A label used on this site
The Borrowed Hearth
Last revised
The borrowed hearth is this site's name for one move found in the front matter of story collections. A preface, title page, advertisement or note takes a specific teller, someone with a name and a documented life, and presents that person as the voice of a nameless folk tradition. The hearth in the phrase is the imagined fireside where “the folk” tell tales; a real, named teller is borrowed to stand at it.
When the label applies
The borrowed hearth is applied on this site only when three conditions hold:
- The promotional wording itself is quoted, with the edition and page it appears on.
- The teller's own record is cited: a name and a life documented in a source.
- If the page also claims that the compilers rewrote that teller's tale, it shows the evidence for that one tale by setting its editions side by side. A rewriting shown in one tale is never assumed for another.
If any of the three is missing, the label is not used.
When it does not apply
The label is never assigned on the basis of whether a teller could read, or on a teller's name, ethnic origin or social class. Being named is not the same as being made anonymous, and whether a book names a teller or not does not settle the question either way; only the three conditions do.
Nor does the label cover every case where the wrong person gets the credit. When the name on a book's cover stands in front of the people who did the retelling, the credit has been taken over, but no named teller has been turned into a nameless folk voice.
An example
The second volume of the Grimms' Kinder- und Haus-Märchen appeared in 1815. On page IV of its preface the brothers describe their acquaintance with “einer Bäuerin aus dem nah bei Cassel gelegenen Dorfe Zwehrn,” a peasant woman from the village of Zwehrn near Kassel, through whom they received a considerable part of the volume's tales, “darum ächt hessischen,” therefore genuinely Hessian. On pages V and VI the preface goes further and treats her as evidence for people “die in gleicher Lebensart unabänderlich fortfahren,” who carry on unchanged in the same way of life.
The teller was Dorothea Viehmann. Germany's national biography records her as an innkeeper's daughter who married a tailor in 1777. The preface wording and that record together meet the first two conditions. No claim is made there about how the brothers rewrote any one of her tales, so the third condition is not needed. The full case is in Brothers Grimm: Their ‘Peasant Woman’ Was a Tailor’s Wife.