The Tale Of This Fairy Tale
Fifteen years ago I cast about for a topic that would enable me to connect today’s culture with the literature in my main field of interest (and please do not put down this book after reading the next three words), Medieval Latin literature. My professional situation prompted me to think of folktales and fairy tales.
On the one hand, half of my appointment was in a classics department, where, at that time, the meaning and value of philology were topics of considerable discussion and even tension.
In addition, I was trying to find common ground with most of my colleagues in Medieval Latin outside my university, who were predominantly Europeans, who held positions flagged explicitly as Medieval Latin philology, and who devoted much of their research and writing to editing, textual criticism and transmission, and other unquestionably philological pursuits.
On the other hand, the remaining half of my salary came from a department in comparative literature, which I subsequently chaired for a number of years.
Although comparative literature has never been defined overtly so as to exclude premodern literatures, the understanding of it as “the systematic study of supranational assemblages” tends to diminish the ease of including in it literatures from before when nations existed.
1 Furthermore, comparative literature, which was once bound up with the languages and literatures of different traditions, has become increasingly connected with theoretical approaches, among which the place of philology has been extremely controversial.
Classics and comparative literature differed starkly from each other in the time periods with which they were most often concerned and in the theoretical approaches with which they were associated.
A way to elide the differences came to me through one of the happiest serendipities in my intellectual life. Very soon after being hired at Harvard, I had been enlisted by
Albert B. Lord (1912–91) to serve on a committee devoted to the study of folklore and mythology. In seeking a confluence between my two or more intellectual identities, I gravitated toward a number of texts written in Medieval Latin that recounted tales that were also documented in later times (especially the Romantic era) in fairy tale collections.
Some topics seemed narrow and specific, others too broad and amorphous, but fairy tales seemed just right: Goldilocks would have been happy.
