"Peace on Earth..."

"Peace on Earth; good will to men..."

The other day, I started to think about the word "peace;" it's a word we seem to take for granted, especially this time of year.

Words change over time, and not only in their sounds, like the garbled messages at the end of a long game of "Telephone." Their meanings change subtly, too. And just as you can gain deeper understanding of a person through learning about their life's journey, so you can gain deeper understanding of words by learning about their etymology. And sometimes, like a grizzled traveler, they're carrying secrets in their baggage that make you look at them in a whole new light.

So, this afternoon, I took one of my favorite books, The Roots of English: A Reader's Handbook of Word Origins by Robert Claiborne,* down from the shelf and looked up PEACE in the word index. I was led to this (Page 142):

PAG-, PAK-, L pangere, pact-, fasten, fix, whence COMPACT ("fixed together") and PEACE (when enemies are "fastened together" by a PACT), whence PACIFY [. . .]

L palus, a stake (fixed in the ground), > the PALE or PALING made of stakes or POLES. [. . .] Also < the "stake" sense is L pagus, (staked out) boundary, hence village, hence countryside, whence PEASANT, paganus, countryman, hence civilian, > PAGAN (a "civilian" not in the army of Christ).

It is perhaps disapointing that a word so many of us associate with serenity and idyllic freedom has, at its core, such strong ties to the concept of force -- whether the bodily force assoicated with tying something down, or the conceptual force of laws and treaties, or the energetic force of a peasant wresting food from the soil, and domesticating herds of animals, and keeping them in pens. We'd rather associate "Peace" with life in the Garden of Eden, than with the life of toil and pain that came after the exile.

And yet...

I'm reminded of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall":

. . . The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.

The pat interpretation of this poem, the one most American students are taught, in Junior High Englsh class, is that the narrator represents the enlightened, peaceful, view, and the neighbor, who insists on repeating: "Good fences make good neighbors," as unenlighteded and belligerent: "Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top / In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. / He moves in darkness as it seems to me."^

But maybe, considering that fences, themselves, are at the very root of "peace," that pat interpretation has got it the wrong way 'round. After all, without the wall to mend, would the neighbors meet at all? Would there be any occasion for them to cooperate, despite their differing points of view, and do the delicate work of balancing stone on stone?

Psychologically, too, boundaries are important for our "peace of mind--" knowing how to give ourselves the safe space necessary to rest. Knowing that the boundaries are there, even with our loved ones, when there is no threat of attack, grants us the confidence to know that each of us is unique, and each of us has special gifts to give the world. Without some sort of boundary, there'd be no meeting place, no point of exchange, trick-or-treat, Jolly Wassail, or generosity.

Peace on Earth.


*(1989, Times Books, a division of Random House, New York).

^The complete etext of Mending Wall, by Robert Frost

Two versions of the tale of the Christmas Spider (retold from memory)

Preamble: Because spiders have been among my favorite animals since I was small enough to crawl under chairs, and marvel at their webs close up, these legends will always have a special place in my heart. I suspect I first encountered the German version of this story in an anthology from my high school library, and found the Ukrainian version online, later. But "later," in this case, had to have been at least fifteen years ago, as best as I can figure.

I know I've seen both (distinctly different) versions online, in the recent past. But when I put "Christmas Spider folktale" into Google's search engine today, I kept getting just the German version (with certain passages being word-for-word copies) at nearly every page result, except for one link that gave a three-line summary of the Ukrainian version .... So I won't be including any links in this post, since I can't guarantee they'll still be alive come this time next year.

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LEGEND OF THE CHRISTMAS SPIDERS (retold from a German Legend)

It was Christmas Eve, and the lady of the house was working feverishly, to get everything spic and span so it would be fit for the visit from the Christ Child, to receive his blessing. Even the spiders, every last one of them, were banished to the farthest corner of the attic, while the silver was polished and the tree in the grand hall decorated, and all the excitement was going on downstairs.

This made the spiders sad -- not so much because their homes had been swept away, but because they wanted to be included in the celebration. So, once the house was quiet, and all the humans were snug in their beds, the spiders sneaked downstairs, to get a look at the Christmas tree. And when they saw it, they were so overcome with curiosity and admiration that they lost all sense of restraint, and swarmed the tree -- scampering over every needle, and gazing at their reflection in every bauble. And everywhere they went, they trailed their silk threads behind them. The tree was covered, tip to trunk, in webs.

At midnight, the Christ Child appeared, and he saw what the spiders had done. He knew that the mistress of the house would be angry, to see her beautiful tree covered in spiderwebs. But he also knew that the spiders had meant no harm, and that their wee hearts were pure. So he reached out and touched the silk. And in that instant, the spiders' drab webs were transformed into silver and gold, and the tree was more beautiful than it had ever been.

...And that's where the tradition of hanging tinsel on the Christmas Tree comes from.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

THE LEGEND OF THE CHRISTMAS SPIDER (Retold from a Ukrainian Legend)

Once upon a time, there lived poor mother and her children. It had been a hard year, because her husband, the village blacksmith, had been called away to war, and she could not earn enough money with him gone.

The year before, their Christmas had been a time of plenty, but this year, she could barely afford to scrape together the basics for the Christmas Eve feast, much less bake extra cookies, or buy new decorations, to hang on the tree for her children's sake. And they had been so good this year, too. She put on a brave face as they put their small tree outside their door, and hung small nuts, and the tattered ribbons from last year on its branches.

But that night, after the children were asleep, she wept, and prayed for the strength to make it through another year.

Now, this house, like all Ukrainian houses, had a special house spider -- one who was never molested, and who was given crumbs to eat, so she could protect the good luck of the family within. The kind-hearted mother had taken good care of this spider, and the spider wanted to do something to make her happy.

A spider has no money to buy fancy decorations. And a spider would likely get stepped on, if she ventured into the market, anyway. But a spider does have her silk.
So, all night long, the spider worked, weaving her most beautiful designs on every branch of the tiny tree. And, just before dawn, she fell asleep, exhausted, on the top branch.

The mother was awakened, the next morning, by the squeals and laughter of her children. And when she looked out her window, she saw their tree: covered, tip to trunk, with spider webs, The spider webs were covered in dew, and glistened in the morning sun as if they were silver and gold. As poor as they were, they had the most beautiful tree in the town. It was a simple thing, perhaps, but the sight gave the mother hope.

That night, after the first star appeared in the sky, and the family sat down to their Christmas dinner, there was a knock at the door. The mother opened the door, and there, miracle of miracles, was her husband, home from the war. Peace had been declared the week before, and he had traveled non-stop to get home, and he appologized for being too late to say the first blessing over the meal.

Well, you can imagine everyone's joy, and how they all hugged him, and welcomed him home. Their little Good Luck spider had brought them very good luck, indeed.

And to this day, in the Ukraine, the first ornament hung on the tree every year is a spider ornament, for good luck. And it's considered especially good luck for the coming year if you find a real spiderweb in your tree on Christmas morning.

Let me introduce myself, and talk about the problem of "authenticity"

All my life (or at least as much of my life as I can remember), I've loved stories. Once, when I was eight or nine years old, I announced to my family that I could happily go a day without eating, but I couldn't go a day without reading. Every Christmas, the presents that always got me the most excited were the books (I could tell they were books just by picking them up). And my favorite books were collections of folk and fairy tales. These are still my favorite sorts of stories, and that's why I've started this blog -- because, frankly, there's really no easy way to bring The Three Snake Leaves or The Seven Ravens into everyday conversation, no matter wonderful they are.

When I was a freshman in college, I was lucky enough to have the chance to study my favorite stories, and get credit for it. It was a senior-level survey course that traced the evolution of "Wonder Tales" from the oral tradition to modern, literary fantasy. The oral tradition was represented by Grimms' Tales for Young and Old: The complete Stories, as translated into English by Ralph Manheim. (Anchor Press/Doubleday: Garden City, New York. 1977). That notion that "The Grimms' Tales" represent the truest, roughest, and darkest, "unpolished," versions of stories is an enduring one, and is one that the translator himself reinforced in his preface:

...the Grimms were astonishingly faithful, undeterred by the irrational or unseemly. To appreciate their fidelity, one need only look at most English translations, where the puzzling "Hans my Hedgehog" becomes "Hans the Hedgehog," where the donkey, instead of "emitting" gold pieces from both ends, merely spits them out [ . . . ] More important -- and this, I believe, is the greatest mark of their genius -- they make us hear the voices of the individual storytellers, and much more clearly I am sure than if they had been two tape recorders.
(Grimms' Tales: Translator's Preface, page 1)

And so an image emerges of two literarily-focused field anthropologists, bravely traveling across the countryside, recording the stories of the peasants and the poor -- the people no one else would listen to. In showing the Grimms brothers (for the record, Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl) as the true, authentic recorders of tradition, Mr. Manheim is claiming that attribute for himself.

The first problem with this image is: it's simply not true. The idealistic bubble finally burst for me when I got access to the Internet and could run the online stories in the original German through the Babelfish translator. As grammatically garbled as the results were, they made it clear that Ralph Manheim had made his own changes to several stories, when the original details struck him as "irrational or unseemly," and simply failed to mention anything at all. And then, there's the whole question of what the brothers, themselves, intended, and what they actually did. A few years ago, I came across a book at my local library: The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, by Jack Zipes. The author's thesis was that the brothers had a political agenda behind the publication of their stories (establishing new government in Germany), and that they deliberately crafted the stories to make such an idea palatable to their audiences.

When I first encountered that idea, I was struck by the cynicism of it. With further contemplation, I felt liberated by it; if the Grimms Brothers, themselves, were free to reinterpret the stories, to express their beliefs about wider social issues, then so was I. Still, I made a promise to myself not to repeat the sins of Mr. Manheim, but instead to acknowledge any deliberate changes I've introduced from my sources.

The second problem with this image is the whole notion that there are "ancient, authentic versions" of the stories, in the first place, for the brothers to record. It's a more subtle problem, and it's rooted in the very same Romantic movement that Jacob and Wilhelm were themselves a part of -- the belief that unlettered farmers and peasants are somehow less sophicated, aesthetically, than university professors and librarians. Every human being who is drawn to tell a story, no matter what his or her social status, or educational background, has the right and the ability to add artistic flourishes, to highlight certain details, and to express truths revealed simply by living life. Jacob and Wilhelm had that right, I have that right, and you have that right.

I hope that what I post here inspires you to tell your own favorite stories, and to share them with others. It's our stories that make us human.

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Here are two sites which give a factual overview of the Grimms Brothers' lives (which is almost as romantic as the folklore that's evolved around them):
Jakob and Wilhelm Karl Grimm, Encyclopedia of World Biography

Grimm Brothers' Home Page (as Compiled by D. L. Ashliman, (C) 1999-2009)