When last we saw our protagonist, he had ridden in on a raft of lions, reclaimed his belt of superstrength, murdered his mother, and blinded and set adrift the troll who started all this.
Now, I must break to you a terrible piece of news.
After he dismounts his lion raft, the eleven lions are never seen again. No lions will appear from here on out. They will be missed.
Having dealt with things at home, our dude decides he should probably track down his wife.
(Sidenote. Was he supposed to join her in Arabia after a while? Was she supposed to come home after visiting her parents? It was never really discussed. Why didn’t they just go to Arabia together?)
He loads four ships and heads to Arabia. Where did he get all these ships? Who is manning them? Why does he need four of them? Where are his lions?
They have to stop for a while on an island, where they find a giant egg. None of the soldiers can crack it, but our guy breaks it with a single blow of his giant troll sword, releasing a chicken the size of an elephant.
His response to this turn of events is “Now we have done wrong; this can cost us all our lives.”
I’m not sure why? Does he think the chicken is going to attack them? Eat them? Step on them? He just seems really freaked about the giant chicken, and it doesn’t seem that scary, compared to everything else he's faced. I mean, he beat one lion to death, and tamed eleven more.
If only he had a small army of tame lions to help him fight the chicken.
(Seriously, where are they? I will never be over this.)
They have to get off the island fast, apparently. His sailors get him to Arabia in 23 hours. Then he orders them all to bury themselves up to their eyes in a sandhill, while he climbs a big fir tree.
A giant bird comes flying in, carrying an island, which he drops onto the ships and sinks them. It flies past the sandhill and over the fir tree, and our guy chops off its head with the troll sword.
I’m gonna be honest. I have no idea what’s going on here. How did he predict this situation? Is the giant bird friends with the chicken? Is the giant bird the chicken? Why is it using islands to sink random ships?
With the bird decapitated, dude heads into town, where he learns that the king’s daughter is home, but he’s hidden her away, and is offering her hand to anyone who can find her.
Awkward, since she’s already married.
(The story does briefly mention that the king is doing this even though she was already betrothed, and it’s unclear whether it’s referring to her full-fledged marriage to our hero, or if she was engaged to some other guy before the trolls kidnapped her.)
Instead of going to the king and explaining the situation, our guy goes immediately to find a man selling white bear skins. He buys one, puts it on, and has one of his sailors take him around town on a leash. He spends some time dancing and doing tricks, somehow convincing everyone that he is a real live bear, and the king hears about it.
The sailor is ordered to bring the bear to the palace, where everyone is very scared. He tells them all that there’s no danger as long as they don’t laugh at the bear.
A maid laughs. The bear responds by ripping her to shreds.
Reminder that this is not actually a bear. This is not even a man who has been transformed into a bear. This is a human man wearing a bear pelt. A human man who has previously demonstrated such qualities as, like, self-control, and mercy.
The rest of the palace is understandably upset about this. The sailor is understandably upset about this. The king’s response is, “Whatever, she was just a maid.”
The bear continues to put on a show. By the time he’s done, it’s late, and the king says the sailor and the bear better just spend the night. The sailor gets a bedroom, and they leave the bear in the throne room with some pillows.
In the middle of the night, the king comes and carries off the bear.
Carries him?
I mean, okay, a human man in a bear skin weighs a lot less than an actual polar bear, but that’s still a lot of carrying? And again, how is he pulling off this disguise? There is a significant size and shape difference.
Anyway. They wander through a whole bunch of hallways, until they get outside, and onto a pier, where the king pulls a bunch of fancy levers, and a little house floats up.
This is where the princess is being kept.
The king shows off the bear to the princess and her maid. This maid also laughs despite a warning, and also gets torn to pieces.
The princess is understandably frightened and distressed. The king brushes it off again, and leaves the bear with the princess even though she’s terrified and doesn’t want it there.
Once the king is gone, the bear suit is removed, the couple is reunited, and our dude is instantly forgiven for brutally murdering someone—presumably someone she knew and cared about—right in front of her.
They spend the night together, and the bear suit is back on by the time the king comes back. He returns the bear to the sailor, and they leave the palace.
Our guy comes back to the palace without the bear skin to present himself as a suitor for the princess. He’s given twenty four hours to find her, or he’ll be killed.
He hangs out in the palace and parties for the next twenty three hours. Then, with an hour to go, he follows the path the king took last night, while the king follows him and tries to convince him he’s going the wrong way.
With three minutes left on the timer, the house is floating in front of us, but the door is locked, and the king is insisting that he doesn’t have the key, and can someone please come behead this kid?
He kicks down the door, is reunited with his wife, and lives happily ever after.
This story is just. It’s just. So much.
The mom’s drastic personality change. For that matter, the boy’s massive personality change. In the beginning, he carried the troll home to bed after he was injured attempting to kill him. In the middle, he dashes his mother’s brains out. In the end, he rips two women to pieces for laughing at a dancing bear. I just—what is even happening here?
Where did our lions go?
It kind of feels like the first sixteen pages and last eight pages of this are two separate stories. In the first part, we have a too-trusting young man with lion sidekicks surviving the malicious intentions of his mother and stepfather. In the second part, we have an angry, clever man outsmarting a king to win a bride. The character personalities and the overall tone of the story just aren’t consistent from the first page to the last.
All of it is so fun, but also just, like, insane. I don’t even know how to feel about this. I love it. I hate it. It’s a masterpiece. It’s a mess. I don’t know how a single story managed to do so much, and also I will never, never forgive it for abandoning the lions partway through.
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