In Bordeaux, a little girl in a red hood packs a basket for her sick grandmother. She puts in a bottle of red wine and a small bowl of pâté, then sets off through the forest.
Now stretch that forest all the way to Russia, says Varvara Dobrovolskaya, associate professor at the Institute of Slavic Culture of the Kosygin Russian State University, and watch what happens to the basket as the girl walks. At the border between France and Germany the pâté disappears. Sauerkraut takes its place, and the red wine turns white, because these are Rhine wines. A little further on come sausages, and the wine gives way to beer. Further east the basket fills with horilka, pork crackling, a potato babka and kvass. By the time she reaches Russia she is carrying sweet pies and a bottle of milk.
The wolf has not changed. Neither has the grandmother, or the path, or the trick at the bed. So when you pick up a tale from some far-off place, the plot will feel familiar and the lunch will tell you whose kitchen it came from.
Dobrovolskaya is the first to admit the walk is absurd. You could keep going down the drinking road and hand the girl moonshine somewhere around the Russian border. But a sick old grandmother gets soft pies and milk, and a storyteller knows that without being told.
The host of NauchDok pushed on exactly this point. Motifs in these stories run from Ancient Greece to the present, so where does ethnicity live? Dobrovolskaya's answer is that it lives in the small stuff.
Ethnicity will be in the details, of course, yes. That's kind of obvious, because a storyteller puts into the tale whatever he sees.
Этничность будет, конечно, в деталях, да. Это очевидно, потому что сказочник, он что видит, то в сказку и вставляет.
— Varvara Dobrovolskaya, NauchDok, 33:11
Nobody sits down and decides to make the tale more German or more Russian. The teller looks around the room, the market and the table, and the tale picks up whatever is there. The details, she says, number in the thousands. The red cap goes the same way: a hood in France, then a little cap with ears, then maybe a beret, then just a cap.
The skeleton is sturdy, though. In 2013 Jamshid Tehrani compared 58 folktales in a study in PLOS ONE. He showed that Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf and the Kids can be told apart as two international types, even though oral stories are often assumed to be fluid. The plot holds across tellings. The groceries don't.
The same habit shows up in a single teller. A woman named Vinokurova, who was recorded at the end of the 19th century, performed her father's repertoire, which was a man's repertoire. She was good at bending it to fit herself. "A storyteller adapts the text to himself," Dobrovolskaya says, "like any narrator." The adapting is part of telling.
What goes in the basket is easy to see. The cap is harder. Once the French hood is gone, nobody can say exactly what it looked like. In Dobrovolskaya's words, you can guess however you like.
