Everybody's got their little touchstones, things that, even if not immediately apparent why, are somehow central to their development.

For me, it's this essay. At college, in the main library, in the dawn of the 90s, there was a corridor you could walk through with I guess what we'd now call Staff Picks--a mix of old and new and weird and fun stuff. And as I'm walking through there one day, a title catches my eye: The Great Cat Massacre. Well, I'm not going to be able to avoid a title like that, so I check it out, and while the other essays in the book are interesting enough, it's this one, about Red Riding Hood, that absolutely changes my life forever.

The other one I came across at roughly the same time was Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial and Death. Both were eye-opening in much the same way: We inherit origin stories for the things that interest us, that we assume have some sort of validity--but what if the actual history of those things contradicts those stories? Suddenly those things become even more interesting.

A door was opened. For the first time in my young life, I realized that history didn't have to be boring, and that it wasn't all about politics and wars and rulers. I mean, for a redneck kid who'd grown up in Baptist schools, pledging allegiance to the Christian Flag and the Bible every morning, this was pretty big news! You could have history of interesting things!

I've made sure that copies of these two books are always with me, I've shared them with other people, I'm sure I've bored my kids to absolute tears over them. But what an absolute joy to see Darnton's essay here.
posted by mittens at 11:18 AM on September 29 [9 favorites]

I get no linkage on the first and the last one (ungated).
posted by Brian B. at 11:20 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]

Amazing and pretty throughly convincing essay. Also extremely grim ¡ª by demonstrating that the brothers Grimm were anything but compared to the true original versions of the tales they collected!

Sometimes the names themselves suggest the qualities of wit and duplicity that carry the hero through his trials; thus Le Petit F?teux, Finon-Finette, Parlafine, and Le Rus¨¦ Voleur. When passed in review, they seem to constitute an ideal type, the little guy who gets ahead by outwitting the big.

reminds of an assertion I read years ago in a New Yorker article by a historian who concerned himself with height in historic European populations that the peasants who stormed the Bastille averaged less than five feet in height.

French gastronomy has deep and dark roots indeed.
posted by jamjam at 12:03 PM on September 29 [3 favorites]

I really like Darnton¡¯s idea that, with history, you should always start with the unsettling and inexplicable, since we¡¯re bad at telling the difference between what is familiar and what seems familiar, and that can lead us to badly misinterpret the past.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:25 PM on September 29 [3 favorites]

Brian B.: "I get no linkage on the first and the last one (ungated)."

There's a typo in link. Correct link here: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/02/02/the-meaning-of-mother-goose/
posted by caution live frogs at 12:43 PM on September 29 [3 favorites]

Marina Warner¡¯s book is better.
posted by Ideefixe at 2:38 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]

Marina Warner¡¯s book is better.

given that darnton wrote 32 years before she wrote this book, i suspect it's probably good because it's based on and in conversation with it, so i'm not sure that's a slam dunk
posted by sickos haha yes dot jpg at 4:51 PM on September 29 [5 favorites]

Make sure you read the letters in response to that article!
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:34 PM on September 29 [3 favorites]

Fairy tales contain many motifs that are ancient. Read some of Marie Louis von Franz's work on them.
posted by DJZouke at 5:33 AM on September 30 [1 favorite]

Fell into a rabbit hole about the story numbering. This is the Aarne¨CThompson¨CUther Index and it's tough to find an actual list of all the story numbers. This six-year-old blog entry suggests the only available list is in the Internet Archive. Would happy to be proved wrong by someone with better foo.
posted by achrise at 10:08 AM on September 30 [3 favorites]

So why were French and German mentalit¨¦es so different? The ancient line of Latinity or what?
posted by clew at 11:20 AM on September 30 [1 favorite]

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