Matilda Davis, the Grimms, and the Olympians

Matilda Davis, the Grimms, and the Olympians

Judaeo-Christian references occur in most of the Grimms' tales. Rollecke (1985) points out that the name of the LORD (ie G*d) occurs either as a character or in the lexis (for example in adjectives like ‘gottlos’ (ruthless), references to prayer or exclamations, such as ‘Ei, du lieber Gott!’) in no less than 120 of the 200 numbered tales in KHM 1857 (see also Bottigheimer 1987: 145 - 146)+

Judaeo-Christian references in Snow White

The dwarves and Sneewittchen take the name of the LORD ‘in vain’. The dwarves exclaim ‘Ei, du mein Gott! ei, du mein Gott!’ (OhmG! MG!) when they first find the heroine asleep in one of their beds, while Sneewittchen cries ‘Ach Gott, wo bin ich?’ (Oh G, where am I?) when she revives in her coffin. There is one reference to the heroine praying, i.e. ‘befahl sich Gott’ (commended herself to G*d).

Brian Alderson, for example, a translator and expert in children’s literature, wrote an article for The Times Literary Supplement in 1978, highlighting the ways in which most ‘Victorian’ English translators had bowdlerised the tales by avoiding or softening [···] Judaeo-Christian references [···] and how they had failed to achieve ‘complete naturalization for English storytellers’ (Alderson 1978b: 6). He refers to:

 ...the long and inglorious tradition of giving to the public versions of Grimm which were not only silently and brutally adapted but were also in hopelessly bad English anyway. 
(Alderson 1978b: 6)

Victorian translator Matilda Davis (Routledge, 1855, Home Stories. Collected by the Brothers Grimm; one of the most commercially successful translations in England in the nineteenth century.) takes pains to avoid Judaeo-Christian references, in particular references to divinity, demons, and saints.

Davis omits the profane element of the dwarves’ exclamation by using the neutral exclamation ‘Oh!’ and omits the heroine’s exclamation entirely. She retains the reference to the heroine praying, but does not mention divinity (‘said her prayers’). Neither does she in several tales in HS. This tendency is particularly obvious in two tales:

• Der Schneider im Himmel (KHM 35) becomes The Taylor (sic) in Olympus, replacing the Heavens with Olympus (notch), the LORD with Zeus, and Saint Peter with Mercury/Hermes.
• And in her version of The Three Golden Hairs (KHM 29), originally featuring Satan as the antagonist from whose head the hero has to get the three titular strands of hair, the descent to Hell becomes a descent to Tartarus, replacing Satan with Hades, his helpful great-great-grandmother with Hades' kind-hearted wife Persephone, and explaining that the river that divides the Living World from the Underworld is the Styx and the boatman across is Charon.

This tendency is particularly obvious in these two tales, in which she replaces Judaeo-Christian settings and figures with settings and figures from Greek mythology, since the old gods were already dead for millennia.
Miss Davis is the first translator at all to venture a rendering of ’Der Schneider im Himmel’, entitling it ’The Tailor in Olympus’. She solves the problem of treating religious matters in a humorous way by transposing the figures of the LORD and Saint Peter into Zeus and Mercury. It seems a pity that Davis’s translation was not better received. George Thompson’s illustrations did nothing to help. Her work was not the commercial success that Routledge obviously found with the Addey and Co. edition. Publishers are not much interested in accuracy or fidelity as values in themselves, if they have something else that they don’t have to pay for and sells better.