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| The Northwestern Miller journal was published from 1880 to 1973. Alongside the colourful covers which featured themes such as food related nursery rhymes and images of mills from around the world, the journal was full of milling and baking adverts. In a previous blog post I explored the history of the Bemis bag company. This particular full-page advert shown above was published in an anniversary issue, and reflects the children’s story of ‘Puss in Boots’, with the words: “As Puss in Boots brought good luck to the Millers’ son, so Bemis Bags bring good fortune to the Miller” The wording on the advert caused me to look into the story of Puss in Boots. |
| The story of Puss in Boots |
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| “You have but to give me a sack, and a pair of boots such as gentlemen wear when they go shooting,” Puss in Boots, The Fairy Book, Illustration by Warwick Goble, 1913. |
| The tale opens with the third and youngest son of a miller receiving his inheritance – a cat. At first the youngest son laments, as the eldest brother gains the mill and the middle brother gets the mules. The feline is no ordinary cat, however, but one who requests and receives a pair of boots. Determined to make his master’s fortune, the cat bags a rabbit in the forest and presents it to the king as a gift from his master, the fictional Marquis of Carabas. The cat continues making gifts of game to the king for several months, for which he is rewarded. |
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| Puss in Boots, illustration by Carl Offterdinger. |
| One day, the king decides to take a drive with his daughter. The cat persuades his master to remove his clothes and enter the river which their carriage passes. The cat disposes of his master’s clothing beneath a rock. As the royal coach nears, the cat begins calling for help in great distress. When the king stops to investigate, the cat tells him that his master the Marquis was bathing in the river and has been robbed of his clothing. The king has the young man brought from the river, dressed in a splendid suit of clothes, and seated in the coach with his daughter, who falls in love with him at once. The cat hurries ahead of the coach, ordering the country folk along the road to tell the king that the land belongs to the “Marquis of Carabas”, saying that if they do not he will cut them into mincemeat. |
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| Illustration from Les Contes de Perrault, 1941, by Albert Robida and Émile Tapissier. |
| The cat then happens upon a castle inhabited by an ogre who is capable of transforming himself into a number of creatures. The ogre displays his ability by changing into a lion, frightening the cat, who then tricks the ogre into changing into a mouse. The cat then pounces upon the mouse and devours it. The king arrives at the castle that formerly belonged to the ogre, and impressed with the bogus Marquis and his estate, gives the lad the princess in marriage. Thereafter, the cat enjoys life as a great lord who runs after mice only for his own amusement. So, the cat has enough wit and manners to impress the king, the intelligence to defeat the ogre, and the skill to arrange a royal marriage for his low-born master. |
| A clever lesson in lying |
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| Illustration by Gustave Dore. |
| The renowned illustrator of Dickens’ novels and stories, George Cruikshank, was shocked that parents would allow their children to read “Puss in Boots” and declared: As it stood the tale was a succession of successful falsehoods—a clever lesson in lying!—a system of imposture rewarded with the greatest worldly advantages. A creature who has mastered the arts of persuasion and rhetoric to acquire power and wealth. The morals Perrault attached to the tales are either at odds with the narrative, or beside the point. The first moral tells the reader that hard work and ingenuity are preferable to inherited wealth, but the moral is belied by the poor miller’s son who neither works nor uses his wit to gain worldly advantage, but marries into it through trickery performed by the cat. The second moral stresses womankind’s vulnerability to external appearances: fine clothes and a pleasant visage are enough to win their hearts. |
| Seven league boots |
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| Illustration by Nyah Addicott. |
| Another author Katharine Briggs, a storyteller who made a study of fairy tales and folk traditions in England, asserted that cats were a form of fairy in their own right, having something akin to a fairy court and their own set of magical powers. Still, it is rare in Europe’s fairy tales for a cat to be so closely involved with human affairs. According to Jacob Grimm, Puss shares many of the features that a household fairy or deity would have, including a desire for boots which could represent seven-league boots. This may mean that the story of “Puss and Boots” originally represented the tale of a family deity aiding an impoverished family member. ‘Seven-league boots’ originally arose as a translation from the French ‘bottes de sept lieues’, popularised by Charles Perrault’s fairy tales. A league (roughly 3 miles (4.8 km)) was considered to represent the distance walked in an hour by an average man. If a man were to walk 7 hours per day, he would then walk 7 leagues, or about 21 miles (34 km). In the 17th century, post-boys’ boots were called ‘seven-league boots’. Russian folklore has a similar magic item called ‘сапоги-скороходы’ (fast-pace boots), which allows the person wearing them to walk and run at an amazing pace. In Finnish and Estonian translations of stories with seven-league boots, they are often translated as “seitsemän peninkulman saappaa” (Finnish) and “seitsmepenikoormasaapad” (Estonian), literally “boots of seven Scandinavian miles”. |
| The Northwestern Miller |
| The Mills Archive holds an almost complete set of The Northwestern Miller, so if you are interested why not come along and see the collection for yourself. There is a wealth of information contained within the pages, including stories and images from the USA and around the world and profiles of eminent people in the milling world.Here are some of the colourful Northwestern Miller covers: |
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