Fairy Tales & the Scarab Beetle

We’ve talked about the scarab beetle here before since it played a major role Carl Jung’s development of his concept of synchronicity. His story of a female patient telling him about her dream of a scarab beetle just as a beetle very similar to the scarab struck Jung’s window. He opened the window, caught it in his hand and showed it to the woman. She had been extremely rigid in her thinking and the remarkable meaningful coincidence was a break-through in her therapy.

Now we have a collection of ‘lost’ fairy tales surfacing from Germany that are entitled Prinz Roßzwifl. That’s a local dialect for “scarab beetle.” The scarab, also known as the dung beetle, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Erika Eichenseer, cultural curator in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz, sees the beetle’s lifestyle as symbolic of fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Eichenseer published a selection of the 500 new fairytales that were compiled in the 19^th century by a local Bavarian historian, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886), the same time a sthe Grimm brothers were gathering fairytales that became a world famous collection. The fairy tales had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years.

According to an article in The Guardian, Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, laborers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.” Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother’s work was Von Schönwerth.

Von Schönwerth compiled his research into a book called Aus der Oberpfalz – Sitten und Sagen, which came out in three volumes in 1857, 1858 and 1859. The book never gained prominence and faded into obscurity.

Many of the fairy tales do not appear in other European collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch. However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe.

Von Schönwerth was a historian and recorded what he heard faithfully, making no attempt to put a literary gloss on it, which is where he differs from the Grimm brothers. However, says Eichenseer, this factual recording adds to the charm and authenticity of the material. What delights her most about the tales is that they are unpolished. “There is no romanticising or attempt by Schönwerth to interpret or develop his own style,” she says.

So now we have a whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches coming to light. Thanks to Jim Bansholzer for alerting us to this story.