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From Plato to Pullman—the circle of invisibility and parallel worlds: Fortunatus, Mercury, and the Wishing-Hat, Part II
Folklore, Dec, 2006 by Michael Haldane
Furthermore, the seven-league boots are not without interest. In the Grimm tale "The King of the Golden Mountain" (Rolleke 1980, no. 92, vol. 2, 44-51), wishing-boots are one of the three magical items that constitute the giants' inheritance. A variant of this tale offers an interesting conflation of time and space: whenever these boots are worn, "macht man hundert Stunden mit einem Schritt" ("one covers a hundred hours with one step") (Rolleke 1980, vol. 3, 167). The provenance of the boots is suggestive, for these articles enable the wearer to walk like a giant: the properties of an individual are transferred to the clothes that he wears. One is reminded of "The Drummer" (Rolleke 1980, no. 193, vol. 2, 397-408), in which the hero shortens his journey by being carried by giants; from the idea of giant's legs as a faster means of transport develops the concept of giant's boots. This mode of conveyance has its limitations, however, since the final giant-porter is unwilling, or unable, to place the drummer on the top of the glass-mountain, and he can complete his journey only through an old, magical saddle ("Der alte Sattel"; ibid., 404). In Peter Schlemihl, the seven-league books are likewise limited: although they can be fitted with brakes to travel a shorter distance with each step, they are unable to span the sea between Indonesia and Australia. Fortunatus had turned back at Lombok, having discovered the source of pepper; Schlemihl, who wishes to study the zoology of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, is halted at Lombok, and feels the restriction of a prisoner (Chamisso 1980, chapter X). Mankind can take giant strides, but that is ultimately insufficient: his feet cannot follow his head.
For the Swedenborgian clergyman Chauncey Giles (1813-93) in the late nineteenth century, time and space are more closely linked, and modern means of transportation are likened to the Wishing-Hat:
What freedom the new methods of locomotion give him [mankind] to travel over the earth, to see its beauty and grandeur, to stand in the presence of old civilizations, to associate with people in all planes! Steam is the fairy wishing-hat which annihilates time and space, and brings all climes to every door (Giles 1879, 253).
This annihilation involves the compression of the future and the present through the reductive powers of speed. The Hat, by implication, can bring man to "stand in the presence of" the past; it cannot bring the past to him, or animate silent statues, but mankind now has the means to voyage to the remains of ancient civilisations all over Earth, to illuminate the shadow of the past with his imagination, and to inform that imagination through personal experience. Freedom is here ability and opportunity as opposed to the escape from the routine of respectable social life it represented in the original Fortunatus. As with Carlyle, the difference between the nineteenth-century reference and the Renaissance versions of Fortunatus is marked, but in this case it takes the form of appreciation of the natural world.
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