Sutrop says Snow White need not be female

Estonian linguist, translator and folklorist Urmas Sutrop has translated an Icelandic saga into Estonian as a continuation of his research into the prototypes of Snow White stories, ERR reports. He says the main character does not even have to be a woman to belong to the Snow White “family”.

Sutrop, who turned 70 this year, primarily considers himself a linguist and folklorist, although he originally studied biology.

“Biology is a distant memory in the background. I can explain biological concepts, but I am no longer a biologist. I am interested in everything and do everything. Although my interests are concentrated around certain topics,” Sutrop said.

He has often reflected on his change of field. His supervisor, Ants-Peep Silvere, died around the time of his 50th birthday shortly before Sutrop was due to defend his diploma thesis. Sutrop said the loss left him feeling empty and unable to continue in biology.

By then, he was already interested in cultural subjects, influenced by several classmates. He had been interested in philology since secondary school, but did not choose to study Estonian because his literature teacher believed he had never read a book, despite Sutrop’s insistence that he had read more than the entire class combined.

Sutrop became a linguist in Germany, where he completed a doctoral thesis on Estonian colour terms with a Finnic and Uralic background. He credits writer and philologist Heldur Niit with teaching him philology while Sutrop was director of the Estonian Institute of Language and Niit worked in the editorial office of Keele ja Kirjandus.

“I understood language in real depth while working on my doctoral thesis, when I was taught by two absolute world leaders,” Sutrop said. His studies covered linguistic typology and phonology, which he described as the detailed analysis of languages, words and sentences.

His continuing interest in Icelandic sagas grew out of the thousand-page collection The World’s Most Beautiful Woman: Snow White Stories, compiled in 2018. The book includes Snow White stories from many peoples, with particularly numerous examples from Asia, Africa and Europe, as well as many tales predating the Brothers Grimm.

Sutrop said five technical characteristics can be used to identify a Snow White story, but he instead applied the family resemblance method. Not every characteristic must be present, and the main character does not have to be female. Pushkin, he noted, wrote down a story about a male Snow White figure.

After completing the collection, Sutrop discovered that one important Snow White story had been left out: the Ali Fleki Saga. The saga’s origins are placed at the beginning of the 15th century and it has now appeared in Sutrop’s translation with extensive commentary.

The difficult-to-classify saga tells of heroes struggling against trolls. Sutrop initially planned to translate it, write a three-page afterword and publish it as part of his Snow White e-book series.

“Once I started, it became so interesting that it was impossible to stop there,” he said. Sutrop translated the work from English because he did not know Icelandic. After studying numerous sources, he revised the translation against Lagerholm’s Icelandic text.