Italian Popular Tales: Italian Popular Tales

387 Pages·2001·1.81 MB·English

by  Thomas Frederick Crane

I P T
TALIAN OPULAR ALES
a
ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales
Jack Zipes,Series Editor
Collectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries unearthed
a wealth of stories from around the world and published them in
English translations for the delight of general readers, young and old.
Most of these anthologies have been long out of print.
The ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales series brings back to
life these key anthologies of traditional tales from the golden age of
folklore discovery.Each volume provides a freshly typeset but otherwise
virtually unaltered edition of a classic work and each is enhanced by an
authoritative introduction by a top scholar.These insightful essays dis-
cuss the significance of the collection and its original collector; the
original collector’s methodology and translation practices;and the orig-
inal period context according to region or genre.
Certain to be of interest to folklorists,these classic collections are also
meant to serve as sources for storytellers and for sheer reading pleasure,
reviving as they do hundreds of folk stories, both reassuringly familiar
and excitingly strange.
forthcoming titles:
Creation Myths ofPrimitive America,by Jeremiah Curtin;
Introduction by Karl Kroeber
English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales, by Joseph Jacobs;
Introduction by Donald Haase
Folktales from Northern India, by William Crooke and
Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube;
Introduction by Sadhana Naithani
Old Deccan Days or Hindoo Fairy Legends,by Mary Frere;
Introduction by Kirin Narayan
Popular Tales and Fictions, by William Alexander Clouston;
Introduction by Christine Goldberg
Popular Tales of Ancient Egypt,by Gaston Maspero;
Introduction by Hasan El-Shamy
Italian
Popul ar Tale s
a
Thomas Frederick Crane
edited and with an introduction by
Jack Zipes
Santa Barbara,California
Denver,Colorado Oxford,England
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crane,Thomas Frederick,-
Italian popular tales / Thomas Frederick Crane;with an Introduction
by Jack Zipes.
p.cm.– (ABC-CLIO classic folk and fairy tales)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN ---X (hardcover);--- (e-book)
. Tales—Italy. I.Title.II.Series.
GR .C 
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This edition reprints in its entirety and retains the original chapter
sequence of Italian Popular Tales, by Thomas Frederick Crane, A.M.,
published by The Riverside Press,Cambridge,and printed by Houghton,
Mifflin and Company,.The text of the  edition has been altered
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a
C
ONTENTS
Preface to this Edition vii
Thomas F. Crane: The Uncanny Career
of a Folklorist ix
Bibliography of the Writings of
Thomas F. Crane xxv
Italian Popular Tales
Preface xlvii
Introduction xlix
Bibliography lvii
List of Stories lxv
I. Fairy Tales 3
II. Fairy Tales Continued 79
III. Stories of Oriental Origin 119
IV. Legends and Ghost Stories 149
V. Nursery Tales 193
VI. Stories and Jests 221
Notes 255
List of Works Referred To 309
Index 311


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P
REFACE TO THIS EDITION
Italian Popular Tales is a treasure for folklorists, storytellers, and liter-
ary critics.More than the Grimm Brothers' Children's and Household Tales
and Afanasyev's Russian Fairy Tales,which have unfortunately,I believe,
dominated our contemporary imagination of what folk and fairy tales
were like in the nineteenth century,Thomas Frederick Crane's collection
of different nineteenth-century Italian tale types offers a much more
complex and rich selection of oral and literary tales with multiple ver-
sions from different centuries and countries and exhaustive notes.In fact,
one might consider Italian Popular Tales a correction to many miscon-
ceptions of popular storytelling and literary publications of the nine-
teenth century that stem from the emphasis that has been placed on the
Grimms and Afanasyev as European models.
Crane worked assiduously to document all the tales from his collection,
which were taken from over forty different works,and to demonstrate the
fluid flow between the oral and literary traditions.He covers a wide range
of tale types including the fairy tale,Oriental tales,legends,ghost stories,
nursery tales and rhymes, jests, and anecdotes. Unlike the Grimms and
Afanasyev, he does not "clean up" or modify all the tales that he trans-
lates from different regions of Italy. The tales deal openly and frankly
with such subjects as murder, adultery, incest, child abuse, brutal
vengeance, robbery, cheating, and exploitation. Many of the morals are
dubious. In fact, numerous tales might be considered "immoral" today,
for they depict simply that crime pays, might makes right, and cunning
is necessary to survive in a dog-eat-dog world.The realism of the tales is
uncanny.
The language and style of the different texts vary depending on the
collector and the storyteller. Many of the stories were recorded in stan-
dard Italian after they were heard in dialect;some were printed in dialect,
especially those from Giuseppe Pitrè's Sicilian collections; many were

Preface
taken from German translations that were originally told in an Italian
dialect. As Crane,who did all the translating from the Italian,German,
and French,makes clear,all these tales have unique histories and can be
traced to similar narratives in the Orient and in Europe.He does not deal
with American folklore and the transmission of the tales to North Amer-
ica or the parallels between Native American and indigenous European
tales.Crane was very much the Europhile with a comprehensive knowl-
edge of Oriental folklore.Though he participated in the founding of the
American Folklore Association at the end of the nineteenth century, he
appears to have distanced himself from the association and its focus on
North American folklore soon after its establishment.
Crane's translations are remarkably accurate. Somehow he mastered
different Italian dialects and slang, and though his nineteenth-century
English is somewhat archaic and quaint, and his punctuation uneven,
there is a "raw" quality to his literal translations that gives to them a more
"authentic" ring than would a smooth contemporary translation. His
notes are still valuable,and in some cases,present minor discoveries such
as his remarks on the diffusion of Petit-Poucet (Little Tom Thumb) and his
translation of rare versions of this tale type. For the most part, very few
changes in the original text of Crane's book were made in the ABC-
CLIO reprint.Since Crane was a prolific and significant folklorist and lit-
erary historian, I have included his own mammoth bibliography that he
composed and printed privately right before his death.Otherwise,I have
made only minor orthographic and factual corrections in his book.
I am deeply grateful to Todd Hallman,who helped initiate and devel-
op the ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales series, and I am very
much in debt to Martha Whitt,who has done a superb job in overseeing
the editing of Italian Popular Tales,which,I hope,will not only reawak-
en an interest in Crane and Italian folklore but also inaugurate a series of
significant collections of folk and fairy tales that will appeal not only to
specialists but also to the general public that still constitutes the original
audience of the tales.
—Jack Zipes
Minneapolis
September 5,2001

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I
NTRODUCTION
Thomas F. Crane:
The Uncanny Career of a Folklorist
It is generally believed that Italo Calvino’s book of Italian folktales,
Fiabe Italiane, published in , was the first comprehensive collection
of stories from all over Italy, composed in the manner of the Brothers
Grimm,to celebrate the rich tradition of Italian folklore.But the fact is
that the American scholar Thomas Frederick Crane was really the first to
produce a monumental anthology of tales, in , dedicated to estab-
lishing the significance of Italian folklore in the English-speaking world.
It is somewhat of a mystery as to why and how Crane did this,and it is
a story worth telling before I turn to discussing the nature and impor-
tance of his edition of Italian Popular Tales.
Though Crane was one of the leading folklorists and professors of
medieval literature in the nineteenth century and one of the founders of
the Journal of American Folklore, very little is known about him, and the
papers that he deposited at Cornell University do not provide abundant
information about his life,his training,and his contacts with other folk-
lorists. Nevertheless, the materials at Cornell and his voluminous pub-
lished works are sufficient enough to draw a brief portrait of an amaz-
ingly prolific,meticulous,and imaginative scholar,who had little prepa-
ration for the great career that he made for himself in the fields of folk-
lore and medieval literature.
Born in New York City on July , , Crane was the oldest son of
Thomas Sexton and Charlotte (Nuttman) Crane.His father was a mer-
chant,and soon after Crane was born,the family moved to New Orleans.
He learned to read before the time he was five and developed an early
interest in literature. Due to the nomadic life of his family, Crane was
sent in  to live with his father’s mother in Ithaca,New York,and was
educated at a public school and Ithaca Academy.Early in ,his father
retired from business, and his parents moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey,

Introduction
where his mother died the next year. In , his father summoned him
to Elizabeth, and Crane wrote that “not having the advantage of school
athletics my health was not strong, and my father insisted on my aban-
doning my studies entirely and spending a year on the farm.I draw a veil
over that period.For years I could not behold a potato or a kernel of corn

without a back ache!”
Evidently there was some tension between son and father,who was not
entirely supportive of his son’s intellectual proclivities. However, he did
allow Crane to return to a New Jersey private school in ,and the fol-
lowing year his father granted him permission to attend Princeton Col-
lege.Crane’s description of his four years at Princeton reveals a great deal
about the educational climate of those times:
So to college I went,and during four years studied the
classics,philosophy,and every species of mathematics
then known to the civilized world.I know it will sound
incredible,but it is true:there was no elective system,and
no elective studies,except,I believe,that more mathemat-
ics could be substituted for Greek in the senior year.
There was no English literature in the course,no history,
no modern languages.Otherwise the place was an educa-
tional paradise.There were no fraternities,no musical or
dramatic clubs,no athletics,nor even a Minor Sports
Association,no Junior Week! We had absolutely nothing
to do but to study and dissipate.It was before the days of
large fortunes and there was no display of any kind.Men
were ranked according to their intellectual and social
qualities and the hero of those times was the one who
could write well,speak well,talk well and was moreover a

good fellow.
By the time Crane graduated in ,at the age of twenty,he had devel-
oped a great love for literature and a strong interest in foreign languages,
even though he had only studied some French outside the normal cur-
riculum. It never occurred to him to teach because most of the profes-
sors at that time were clergymen who were not particularly stimulating
or dedicated to scholarly pursuits,and most of the students had a vague
idea of becoming lawyers.Since Crane’s father also wanted him to study
law, Crane enrolled at Columbia law school in the fall of , but his
passion for literature had not abated, and he also began studying Ger-
man, Spanish, and Italian on his own. Early in January , he was
