Orality – Reinvented or Invented Johan de Mylius The Hans Christian Andersen Center at University of Southern Denmark, Odense. In principle the concept of orality implies quite different things when speaking of the folk tale tradition and when speaking of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and stories. In terms of folk tales, orality primarily refers to the way in which a story is transmitted from one person to another, from one culture or one age or one part of a population to another. Secondarily it may also refer to the way in which a story is told or phrased, since this is or may be essential to the spreading and distribution of such a story. Orality implies linguistic as well as narrative formula and structures. But essentially orality is identical with the existence and transmission of the text as such. When we – or for instance an author like Hans Christian Andersen – meet a text rooted in oral tradition, but now in a print version, like the folk tales published by the brothers Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this text does not necessarily appear in a form, which bears traces of orality as such. Written down and published in a book, this kind of tale has become a literary text. This fact is even more obvious in the case of the earlier German and French editors of folk tales such as Musäus or la comtesse d’Aulnoy or Charles Perrault. Orality is not an inherent feature of the story as such. It is the story’s mode of existence up to a certain point. Realizing that the simple oral-like texture of stories rendered by the brothers Grimm was a construction, a literary form made to simulate folk-spirit in the Romantic sense, folklorists of the twentieth century have made an effort to restore true orality to the folk tales by tape recording the last tellers of folk tales, old people of rural origin with wavering speech and memory, whispering their more or less inconsistent stories through their few remaining teeth. Book versions of such story-telling, faithful to every detail of the actual performance, are regarded as testimonies of true orality. Andersen’s fairy tales and stories are in no way attempts to imitate or preserve an oral tradition. Whatever sources Andersen had for his stories, his tales are literary products, in style and intention submitted to a literary strategy. This is not only in the self-evident meaning, that his stories are invented, written and published within the cultural circulation of book products, but in a sense, which has not been obvious to most of his foreign readers, that they are the core of Andersen’s poetic ambition, a frontline for his strife as a poet in and beyond his time. However, orality is a term often used in connection with Andersen’s stories. Although misunderstandable, and in fact misunderstood, the concept of orality makes sense, when used properly defined. Let us examine three possible applications of the term for possible use in case of Andersen’s stories. First: Orality meaning already existing oral tradition as one of Andersen’s sources. Second: Orality meaning the narrative mode, the telling of stories. Third: Orality in the sense of linguistic proximity to spoken language. The first issue, Andersen’s use of oral tradition, has been investigated often and thoroughly. Most recently in the folklorist Else Marie Kofod’s book De vilde svaner og andre folkeeventyr. Sidestykker til syv af H.C. Andersens eventyr (`The Wild Swans and other folk tales. Parallels to seven fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen’). The seven tales referred to here are the same ones, which Georg Christensen already singled out in two articles in Danske Studier (Danish Studies) 1906: `The Tinder Box’, `Little Claus and Big Claus’, `The Travelling Companion’, `The Wild Swans’, `The Swineherd’, `Simple Simon’ and `What the Old Man does is Always Right’. 2 These are stories, which Andersen may have heard as a child back in the slums of provincial Odense, stories told by the old women in the almshouse. The total agreement as to the limited number of stories relevant to a comparative study of Andersen and oral tradition (limited, since Andersen himself published 156 stories in all) conceals the fact that this question of intertextuality is far more complex. The definition of oral tradition here apparently implied means stories, which Andersen once in his youth has met in actual oral presentation. That means stories, which can still be identified in Danish folklorist collections. Not taken into consideration then are stories from oral tradition, but written and published by German editors like the brothers Grimm. Andersen has not heard these stories, and so they are not taken into consideration. Apparently the investigations of intertextuality conducted by Georg Christensen and Else Marie Kofod also tend to exclude stories, which do not belong to the genre fairy tale. A broader definition using the term folk tale would also have brought a text like `The girl who trod on the loaf’ into focus. And then what about a story, which Andersen may or may not have heard as a child, but of which we with absolute certainty know that he has read it in a book- version? I’m referring to `The Wild Swans’, as Andersen calls it, the story which has provided the very title of Else Marie Kofod’s book. Andersen has stated in his so-called `Remarks’ for the Fairy tales and stories (1863 and later), that he read this story in the first Danish collection of folk tales, Mathias Winther’s Danish Folk Tales (1823), where it is called `The Eleven Swans’. The story is also known in a Grimm-version: `Die sechs Schwäne’, and in a Biedermeier-version by Ludwig Bechstein, `Die sieben Schwanen’. Anyway, regardless of definitions and through that the number of relevant retellings which are to be considered, Andersen holds a unique position among literary fairy tale authors in the period of late Romanticism and dawning Realism. He has by social origin been confronted with genuine oral tradition. 3 The question, however, is: how far can he be said to be an heir to this tradition? And in what sense can orality be ascribed to his stories as a significant feature? All difficulties in answering these questions – or at least most of the difficulties – can be illustrated through taking a brief look at Andersen’s earliest published fairy tale, `The Dead Man’, published 1830 as the final part of his first collection of Poems. `The Dead Man’ has never been translated into English. The reason for this is that it is an early version of a well-known Andersen tale, `The Travelling Companion’ (published in the second volume of Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. ` Fairy tales, told for children’, 1835). The subtitle of this story (1830) is `et fyensk Folke-Eventyr’ (`a Funean folk tale’), and in a short introduction Andersen wrote: Som Barn var det min største Glæde at høre Eventyr, en stor Deel staae endnu ret levende i min Erindring, og nogle af disse ere kun lidet eller intet bekjendte; jeg har her gjenfortalt et, og dersom jeg seer det optaget med Bifald, vil jeg saaledes behandle flere, og engang levere en Cyclus af danske Folke-Eventyr. (As a child I took great pleasure in listening to fairy tales, and even now I still have a live memory of them, and some of them are either unknown or only scarcely known. Here I have retold one of them, and if I find that it is received with acclaim, I intend to treat more of them in this way and once publish a whole cycle of Danish folk tales). The story about `The Dead Man’ or `The Travelling Companion’ is well known in international folk tale tradition, going back to what may be its oldest known source, Tobit’s Book, one of the Apocrypha among the Old Testament books. So when Andersen calls it a Funean folk tale, it can only mean, that it has actually been told (or retold) in Funen, more specifically in Odense in the days of Andersen’s childhood there. It doesn’t mean a tale of Funean origin. This is only worth noticing since Andersen localizes the story to start at a certain place near the small manor house, Elvedgaard, on Northern Funen, not far from Bogense. Also, since it has a long and widespread tradition, it cannot be true of this story, when Andersen counts it among folk tales now only little known or completely unknown. 4 According to Andersen’s introductory words he has heard the story, he still has a vivid memory of the version he has heard maybe fifteen years or more back, and now he is retelling the story he then heard. And in addition to this folklorist aspect he adds, that he may continue publishing a whole collection of Danish folk tales (meaning tales, which have actually been rendered in local tradition). But at the same time he says something completely contradictory. In a motto on the title page he quotes two verse lines by Goethe: Märchen noch so wunderbar, Dichterkünste machen’s wahr. Meaning, that the folk tale or fairy tale – belonging to what aesthetic theory of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Germany (and Denmark) called `das Wunderbare’, the non-real, the imaginative (French: `le merveilleux’) – will be made true, i.e. receive a higher kind of reality through the art of the poet. The Goethe quotation contradicts the impression, which the reader might get from the small introduction, as it defines `The Dead Man’ as a `Kunstmärchen’, a fairy tale of art.