Fear and Trembling: Oscar V. de L. Miłosz’s ‘La Reine des Serpents’ (1930) as a Decadent Fairy Tale

Abstract

The Francophone-Lithuanian writer Oscar V. de L. Miłosz (1877-1939) considered his fairy tale ‘La Reine des serpents’ [‘Queen of Serpents’] so important that he published it twice, in both of his collections of Lithuanian Fairy Tales (1930, 1933).[i] ‘La conte si curiuex de la “Reine des Serpents”’  [The very curious tale of the ‘Queen of Serpents’], as he writes in the introduction to the first volume, ‘est tout à fait caractéristique […], et mériterait peut-être d’être rapproché de certaines théories scientifiques modernes relatives à l’origine animale des végétaux’ [is quite characteristic […] and would perhaps deserve to be compared to certain modern scientific theories relating to the animate origin of plant life.[ii]  In this article I contextualize and closely read this text, a version of ‘Eglė Žalčių Karalienė’ [‘Eglė, Queen of Serpents’], which is best known as a ‘national’ folk tale of Lithuania.[iii]

[i] O. V. de. L. Miłosz, Œuvres Complètes, 11 vols (Éditions A. Silvaire, 1963), ix, pp. 144.  

[ii] O. V. de L. Miłosz, Contes et fabliaux de la vieille Lithuanie (Éditions J. O. Fourcade, 1930), p. 6. All translations from french are the author’s, unless otherwise noted.

[iii] Throughout this text, I use the Lithuanian formal name Eglė, rather than the French transcription (Eglé) to refer to the protagonist of both the folk tale and the fairy tale.