fairy Tales. Together these two books present in English a selection of tales that are fairly representative of the folk genius of a small but highly gifted branch of the great Slav people.
May, 1920.
THE TWELVE MONTHS
There was once a woman who had two girls. One was her own daughter, the other a stepchild. Holena, her own daughter, she loved dearly, but she couldn't bear even the sight of Marushka, the stepchild. This was because Marushka was so much prettier than Holena. Marushka, the dear child, didn't know how pretty she was and so she never understood why, whenever she stood beside Holena, the stepmother frowned so crossly.
Mother and daughter made Marushka do all the housework alone. She had to cook and wash and sew and spin and take care of the garden and look after the cow. Holena, on the contrary, spent all her time decking herself out and sitting around like a grand lady.
Marushka never complained. She did all she was told to do and bore patiently their everlasting fault-finding. In spite of all the hard work she did she grew prettier from day to day, and in spite of her lazy life Holena grew uglier.
"This will never do," the stepmother thought to herself. "Soon the boys will come courting and once they see how pretty Marushka is, they'll pay no attention at all to my Holena. We had just better do all we can to get rid of that Marushka as soon as possible."
So they both nagged Marushka all day long. They made her work harder, they beat her, they didn't give her enough to eat, they did everything they could think of to make her ugly and nasty. But all to no avail. Marushka was so good and sweet that, in spite of all their harsh treatment, she kept on growing prettier.
One day in the middle of January Holena took the notion that nothing would do but she must have a bunch of fragrant violets to put in her bodice.
"Marushka!" she ordered sharply. "I want some violets. Go out to the forest and get me some."
"Good heavens, my dear sister!" cried poor Marushka. "What can you be thinking of? Whoever heard of violets growing under the snow in January?"
"What, you lazy little slattern!" Holena shouted. "You dare to argue with me! You go this minute and if you come back without violets I'll kill you!"
The stepmother sided with Holena and, taking Marushka roughly by the shoulder, she pushed her out of the house and slammed the door.
The poor child climbed slowly up the mountain side weeping bitterly. All around the snow lay deep with no track of man or beast in any direction. Marushka wandered on and on, weak with hunger and shaking with cold.
"Dear God in heaven," she prayed, "take me to yourself away from all this suffering."
Suddenly ahead of her she saw a glowing light. She struggled towards it and found at last that it came from a great fire that was burning on the top of the mountain. Around the fire there were twelve stones, one of them much bigger and higher than the rest. Twelve men were seated on the stones. Three of them were very old and white; three were not so old; three were middle-aged; and three were beautiful youths. They did not talk. They sat silent gazing at the fire. They were the Twelve Months.
For a moment Marushka was frightened and hesitated. Then she stepped forward and said, politely:
"Kind sirs, may I warm myself at your fire? I am shaking with cold."
Great January nodded his head and Marushka reached her stiff fingers towards the flames.
"This is no place for you, my child," Great January said. "Why are you here?"
"I'm hunting for violets," Marushka answered.
"Violets? This is no time to look for violets with snow on the ground!"
"I know that, sir, but my sister, Holena, says I must bring her violets from the forest or she'll kill me and my mother says so, too. Please, sir, won't you tell me where I can find some?"
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