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The little doll.

Article Excerpt
Translator's Introduction

Juan Valera y Alcala-Galiano (1824-1905), one of nineteenth-century Spain's most distinguished literati, wrote novels, stories, essays, poetry, and literary criticism. Two of his fairy tales, "The Green Bird" and "The Queen Mother," are justly well known and have appeared in Marvels & Tales (for biographical data and information on his work, see my introduction to the former tale in volume 13 [1999]: 211-14).

Carmen Bravo-Villasante, the compiler of Valera's The Knight of the Goshawk and Other Stories (El caballero del Azor y otros cuentos [Madrid: Mondadori Espana, 1988] 10) tells us that Valera wrote "The Little Doll" ("La munequita") in 1894, when he was ambassador to Vienna. And she adds: "The German writer Ludwig Bechstein had published a similar tale with the title 'Angela of the Duchies.'"

The Bechstein tale is "Das Dukaten-Angele" (Ducat-Angela), which was published in his Neues deutsches Marchenbuch (1856). It is a variant of tale type ATU 571C, The Biting Doll. As noted in Hans-Jorg Uther's The Types of International Folktales (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004), early versions are found in Giovan Francesco Straparola's Piacevoli notti (5.2) and Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone (5.1). Uther also records that Spanish variants are documented in the tale-type catalogs by Julio Camarena and Maxime Chevalier (Catalogo tipologico del cuento folklorico espanol, 4 vols. to date [Madrid: Gredos, 1995-- --]) and by Carlos Gonzalez Sanz (Catalogo tipologico de cuentos aragoneses [Zaragosa: Instituto Aragones de Antropologia, 1996]).

Centuries ago there lived in a great city--the capital of a kingdom, the name of which is unimportant--a poor and honorable widow who had a fifteen-year-old daughter as beautiful as a May flower and as gentle as a dove.

The excellent mother doted on her and considered that in her innocence and beauty she possessed a treasure that she would not have exchanged for all the money in the world.

Numerous gentlemen, youthful suitors, and libertines, seeing these two needy women who earned barely enough from spinning to feed themselves, had the audacity to make base and contemptible propositions to the mother about her beautiful child, but she would always reject them with that quiet firmness that convinces and dissuades to a much greater extent than exaggerated and vehement indignation. With respect to...