Hi, Hivean lovers of fairy tales.
Horacia reads from our copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales - photo of mine
When you were little, did you ever hear of “The Tale of One Who Traveled to Learn What Shivering Meant”?
I didn’t. I read the story when I was nine or ten from a book in our local Public Library: Grimm's Fairy Tales; and I have to be honest, I kind of liked it. But recently, when I read it again, I found it boring and inconsistent. Then I’ve been searching for information on this matter; I’ve seen there have been some important literary and TV adaptations; I have also read somewhere the story is loosely based on one of Lancelot’s adventures. But it seems to me that in spite of its alleged cultural value, perhaps this tale didn’t make it to the memepool; otherwise, I’m missing something.
In Jack Zipes's words, “only when a tale makes itself relevant or is made relevant through human agency, and also fulfills certain basic needs, will it become a meme […] Once it retains a place within a module of our brains, it provides information vital to the adaptation to the environment" (111). Then probably this tale lacks this relevance Zipes writes about, does it? The answer is up to us.
(If you have not read the story, I invite you to do it here.)
What Does “The Tale of One Who Traveled to Learn What Shivering Meant” tell?
Well, it tells exactly that:
(This is not a summary.)
A boy who was “so stupid that he could learn nothing” leaves his home and sets off on his journey to learn what shivering was, for he had heard everyone to say, “Oh, it makes us shiver!” when they were told scary stories, but he could not understand it; he felt no fear. At the time of his departure, his father has given him fifty dollars and has warned him that even when he finally gets to learn what shivering means, he would never earn his bread by that.
On his quest for feeling the shiver, and after he has assured his skeptical and disappointed father he knew this business would support him, he faces supernatural and lethal opponents, whom he defeats with a tremendous display of serenity and prowess.
By the time he’s about to take what seems to be his definite challenge, we have learned he’s strong, skilled, and good looking (the inn keeper’s wife fears “such beautiful eyes …should not see the light again,” and when the King looked at him, “his appearance pleased him”); he also happens to be peculiarly—or questionably—clever (he knows what “inanimate things” to request that he can use later to overcome the final obstacles—a fire, a lathe, and a cutting-board).
He decides to take the challenge. Whoever ventured to watch three nights in the enchanted castle would marry the King’s daughter, who is described as “the most beautiful lady that the sun ever shone upon.”
On his first night in the castle, our hero beats ghostly evil black cats, dogs and six horses which try to kill him violently. On the second night he plays at ninepins using thigh bones and skulls brought by dead men. And on the third night, he has to fight his dead cousin who wants to strangle him; and then he’s challenged by the tallest and strongest of the six pallbearers who had brought his cousin’s living corpse.
He beats the tall spectrum, demonstrating with this last achievement that he is a formidable fighter. Fearing a sure death, this last opponent offers him a fortune in exchange of his life—Yes, dead men have lives they cherish too; what can I say—; “three chests full of gold in a cellar,” one for the poor, one for the King, and one for him (according to the instructions of the challenger). And none of these terrors remains after midnight whatsoever.
The morning after the third night, the King asks the boy, “Now have you learnt to shiver?” But the boy sadly answers he hasn’t. And after the King tells him he has won the castle and will marry the princess, and even after the wedding, “notwithstanding his love for his bride and his great contentment, [he] was still continually crying, ‘If I could but shiver!’ If I could but shiver!’”
A bit of a tantrum
Now, at this point, I wanted to kill the boy myself. How stubborn can he be! When I realized I was already in the last paragraph, which meant there was no time to make it any better, I felt even more frustrated; it’d been so long a climax that the story had lost me out of annoyance. I thought the writers could have been better entertainers, right? But it was a hit two hundred years ago, so it was probably my bad. But wait! A hit I said? Rapunzel (ATU 310) is still a hit, The Bluebeard (ATU 312) and Little Red Riding Hood (ATU 333) still are, too; all them in the category of Supernatural Opponents along with this tale of this morose fellow who goes crying all along the story.
My guess? This is probably one of those stories which, in Stephen Evan’s words, “have fallen out of favour.” In his 2014 article, Evans remarks:
It’s clear that many children love the gory bits. And it’s clear that many parents don’t. A survey last year found that many reported that their children had been left in tears by the gruesome fate of Little Red Riding Hood. Some parents wouldn’t read “Rumpelstiltskin” to their children because it was about kidnapping and execution. And many parents felt that Cinderella was a bad role model for daughters because she did housework all day. (par.9)
So why do children—and adults—continue to read, buy and recommend stories like these? Let’s be casual and digress a little. I think It’s like what happened to many of us with that old school anime Takahata’s Haha o Tazunete Sanzenri from the seventies (3000 Leagues in Search of Mother)—which I’ve just learned is loosely based on the story of Marco in Edmondo De Amici’s children’s novel Heart (1886)—. Go back forty years in time and we’re there—well, I am—, watching today’s episode, suffering because deep down we know he’s not going to find his mom this time either, but we can’t help it, perhaps we crave for the customary emotional whiplash, or we want to exercise our clinging to hope—maybe faith does work—.
Well whatever keeps us engaged to stories like this one seems to be difficult to appreciate in “The Tale of One Who Traveled to Know What Shivering Meant.”
Is It a Dull Story Then?
I think this goes beyond Disney’s picking up “on the scariness of fairy tales as something which appeals to both children and adults” (Tatar qted. in Evans, par. 15).
Even when one decides to put aside other brilliant annotations like the ones made by professor Maria Tatar (1987), with her functional synthetic approach “drawing on the methods promoted by folklorists, the insights developed by psychoanalytical critics, and the data provided by historians” (qted. in Ward, par. 1), we have that the hero fails to be empathic; and in turn, we fail to establish empathy with him. Even the disgusting Frog in “The King-Frog; or Iron Heinrich” (aka “The Frog-Prince,” ATU 440) shows empathy when he asks the princess what ails her so much after she has lost her golden ball (like we’re told in some of the most popular versions). And one certainly talks about this matters not without fearing that professor Alan Dundes should come back from the dead just to reprimand us for treating the matter so lightly (mainly for our fallaciously dealing with a single version of a folk tale).
Our hero doesn’t display any valued trait at the beginning. And although he proves himself a man of prowess throughout the story, let’s say he does not make a first good impression. Besides, we might fail to feel bad for him because his father treats him unjustly, but we are not sure about that. In spite of being rude, his father seems to be right. Also, it is difficult for us to establish empathy because he doesn’t wish for something universally understood. Fear is natural and inherent to all human beings, unless biology fails to do its job; we don’t roam the world trying to discover what this is like; at its best, we could compare his to the want for adrenaline some people experience. And I know this is a fairy tale, but.
Good Vs. Evil
Good must always win. Bettelheim knew it was important for children, and so does our fairy tale. One of the problems of the story, in my humble opinion, is that most evident evil is defeated too easily; there’s hardly tension, or emotional contagion. While the less evident evil but which actually triggers the action, his father’s rejecting him, his brother’s ridiculing him, plus the social scorn which he had to stand not only are dwarfed by his obsession with learning what shivering feels like, but are never resolved—as if those lines never mattered—. At the beginning of the story we are presented with a hero and a conflict in a family context, and in the end we are left with the feeling that it will linger there forever, waiting.
(And yes, I have already considered this is ATU 326, “Supernatural Opponents” category. But I like to think Aarne, Thompson, and Uther would agree on this and then say, “Hey, we’re just doing our job.”)
A Failed Hint of Humor?
Was it supposed to be funny perhaps? If they wanted to parody some Lancelot’s adventure, which I can’t tell, I’m sure Chaucer would have done it outstandingly—Certainly, I could not think of Sir Thomas Malory for this—. The kind of spicy humor we find in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” for example, would have made this Grimm tale become not exactly a mock-heroic story, but it would have added some flavor in the last scene, when the princess, on one of her chambermaids’ advice, pours a pail of cold water and fish over her husband, making him finally—Lord, finally!—shiver. The princess would make a nice Pertelote; just imagine her telling her husband to stop the foolishness and go about some serious business—other than learning what shivering means now that he has finally learned it.
Finally, you and I know the difference between shivering because we’ve seen a ghost and shivering because we’re cold. And you and I know that this boy must have felt cold before, right? Right. Then how are we supposed to make this tale relevant for any reason other than it is one Grimm tale? That’s what I mean.
Thanks for reading and for being fond of fairy tales.
References
Brothers Grimm. “The Tale of One Who Travelled to Learn What Shivering Meant.” Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Barns & Nobles Classics, 2003, pp.18-26.
Evans, Stephen. “Are Fairy Tales Too Twisted for Children?” BBC Culture, 21 Oct. 2014, bbc.com/culture/story/20130801-too-grimm-for-children. Accessed 15 Apr. 2020.
Ward, Donald. Review of The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, by Maria Tatar. The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 102, no. 403, Jan.-Mar. 1989, pp. 97-100, jstor.org/stable/540089?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3Aef5b3a14299ddf12cba48f97bb794b67&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Accessed 18 Apr. 2020.
Zipes, Jack. “What Makes a Repulsive Frog so Appealing: Memetics and Fairy Tales.” Journal of Folklore Reasearch, vol. 45, no. 2, May-Aug. 2008, pp. 109-143. Indiana University Press, jstor.org/stable/40206971?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed 15 Apr. 2020.