An illustration from The Flying Ship
This past Sunday saw the passing of the outstanding, beloved children’s author Joanna Cole. For many – including for myself and my children – her Magic School Bus series of books were some of our first explorations into the world of the natural sciences, and for these contributions to children’s literature Joanna Cole is rightly remembered and honoured. But for me, ever since I was seven years old, Ms Cole’s name is also indelibly associated with a collection of folktales, the Best-Loved Folktales of the World, which (as the title suggests) she compiled from a vast variety of cultures and times from around the globe. This book, an old favourite, has followed me around everywhere and always occupied a place of honour on my bookshelf long into my adulthood.
Children are enchanted by folktales, and I was no exception – but folktales are by no means a childish thing. Indeed, Joanna Cole put together this collection as much for adults – not just parents – as for children. Because prior to the invention of the printing press, most written materials were in fact the self-narration of the élite classes, folklore and folktales are a pristine window into the lives, concerns, struggles and aspirations of the common people. This was one of the big draws of folklore for scholars like the Brothers Grimm, August von Haxthausen, Julius Krohn, Marianna Kambouroglou and Pyotr Kireevskii. As Joanna Cole herself put it:
Because they are the products of preliterate societies, the folktales, unlike our modern novels and short stories, were not invented by a single author and printed in a book to be read unchanged forever. Instead, they were passed by word of mouth from one teller to another, never told twice in exactly the same way. This oral tradition made for a unique intimacy between teller and listeners, and the give and take with the audience no doubt influenced the form of the tales. Thus the stories express the wishes, hopes and fears of many people, rather than the concerns of a particular writer, and they deal with universal human dilemmas that span differences of age, culture and geography.
When heard again and again throughout a lifetime, the tales served not only to entertain but to transmit the values and wisdom of the culture, imbue a strong sense of right and wrong, and provide a reservoir of vivid images that became part of the individual’s imagination and even of his everyday language.
Joanna Cole acknowledges both the universal themes in the body of folklore she herself selected to transmit to another generation, and the particularities of the cultures she sought to represent in translating and compiling them. Indeed, one of her methodologies in this book is to attempt to find a source for the story that is as close as possible to the oral tradition, and then to write in-character in an attempt to transmit the style and voice of the storyteller. Small wonder indeed, that a seven-year-old would, upon stumbling on this book, at once find himself mesmerised by the many voices in Cole’s storytelling!
It was natural that I should gravitate toward the folktales of certain cultures within the book. I was drawn to the trickster-spider Anansi stories of the Ashanti tribe of West Africa. I enjoyed the underdog tales of small, less-regarded children against giants and ogres in English folklore – or the parallel adventures of younger sons against enchanters and trolls in the folklore of Northern Europe. But the folktales that I kept coming back to, time and again, were the stories from Russia: ‘The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship’, ‘The Firebird, the Horse of Power and Princess Vasilissa’, ‘Prince Hedgehog’ and ‘Salt’. The heroes of these stories are remarkable not for their book-smarts or martial prowess, let alone for their wealth. The Fool of the World and the simple Ivan are, in fact, far less than clever to begin with, have no real special abilities and are even belittled by their parents. And even if the heroes in these tales are possessed of cleverness (like Prince Hedgehog) or martial prowess (like the archer in the story of the Horse of Power), they are never saved from danger by their natural gifts but instead by a mixture of faith, compassion and an innate sense of fair play – as well as a certain kind of natural cunning which the villains always seem to underestimate.
I quickly came to admire, and even internalise to a degree, these deeply humane aspects in the moral substratum, by which the folklore of Russia represented the values and wisdom of its common people. As such, the Western ‘meritocratic’ præoccupations, that we should judge people by how smart they are or by how strong they are, never really rubbed me the right way. By the way, you can see from some of the East Asian folktales in this collection – like ‘The Wife’s Portrait’, ‘The Magic Brocade’ and ‘Mister Lazybones’ – that the idea of ‘merit’ in cultures influenced by Ru ideology is very different from the modern Western idea. East Asian ‘merit’, at least in its folk conception rather than in its Legalist one, has a lot more to do with fulfilling filial duties and confining oneself to the appropriate social rôles, than with showing off book-smarts or military strategy. It seems interesting – though not surprising – that the dangers of the usual East Asian studies tack, of conflating Rujia with the disembodied and rationalised ethics of the Enlightenment (which indeed tore up in Europe many of the social substrata upon which Ru ethics in China were built), are brought to the fore and thrown into such sharp relief by the study of East Asian folklore.
The folklore of Russia – and in particular the Great-Russian folklore of Novgorod, in whose vicinity Arthur Ransome lived and collected the folktales that would go into Old Peter, and from there into Joanna Cole’s collection – has retained on the flipside much of the old kenotic radicalism of the Rus’ polity, long after it was abandoned by princes and chroniclers and even churchmen. In this folklore, the ordinary muzhik, even – nay, especially – if he is a simpleton, is often allowed to triumph over tyrannical tsars, mighty giants, violent generals and jealous older brothers. And this triumph occurs occasionally on account of the muzhik’s underhanded cunning, but more often on account of his natural good nature, his instinctive generosity, and most of all his simple faith in God.
On another note: it’s hard not to see the impress of heroes like Ivan and the Fool of the World on the protagonists in Russian cinema. The Kazakh youngster Mustafa in Shıza, Vanya in Kavkazskii plennik, Danila Bagrov in the Brat films, even (to a certain extent) Kris and later Anya in Ya ne vernus’, all embody in a certain sense this distinctively Great-Russian folkloric archetype. They all seem to have these same characteristics of faith, fair play and an instinctive underdog cunning that are hinted at in Ivan and in the Fool of the World – even though the archetype is occasionally played with or subverted in the transition to film.
May God grant unto Joanna Cole everlasting rest, and make her memory to be æternal! It’s interesting to me to discover that the authorial genius behind the Magic School Bus books, indeed did have a profound impact on me and particularly upon my respect and affinity for Russian culture – though this was one signpost I had nearly forgotten until now. Perhaps I’ll go back and read ‘Salt’ again tonight.
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