Although Arthur Evans knew the two trees principally in multiforms from the Aegean Bronze Age, he had one first-hand ritual experience of his own with one of them, the green tree of segregation and severance. He, like many other learned men of the nineteenth century, believed that ancient rites had survived over prodigious lengths of time in the customs of uneducated rural populations in Europe. According to this ‘doctrine of survivals’ it was reasonable to suppose, and Evans did suppose, that modern peoples within the geographic sphere of ancient Aegean culture would have inherited and continued to practice rites like those portrayed in Aegean art of the Bronze Age. Being an enthusiastic traveller and life-long amateur of the modern Balkans, Evans missed no opportunity to observe and even participate in contemporary rituals in districts contiguous to his archaeological research. At Tečino selo in Yugoslav Macedonia he helped to celebrate a modern Muslim ritual at a gravesite:
...A personal experience may thus supply a more living picture of the actualities of this primitive ritual than can be gained from the discreet references of our biblical sources or the silent evidence of engraved signets and ruined shrines.
For the better understanding of the ritual employed, I went through the whole ceremony myself... .
The worshipper who would conform to the full ritual, now fills a keg of water from a spring that rises near the shrine...and makes his way through a thorny grove up a neighbouring knoll, on which is a wooden enclosure surrounding a Mohammedan Saint’s Grave or Tekke. Over the headstone of this grows a thorn-tree hung with rags of divers colours, attached to it...by sick persons who had made a pilgrimage to the tomb... .
In the centre of the grave was a hole, into which the water from the holy spring was poured, and mixed with the holy earth. Of this the votary drinks three times, and he must thrice anoint his forehead with it... .87
Evans thought that he had witnessed in this scene of modern ritual the same scene intended by ancient Aegean artists in their depiction of rites beside green trees.
His analogy was generically right, but nominally wrong: none of the Bronze-Age portrayals show a green tree bedecked with rags or on a grave. Nor was there any other certainly verifiable motif beside the green tree itself and the paling around it to warrant the supposition of any direct line of ritual continuity linking the tree at a modern Muslim saint’s grave with the green trees in ancient Aegean iconography. The ‘doctrine of survivals’ as applied to ritual or religion was no more demonstrable in this instance than in the many other equally uncertain cases cited by so many other scholars in the nineteenth century.
Had Evans known more about oral fable in the regions where he carried on his archaeological research, or anywhere else in Europe or the Near East, he would surely not have been so quick to think that a tree growing at a modern grave necessarily owed its identity as an object of ritual to such a remote historical origin. But Evans knew next to nothing about fable, and he shared to a high degree the peculiar single-minded dedication to historical explanations that so typified serious nineteenth-century English intellectuals and so often concealed from them the sources and utility of necessary fictions such as those in oral fable and cult. Partly because of the effect of the Pauline doctrine, and because it is not a body of historically exact facts, oral fable in all its forms was for the most part debarred from the canon of dignified knowledge in the England of Evans’ time, and so it has largely remained since then. A man like Arthur Evans would have been ashamed to cultivate very much acquaintance with the substance of oral narrative tradition.
The opinion that oral fable is not worthy of serious attention because it is unveracious and irreligious would matter less were it confined to Britain. But through the writings of such influential men as James Frazer, British contempt for fictions as subjects of learning (except in law) has spread everywhere, even into scholarly circles otherwise rather averse to British influence. A case in point is the work of the eminent Soviet folklorist and scholar of folktale and epic, Vladimir Jakovlevič Propp.
Propp knew all those things about green trees on gravesites in modern European fable which Arthur Evans should have known. He published what he knew about that subject in 1934 in one of his three most widely known writings on folk-tale, an article entitled “Volšebnoe derevo na mogile” (The Magical Tree on the Grave).88 He knew that the sepulchral kind of green tree was a stock motif in the Cinderella story, one of Europe’s most common tales: An orphaned maiden (or youth) is mistreated by step-relatives. A tree grows from the grave of her (his) parent(s) or an animal mascot. The tree provides means of distinguishing the orphan from its step-relatives, and helps the abused step-child to marry into another family.89
Another multiform of the sepulchral green tree was less common in European oral tradition, but still a frequent motif. It occurred in a type of story about murder and revenge very similar to Mumba’s tale “Let the Big Drum Roll” from the Lenje in Central Africa: a youth is murdered and the corpse or dismembered parts of the corpse are buried by the murderer(s). Out of a tree growing at the place of burial a tattling bird flies up or a flute is hewn, which sings a song of vengeful accusation until the murderer is slain and the guiltless members of the murdered youth’s family are reunited.90
Had Arthur Evans known these details of modern European fable so familiar to present-day scholars of folktale, he might have recognized in the sepulchral green thorn-tree at Tečino selo the same tree that succoured and avenged the weak and outcast in oral tales being told all over Europe and the Near East even as he performed the rites of an obscure Muslim cult in a by-way of Yugoslav Macedonia. No doubt it brought a frisson to Evans’ spine to think that a ‘primitive ritual’ among the colourful modern people of the Balkan hinterland at the turn of the twentieth century had descended from an Aegean ritual prototype of three millennia ago. That kind of excitement has ever been a moving force in Old World archaeologists and ethnographers. But in reality Evans’ Macedonian thorn-tree with its sepulchral and succouring concomitants in rites to be performed by the poor, the sick, and the injured had more corroborative equivalents in contemporary Mediterranean fable about poor, anonymous orphans and murder-victims than in the scant reliques of state religion surviving on the monumental architecture, elegant ceramics, and costly jewelry of wealthy men and women who lived in the great commercial centers and occupied the opulent tombs of rich and mighty Aegean states in the Bronze Age.
Though there was surely a nominal error in Evans’ positing a direct historical continuum between the ancient Aegean iconography and the green tree in a modern Macedonian cult, he was nevertheless right in supposing that the Macedonian tree was akin generically to the green tree in “the silent evidence of engraved signets and ruined shrines” from the ancient Aegean. Like it, the tree on the grave in modern oral fable is a separator, and stands in a place where giving and taking need not be reciprocal. Marking the grave of the dead, the green tree is set apart from the habitations of the living, and so denotes the segregation of the dead from the living. It is, moreover, the particular resort of outcasts; the relatives and friends of orphans and murder-victims shun it, nor will the green tree respond to them if they do happen to approach it. Its help lies only to the injured or disabled individual whose human society will not or cannot help him. Only when this tree is hewn and the hewn portion is carried away, as in the fashioning of a flute (or a cross) from its wood, will it act upon a group of persons. In that case it first separates the wicked from the righteous (or the damned from the redeemed), and then reunites the righteous with their own kind, as may be expected of any hewn wood.
Evans’ ritual thorn-tree had this same segregational significance, even down to such minute votive detail as the bits of rag torn away from whole cloth and stuck individually on the spines of the tree. This tree too marked the separation of the dead from the living, standing as it did apart from the dwellings of the living and segregated from the usual walks of men by a thorny copse. As Evans himself witnessed, the injured and disabled resorted to it individually for help which their living kin and friends could not or would not give them.
Evans’ experience of the Macedonian ritual did not include any witness of the tree being hewn, and he did not on this occasion observe any other counterpart of the hewn wood in fable. Perhaps there was some such hewn concomitant of his green thorn-tree which he did not see ritually manipulated; or perhaps not. But had there been, knowledge of modern oral fable such as Propp’s would not have benefited him as Propp’s knowledge of green trees might have, because Propp knew less about the pairing of green and hewn wood in story-patterning than did Evans. In fact, he knew nothing of it at all, and the reason for his ignorance was mainly the effect upon him of scholars like Arthur Evans and James Frazer, who sedulously pursued the most obscure details of heathen ritual to the farthest corners of the earth while ignoring the most obvious facts of oral narrative tradition that begged for recognition at every step along their several paths to the distant circus-entertainments of pagan and pre-Christian religion.
Vladimir Propp’s earliest important monograph on folktale was Morfologija skazki (The Morphology of Folktale), published in Leningrad in 1928. It was a reaction against the prevalent emphasis on nominal motifs in earlier European learning about folktale. Propp thought that previous attempts to classify and interpret the tales in modern European oral tradition according to their typical or characteristic nominal motifs were misguided. He did, however, accept the old notion that the units of oral tradition were whole tales exactly as told to the various collectors whose records of oral story Propp had to rely upon (since he was not himself a collector). As other students of folktale both before and after him usually did, Propp too noticed that the plots of many nominally different tales are much alike. He tried in Morfologija skazki to define that likeness in one hundred Russian märchen from the secondary collection of an earlier Russian folklorist and conflator, Aleksandr Nikolaevič Afanas'ev (1826-1871). It was not an entirely happy choice of material, since both the texts and the tales in Afanas'ev’s publication were ‘idealized,’ i. e., considerably altered both verbally and substantively from the reality of oral narrative tradition in Russia. But like the Grimms’ earlier compilation in Germany, Afanas'ev’s in Russia (a conscious emulation of its German precursor) was a familiar part of civil culture in the twentieth century, and Propp could be confident that those who read his Russian monograph would be able to find in print and read the material on which it was based.
Propp sought to resolve all one hundred of his selected Russian märchen into a single plot. He went about this by first reducing the personae fabulae in numerous tales to a few character-types. Then he reduced the events in tales to thirty-one ‘functions’ of character-types, and finally he said that the various beasts, plants, and inanimate objects of story should be reduced to a few categories of instruments and means whereby folktale characters discharge their prescribed functions.
The result of this reductive analysis was banal. Shorn of its residual Russian peculiarities, the common plot which Propp was able to extract from his sample of Afanas'ev’s Russian tales amounted in sum to the statement: All heroes in folk-tale have trouble; someone helps them; they exert themselves to vanquish other characters and/or to surmount various obstacles which pose or represent their troubles; thus they achieve happiness and gain tranquillity. Such an undiscriminating truism flatly contradicted the ingenious conceptual variegation of real folktales. It explained none of the things in tales that needed explanation, things which other scholars of folktale before Propp had been trying for generations to explain about oral story-telling: why humans tell tales, why tales are preponderantly fabulous, and why multiform.
Indeed, Propp had only deepened those long-standing mysteries by his anticlimactic results. For when he had done his work, he had left himself no way to account for the variety of multiforms in which characters, functions, and objects actually occurred in tales—the variety that gave rise in the first place to a hundred Russian tales all radically different in detail, however similar they might be in plot. He had knowingly and intentionally eliminated from consideration all motival multiforms, the only possible avenue to an explanation of motival multiformity. In doing that, he had incidentally also eradicated every trace of fabulosity—the preternaturally sundered and rejoined pieces of reality—from his material. The effect was to make the fabulosity of oral fable appear even more irrational and senseless after than it had seemed before Propp’s formalist exercise. And that result was truly a disaster for folktale scholarship, because fabulosity—the manifest incongruence between anyone’s tangible reality and the stories in oral tradition—was the very thing that militated most against admission of oral narrative into the charmed circle of ‘legitimate’ and ‘worthwhile’ subjects of learning for the historiographically oriented intelligentsia of western Europe and its cultural satellites.
Robbed in this manner of its two most distinctive traits—its multiformity and its fabulosity—oral fable in Vladimir Propp’s hands in 1928 ceased to be oral fable and became something else instead. The terms of his plot-analysis exactly disclose the identity of that something else: Propp saw nothing in folk-tale that others before him had not previously seen in cult. The terms of his narrative analysis did not in fact derive from narrative itself (as he pretended it did), but rather from religious studies and religious terminology of the same kind as James Frazer and Arthur Evans and others like them had developed for use in their several ‘respectable’ branches of learning: anthropology, archaeology, history, literature, psychology, sociology, etc. Scholars of all these academic subjects had at least found ways of coming to grips intellectually with religious phenomena if not oral fable, and clearly Propp’s ambition was somehow to assimilate the unacceptable ‘nonsense’ of traditional oral story-telling into acceptable, polite learning by assimilating it to religion. Accordingly Propp cast his parsing of narrative morphology in ritual categories and ritual terms. The specifically Christian reason for Saint Paul’s elevation of ritual and abomination of fable had perished from Russian academic life with the passing of the Romanoffs and the Orthodox Russian Empire, but the old Pauline contempt for fabulous narrative as such lived on in Propp’s mind as vigorously as ever it had in any Church Father.
So Propp’s folktate heroes in Morfologija skazki moved in a world of taboos, victims, magic spells and entrancements, occult instructions, ritual paraphernalia, ritual contests, ritual markings, persecutions, rites of recognition, epiphanies, transfigurations, and all the other physical and conceptual trappings of religious ritual. For Vladimir Propp, folktale was not more nor less than it had been for James Frazer: the scenario for performance of rites. Yet Propp did not attempt in Morfologija skazki (nor in any of his later writings) to explain how it happened that no rite had ever been observed anywhere in the world which contained more than a scant few of the many motifs in any of his hundred Russian folk-tales. He made folktale a scenario for ritual, but curiously he never discovered any rite that followed more than an occasional random passage in the scenario. Worse, he seems never to have so much as noticed, not to say reflected upon, that discrepancy.
Nominal motifs had been the focus of attention among the European scholars who gave their attention to folktale before Propp. But Propp discarded motifs as the fundamental units of oral narrative tradition and, fleeing from one extreme to another, put whole stories in their place. Although traditional performers of oral narrative mistakenly suppose that they have a certain repertory of different tales, actually they all tell the same story all the time according to Propp’s findings in 1928. What is always the same without change cannot, of course, hold any clues about its own history, and since Propp’s analysis yielded no evidence that the basic plot of folktale had ever changed, nothing useful could be expected to come from historical study of folktale. Historical studies of ritual might help to illumine the origins of folktale, but folktale as Propp defined it could have no history of its own. For him was truly an aberration and a cul-de-sac in man’s intellectual evolution, just as James Frazer had said it was; oral stories were nought but primitive chop-logic and the philosophical gibberish of mentally incompetent savages. From an initial position of challenge to the narrow rationalists and historicists of European scholarship, Propp had thus in a few bold moves placed himself in an opposite attitude of abject capitulation to the worst enemies of oral narrative studies.
If folktale was what Propp said it was, then no one need bother about acquainting himself with much of it. All stories were essentially the same anyway, and nothing could be gained by cluttering the mind with an excessive number of variants and multiforms. Propp recognized that admonition in the results of his own work, and obeyed it. He was never widely read in oral tradition. What he knew and wrote about in later years as in 1928 was confined principally to the established literary canon of Russian folktale and epic, together with some other material that came under his hand to edit, and some well-known western European collections of tales such as that of the brothers Grimm. But comparative study of folk-tale would have been anomalous in a man of Propp’s views.
Rites were another matter. While Propp stayed within close boundaries in his acquaintance with story, he energetically followed James Frazer’s advice that man’s history as a ritual animal had, unlike his history as a knower and teller of fable, led civilized mankind out of the moral and political morass of savagery to the orderly bliss of good government and ethical religion. The opinion was quintessentially British, but in Vladimir Propp it found a vigorous exponent in Soviet Leningrad. In keeping with it, even a Soviet folklorist should know all he could learn about ritual and cult, even the rites and cults of peoples unrelated to Russia or to Europe. So Propp’s next important work after Morfologija skazki was the article “Volšebnoe derevo na mogile,”88 where he broke with the precedent of his own earlier formalistic work and adopted instead the historicizing and religiously oriented precedent of James Frazer’s work in The Golden Bough. In this way he returned to the nominal motifs which he had so decisively discarded from his previous analysis of folktale, and began to review them one by one as historical, ritual antecedents of tales. His tenet now was Frazer’s old dictum about
that large class of myths which are made up to explain the origin of a religious ritual and have no other foundation than the resemblance, real or imaginary, which may be traced between it and some foreign ritual.
The years that followed publication of “Volšebnoe derevo na mogile” in 1934 were the most difficult period of Russian history in three centuries, and one can only guess at the pressures that bore upon Propp as upon other Russian urbanites and intellectuals during those years. But he did not waver in his Frazerian mission to find the ritual causes of folktale motifs no matter how intense official disfavor toward any kind of serious religious studies might be, and in 1946 he published another, longer monograph entitled Istoričeskie korni volšebnoj skazki (The Historical Roots of Märchen).91 It was an enlargement of the research on ritual and cultic counterparts of folktale which he had begun with the article in 1934, informed by the same axiom that ritual practices were somehow the antecedents of tales (though he did not anywhere in that book explain how).
Propp’s next original book was on another form of oral narrative tradition, Russian oral epos. His treatment of it was even more prosaically rationalistic than his writings on folktale had been. Oral epic poetry to him was folk-history, and a scholar’s service was to refine true historical knowledge from the senseless mixture of truth and fantasy in it. Again Frazer and Propp were of one mind: historical truth was precious stuff, but fantasy was only worthless dross. Thus the book Russkij geroičeskij èpos (Russian Heroic Epos)92 was an exercise in refining historical verity from the impure ore of the kind of traditional Russian oral fable that was composed in verse.
Finally Propp left the field of narrative studies altogether and gave his undivided attention to investigations of ritual, cult, and customs entirely apart from fable. The book that resulted, Russkie agrarnye prazdniki (Russian Agrarian Festivals), was surely the best of Propp’s several monographs. It was a logical conclusion to the intellectual development that had begun in him more than thirty years before. It was also a crowning achievement in research on ritual in modern Europe, for not many men in this century have understood the continuity of European cultic and ritual traditions as well as did Vladimir Propp.
Despite his religiously and ritualistically blinkered view ot it, he also offered the twentieth century’s most interesting new thoughts about folktale. But Propp no less than other men was a product of his era, and in Propp’s era men of learning commonly gave precedence to religion and ritual, eschewing the substantive perplexities of oral narrative with an almost frightened avoidance. Cult and ritual were more tangible, and did not so much demand the gift of tongues. Ritual was sometimes nonsensical—it exploited narrative imagery and narrative tropes of action—but the adepts of heathen cult who performed strange rituals could invariably give a foreign observer some sensible explanation of his rites if he wanted to do so, and a thoughtful observer could discern other unarticulated causes as well, as did Victor Turner in Africa.
In contrast, traditions of oral narration are not so easily accountable. The native’s reason for knowing and telling a tale is scarcely ever so immediately utilitarian as his reason for a rite. And the substantive complexity of even simple tales is exponentially greater and more elusive than anything men do physically, whether it be for material gain or in performance of rite. So despite his erudition in cultic and ritual matters, Vladimir Propp could not have given Arthur Evans any help in understanding the necessary relationship between the green and hewn trees. Nor does he give us any. In his preoccupation with ritual, he had not studied oral fable closely or broadly enough for that. Both of those generic motifs existed plentifully in the ancient and modern cults and rites which Arthur Evans and Vladimir Propp both knew. But the tie that bound the two trees together and kept them together during at least four millennia in Europe and the Near East was not religious or ritual. It was narrative, or more exactly, it was the two trees’ traditional association with one another in a pattern of oral fable—a cluster of generic motifs indissolubly adhering to each other by virtue of countless oral story-tellers’ timeless and immutable narrative habit.
Propp knew tales, he knew nominal motifs, and he knew of variations in both of those categories, but he did not understand the patterns of oral fable. Less than whole performances, and larger than single motifs, they are the real entities of narrative tradition, because they are what a traditional oral story-teller must know to make any tale, long or short, simple or complex, in prose or in verse. Cults and rituals that have occasionally drawn from the fund of motifs in oral fable for renewal may themselves be widespread and very old; but still they cannot be traced so widely or in such diverse multiformity as the tales that have periodically served them as motival reservoirs. In relation to narrative, cultic and ritual imagery is moreover systematically incomplete, and it regularly lacks the continuity of narrative multiforms over vast geographic ranges unobstructed by the ethnic, linguistic, or other boundaries of cultural differentiation that have played havoc with the younger diffusions of particular cults and religions. Scholars of ancient and primitive religion cannot therefore afford to ignore oral fable any more than can scholars of literary narrative, for whereas narrative motifs and religious symbols are, as they have long been known to be, intimately affiliated, their common matrix is story, like the story of the Two Trees.