Earlier this week the Guardian, Forbes and others covered the discovery of 500 fairy tales collected by 19th century folklorist Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. I sent a note about this to Professor Jack Zipes, who promptly replied urging caution about the discovery and pointing to many other (in his view more interesting) 19th century collections from France and Germany. An expanded version of his note is now up on the website for the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy.

Says Professor Zipes:

I have only read Schönwerth’s tales from the earlier three volumes, and they range from boring to good examples of Bavarian customs. Nothing to get excited about, just as there is nothing to get excited about in the more recent example provided in The Guardian.

He continues:

I can point to some brilliant German collections by Theodor Vernaleken, Johann Wilhelm Wolf, Ignaz and Joseph Zingerele, Heinrich Pröhle, Josef Haltrich, Christian Schneller, Karl Haupt, Hermann Knust, Carl and Theodor Colshorn, etc. etc. and even more brilliant French collections by François-Marie Luzel, Paul Sébillot, Emmanuel Cosquin, Jean-François Bladé, Henry Carnoy, etc. etc. that contain tales fastidiously recorded by these folklorists, who translated them from dialect versions. They also include raw dialect versions with their translations.

And then:

There is also the question of artistic value. Many of the European folklorists like the Grimms, had a great artistic sensibility. The artistic power of the Grimms’ tales and other collections can be experienced when they are read aloud. I believe that the best folklorists always had to “translate” and “adapt” the tales they collected, and they did this while trying to remain true to the spoken word. So, you can praise Schönwerth’s “raw” tales, but those that I have read thus far lack an important element of artistic re-creation.

He says that “we have not yet translated the best European folk-tale collections into English and given them their due recognition” and that “the general public is not aware that Schönwerth’s work was just a drop in the bucket of folk-tale collecting in Europe during the nineteenth century”.

Salman Rushdie takes up the idea of a “Sea of Stories” from the Kathasaritsagara (literally: “Sea of the Rivers of Story”) an 11th century collection of Indian fairy tales and folktales. Liquid metaphors are an attractive way of alluding to the richness and reciprocal influence of various fairy tale and storytelling traditions. The many tales in One Thousand and One Nights wonderfully exemplify how narrative themes and patterns are echoed, refracted, and parodied. The epic, rhapsodic, near geometrical complexity that emerges from the relations between the tales leaves the reader with a taste of the infinite, a sense of awe that could easily be described as oceanic. Rushdie writes:

So Iff the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and as many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

While the Sea of Stories will remain a Platonic fantasy, one can imagine its worldly counterpart in the form of a comprehensive scholarly index of fairy tales and folk tales from around the world. One could explore the index by language, country of origin, date, and author. Perhaps one could explore linkages between early sources and contemporary retellings. Or explore tales by theme or trope, hopefully without falling prey to a Proppian hubris of comprehensive classification and analysis.

This is something that I’ve been wanting to pursue for a while as a project tentatively dubbed the ‘Synoptic Folktale Index’ with the Sussex Centre, which was founded by my dad. Several people have expressed support for the idea. Professor D. L. Ashliman has very kindly offered to donate his collection of Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts to the project, as well as a large private database of bibliographic references. Professor Jack Zipes has given us several big bibliographies of works that he’s used for his own research and publications. The index could be powered by the open source TEXTUS platform, which would enable users to update bibliographies and upload, transcribe and translate texts. The index would enable users to see which tales have and have not been translated, and a translation fund could help to incentivise new translations.

In Rushdie’s world, the Sea of Stories is a fertile source for storytellers, whom, if they are brave and “very, very careful, or very, very highly skilled”, can “dip a cup into the Ocean” and “fill it with water from a single, pure Stream of Story” (ibid, p. 72). The protagonist of the book learns that “nothing comes from nothing”, “no story comes from nowhere”, and that “new stories are born from old” (p. 86). This is explained with reference to the digestive systems of “artistic Plentimaw fishes”, who help to generate new tales by combining (parts of) old tales.

Many German folklore collectors in the 18th and 19th century believed that folk culture was a fertile soil out of which new works could grow – by retelling, reworking, synthesising and incorporating traditional tales. Johann Gottfried Herder helped to popularise the idea that literary genius could grow out of folk culture – an idea which was fostered by his former teacher Johann Georg Hamann, who was in turn influenced by the vegetative metaphors of English poet Edward Young, who was reacting against what he considered the staid, formalist aesthetic theories of his contemporaries. The paradigmatic case to which German literary theorists after Herder turned was Shakespeare, whose works they believed had grown out of an abundant amalgam of tales, legends, and myths.

One can envisage that of the many thousands of folk tales that have been collected, some will be of historical interest to those specialist oceanographers who are interested in the subtle inflections and shades of variation in the great waves that roll across the Sea of Stories. But perhaps for the rest of us, the value of a given tale will for the most part be proportional to the talents of the teller.

As someone engaged in research in the humanities I find that I am often making lists of books about particular authors, periods, and themes. A single publication will often appear in more than one list. For example, I may wish to include Frederick Beiser’s The Romantic Imperative in a list of books about Novalis, a list of books about Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, a list about the Early German Romantics, a list of books about German philosophy to be recommended to a non-specialist reader, and so on.

It is not only individual researchers who make such lists. Those who teach often create and update lists of publications for their students. Large bibliographic indexes, such as the subscription-based Philosopher’s Index, are useful references for those looking into what has been published on a given topic. Books, articles and personal websites contain lists of related or recommended publications. These can be alphabetical, or organised by subject or author. They can be annotated with comments and summaries or left alone. They can be actively curated or printed and never revisited.

Though they may be easy to overlook, lists of publications are an absolutely critical part of scholarship. They articulate the contours of a body of knowledge, and define the scope and focus of scholarly enquiry in a given domain. Furthermore such lists are always changing. Books and articles are published and translated all the time. Works fall in and out of fashion. ‘Secondary’ reference works can become obsolete – considered interesting more for what they say about a particular intellectual period than what they say about their subject matter. (As an aside: I always wanted to scan and compare reading lists from the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty Library for as far back as they exist – to get a sense of the changing zeitgeist at an influential department. Lists of publications are presumably an invaluable resource for intellectual historians!)

On beyond paper: from books to bits

Until recently bibliographies had to be compiled and printed in physical dead-tree volumes. This limited not only how often the bibliographies could be updated, but also how the items contained within them were organised. Items would have to be placed in a definite sequence, perhaps according to some rigid taxonomy. At best dead-tree bibliographies may skew the selection, presentation and ordering of works according to one of many possible interpretations of a body of scholarship. At worst they may shoehorn individual works into an arbitrary scheme so they fit the expectations and contrivances of the bibliographer. For example, for the sake of taxonomical integrity Johann Georg Hamann is classified by Jules Michelet, a nineteenth century historian, as an example of Glaubensphilosophie, a term which became popular many decades after the former’s death and which Hamann and those who knew him almost certainly wouldn’t apply to his work!

In the last few decades we have moved beyond print bibliographies and card catalogues to more fine-grained and (sometimes) more sophisticated bit-based systems. These allow lists of publications to be sorted, searched and queried in all kinds of interesting ways, and to be annotated and updated on-the-fly. For example, websites like Library Thing and Amazon allow people to create arbitrary lists of books – as well as to rate and comment on books. Software packages and services like Mendeley and Zotero allow people to manage and share collections of links, documents and sources. We are seeing the emergence of new kinds of technologies that transform the way we work with lists. One thing that the web currently seems to be very good at is allowing people to create and curate various kinds of lists – from lists of links to lists of encyclopedia topics. Lists can easily be kept near-comprehensive (but – and this is a virtue – never quite complete), very up to date, and do not have to be shoehorned into any particular pre-determined structure, unlike their paper counterparts. Diderot would have been jealous!

A case study: the genealogy of stories

Recently I was talking with my dad about his new research centre, the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy. A little while ago I proposed that a useful output of the centre could be a large multilingual, collaboratively edited bibliography (or bibliographic database) of publications related to folk tales, fairy tales and fantasy. Naturally one that would make the likes of Herder, Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimms proud! This would include:

• primary sources for fairy tales in different countries (e.g. Giambattista Basile, the Brother’s Grimm, Charles Perrault, …)
• secondary commentaries (e.g. Vladimir Propp, Jack Zipes, …)
• new literary tales and new reworkings of old tales (e.g. Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A Hoffman, George MacDonald, Italo Calvino, …)

Ideally the database would be able to give answers to questions like:

• What has been published about Giambattista Basile in German in the last 20 years?
• Which Italian folktales and fairy tales have been translated into Norwegian?
• What was published about Charles Perrault in English between 1850 and 1900?

Among other things it could be useful as a scholarly tool to compare translations, reworking and editions of particular tales – as well as as the basis for serious source criticism and comparative scholarship, looking at the transmission and influence of different tales across different regions.

I’ve been looking around to see whether there’s anything which fits the bill, but have been unable to find anything that seems quite right (if you know of anything please let me know!). Meanwhile, I’ve put together a preliminary specification for an open source web service tentatively dubbed ‘Bibliographica’ to scratch the itch. So far I’ve used the Sussex Centre project and examples from my own research to illustrate the project, but the idea would be to create something generic which could be used in lots of different domains – not just for philosophy or folktales!

Bibliographica: what lovely features you have

Overview

A list of desirable features (in no particular order):

• Free, open source and easy for for anyone to set up their own branded instance of the service at their own domain name (e.g. biblio.york.ac.uk or books.example.com)
• Easy to import and export data in a variety of common formats (including from existing online sources of open bibliographic data such as the Open Library)
• Fully versioned so that all changes to the bibliography can be tracked and, if necessary, reversed
• Allows different read/edit permissions to be assigned to different users and groups (e.g. individual researchers, research groups, …)
• Allows users to easily create their own lists of publications (e.g. for a taught course, for an article, book or thesis, …)
• Allows users to easily create new ‘record’ for a publication
• Allows users to search, sort and query records by author, title, subject matter, language, country/region of origin, date of publication, date of subject matter, and so on
• Uses existing technologies such as OpenID
• Support for arbitrary, user-generated tags of authors and works
• Well documented API
• Allows users to see which works are in the public domain in their jurisdiction (using a series of public domain calculators)
• Allows users to find digital copies of works which have fallen into the public domain – as well as links to online journal archives, library catalogues and so on

Data elements/model

This would be, to the greatest extent possible, based on and compatible with existing bibliographic data standards including MARC, FRBR and Dublin Core. Below are some rough ideas for fields that might be included. Any and all suggestions welcome in the comments below, or via email! This is intended to be a work in progress…

Author:

• ID
• First Name
• Last Name
• Date of Birth
• Date of Death
• Place of Birth
• Place of Death
• Area(s) lived in
• Country(/ies) associated with
• Which users/groups can edit (optional)

Work:

• ID
• Title
• Author
• Language
• Date of Publication
• Country/region of origin
• Country/region of subject matter
• Which users/groups can edit (optional)
• Author(s) it is about
• Subject matter (perhaps based on Library of Congress Subject Headings)
• Medium/type of work (book, article, audio recording, film, …)
• URL (if relevant)

List:

• ID
• Works in list
• Title
• Description
• Comment/annotation associated with a given work in the list
• Which users/groups can edit (optional)

User:

• ID
• User name
• Contact details
• Description (bio, links, …)
• Authors edited
• Works edited
• Lists edited

Group:

• ID
• Users
• Title
• Description