#do you ever set out to share a short tidbit of mildly interesting info and end up writing the rough outline of an academic essay?

[opalescentegg]

I was today years old when I finally learned that the word “tutu” actually originates in the early 20th century, and wasn’t some kind of coevolution with the entirety of 19th-century ballet as I’d vaguely assumed. Specifically, Etymonline (by far the online source I consider most trustworthy for this kind of research) gives the first usage of the word as 1910; Merriam-Webster gives it as 1913.  Other sources, such as the Macmillan Dictionary blog and the Oxford Languages result that typically pops up if you Google something like “X etymology” give the the first appearance of the word as simply “early 20th century,” insofar as it refers specifically to the skirt worn by a ballerina.  (The Wikipedia page for “Tutu (clothing)” gives the earliest recorded usage as 1881, but that date has no citation and appears nowhere else I’ve been able to look, so I’m disinclined to give it any merit.  And, frustratingly, Apollo’s Angels by Jennifer Homans, an otherwise excellent history of ballet, for some reason skips over the origin of the word “tutu” entirely; so unfortunately I can’t appeal to non-digital resources for clarification.)   This would ordinarily be just a fun little bit of trivia, but in the context of Princess Tutu it brings up some Interesting implications.  Like, this means that in order to have a character named “Princess Tutu,” and for that name to automatically conjure in the public consciousness images of a ballerina in a frilly skirt, Drosselmeyer couldn’t have begun writing The Prince and the Raven any earlier than 1910.  Among other things, this indisputably puts the anime as technically happening in the “modern day” (sometime between the mid-1990s and the 21st century aughts, depending on how you measure) --- it kind of has to, for Drosselmeyer to have been writing that late and still be four or five generations distant from Fakir.  Especially since the age of marriage (and presumably occurrence of first legitimate offspring) rose throughout the 19th century, the time period in which Drosselmeyer would’ve been born and probably lived the majority of his years.  Looking at all states in 19th-century Germany, as in this JSTOR article, in 1867 an average of about 74% of men who married at all did so between the ages of 30 and 39, rising to nearly 77% in 1871, then to a little over 81% in 1880; the numbers for women in that same age bracket kept pace, though the percentage of them represented in later marriage seems to consistently stayed a little bit higher. So the old-timey storybook aesthetic seen throughout the show isn’t any indicator of when the anime takes place, so much as simply the “look” of the Story as dictated by Drosselmeyer.  An out-of-time fairytale town, the perfect stage for any number of tales he might spin. More interestingly, this means that Drosselmeyer would’ve been writing his final work either in the years just preceding World War I, or perhaps during the war itself.  Even before that, around the turn of the 20th century, the world of German art (theatrical and literary) had been enamored of tragedy and violence, as Barbara Tuchman expounds on in her thorough and compulsively readable book The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890 - 1914 (though it should be noted that by “world” she’s mostly referring to Britain, France, Germany, America, and the Hague): “Tragedy was the staple of the German theatre [...] Death by murder, suicide or some more esoteric form resolved nearly all German drama of the nineties and early 1900′s.”  So, if writing before the War, Drosselmeyer would have been surprisingly in line with the zeitgeist of the nation.  At the very least, I think it’s safe to say that his brand of storytelling was a solid fit for the time period.  And the specification of “theatre” isn’t a dealbreaker, since many a writer of short stories and novels also dabbled in playwriting, and vice versa --- Oscar Wilde is the immediate example that jumps to mind.  Not to mention that Drosselmeyer himself seems to have something of a preoccupation with theatre in the broad sense, what with all those puppets.  We’re never given enough information about his oeuvre to definitively conclude whether or not he ever wrote for the theatre or was acquainted with anyone who did, but in any case it’s not a far leap to posit that the prevailing aesthetic of the stage likely influenced and informed what went on the page.  If he was writing The Prince and the Raven during World War I, though, we must enter the realm of the more purely speculative (though that is half the fun of applying Real World History to something like this).  We know that Drosselmeyer was killed because the Bookmen, as well as various people who had apparently once come to him to have stories of wealth and power spun for them (“the nobles” in particular are mentioned, which I find interesting), feared that he would use his power to create a great tragedy that would sweep them all along in its destructive wake.  Now, on the one hand, it probably only takes five minutes of talking to the guy to figure out that he doesn’t exactly have humanity’s best interests at heart, so their conclusion didn’t really need much in the way of supporting evidence.  On the other hand, World War I was itself a tragedy in every sense, and a brutal one at that; which tore a great rift between the Old World and the Modern World with such unimaginable violence that the world was irrevocably and forever changed by the trauma of it.  While I doubt that any of the Bookmen or others would have necessarily thought Drosselmeyer responsible for the conflict --- even his considerable story spinning powers could alter reality significantly only in one small town, plus he seems just plain uninterested in “realistic” storytelling devices and genres --- I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all suddenly keenly aware of how he might take advantage of it to craft even more gruesome tragedies of his own.  That realization and paranoia, combined with the ever-mounting cost of the war in terms of both resources and human lives, could have been the catalyst that pushed these people to act to decisively against the possible threat that Drosselmeyer represented.  Indeed, it might also account for the cruelty of the execution, the impotent brutality of the wider war finding its local synecdoche in a mob removing the hands of a dangerous individual, but not the head.  (Although, that’s also assuming that Drosselmeyer didn’t just find out about the Bookmen’s plan and use his spinning to manipulate them into performing an “execution” that would give him time for the whole writing-in-blood thing --- but that’s going from simple speculation to wild speculation, so I’ll leave that be for now.) In any case, looking at all of this evidence across history and culture, I feel relatively safe in stating that Drosselmeyer likely wrote The Prince and the Raven, and of course died, sometime between 1910 and 1918.  (There might also be something to be said about a possible connection between his mechanical clockwork pocket dimension and the emergence of mechanized warfare during WWI as well, I think, but the idea isn’t fully formed and I’ve already gone on long enough as is.)  I might even go so far as to shorten the time frame to no later than 1917 --- that would still allow for the conclusion of 1916, the year that saw the battles of both the Somme and Verdun, two of the most infamously bloody battles of World War I (which would certainly have an effect on the psyches of the general population, and specifically certain individuals who were already fearful of tragedy befalling them).  Hell, maybe even smack-dab in the middle of 1916, it certainly would’ve been stressful enough.  Regardless, it’s strange and a little exciting to have identified a more or less precise time period for the writing of The Prince and the Raven, and all thanks to looking up the history of a single related word.

#princess tutu #my writing #meta #historical context #oh god i just put drosselmeyer in historical artistic context #oh fuck i have Sources supporting my claims #do you ever set out to share a short tidbit of mildly interesting info and end up writing the rough outline of an academic essay? #this is how my mind works someone please either stop me or pay for me to go back to college