Censorship in Folklore

An essay by

D. L. Ashliman
© 1997-2002

Tales not fit for print

One could argue, as folklorists sometimes do in their professional meetings and journals, that no true folktale is fit for print. What they mean by this is that the act of reducing any oral performance to written language, by the very nature of things, introduces its own set of changes. Interaction between teller and listener is largely lost, as are nuances of voice; meaning carried by gestures, and so on.

Collectors and editors of folktales have wrestled with these problems from the very beginning. How, for example, should one spell the "wolf whistle" used by insensitive construction workers to signal their approval of attractive women? "Wheet-wheeo" may get the point across, but it surely does not carry the emotional impact of the audible whistle. Similarly, how should one spell the sound of disapproval made by clicking the tongue against the roof of the mouth? The approximation "tsk, tsk" is about the best one can do with a written word, but it too is a weak imitation of the real thing, to say nothing of a statement such as "and he responded with an obscene gesture."

Further, speech in a regional or socio-economic dialect carries a level of meaning that can only be alluded to in print. For example, the pioneer folktale collectors Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm bemoaned the loss of texture and meaning imposed on their stories by translating them from local dialects into standard German. They did, by way of example, publish a handful of tales in Low German, Bavarian German, and Swiss German, but the great majority of their stories are in a simple, but literate and grammatically correct standard High German, the language of writing, not the language of ordinary speech.

The problem of reducing speech to print intensifies when one is confronted with words or acts that, according to longstanding convention, are "unprintable." Any collector of ordinary people's speech acts will soon meet up with indelicate, even tabooed language, gestures, and events.

By today's norms, nineteenth-century (the age of most pioneering folklore collections) publication standards were exceedingly careful, even prudish. Although printed anecdote collections from earlier centuries were normally unashamedly blunt, nineteenth and early twentieth-century editors and publishers were much more cautious. With few exceptions, they bowdlerized or omitted any potentially offensive words and episodes.

"Victorian" scholars apparently saw no contradiction in their attempts to preserve common culture while avoiding that which was vulgar. Virtually every major collection offers examples. The following quotations speak for themselves:

• In this new edition we have carefully removed every expression inappropriate for children. -- Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, preface to the 1819 edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales).

• And now, before the translator takes leave of his readers for the second time, he will follow the lead of the good godmother in one of these tales, and forbid all good children to read the two which stand last in the book [Tom Totterhouse" and "Little Annie the Goose-Girl"]. -- George Webbe Dasent, preface to the second edition (1859) of his translation of Popular Tales from the Norse by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (Edinburgh: David Douglass, 1888), p. vi.

• Many parts [of the old Cornish folk plays] are omitted, as they would in our refined days, be considered coarse; but as preserving a true picture of a peculiar people, as they were a century and a half or two centuries since, I almost regret the omissions. -- Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (London: John Camden Hotten, 1871), p. 395.

• "The Swineherd" has certain traits in common with an old Danish folktale, but the version I heard, as a child, would be quite unprintable. -- Hans Christian Andersen, "Notes for Fairy Tales and Stories" (1874), The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), p. 1073).

• I have had to omit a certain number of stories as unsuited for publication. -- Cecil Henry Bompas, preface to Folklore of the Santal Parganas (London: David Nutt, 1909), p. 7.

• Here are a few of the stories told of Johha [a Palestinian trickster analagous to the European Till Eulenspiegel]. The majority are unfit for reproduction. -- J. E. Hanauer, Folk-Lore of the Holy Land: Moslem, Christian, and Jewish (London: The Sheldon Press, 1935), p. 64. First published 1907.

• When the tales are found they are adapted to the needs of British children by various hands, the editor doing little beyond guarding the interests of propriety, and toning down to mild reproofs the tortures inflicted on wicked stepmothers and other naughty characters. -- Andrew Lang, preface to The Crimson Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1903), p. v.

• Whenever an original incident, so far as I could penetrate to it, seemed to me too crudely primitive for the children of the present day, I have had no scruples in modifying or mollifying it, drawing attention to such bowdlerization in the somewhat elaborate notes at the end of the volume. -- Joseph Jacobs, preface to European Folk and Fairy Tales (New York: G. Putnam's Sons, 1916), p. viii.

• A few (four or five) of the stories are frankly indecent, and are always expurgated from popular editions of the work in Italy, a course which I have followed here. Two or three of the present collection are also a trifle free, but I have decided to leave them in their place, with a few unimportant excisions and alterations. -- Edward Storer's introduction to his translation of Il Novellino: The Hundred Old Tales (London and New York: George Routledge and Sons and E. P. Dutton and Co., ca. 1925), pp. 31-32.

• Being productions of a more outspoken age, many of the following tales are, as was to be expected, of a character that is contrary to the taste of the present time. I have, however omitted nothing in this book; but in the case of a few isolated passages and of three entire stories, the nature of which is such as to preclude the possibility of their publication in these days, I have been content to print the original transliterated into the Roman alphabet, but untranslated. -- E. J. W. Gibb, preface to his translation from the Turkish of The History of the Forty Vezirs; or, The Story of the Forty Morns and Eves by Sheykh-Zada (London: George Redway, 1886), pp. xx-xxi.

• His book is befouled with obscenity, and, like obscenity itself, is ceasing by degrees to be part of a gentleman's education.... The translator ... must leave whole pages in the decent obscurity of Latin. -- Michael Heseltine, preface to his translation of the Satyricon of Petronius, Loeb Classical Library (London and New York: William Heinemann and The Macmillan Company, 1913, p. xvi.

Similarly, naive readers of the 1891 English translation of The Facetious Nights by Giovanni Francesco Straparola (ca. 1480 - ca. 1557) are protected from the passages of that collection that are most wanting in decency by the fact that the editor translates the critical parts of the most offensive tales (for example, night 6, tales 2 and 4) from the original Italian into French rather than into English. Uneducated readers -- who presumably would not understand French -- are thus spared from the deleterious effects of the racier tales. Educated readers -- who could read French -- presumably would be protected from negative influences by their own sophistication.

Bibliographic reference:

Straparola, Giovanni Francesco. The Facetious Nights, London: Privately printed for members of the Society of Bibliophiles, 1901.

Not even the works of established and (for the most part) respected storytellers are safe from bowdlerization. Boccaccio's The Decameron, by its very name and obvious structure, must consist of 100 stories. However, some versions have only 99, the tenth story of the third day ("Alibech Puts the Devil Back into Hell," type 1425) being too racy for some "Victorian" publishers.

Even scholars of folklore, whose very science depends upon the unaltered recording of data, are sometimes reluctant to give the whole story, or -- in some instances -- any of the story. For example, Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, two of the greatest folktale catalogers, were reluctant to provide details for the many erotic tales that they encountered, sometimes identifying them by little more than a number and the tag "obscene" (for example, types 1546*, 1549*, 1580*).

Bibliographic reference:

Aarne, Antti, and Thompson, Stith. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, FF Communications 184, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1961.

Counter examples

The Grimm Brothers

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, as stated above in their own words, "carefully removed every expression inappropriate for children" from their published folktales. They did not, however, avoid tabooed material altogether. For example, their story "All-Kinds-of-Fur" (no. 65) has the threat of father-daughter incest as its central theme, while "Old Hildebrand" (no. 95) is the tale of an adulterous adventure between a priest and a peasant woman. But still, in the main the Grimms avoided material that would have offended their 19th-century bourgeois public.

• Click here for the full text of the Grimms' All-Kinds of Fur (called here "Allerleirauh") in English or Allerleirauh in German.

• Click here for the full text of the Grimms' Old Hildebrand in English or Der alte Hildebrand in Bavarian dialect.

Aleksandr Afanasyev

Aleksandr Afanasyev (the transliteration Afanas'ev is also used) (1826-1871), the Russian counterpart to the brothers Grimm, published 640 folktales in numerous editions between the years 1855 and 1873. Like the Grimms, he molded authentic folklore material into a simple, but literate style, a style that has endured for more than a century. Unlike the Grimms (and unlike virtually every other nineteenth-century folklorist) Afanasyev did not shy away from patently offensive material and language. His published stories are innocent enough, but he also kept manuscript collections of obscene stories. These were smuggled out of Russia and first published (in Russian, under the title Russian Secret Tales) in Switzerland in 1872. Anticlerical, scatological, erotic, and often crude, these tales, reflect a vulgar side of everyday life in the nineteenth century that many would rather not think about. But without doubt it was there.

Two English translations of Afanayef's Russian secret tales are:

Russian Secret Tales: Bawdy Folktales of Old Russia, New York: Brussel and Brussel, 1966.

Erotic Tales of Old Russia, bilingual edition, Oakland: Scythian Books, 1980.

The late twentieth century

For better or for worse, the reading public appears to have lost its squeamishness with reference to tabooed subjects, and folklorists of today no longer apologize for their "offensive" material, as did their nineteenth-century counterparts. Indeed, what few restrictions may have been imposed by the book publishing industry have vanished into cyberspace. Here are a few titles by respected folklorists that, a few years ago were quite daring, but that today seem almost bland.

Examples:

Legman, G. Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Randolph, Vance. Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales, New York: Avon Books, 1977.

Dundes, Alan. Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

In the tradition of fairy tales, I let three examples suffice. And in the tradition of my Victorian forebears, I leave unsaid why it is that "life is like a chicken coop ladder," even though as a boy, one of my chores was to haul the sh-- out of the chicken coop.

Return to D. L. Ashliman's folktexts, a library of folktales, folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.

Revised February 7, 2002.