I should have considered the fact that in poetry and folklore these words tend to be used a little differently in both languages. In the Fountain of Youth story, it’s understood that the “fountain” is a simple spring, and not an artificially constructed decorative water display as the word “fountain” more typically denotes in contemporary English. “Fountain” is of Romance language origin, but “spring” and “well” are both of Germanic origin via Anglo Saxon.
I wonder if there are versions of the legend that attempt to explain the seasons. Since Pechmarie didn’t shake the bedding to make the snow as she was told to do, I would think this was meant to explain a seasonal lack of snow. If this motif ever appeared in the story, though, it didn’t make it into the version recorded by the Grimms.
All terms can mean a fictional tale invented and/or spread mainly to impart moral lessons or teach cultural values and history in an entertaining way.
“Fable” usually refers to the stories of Aesop–little lessons in morals, ethics, or common sense behavior. Arguably “fairy tales” often cover the same ground, like Pechmarie and Goldmarie story discussed upthread. But in English, “fairy tale” usually means stories set in an idealized past and usually involving royalty, and in many cases the rise of a downtrodden girl, like Cinderella, to royal status through marriage. The actual inclusion of a fairy in the story is optional, though.
A “legend” can have elements of truth, or even be substantially based on historical events. It comes from the same root as leyenda, though I don’t know if the connotation is the same. The Norse sagas are legends, some essentially histories embellished to impart cultural values of courage and heroics, but others involving the supernatural. For instance, the saga of Grettir is a Norse version of the Beowulf story.
Is her family name actually Von Sinnen, or is that just a joke?
Funnily enough, “hella out of her mind” is good Northern California English too; “hella” in Northern California slang means “very” or “to a great extent”, so one could say “she’s hella out of her mind”.
I’d be curious to know when the fairy tales started being set solidly in the past, instead of being brought up-to-date by their tellers. The Grimms clearly wanted to capture the folktales in their own time, and take them as they were being presented. So those were probably updated by the storytellers until being recorded by the brothers. Some newer versions of their stories tend to leave out details but they usually keep the setting.
It seems to me that Andrew Lang’s collection are mostly in the past, although some 19th Century details seem to come through. That may simply be the case of working with older material, though. It may also be around the time that the world had changed so much that retelling those stories became harder to do, so at least some of them started to fossilize.
Fairy tales (the literary versions of folktales) have always been set in the past, from the time they were first deliberately created by (arguably) Basile or Perrault or wherever you want to start the clock. Folktales, fictional tales in oral tradition, continue to have a less consciously created setting, usually vaguely in the past but with plenty of intrusions from the contemporary world.
His are not the only ones, and not all of them are attributed, at least in Spanish; mind you, I would have been surprised if anybody here other than the Hispanics and perhaps Dr Drake’s had heard of Samaniego or Iriarte (whose works are titled Fábulas), or of Conde Lucanor (whose works are not, but fit the mold). But we shall set aside the issue of what’s the difference between a fable and a moral tale for another day…
In German the Fountain of Youth is called theJungbrunnenwhich means to most a well that’s been man-made, but with allusions to the older German word of brunn or born, which refers to the natural spring aspect. (Compare the song “Ich hört ein Brünnlein rauschen…”) But because the meaning of Brunn changed, most people think of a man-made Fountain in that legend, and that’s how it’s been depicted since medieval times, see the picture by Lucas Cranach for a well-known example. (In Beedle the Bard’s Tales, the Magic Fountain is - of course? - depicted as man-made fountain, not a spring.)
That of course is part of the larger problem of writing down fairy-tales in the first place. In the old Osman Empire/ Turkish culture, there existed the profession of “Teller of fairy tales” (Hakawati). The professional part was not only remembering the story, but suiting the telling to the audience, to make it exciting even if they knew the basic, to pass the time. In 1001 nights, Shehezerade can make the telling of one fairy tale last one night.
Of course they were not the only ones - in most cultures there were people whose job it was to preserve and tell stories, and some stories would be adapted. Today, the tradition of “Fairy-tale teller” has been revived in the work with children and other groups as pedagogic approach, so on special occasions, they will put up a tent and children can listen to stories being told.
Which, as Momo already knew, is much better than listening to a story on tape, or watching it on TV.
Then again, visual artists in particular tend to superimpose their own culture and even ethnicity when depicting remote history or myth, accounting for all those paintings of the Virgin Mary in which she looks like a young Italian farm girl. Obviously the illustrator has to paint something to represent the fountain, while the writer can leave it to the imagination.
Actually, I think the connection to show the fountain of youth as man-made is a different path:
since Ancient Greece, people have known about springs that healed some sicknesses. Quickly, these developed into “Baths” (Bad… in German), where around the spring there was a support network of hotels and doctors. Esp. once the rich upper crust people would go to a Bath for help with Rheuma or similar and want luxury once there.
To facilitate the bathing (or sometimes drinking) of the special water, the springs would quickly be formed into wells with nice stones.
From that the leap to some magic fountain that restores youth isn’t far.
Also, if people have gone there (otherwise, where would you know how to find it?), then why shouldn’t they have modified it? The tale is not of a guy in the jungle stumbling over a spring, drinking from it and becoming young again, but of journeying on purpose to a specific destination (because others told you about it) to undergo a transformation. So imaging a spa resort was logical.
BTW, the french word fountain also immigrated into German as Fontäne, which is the shooting-upwards part of a Springbrunnen. It can also apply to water generally shooting upwards, like a burst pipe or similar.
I always imagined it was exactly about a guy tripping over the F.o. Y. while in the jungle, presumably lost and thirsty. Either that, or he would have to find the unknown tribe of aborigines who would then take him to the fountain–but either way then I pictured it as a spring of some kind. Remember, this is more or less the American version of the story, because somehow the F.o.Y. legend became conflated with the explorations in Florida by the RL explorer and conquistador Ponce de Leon. Since the native inhabitants of Florida presumably hadn’t the materials or skill to build pedestals and do the piping and plumbing needed for a spraying fountain, the F.o.Y. image is usually that of a simple spring.
But given Europe’s ancient heritage of going to spas for reasons of health I can see the facts of spa treatments IRL* might have crept into variants of the F.o.Y. story.
*I think most Americans may not be aware that the patients at these spas actually do drink the water as opposed to merely bathing in it. I only came across it in the stories of P.G. Wodehouse. (In one story, Bertie is supposed to go to Harrogate Spa to keep his uncle company, a prospect which he dreads.).