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the Italian Folktale
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    Can one speak of the Italian folktale? Or must the question of the folktale be dealt with in terms of a remote age that is not only prehistoric but also pregeographic?
    The disciplines concerned with studying the relationships between the folktale and the rites of primitive societies yield surprising, and for me, convincing results, as in Propp’s
Historical Roots of Russian Fairy Tales
(1946), and it seems to me that the origins of the folktale are to be found in these rites. But having arrived at this conclusion there are still many unanswered questions. Was the birth and development of folklore a parallel and similar phenomenon throughout the world as the proponents of polygenesis claim? In view of the complexity of certain types that explanation may be too simple. Can ethnology explain every motif, every narrative complex throughout the world? Evidently not. Therefore, quite apart from the question of the ancient sources of folktales, the importance of the life which every folktale has had during a historical period must be recognized: storytelling as entertainment means the passage of the tale from narrator to narrator, from country to country, often by means of a written version, a book, until the story has spread over the entire area where it is to be found today.
    Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Tuscany, through its ballads and popular verses, often imitative of folklore motifs, must have defined and diffused the most successful categories. The ballad has its own history, distinct from that of the folktale, but the two cross: the ballad draws its motifs from the tale and in turn adapts the tale to suit its motif.
    We must be careful not to “medievalize” the folktale too much. The ethnological view plucks the fable from the décor given it by a romantic taste, and has accustomed us to see the castle as the hut where initiations to the hunt took place, to regard the princess as a sacrificial offering to the dragon for agricultural necessities, the wizard as the sorcerer of the clan. Moreover, one need only glance at any collection faithful to the oral tradition to understand that the people (namely those of the nineteenth century unfamiliar either with the illustrations of children’s books or with Disney’s
Snow White
) do not visualize the folktales in terms of images which seem natural to us. In these stories description is almost always minimal, the terminology is general. Italian folklore tells of palaces, not castles. It rarely speaks of a prince or princess but rather of the son or daughter of the king. The names of supernatural beings such as ogres or witches are drawn from the most ancient pagan background of the locality. The names of these beings are not classified with any precision, not only because of the diversity of the dialects—for example, in Piedmont the
masca
(witch) is the
mamma-draga
(mother dragon) in Sicily, and in Romagna the
om salbadgh
(wild man) is the
nanni-orcu
(orca) in Puglia—but also because of the confusion that arises within the confines of a dialect; for example, in Tuscany
mago
(sorcerer) and
drago
(dragon) are often confused and used interchangeably.
    Nevertheless, the medieval stamp on the popular tale remains strong and enduring. These stories abound in tournaments to win the hands of princesses, with knightly feats, with devils, and with distortions of hallowed traditions. Therefore, one must examine as a prime occurrence in the historical life of the fable that moment of osmosis between folktale and the epic of chivalry, the probable source of which was Gothic France, whence its influence spread into Italy via the popular epic. That substratum of pagan and animistic culture which at the time of Apuleius had taken on the trappings and names of classical mythology, subsequently fell under the influence of the feudal and chivalrous imagination, of the institutions, ethics, and religious beliefs of the