The Question of Beowulf’s Relation to Fairy Tales Revisited Andrzej Wicher University of Łódź, Poland ABSTRACT: The question of Beowulf’s link with a specific type of fairy tales, particularly AT 301 “The Bear’s Son” (“The Three Stolen Princesses”), has been extensively discussed by many critics and scholars, including the magisterial studies by Chambers (1921) and Lawrence (1928). The main similarities, and the no less striking differences, between Beowulf and AT 301 are well known. We have also J. R. R. Tolkien’s (2014) ambitious and poetical attempt to reconstruct the folktale that was, apparently, behind Beowulf, entitled Sellic Spell, which in Old English means ‘wonderful tale.’ It would, naturally, be presumptuous to try to find out whether Tolkien’s attempt was successful or not, and its value, as a piece of literary archaeology, is disputable, and is likely to remain so. But some work needs to be done, it seems, on the connection between Beowulf and the fairy tale understood as a genre, not necessarily a specific type of it. In trying to achieve this aim, I should be guided by such folklore and fairy tale scholars as Propp ([1928] 1968) or Lüthi (1982), rather than by Aarne and Thompson (1928), even though I am very far from dismissing the value of their Types of the Folk-Tale. KEYWORDS: Beowulf, the fairy tale, heroes vs false heroes, literary archaeology, Christian motifs 1. Beowulf vs the Grimms’ “Gnome” The connection between the plot of Beowulf and “The Bear’s Son” (AT 3011 “The Three Stolen Princesses”) seems well established. The best known among this type of wondertales is probably the Grimms’ No 91 tale, whose German title is “Dat Erdmänneken” (told in a North German dialect) and the English title is “The Gnome.”2 The gnome in question is, in fact, most often called by the name of “mannikin,” which is clearly an allusion to the 1 I am using the classification of folktale types based on Aarne–Thompson Tale Type Index. 2 The Polish title, at least in the translation by Bielicka and Tarnowski, is “Podziomek” [‘Under-earthling’]. The title “Gnome” follows The Brothers Grimm‘s The Complete Fairy Tales ([1812] 1998).
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