Exploring the Indigenous Face of Europe: Rethinking Fairytales, the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and Glass Mountain before Cinderella

Roslyn M Frank

doi:10.17077/pp.006733

This monograph examines the way two sets of wide-spread European folktales became incorporated into the storytelling traditions of Europeans. The stories themselves are compared and treated as reservoirs of orally transmitted popular beliefs and traditions that are no longer readily accessible to a modern audience. It is shown that the tales themselves have acted as vehicles for transmitting an earlier animist worldview from one generation to the next, albeit with modifications. When viewed in the longue durée, certain repetitive elements found in the tales reveal their ethnographic value and allow us to reconstruct, always tentatively, the animist ontological framing that contributed to their creation. After carefully exploring the interpretive framework that characterized the tales in times past, a framework shared by storytellers and their audiences alike, what comes into focus is a worldview unfamiliar to most Europeans, but well known to Native Americans and Indigenous groups where bear ceremonialism has been or still is practiced and whose traditional narratives incorporate the belief that bears were ancestors and therefore kin. The comparative analysis of the European tales serves as an introduction to a larger question, namely, whether traditions associated with the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela (the Way of St. James) have a pre-Christian origin and more specifically, whether the choice of this specific geographic location for the “discovery” of the remains of St. James was motivated by the geomorphological characteristics of the nearby mountain peak called Pico Sacro and the legends that had grown up around it. This approach includes the possibility that the mountain was already the focal point of a pre-Christian pilgrimage tradition. Using the results obtained from analyzing the recurring motifs found in the two sets of folktales, what is suggested is that the ecclesiastic authorities who came up the story about the miraculous discovery of the Saint’s remains eight hundred years after he was allegedly buried, may have been aware that people were already regularly visiting Pico Sacro and that this site was already the subject of veneration and enveloped in a form of sacrality. In this scenario, the founders of the alleged discovery of the relics of St. James may have realized that if they could come up with the right story, they could overlay it on an already existing pilgrimage tradition. In that way they would be able to co-opt the already existing practices and profit from them in a myriad of ways. The process of superimposing a Christian narrative on the pagan practices and beliefs would be facilitated by inventing a story, based on the discovery of the tomb of one of Christ’s own disciples. In the folktales discussed here there is a motif that surfaces over and over, namely, a journey to a location referred to as Glass Mountain or Crystal Mountain. Furthermore, folkloric references to this steep mountain are widespread in Europe. It is directly linked the belief that upon death one’s soul must successfully scale the peak to be able to enter Paradise. And in some cases, it was customary for the dead to be buried along with the claws of a bear, in the belief that the bear claws would aid the soul to climb that steep mountain. That motif will be analyzed and shown to have a real-world counterpart.

Exploring the Indigenous Face of Europe: Rethinking Fairytales, the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and Glass Mountain before Cinderella

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