Saturday, September 9, 2023

Carl Krenek

Carl Krenek (1880-1948) was an Austrian illustrator. Above, his Sleeping Beauty, which is all over the internet these days.

My sources say this is an illustration of "Hans and the Maneater," a tale I have never heard of, so I assume it is just a 20th-century translation of "Jack and the Beanstalk." 


Hansel and Gretel




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2 comments:

G. Verloren said...

My sources say this is an illustration of "Hans and the Maneater," a tale I have never heard of, so I assume it is just a 20th-century translation of "Jack and the Beanstalk." (A tale that has a very traditional feel but was recorded only once, in Austrialia in the 1860s.)

Googling "Hans and the Maneater" in quotations literally produces only one result - your post. What are your sources, may I ask? I'm intrigued.

I'm also quite confused by your notion about Jack and The Beanstalk - both the date, and the origin point. I immediately found a whole slew of earlier print sources, with English origins.

Henry Cole's version included in "The Home Treasury of Old Story Books" - 1845, London
Benjamin Tabart's "The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk" - 1807, London
"The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean" - 1734, London
J. White's "The History of Jack and the Giants" - 1711, Newcastle

The tale of "Jack and The Giants" is referenced (but not printed) in "The Weekly Comedy" of 22 January 1708. The story itself seems to stem from Cornish folklore, which placed the events of the story during the time of King Arthur, and in some early versions it is Arthur himself who is the hero that slays the giant Blunderbore - a figure who appears elsewhere in Cornish stories, including a version of "Tom Hickathrift" which dates to 1660.

I don't have time to keep digging further back, particularly as the sources get murkier and harder to find as we retreat into the past, but there's definitely a connection to Shakespeare - in King Lear (1606), Act 3, Scene 4, we get "Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man". I'm not sure whether the fairytale came after and borrowed from Shakespeare, or if Shakespeare was borrowing from already extant versions of the story - which is absolutely something he would have done, and did in other forms with other stories.

Clearly this is not a tale that was "recorded only once", and is in fact QUITE traditional.

September 9, 2023 at 5:35 PM
John said...

Well, that's interesting. The Ogre's Treasure is a very old tale, but I had read that the modern version of Jack and the Beanstalk, including the "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum" came from a single Australian telling, and that indeed appears to be false. The source for "Hans and the Maneater" was an art site that probably used a Google translated version of the German title.

September 11, 2023 at 2:24 PM

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