Italian Folktales Read Online Free PDF Page B

a bird in flight is wounded by an envious rival who puts ground glass in a basin or tacks on a window ledge where the bird will alight. There is the serpent- or swine-king who at night turns into a handsome youth for the bride who respects him, while the wax of the candle lighted by curiosity thrusts him back under the evil spell. In the story of Bellinda and the monster a curious sentimental relationship develops between them. In those cases where the suffering partner is the man, it is the bewitched bride who comes silently at night to join him in the deserted palace; it is the fairy love of Liombruno who must remain a secret, it is the girl-dove who recovers her wings and flies. These stories differ but they tell of a precarious love that unites two incompatible worlds, and of a love tested by absence; stories of unknowable lovers who unite only in the moment in which they are lost to one another.
    Fairy tales are rarely structured along the simple and basic lines we associate with a love story in which the characters fall in love and encounter obstacles to their marriage. This theme is developed only occasionally in some melancholy tales from Sardinia, a land where girls used to be courted from their windows. The countless tales of the conquest or liberation of a princess always deal with someone never seen, a victim to be released by a test of valor, or a stake to be won in a joust to fulfill a destiny, or else someone falls in love with a portrait or the sound of a name or envisages the beloved in a drop of blood on a white portion of ricotta. These are abstract or symbolic romantic attachments that savor of witchcraft or of malediction. However, the most positive and deeply felt loves in folklore are not these, but rather those in which the beloved is first possessed and then conquered.
    Propp, in
Historical Roots of Russian Fairy Tales
, gives the Cupid and Psyche type of story a suggestive interpretation. Psyche is the girl who lives in a house where youths are segregated during the final phase of their initiation. She comes into contact with young men in the guise of animals, or in the dark, since they must be seen by no one. Hence it is as if only one invisible youth loved her. Once the period of initiation is over, the young men return home and forget the girl who lived segregated with them. They marry and begin new families. The story grows out of this crisis. It describes a love born during the initiation and doomed to destruction by religious laws, and shows how a woman rebels against this law and recovers her young lover. Although the customs of millennia are disregarded, the plot of the story still reflects the spirit of those laws and describes every love thwarted and forbidden by law, convention, or social disparity. That is why it has been possible, from prehistory to the present, to preserve, not as a fixed formula but as a flowing element, the sensuality so often underlying this love, evident in the ecstasy and frenzy of mysterious nocturnal embraces.
    This eroticism of tales that we now consider as a part of children’s literature proves that oral tradition was not intended for any particular age level; it was simply an account of marvels, a full expression of the poetic needs at that cultural stage.
    Folktales especially intended for children exist, to be sure, but as a separate genre, neglected by more ambitious storytellers and carried on in a humbler and more familiar tradition, having the following characteristics: a theme of fear and cruelty, scatological or obscene details, lines of verse interpolated into the prose and slipping into nonsense rhymes (see story no. 37, “Petie Pete versus Witch Bea-Witch”), characteristics of coarseness and cruelty which would be considered wholly unsuitable in children’s books today.
    The tendency to dwell on the wondrous remains dominant, even when closely allied with morality. The moral is always implicit in the folktale in the victory of the