The Crow

 This story is—well. It’s really something. It’s Polish; I read it in Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book, but I did double check the origin through other sources, as Lang is not always accurate in his attributions.

It’s like if you started with a standard enchanted bridegroom story, and then just took out everything that made it make sense.

We start where we often do, with three beautiful princesses, the youngest of whom is the kindest. (Though we see no indication that the others aren’t also kind.) One day she comes across an injured crow, who tells her that he's an enchanted prince, and if she leaves everyone and everything she knows and loves to live in an abandoned castle with him, she can save him. There’s only one livable room in the castle, and it’s haunted, or demon-possessed, or something, and if she makes any noise when the monsters try to torture her all night, the crow’s suffering will double.

So naturally she goes with him.

Honey, why?

You have no evidence that he’s telling the truth. You have a loving, wealthy family; you’re not trying to get away from or provide for them. No one has threatened your father’s life. This is a Bad Move.

(In the enchanted palace, strange beings try to boil her alive in a giant cauldron.)

So, like, you know the thing you get in stories like Cupid and Psyche, where the heroine’s evil older sisters visit and try to screw everything up for her?

One of our girl’s sisters visits. She does not try to screw things up. Despite the fact that in this case I am begging someone to screw things up and get this poor girl out of this deeply concerning situation. She sleeps over for one night, and she screams, understandably, when the boiling starts. This of course causes the crow to suffer, so the princess sends her home.

She stays in this torture chamber for two years. Two. Years. Then the crow tells her he’s got one year left on his enchantment (it’s a seven year curse, the breaking of which doesn’t actually seem to be contingent on her presence in the castle), which means that she must go out into the world and become a maidservant. Apparently this (UNLIKE HER TIME IN THE TORTURE CASTLE) is necessary for him to become human again. Why? He doesn’t tell us.

I just. Like. This is—this is a standard step in the enchanted bridegroom plot. Girl goes into the world, works, and suffers. But usually there’s a reason for it. Just like there’s usually a reason for her going with the beast in the first place. Usually her sister visiting the palace would have led to her going out and suffering, but this story frames these two events as completely unrelated. The sister’s visit seems to have been toward the beginning of the two years.

Why is this happening? I want to know why this is happening.

So she spends a year working, and gets treated pretty badly throughout, until suddenly a handsome dude appears and claims to be the crow. They go back to the castle, which is no longer abandoned or haunted, and live happily together for a hundred years.

It doesn’t make sense. It’s like someone just looked at the outline of an enchanted bridegroom story, identified the key events, and somehow failed to realize that they’re supposed to be connected somehow.

Things don’t just happen. That’s not a story. There’s no reason for anything that happens. No stakes. No motivations. No explanations.

Why did the crow need someone to live in his palace and be tortured? Why did she agree? Why did the crow need her to be a maid for a year? Why did she agree? Why did her father the king not at any point interfere in this mess?

This is just…I don’t know what this. Girls, if a talking crow invites you back to his haunted castle, just say no.

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The Peasant's Wise Daughter

 I have always adored this story. I’m not sure why, because it also makes me kind of mad? But it’s fantastic.

Once a peasant and his daughter were granted by the king a piece of land. When they worked this land, they found in the soil a golden mortar. The peasant wished to give it to the king, to thank him for the land, but his daughter advised against this. If he was given the mortar, she said, he would certainly then demand the pestle to match.

Well, the peasant took the mortar to the king anyway, and the king demanded the pestle. He put the peasant in prison, refusing to release him until he’d produced a golden pestle.

Dude. You gave him an entire plot of land. That pestle could be anywhere on the property. There’s no telling how deeply it’s buried. It might be buried on the next plot over. Or it might not have been buried with the mortar at all. But if it was, how on earth is this man supposed to track it down while in prison?

In prison the man refused to eat or drink, only saying, over and over again, that he should have listened to his daughter. The king asked him about his daughter, and he explained the advice he’d ignored. The king was impressed by her wisdom, and demanded to meet her. He said that if she could answer his riddle, he would marry her.

Because who wouldn’t want to marry a jerk who imprisoned her father for the terrible crime of giving him a gift?

The girl was instructed to come to the king neither naked nor clothed, neither riding nor walking, neither on the road nor off it.

So she stripped, wrapped herself in a fishing net, and had a donkey drag her to the palace in the ditch on the side of the road.

And after this whole spectacle, where half the kingdom saw her dragged down the street mostly naked, the king married her and released her father from prison.

Doesn’t it just seem like this is going to be the happiest, healthiest marriage ever?

Years passed. A man had a horse who gave birth in the night, and the next morning the foal was found standing with his neighbor’s oxen. The neighbor insisted that the oxen had birthed the foal, and that it therefore belonged to him. This dispute was brought before the king, who gave the foal to the neighbor with the ox. Because apparently the king is an idiot as well as a jerk.

The horse owner went to the queen for help. She set him to casting a fishing net on the dry land in front of the palace, and acting as if he was catching fish. When the king had him questioned about this, the man said, "It is as easy for me to fish on dry land as it is for an ox to have a foal."

The king was quite certain this whole thing wasn’t the man’s own idea, and demanded to know who had told him to do it. The man refused, so the king had him tortured until he admitted he talked to the queen.

This man is never mentioned again, and it is unclear whether he ever got his foal back.

The king went to his wife, enraged that she had betrayed him.

Betrayed him? By, firstly, having a brain in her head, and secondly, daring to point out that he doesn’t? Dude, if you’re going to be that stupid and unfair, someone’s gonna call you on it. You’re the one who wanted a wise wife.

He sent her back to her peasant father’s hut. (Seriously? Her dad still lives in a hut? He couldn’t give his father-in-law a room in the palace?) But she could take home her one favorite thing from the palace with her.

So she had the king drugged, and called some servants to take him to the hut while he was sleeping.

Which, like, on the one hand, that’s really sweet. He’s her favorite thing! But on the other hand, why? I haven’t been impressed with his behavior so far. If I was her, I’d be happy to get kicked out, so I wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore.

When he woke up in the hut, and realized how much she loved him, they went back to the palace, and lived happily ever after. Unlike her dad, who still lived in a hut, and the horse owner, who may or may not have his foal back, but either way, had to recover from being tortured.

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Snow White and Rose Red

 This story is completely unrelated to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, although it does also prominently feature a dwarf. I have no idea why the brothers Grimm decided to have two protagonists named Snow White. I know we do often see overlapping names in folklore, but usually the name in question is, like, Hans. Snow White is not exactly the kind of name you just use because it’s a popular name in your culture and the first one you thought of.

Snow White and Rose Red are two little girls who live in the woods with their mother. One winter night, a bear knocks at their door and asks permission to warm himself at the fire, which their mother allows. The two girls have a great deal of fun playing at the hearth with the talking bear, and he returns every night for the rest of the winter. In the summer he has to leave, to protect his treasure from wicked dwarves, but promises to return.

That summer, the girls meet a dwarf whose beard is stuck in a tree. They cut him loose with some kitchen scissors, despite his horrible manners, and he runs off with a bag of gold. Some time later they find the same dwarf in danger of being pulled into the river because his beard is tangled in a fishing line. He’s dreadfully rude to them, but they still help cut him loose. He grabs a bag of pearls and runs away. They then find him about to be carried off by an eagle, and rescue him again. He insults them and runs off with a bag of jewels.

Later they find him admiring all his jewels. A large bear appears suddenly, and the dwarf is very afraid. He offers the bear all his jewels, and then suggests that the bear eat Snow White and Rose Red.

The bear kills the dwarf with one blow. The girls have started to run away, but the bear calls after them, and they recognize his voice—it’s their bear. His bearskin falls off, revealing him to be a handsome man.

He explains that he’s a prince who was cursed by the dwarf, and the spell was broken by his death. Also, the dwarf stole the gold, pearls, and jewels from him.

When the girls grow up, Snow White marries the bear and Rose Red marries his brother.

This is one of those stories that was just fun and cute the first time I read it, but the more times I come back to it the more questions I have.

First of all. The dwarf. Was he just, like, stupid? If you are cursing a man to be a giant wild animal, then your death should absolutely not be the way to break the curse. You are asking to get murdered. Why would you make someone bigger and stronger than you, and then tell him that to be free, he just has to kill you? It took him a single blow. The dwarf was clearly not at all challenging to kill.

How long was the bear enchanted? Was it just a matter of finding the dwarf so he could kill him? This seems like a pretty easy spell to break.

At first I thought maybe the dwarf had an enchanted beard. He was so upset when the girls cut off bits of it to free him those two times—I thought maybe it was a Samson situation, and his strength was in his hair, so he wouldn’t be vulnerable to bear attacks until after they rescued him. But the beard never comes up again after the second time he yells at them for saving his life.

The other big thing is the timeline. Before I reread this story to make this post, I had remembered that the story started when the girls were kids, and that the bear turned into an adult man at the end. But I guess I had thought the story was set over a longer period of time? Like, they met the bear when they were little girls, but they were older by the time the spell broke.

(I’m willing to assume that we kind of put a pause on a character’s aging while they’re under a transformation spell, so I’m not generally bothered much by age gaps in transformation stories—like, the years you were alive while you weren’t in your own body don’t have to count. You go back to exactly the body you left, so you aren’t physically older, you still have the, like, brain chemistry of a younger person, and it’s not like you had a lot of opportunity for emotional/mental/social development while you were cursed.)

But if he was already an adult man when he was cursed, and he met these girls as children, that’s a little weird. But then maybe my original mis-remembering would have been weirder? Marrying a woman you watched grow up is not great; is marrying a woman who you hung out with for a single winter when she was a child better?

I think the thing that really throws me here, though, is the fact that they’re still little girls when the spell breaks. Like, him watching them grow up as a bear seems less concerning than him watching them grow up as a man. Especially if we’re pausing the aging while he’s a bear. If he was cursed at 20, then he might meet the girls when he’s 20 and they’re 10, but then if he knew them as a bear for years, by the time the spell breaks all three of them would be basically 20. But if they spell breaks when he’s still 20 and they’re still 10, then by the time they’re 20, he's 30.

It just says the spell breaks, and they get married “some time afterwards.” How much time afterwards? And, like, do they spend that in between time together, or does the prince go home, and meet them again years later, when they’re adults? I just…I worry about this timeline. I need to know details.

But these are the things I think about when I’m deliberately overthinking it. (The timeline, anyway. I’m always lowkey bothered by the dwarf’s poor curse planning.) Generally I think this is a really cute little enchanted bridegroom story, where no one betrays each other, or lies to each other, or kidnaps each other, or has to go on a whole huge redemption quest after screwing up. Although does it still count as an enchanted bridegroom story when the bride plays no part in the spell-breaking? Like, is ‘you must obtain a bride to break the spell” what qualifies it as an enchanted bridegroom story, or can we just count anything where someone is enchanted and sort of acquires a bride in the course of spell-breaking?

Anyway. I just think it’s sweet. Though giving the dwarf an enchanted beard would have brought it all together a little better.

(In the retelling that is on my list of things to write, the bear is cursed when he’s a kid and he meets the girls when he’s still a kid, which is a little to negate any age gap concerns, but mostly because it worked better for my timeline and because I thought ‘little boy figuring out how to be a bear’ was just more fun? I feel like the three of them can just have a much more interesting time if they’re all the same age and there’s no adult supervision.)

(BTW there is a retelling of this story called The Shadow of the Bear, by Regina Doman, which I haven’t read in years, but remember enjoying very much. It has two sequels based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Sleeping Beauty, which were also great. I think there are several more books that are technically in the same series, but these three all have the same characters, and the others are about someone else. They are quite Catholic. But I very much do not enjoy Christian Fiction, as a genre, and still liked these. So if you’re looking for new fairy tale retellings to read—I think there’s a lot more retellings of this story now, but this was the only one I could find for many years, and I haven’t gotten around to reading any others.)

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The Goldener/The Wild Man/Lousehead

 So this whole story type is weird. Or at least, the categorization of it is. The variant I had read that made me want to make a post was “King Goldenlocks,” from Schonwerth. But I knew I’d read several other versions previously. And it has been incredibly difficult to find any of them. (I have the same issue tracking down specific Impossible Task stories. This is the problem with spending 30 years reading every fairy tale you can find, in 5 library systems and dozens of websites that no longer exist. Finding them a second time is also an impossible task.)

Eventually I wound up with Iron Hans, from the Grimms. Except that, despite having nearly identical plots, Iron Hans and King Goldenlocks are two entirely different tale types according to the Aarne-Thompsen index. Which has just made tracking down variants even more difficult. What interests me is the “Goldener” aspect, not the “Wild Man” aspect. In both Iron Hans and the Goldener story type, a young man gets a job in a palace and has to cover his beautiful, distinctive hair, then manages to marry a princess and save a kingdom. The Aarne-Thompsen classification of Iron Hans is, bafflingly, based on the wild man (Iron Hans), who helps the prince, not on anything about the prince himself. And multiple “Goldener” stories, though certainly not all, also include a wild man.

Anyway. Now that I’ve spent 2 paragraphs complaining. The story. I’m gonna go through King Goldenlocks, with some occasional side information from Iron Hans. If you know of any other variations on this story type, please share in the comments; so far I’ve tracked down Fat-Frumos with the Golden Hair from Romania. What I’m interested in particularly is the prince who covers his hair, and everyone thinks he has lice or some weird skin disease on his scalp. (I always think of this story as “Lousehead”—I’m not sure when or why I started doing that, since the only story I can find that’s actually called “Lousehead” is one from Schonwerth, which does feature the boy hiding his hair, but lacks most of the plot points this story type usually features.)

There a wild man in the woods. (In Iron Hans his name is Iron Hans. I suspect that this is because Hans is sort of the default name for the Grimms, but I’m choosing to believe that the frog prince’s buddy had some adventures between the open heart surgery and the spell break.)

The king has the wild man captured and locked in a cage in the garden. Now, the capturing and locking up was justified, because he was, like, killing people when they wandered into the woods. But displaying him like a zoo animal? Not cool. 

He eventually convinces the small, golden-haired prince to free him. In King Goldenlocks, the king then plans to execute his child for the crime of freeing the wild man, and some servants help him escape. In Iron Hans, after freeing him the prince begs Hans to bring him along, because he’s afraid he’ll get a beating if he stays, and Hans agrees.

In Iron Hans, there’s then a whole story arc where they live in the woods together, but then the prince disobeys instructions and plays in a golden stream. (Which turns his hair gold—like, gold-gold, not blonde-gold, and kind of makes the next bit make more sense?) Iron Hans sends him away.

He gets a job at a palace in a neighboring kingdom, either after leaving Hans or after the servants sneak him away. He wears a cap or kerchief to hide his (usually natural) golden hair, and this is a very important aspect of the story, because everyone thinks he’s hiding something gross under there, and looks down on him because of it.

Which. Like. I get that this is the heart of the story. The cap is his donkey skin. His hair is the glass slipper. But it makes no sense.

Firstly, this isn’t his kingdom. Secondly, everyone thinks he’s dead. Thirdly, it’s not like his hair is purple. Does he think everyone he meets is going to be like, “hey, that kid is blonde, he must be the dead prince of Other Kingdom”? Surely, there are other blondes around.

Of course, this is coming from Schonwerth, who is notable for his stories having undergone significantly less editing than most folktales have by the time we read them in 2024. (Which to be clear is not a criticism! This is the primary reason that I adore Schonwerth.)

At some point the prince—now working as a gardener—starts preparing bouquets for the youngest princess, each of which he ties off with a strand of his golden hair.

(Or she catches him with his hair down, but the little bouquet hint is more fun.)

Now we get into the detail that really makes King Goldenlocks stand out from other stories of this type. While the princess tends to fall madly in love with the prince/gardener as soon as she realizes he's blonde, generally they don’t actually get together until he’s proven himself to her father and his identity has been revealed, at the end of the story.

Here, the princesses (three of them) are all set to get married, and the youngest refuses to marry anyone but the gardener, so the king lets her. And then she goes to live with him in his little hut at the edge of the palace grounds. We don’t bring new son-in-law into the palace. We send youngest daughter to live in poverty. It’s unclear how much of the truth our gardener reveals to his new wife. It just doesn’t really come up in the story at all.

From this point we move on to the usual plot of this story type. The kingdom is in trouble. Only the lice-ridden garden can save it, not that anyone would believe that. There’s generally three incidents where he secretly saves the day, though the specifics vary from story to story.

In King Goldenlocks, the king—the gardener-prince’s father-in-law—falls ill, and can only be healed by apples from paradise. All three sons-in-law set out too find them. The gardener-prince meets the wild man he once rescued in the woods, gets directions, and finds the magic apples. He is then convinced to give these apples to the other two sons-in-law, but in exchange they have to get the mark of the gallows on their backs. Which seems like pretty obviously a bad idea that will have consequences at some point, but I guess these princes aren’t the brightest. They get credit for saving the king.

The same thing happens all over again not long after, except this time the cure is snake milk, and they get the mark of the rack.

(The weird thing about this version is that it seems like they just asked him if they could please have the apples and the milk? And he agreed? When everything is revealed at the end, these two princes will narrowly avoid being hung or put on the rack when King Goldenlocks begs for mercy. But, like, they didn’t do anything wrong as far as we’ve seen. They didn’t steal the apples from Goldenlocks, and if they told any elaborate lies about how they got them, it doesn’t come up in the story. Usually in stories like this, the other two princes steal the cure, and lie about it, and are rightfully punished when the truth comes out. They literally just asked him for the apples. He could have said no, instead of making it into this whole big thing.)

Our third incident is when the country goes to war. The other sons-in-law are rich and powerful and can call upon armies to help them. Our guy is, as far as anyone knows, just a gardener. In some variants of the story, he begs to be allowed to help too, and is given an old lame horse and rusty set of armor to ride to war in. In this version, his wife insists that he mustn’t go at all.

Either way, he goes to the wild man and gets some decent—even enchanted—equipment, and is the deciding factor in their side winning the war.

He’s injured in battle, and the king, who doesn’t recognize him in his armor, bandages his wound with his own kerchief, which he later recognizes binding a wound in the same spot on his gardener son-in-law.

At this point, everything comes out, and also our guy’s crappy bio-dad dies and he becomes king, and everyone lives happily ever after.

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The Clever Bride

 Today we’re going to talk about another Schonwerth story, this one from the smaller, illustrated collection White As Milk, Red As Blood instead of The Turnip Princess. It’s called “The Clever Bride.”

A young man and his mother live in a castle in the middle of a lake, having cut themselves off from the rest of the world in grief after the father/husband’s passing. After many years, the mother tries to  convince the son to take a wife, but he doesn’t want to marry.

At night, he looks out his open window to the lake, and imagines what his bride might be like.

He’s woken by a beautiful woman who spends the night with him. After that, a beautiful woman spends every night with him, though he’s not entirely sure it’s the same woman every time, since she only comes at night.

He decides it doesn’t matter. He’s in love.

His mother is still pressuring him to marry, and the mystery woman refuses to marry him.

Mom arranges a wedding. Bride lays down in the bed to find a water maiden there between her and her new husband, who drives her to the edge of the bed.

For the next year, our guy thinks he’s sleeping with the new bride, but actually he’s sleeping with the water maiden, until finally the bride dies of grief.

It is unclear what, exactly, she’s grieving about, or why this man is so bad at telling women apart, or why she didn’t just try to talk to him.

The same thing happens with ten more women. Which raises lots of questions. Such as: why do people keep agreeing to marry this man? What do he and his mother think is happening here? What does he think happened to that mystery girl? Is everyone in this story just profoundly stupid?

The twelfth bride consults a witch. The witch tells her not to enter the bedchamber until after the witching hour, not to enter the bed before her husband, and to keep the bedroom window closed. She also gives her a magic spell to say and some herbs to throw under the bed.

She does as the witch says. No one invades her marriage bed. A year passes, a son is born, and on the witch’s recommendation, the wife doesn’t let him out of her sight for twelve days. At his christening on the thirteenth day, everyone can hear little voices saying “I want that too,” but can’t see anyone speaking.

The wife has twelve children, and the same thing happens every time. After the twelfth child is christened, she demands to know who’s speaking.

Twelve children appear, pale and beautiful, transparent like water, with silken hair and bound feet. The priest immediately baptizes all of them, and each one falls dead after being baptized. Before the last one is baptized and dies, he explains that all of them are our guy’s children, each with a different water maiden. The children are neither human nor spirit, but with their baptism are released from this in-between state, into death. The twelve water maidens will be rewarded for loving the guy, with three hundred years of beauty and youth.

The end.

Okay. First of all. That priest. I feel like maybe, maybe we can give him a pass on the first two kids. But when two children die in front of you immediately after baptizing, that is a pattern, and it is time to put the baptizing on hold. The correct time to collect all of that information was before child number three, not before child number twelve.

If a child dies immediately after baptism, you need to sit down and think for a minute. Are your actions causing the deaths of children? Do these children absolutely need to be baptized right this second? Are there any alternative options? Should you maybe at least figure out who and where the parents are before you continue?

And our guy. He was sleeping with twelve different water maidens? He couldn’t tell them apart? Like, it said he wasn’t sure it was the same woman every time, but twelve? Seriously? How can you claim to love a woman and not actually realize she’s a full dozen women? That’s ridiculous.

How are these children still children? The youngest one would have been conceived sometime before their dad married his twelfth wife. Since his twelfth wife has now had twelve children of her own, the oldest water children, at least, cannot possibly qualify as children anymore.

Unless they don’t age at human rates, which is possible given their parentage. It’s unclear exactly how good a deal those three hundred years of youth and beauty are; maybe they already have a life span in the hundreds?

Or unless all twelve of them were conceived within a couple years or even months of each other, shortly before wife number twelve? I guess that’s entirely possible since they all have different mothers.

Why exactly are we rewarding the water women for any of this? I mean, I guess they didn’t do anything wrong, exactly. There was some tricking of the guy, but, like, he was stupid. I’m not prepared to hold them responsible for how utterly oblivious he was—he’s apparently shared his bed with a total of twenty four women, and couldn’t tell any of them apart. So not the villains of the story, but I don’t think they did anything worth rewarding.

The only innocents in this story are his twelfth wife and all twenty four of his children, half of whom just died.

I guess the other eleven wives didn’t do anything bad, either, but they were pretty stupid, too. It’s hard to feel bad for women who died of grief because they weren’t sleeping with their husband, while their husband was under the impression that he was sleeping with them, and all they had to do was have a conversation.

Everything about this story is so frustrating. I feel so bad for those twelve dead water kids.

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The Grain Merchant

 Well, we’re still with Pourrat for one more week at least. Today’s story is The Grain Merchant.

A French grain merchant has a son named Jean. After Jean has finished merchant school, he is sent to England to sell grain. He sells the grain successfully, but then meets a young woman and her nurse being kidnapped. He offers the kidnappers all the money he’s earned to set them free.

The kidnappers accept, and then he just…takes the women home? Not to their home they’ve just been kidnapped from, but to his own home, in a whole different country.

His father is proud of him for rescuing these women, but less than impressed with his merchant skills. The women stay home with the father, and Jean goes back to merchant school.

Six months later, his father decides it’s time for him to try again. He goes back to England with another ship full of grain. The young woman he rescued gives him a red kerchief, and says that if he presents it to the king, he’ll get a really good price for his grain.

Jean gets to England. It turns out the king is this girl’s dad, who’s been desperately searching for her for six months.

She just never mentioned to anyone that she was a princess. No attempt was made to return her home, and it doesn’t sound like she asked to go home or anything. This is just…such a mess. Why didn’t she tell Jean her identity immediately and ask him to take her back to the palace, instead of going all the way to France and just chilling there for six months?

The king says that if Jean brings his daughter home, he can marry her. He also buys all the grain.

On his way home, Jean sees a dead man being dragged through the streets by a crowd. He asks what’s going on. The guy can’t have a Christian burial because he owed too much money when he died. So Jean pays back all his debts and makes sure he’s buried properly.

For the second time, he returns home with no grain and no money. His father says he’s not a very good merchant, but he should make a great prince. Jean, his valet, the princess, and her nurse head back to England.

A huge storm comes while they’re on their way. In the chaos, the valet knocks Jean out and throws him overboard. He threatens the princess and the nurse and makes them swear not to tell anyone. The princess is so heartbroken at Jean’s death that she doesn’t care about anything anymore, and doesn’t fight the valet.

Somehow, when they get back to England, the king fails to notice that this is a completely different guy from the one he talked to last time.

But of course, Jean isn't dead. He’s washed up on shore far away.

A crow—apparently a very large one—lands beside him, and offers to fly Jean back to the princess if Jean agrees to give the crow half of his first child on their second birthday. There is no discussion of the logistics of giving the crow half a child.

Jean says no, absolutely not, I would never do that to my child.

The crow says that if he doesn’t, the princess will be forced to marry the evil valet.

Jean agrees that if his first child is a son, the crow can have half, but if it’s daughter, Jean gets to keep all of her.

The crow flies him to the palace, Jean and the princess are reunited, the valet is dealt with, and they get married.

Of course, nine months later they have a son.

Jean waits until the night before the kid’s second birthday to tell his wife about the deal he’s made, and she’s remarkably chill about it. They spend the night preparing to say goodbye to their son, expecting that the crow will kill him and tear him to pieces—which I guess explains how he would take half of him.

But when the crow arrives and sees them prepared to keep the bargain, he transforms into a man. He explains that he’s the man in debt whose burial Jean paid for. He was offered the opportunity to save Jean when he was cast out of the ship, but only on the condition that Jean’s honor be tested again with the deal for the baby. By being willing to keep his promise and give up the child, Jean has passed the test. The crow man returns to heaven. Jean and the princess keep their baby, and live happily ever after.

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The White Goat

So I mentioned Henri Pourrat briefly in my last Beauty and the Beast post. He's really late for folklore collection—1940s and 50s. He collected over a thousand stories all from one specific region of France (Auvergne). I have a book from the library right now with English translations of 105 of them. I won't be able to spend nearly as much time with Pourrat as I would like; this is one of several books I currently have from the interlibrary loan system, which means I can't renew them. Fortunately the stories are organized by type, so I can at least pick out the ones most appealing to me pretty quickly, and just focus on those sections. Still, I'm not sure whether I'll have time for any more posts after this one.

Today we're going to talk about The White Goat.

We open with a pregnant woman—the wife of a lord—who begins having nightmares of a white goat. She eventually gives birth to a white goat. She and her husband are horrified, and send the baby goat to live in an abandoned castle they happen to own, with servants to care for him.

When the white goat is seven years old, he stops bleating and starts talking. When he’s twenty, he tells his father he wants to marry the princess.

The lord asks the king. Instead of just saying no, the king decides to set some impossible tasks.

First, the goat is instructed to make a highway from the king’s palace to his own in a single night. He summons shadows to do this. Next, the king wants a new palace build in a single night—one exactly identical to the king’s, down to the number of nails in the walls. The shadows come through. Then he wants a garden to match the palace, again in a single night, identical down to the number of leaves on each bush. With this done, the only thing the king can think to ask is that the garden be filled with birds.

The white goat cups his hands to call down the birds.

Cups. His. Hands.

What hands? He’s a goat.

Anyway.

Out of options, the king agrees to the marriage, and invites the goat to go hunting with him to celebrate.

When they’re alone in the woods, the king tries to kill the goat. He tries very hard. But, as the impossible tasks should have made clear, this is a magic goat. The king cannot kill him. The king admits defeat, and goes to inform his daughter of her engagement.

Dude. He asked to marry her. You could have just said no. If you hadn’t wanted to make fun of him, if you hadn’t wanted to make him think he had a chance, then demand feats you were sure he could never perform—

All you had to do was say no. This whole mess is because you decided to be mean about it.

The princess agrees to marry the goat only if he accomplishes an impossible task for her, too. She wants the Bird-Who-Tells-All in a golden cage.

The white goat goes out into the forest and whistles a tune that summons a serpent. All the birds in the world are drawn to this serpent, including the Bird-Who-Tells-All, and all of them fall to the ground in front of it. The goat takes the bird he wants, puts it in a cage, and takes it to the princess.

The princess agrees to a secret wedding at the goat’s palace. I am utterly baffled that the king and the princess think a secret wedding is going to work. They don’t even tell the queen. How are you going to hide a whole entire married princess?

Before the wedding, the goat takes a nap. He tells the princess not to look into his ear while he’s sleeping.

Obviously she looks.

In his ear is a golden key, which leads her to a door behind which she finds weavers and embroiderers and lacemakers, along with all their projects, and they tell her they’ve been working for her for the last seven years.

So apparently when the goat was thirteen he hired dozens of people to spend years making clothes for his future wife? Not exactly typical thirteen-year-old boy behavior. Was it, like, for her as in her the princess, or for her as in her the goat’s wife? Exactly how much planning went into this? And why is he keeping keys in his ears?

Alas, we will never know. She leaves and puts the key back. The goat wakes up. They get married.

After the wedding, the goat turns into a handsome young man. He explains that if she hadn’t taken his key, the spell would be broken entirely, but since she did, he’ll be a goat in the day and a man at night. But soon he’ll be a man forever. Unless she tells anyone about the spell, in which case Bad Things Will Happen.

In the meantime, the king has gone home, and been forced to explain the situation to his wife. Shocked and horrified, she rushes off to rescue her daughter.

Things start pretty normally. The girl insists on staying with her goat husband. The mom is not a fan of this plan. They argue. The mom asks her if he’s a goat all the time, or if he transforms at night—it’s unclear where mom got the idea—and she refuses to answer. Which, like, I would have taken as an answer; if he wasn’t, you’d just say no, right?

And then things escalate.

Mom says “Tell me the truth or I’ll cut your throat! I’d rather see you dead than know you’re the wife of a monster!” And she pulls out a knife.

Like. Okay. I get taking a hard stance against bestiality. But murder is not the answer!

Terrified, the princess admits the truth.

Immediately, the palace crashes down around them. Mom runs away. The goat comes out, pissed, because if she hadn’t said anything the spell would have broken tomorrow. Now, he’s going to continue to be a goat in the day, and also be taken to a mystery palace.

To save him, the princess must put on lead shoes that weigh 400lbs each. She must walk until the shoes wear away. Once this is done, she should find him in the finest room, and show him her wedding ring during the time when he is human.

She walks until she wears out the shoes. I don’t understand how she walks at all, with each step weighing 400lbs, but she does it. She winds up in country with no grass or flowers, where the sky has no stars. She finds the castle of the winds there.

The south wind doesn’t know where the goat is, but gives her a dress made of moon-cloth. The east wind gives her a dress made of star-cloth. The west wind gives her a dress made of sun. Not sun-cloth. Just straight up sun. The north wind tells her the goat is in a palace eight days’ walk from here, and he’s about to be married.

So the princess heads that way. On foot. What is up with all these winds who aren’t giving our characters a lift?

Also, when she’s talking to the winds, the princess mentions that the goat is in a palace with the Bird-Who-Tells-All. Which is the first mention we get of the bird since the goat caught him—the goat definitely did not tell her he was taking it along when he got whisked away. But it’s gonna be important.

She gets to the palace. She trades each dress for a night in the finest room in the palace, where the drugged goat is sleeping, and I’m not going to rehash the whole exchange again after this many stories featuring it, but what interests me about this is that she asks for the finest room. Not for a night with the bridegroom. Which makes a lot more sense than the usual? I mean, I don’t see why we couldn’t, like, move the groom to a different room for the night. But asking for a nice bedroom sounds like it would go over a lot better than asking for a night with someone’s almost-husband.

After two drugged nights, the goat—it’s day, so he’s still a goat—is wandering around the palace, and runs into the Bird-Who-Tells-All. And the bird, you know, tells all.

The goat apparently has forgotten all about his wife and their drama, but he avoids the drugging for night three, and when she shows him her ring he remembers everything.

It sounds like his second almost-wife in this situation just, like, didn’t know he was married, and she’s chill about the whole thing. No need for a daring escape. She’s bummed, but she has three cool new dresses and a wedding feast, so it’s okay. Unclear why she drugged him. Again, he could have just slept in another room for a few nights. But the goat’s spell is finally fully broken, and he and the princess live happily ever after.

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