Conventional wisdom has it that the cosmos of oral traditional fiction is divided into two parts, ‘this world’ and ‘the other’ world. But in fact the districts traversed in the fabulous journeys of traditional storytelling everywhere fall into a distinct quadripartite pattern. As with any disjunctive pattern, the order of the four parts is completely variable, and they may or may not be distinguished by separate nominal motifs in particular texts.
Again the Grimms’ German Frog Prince is typical. Princess and bestioform prince meet in “ein grosser dunkler Wald . . . unter einer alten Linde.” Everywhere in traditional German fable such a location is foreboding (this being the verdant member of the Two Trees’ pattern), and the potential duplicity of the linden’s zone is soon realized. Here both of the interlocutors give up old companionships and assume new ones. The frog renounces his froggy surroundings and begs for acceptance into human society. And whether she knows it or not, the princess’s impulsive donation of her company to the frog when he has offered to retrieve her lost toy is a lifelong commitment to a new companion, the princely husband that she is destined to liberate from the frog’s form. The great dark wood is accordingly a kind of limbo that forebodes danger, but where old associations give way to new ones. As such it represents one of the four zones of fabulous geography in the German tale of Der Froschkönig.
The next zone in the linear sequence of the German narration in Grimm No. 1 is the bottom of the frog’s well. It is an untenable location for all the personae of the story. The princess cannot contentedly leave her lost ball there—it is ‘lost’ solely because it is in the well. Nor can the Frog Prince remain there happily. It is a place from which the only value that can be securely extracted is escape. As such it represents the second “otherworldly” zone in the Four Zone pattern.
The third zone is the palace to which the princess and the frog alike retire from the “great dark forest.” It is a place where all good things are found (especially food and the prospect of progeny implicit in the cohabitation of prince and princess), but where a monster must be met and overcome (i.e. the frog transformed).
Last comes the domestic zone of the tale, the place where ordinary relationships (and plain narrative) prevail. ‘Der treue Heinrich’ conveys the transformed, newly-wed prince and his princess away to this zone in a carriage, to the patrimonial home of the prince.
Another German tale chosen at random displays other multiforms of the Four Zones. Number 16 in the Grimm collection, Die Drei Schlangenblätter (The Snake’s Three Leaves) tells of a man whose career begins in the plain, true-to-life setting of home, his native place:
A poor man can no longer provide for his only son. The youth tells his disabled elder that he will go on a journey to seek the means of overcoming the parental disability and so provide for himself. He goes accordingly to a “powerful kingdom” that is at war, defeats its enemies, and is rewarded with the premiership and marriage to the king’s daughter. But the daughter dies after she becomes his wife, and he is obliged by the terms of their peculiar marriage contract to be confined with her corpse in the burial crypt. Here in a place that forebodes his own death the man obtains from a snake three leaves of an herb wherewith he resurrects his dead wife. He and she are then released from the burial chamber, but a “great change” has come over her and she is no longer the good and loyal companion she formerly was. During a sea voyage she takes the ship’s captain for her lover, and the two of them throw the husband into the sea while he is in a deep trance. He drowns, but a faithful servant sets out in a small boat, finds the dead man, and revives him with the snake’s three leaves. Master and servant then row safely to shore.164
The sequential order of the Four Zones is of course different in this tale from the order in which other storytellers express them in other tales. Obviously too the nominal motifs are different. Instead of the limbo of a forest grove, Grimm No. 16 gives us a burial vault where danger forebodes and companionships are altered. Home is a poor old man’s estate, not the princely palace native to the Frog Prince before his theriomorphic transformation. The place whence no value is retrievable except escape is again watery, but this time a salt sea rather than the frog’s well-bottom. Finally, the “mighty kingdom” where the youth struggles fiercely to overcome powerful public enemies is also the place which bestows every imaginable comfort and happiness on the victor. The pattern of the Four Zones is thus again complete:
- Home, a scene of plain domesticity.
- Limbo, a place of foreboding where old companionships and associations are discarded and new ones assumed.
- The ‘good’ otherworld, where violent enemies must be overcome in hard struggle, and where all good things are forthcoming.
- The ‘bad’ otherworld, where nothing matters but escape.
Any ethnic tradition from any historic era affords plentiful examples of the Four Zones pattern; many of the narratives cited elsewhere in the present work demonstrate the pattern. So, for further instance, the hero of the Middle English Breton lay of King Orfeo has his home in Thrace, but the orchard where his wife sleeps under an impe tre is a limbo where she exchanges erstwhile human companions for the companionship of the fairies. Her disconsolate husband goes to live for a decade in the wilderness, whence he desires to retrieve nothing but his and his wife’s eventual deliverance. Finally he comes to the fairy king’s castle, a place abounding with all manner of richness and indulgences not to be found in other zones. Here Orfeo confronts and subdues his monstrous adversary, gaining thereby both wife and a return to power and riches.
In the ancient Near Eastern Epic of Gilgamesh, Uruk is plain home to Gilgamesh, while the wilderness where the temple harlot makes Enkidu exchange his erstwhile companionship with animals for the new companionship of herself and Gilgamesh is the limbo of the Four Zones pattern. Humbaba’s Forest is a blessed tract where violent struggle with a monster ends victoriously and Gilgamesh is preternaturally enriched. Finally, from the time of Enkidu’s funeral to his own return to Uruk from the land of Utanapishtim, Gilgamesh’s Wanderings take him through a complex zone from which nothing is ultimately retrievable except his escape homeward.
The Apinayé tale of Tečware again discloses the Four Zones. First comes the limbo where the piquy tree stands, and where the old companionship of brothers-in-law gives way to the terrified near-victim’s flight to his fellow villagers. The village where the deaths occur and ritual means are found to oppose the murderer is of course the domestic precinct of the tale, or home. The open woods, where the villagers pursue Tečware into the wilderness of his perdition, offer no benefit to anyone except mutual escape; but the roadside where in the end Tečware is violently overcome is also the place where the mangaba tree sprang up over his grave. From the latex of this tree young men first made the rubber balls used in the enriching peny-kra game, says the Apinayé storyteller.
The pattern of the Four Zones has been widely used in Western literature. It is basic, for instance, in the popular modern short story by Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol.” There Home is Ebenezer Scrooge’s own house. The Spirit of Christmas Past shows Scrooge a foreboding limbo where he exchanges old acquaintances for new. Then the Spirit of Christmas Present leads the hero to a bounteous scene, but one where the monstrous crippling of an innocent child must be overcome by energetic measures against the culprit, who for a moment is both the ogre and the ogre-slayer of the piece. Finally the perdition of Christmas Yet to Come is revealed, a scene from which no good can be extracted except escape. Much of the this literary composition’s popularity is no doubt attributable to its conformity with the patterning of traditional oral fable.
Less widely familiar but more beloved of modern literati, the conventional Christian literary cosmology which Dante Alighieri employed in the Divina Comedia is also a latter-day derivative of the ancient fourfold pattern of geography in oral fable. From that literary poet’s first evocation of place with the words nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, his literary epic replicates the Four Zones as, in addition to the “darkling grove” of ‘this world,’ also the three ‘other worlds’ named Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.