(And just like his American counterpart, Pérez has a museum of his own, in Madrid.) In several Spanish-speaking nations, it’s Ratóncito Pérez. For French children, this is La Petite Souris, who appears in French folktales as early as the 17th century. In many countries around the world, children continue to leave teeth out in the hopes that a mouse will come take them away in exchange for money or some other gift. Leo Kanner’s “Folklore of the Teeth,” from 1928, records similar ceremonies involving cats, dogs, squirrels and beavers.īut it is the mouse that remains the predominant animal-dental mascot, even to this day. Perhaps the most widely practiced ritual, one that has been documented everywhere from Russia to New Zealand to Mexico, involves offering the lost tooth as a sacrifice to a mouse or rat, in the hopes that the child’s adult teeth will grow in as strong and sturdy as the rodent’s - a wish for transference that anthropologists call “sympathetic magic.” This offering is often accompanied by a specific prayer or song, and, in a pinch, any strong-toothed animal will do. The items weren’t mutually exclusive, either. (1) the tooth was thrown into the sun (2) thrown into the fire (3) thrown between the legs (4) thrown onto or over the roof of the house, often with an invocation to some animal or individual (5) placed in a mouse hole near the stove or hearth or offered to some other animal (6) buried (7) hidden where animals could not get it (8) placed in a tree or on a wall and (9) swallowed by the mother, child or animal. Townend distilled these rituals down to nine basic forms (as summarized by Wells in her 1991 essay “The Making of an Icon”): Every recorded human culture has some kind of tradition surrounding the disposal of a child’s lost baby teeth, and in the 1960s, a researcher named B. Of course, rituals surrounding tooth loss date back much further than that. By the time Wells started poking around, this supposedly immortal figure was barely even a senior citizen. Her first print appearance is an eight-page playlet for children by Esther Watkins Arnold from 1927, and the oldest oral references date her to approximately the turn of the 20th century. Despite the seeming timelessness of the character, the tooth fairy is in fact an extremely recent arrival on the mythological scene.
What Wells discovered in her initial research was striking. A spokesperson for the Chicago Dental Society added, “We have no position on the Tooth Fairy. “I’m the Tooth Fairy consultant.” It said so on her business card. By then she had become the world’s expert on the tooth fairy, giving countless interviews and talks, and even appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Wells’s name became so synonymous with the dental sprite that she had to clarify things to the Chicago Tribune: “I’m not the Tooth Fairy,” she said. A decade later, Wells remained so engrossed in her subject that she opened an entire museum dedicated to it, run out of her home in Deerfield, Ill. Then there was her survey, again the first of its kind, conducted among some 2,000 parents in the United States. First came a series of magazine articles in which she laid out the first substantive overview of the tooth fairy myth.
So Wells decided to take on the project herself. How was it possible, Wells wondered, that nobody knew where she came from? These kids left notes for the tooth fairy, and believed they shared personal relationships with her that spanned several years (and up to 20 baby teeth). After all, the ritual of children placing their shed baby teeth under their pillows, in the hopes of finding them replaced with cash in the morning, was already being practiced by millions of young Americans.
But in this area we have nothing.”Īround the same time, a professor at nearby Northwestern University Dental School named Rosemary Wells found herself similarly baffled. “We should have at our fingertips answers to all dentally related questions. “We went out of our minds,” the director of library services said at the time. As recently as the 1970s, when a radio DJ in Chicago made an on-air reference to the tooth fairy, staff at the American Dental Association were inundated with calls for more information about her. But while the origins of the first two are fairly well documented - a combination of Christian and pagan traditions, with some recent tweaks from the marketing departments at Coca-Cola and Cadbury, respectively - far less is known about the third. There are three central figures in the pantheon of North American children’s mythology: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy.
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