Spaces
and scenes in The Grimm Tale
In popular stories, as I have put
forward in the abstract, properly detailed descriptions of the spaces where actions
take place don’t exist. This is because they are stories that form part of oral
tradition, and that have been transmitted by word of mouth during centuries,
surviving the disappearance of Empires, revolutions, the extinction and the
birth of new languages, and the change in the uses and habits of the
population.
Why have these stories arrived to
our present day without loosing any of their freshness and interest? It’s very
hard to give a response to this question. Surely the wisest and most judicious
philologists and experts in the matter would say that they form part of
folklore, or the popular substratum of the peoples that have created them, and
they transmit a collection of beliefs and educational values that are
considered by society as very important. Certainly, behind the appearance of
simple and amusing stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Puss in Boots”,
“Cinderella”, “Tom Thumb”… lay hidden some of the phobias, fears, and most
hidden beliefs and passions of our ancestors, and why not, also, of ourselves.
It´s easy to guess, that in the
character of the ferocious wolf in the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”, lay
our fears of the unknown and of the darkest subconscious of the human being.
Also we are horrified to think how the parents of Hansel and Gretel left their
children abandoned in the middle of the forest in order to be devoured by wild
animals and, we can’t stop smiling when we observe how the stepmother of Snow
White can’t bear getting older and older while the beauty of her stepdaughter
increases with time.
Naturally, if we accept that this is
the final object of these fairy tales, it is easy to understand why the immense
majority of these stories, don’t bother to describe the palaces where the
princes lived, or the gloomy castles through which the ghosts wandered around.
Simply, the author presents to us the characters in a predetermined stage, and
these act, moved always, by a predetermined psychological behaviour.
That is why, to describe now the
space in which the action of “The Grimm Tale” takes place, we are going to make
some allowances that are necessary to correctly place the action and the
characters in an adequate context.
In the first instance, we are going
to make a detailed inventory of all the stages that appear in the story.