The Brave Little Tailor

 I have a very clear memory of writing about this story, which is odd, because I can find no evidence that I’ve ever done so.

(I do not have the energy to put in images, but I’ll try to remember to post some another time, because I have a fantastic illustrated copy of this story.)

Tailors are weirdly frequent fairy tale protagonists, but this is probably the best-known, and for good reason; this is definitely one of the best tailor stories around.

We begin with our tailor putting some jam on a piece of bread, then forgetting all about it while he gets caught up in his sewing. This attracts flies. He grabs a piece of cloth and swats at them, killing seven flies in one blow.

The tailor feels this is a very impressive feat. He makes a sash to wear, embroidered with “Seven in one blow,” so everyone he meets will know about it.

(This is pre-sewing machine. He’s hand sewing. Can you imagine how long that would take? To make it look nice? To make it large enough to be easily read from a distance? This is some impressive work.)

The tailor decides this town is just too small for someone with his impressive fly-swatting skills. He sets off to seek adventure in the wider world, bringing with him only his sash and a piece of cheese, which he puts in his pocket.

(I killed 4 flies in one blow with a flyswatter, once. But I decided to keep my day job.)

On his way out, he finds a bird stuck in a bush, and puts that in his other pocket.

This bird is alive, but apparently content to sit motionless in a strange, small, dark place for an unspecified amount of time.

The tailor meets a giant, who will be the first of many characters to interpret “seven in one blow” as referring to men. This misunderstanding initiates multiple rounds of showing off.

The giant picks up a rock and squeezes it until water comes out. Which…isn't how rocks work, but okay.

The tailor takes out his cheese, and squeezes it until way more water comes out—apparently this is a soft cheese, which raises some concerns about his pocket storage, and apparently it also looks enough like a rock to fool the giant.

The giant picks up another stone and throws it as far as he can.

The tailor takes the bird out of his other pocket and throws it; the bird flies away, much farther than the giant’s. The giant believes the bird is a stone, too, and I am having some concerns about his eyesight.

Next, they carry a felled tree together. By which I mean, the giant carries a tree, while the tailor sits in the branches, and every time the giant glances back, the tailor jumps down and pretends to be doing his share.

Eventually, the giant takes the tailor home, where he meets several other giants. He’s invited to spend the night, but is intimidated by the size of the bed the giants offer, so he slips out in the night and sleeps on the floor in the corner.

The giant smashes the bed to pieces, confident he’s smashed the troublesome tailor along with it. And this, friends, is why we always check for a body.

In the morning, when the tailor turns up alive, all of the giants run away in terror.

He proceeds to a local palace, where his sash is again misinterpreted, and he’s invited, as a great warrior, to take a special position in the royal army.

He accepts. The other soldiers are terrified to work with a man who could kill seven of them with one blow, and tell the king, “either he goes or we do.”

The king is unwilling to lose his entire army, but he’s afraid to upset such a dangerous man by firing him. Instead, he decides to set an impossible task to get rid of him.

Two giants are wreaking havoc. If the tailor can kill them, the king will give him half the kingdom and his daughter’s hand in marriage.

(This is a very frequent offer, and I find it baffling. Generally the daughter is this situation is the king’s only child, which means that if you marry her, you’ll eventually get the entire kingdom, as the new king, when your father-in-law dies. So why are we dividing the kingdom now? That seems like a huge mess, politically. You split the kingdom in half. Does it eventually get reassembled when the old king dies? Or does his half go to someone else? If we have a king splitting his kingdom in half every time a giant needs to be killed, or a princess needs to be rescued, how many kingdoms are we going to have in a few generations? Is this why there are so many princes and princesses in fairy tales? Is the continent just littered in dozens of broken-up kingdoms each covering a couple miles? This is not sustainable.)

Of course, the king is expecting that the giants will kill the tailor—he has no intention of actually giving him his daughter or half his kingdom.

The tailor finds the giants sleeping, hides in a tree, and starts pelting them both with stones. Each giant thinks the other is attacking him, and they fight and kill each other. The tailor, of course, takes the credit.

The king sets another impossible task—to capture a unicorn.

The tailor gets the unicorn to chase him, runs almost into a tree, and darts out of the way. The unicorn gets its horn stuck in the tree.

A third impossible task—to catch a wild boar.

Again, the tailor gets it to chase him. He runs into a conveniently located chapel. The boar follows. He jumps out a window. The boar is not able to follow. He circles back around to close the door, and the boar is contained.

The king is out of impossible tasks. The promise must be kept. A wedding is planned.

The princess is not a fan.

It is after the wedding that we learn of the tailor’s only weakness—sleep-talking. His new wife learns from the sleep-talking that he used to be a tailor, and apparently she and the king feel this justifies them in getting rid of him, as if his former profession somehow cancels out the giant-slaying and unicorn-capture.

They plan to have the tailor kidnapped in the night and thrown on a ship that will take him far, far away.

But the tailor’s squire overhears, and tattles.

The next night, when the kidnappers are supposed to come, the tailor pretends to sleep, and pretends to sleep-talk, this time about all of his terrifying feats. The kidnappers run away, successfully terrified, and the tailor allegedly lives happily ever after, though I have some concerns about his relationship with his wife and father-in-law.

There is a variant where the final scene ends with something other than sleep-talking—I think a bucket of fish gets dumped on the princess? But I cannot find it right now, which is driving me absolutely insane. Just know it’s out there somewhere. Hopefully I’ll track it down eventually.

The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh

 This is one of my favorite kinds of stories—enchanted bride/groom without the bride/groom. The transforming power of non-romantic love is just so fantastic.

The Laidly Worm is an English fairy tale, collected by Joseph Jacobs. We open with a widowed king who has two children. These children are named Childe Wynd and Margaret. I’m gonna assume that each parent named one child here, because this looks like wildly different taste in names.

Childe Wynd, the oldest child, and the son, sets off to seek his fortune. Which, like, what fortune? Isn’t he the heir to the throne? That’s a built-in fortune; why is he seeking one elsewhere?

Of course, the real reason he’s off seeking his fortune is so that he’ll be safely out of the way for what happens next. Which is that his father remarries, and his new wife is, as is so often the case, a witch.

It’s all going well enough until someone comments on Margaret’s beauty, which, of course, her stepmother is deeply offended by.

She turns Margaret into a laidly worm, who can only be turned back by three kisses from her absent brother.

Which seems like a great way to guarantee your spell will be broken—I mean “get your brother to come kiss you” is a lot easier than “get someone to fall in love with you in your monstrous form” or “get someone to share a bed with you for a year without ever seeing your face” or any of the other, more traditional ways to break this kind of spell.

Margaret wakes up the next morning, in her bed, as a laidly worm. (Laidly, by the way, just means ugly. And we’re taking, like, serpent, not earthworm.)

Margaret’s maids all run away, and she slithers out of the palace, settling in at Spindleston Heugh.

At this point, Margaret begins terrorizing the countryside, devouring everything she comes across, and so the locals consult with a warlock. He figures out that the worm is really the princess—apparently this is news despite the worm being found in the princess’s bed—maybe they assumed it ate her? But how did they think it got into the palace in the first place without being seen?

Anyway, he tells them the enchanted princess is just hungry, and if they give her the milk of seven cows, she’ll be a good snake. Also, her brother can break the spell.

So. Margaret drinks a lot of milk, and just sort of hangs out, being a snake. I’m really impressed with the problem-solving here. Instead of rushing right to “kill the monster,” we took the time to figure out what was actually going on, and work out a peaceful solution. Margaret didn’t mean to hurt anyone; she was frightened and hungry and confused. And instead of fighting back, we’re feeding her.

Childe Wynd comes home. The stepmom sends some storms to sink his ships, but they can’t be sunk because they’re made of rowan wood. She sends Margaret to attack the ships when they reach shore, which is the first indication we’ve seen that she can control Margaret as Worm. Childe Wynd sails away again, and approaches from the other side. As soon as they’ve successfully landed, the stepmom loses all power over Margaret.

And this is where things get really weird.  Because Child Wynd runs and Margaret, sword drawn.

Like, dude. You’re here to rescue her? It’s common knowledge in the community now that the worm is Margaret, and I get that you’ve been away a long time, but weren’t you briefed on the situation? I find it very unlikely that someone came to get you so you could save your sister, and failed to mention that she had been turned into a worm. Decapitation is not a standard rescue method.

Margaret is like, “wait, no, kiss me.”

Wynd hesitates.

Margaret says, ‘seriously, you gotta kiss me three times.” (But, like, in rhyme.)

He doesn’t actually question this, despite not seeming to know who she is. He kisses her three times. She turns back into his sister. They go to the castle, find the stepmom, and touch her with a rowan branch. This turns her into a toad. She hops away, Wynd becomes king—no word on what happened to his dad—and he and Margaret live happily ever after.

Allegedly, the toad is still hopping around in the neighborhood. So, like, be careful if you’re inclined to frog kissing. Don’t wanna unleash a witch.

Trauma, Villainy, Therapy

 Is anyone else disturbed by the implication in pop culture that we can create evil through torture?

The orcs in Lord of the Rings. The demons in Supernatural.

These are creatures that have become monsters because they were hurt. And this is something that goes beyond, like, brainwashing. These are creatures who are inherently evil, who used to be good or at least normal, until their fundamental natures were changed by pain, and now they're irredeemable.

That is so deeply concerning. That is so very far from okay. The idea that sufficient pain cannot only take away everything you are, but take away any chance that you could ever be in any way worthwhile again?

It's not exactly wrong that having been hurt makes you more likely to cause hurt, in some cases. You're injured, you're frightened, you're traumatized, and so you lash out in preemptive self defense. You cause pain to avoid experiencing it, because you'll be punished for not punishing others, or because anyone who can get close can hurt you, and hurting them instead keeps them far away. And the fact that you've been hurt before doesn't justify hurting others, even if it sometimes explains it. But hurting others because you've hurt before doesn't make you evil. Hurting others doesn't make you evil at all—people hurt each other all the time, through accident or carelessness, in moments of selfishness that they regret later, in impossible situations where someone is inevitably going to be hurt, and you just have to decide who, or how much.

The idea that you can render someone truly evil—not careless or selfish or deeply afraid, not inclined to do bad things because the consequences are unbearable, or because they don't know better, but evil—that if you just hurt someone enough, they will come to find joy in hurting others—I'm letting this sentence run on and on because I just don't have words for how bad that is.

Sometimes, you are a Good Guy, and you are in a Bad Situation. Sometimes it's kill or be killed. Sometimes it's kill or let someone helpless and relying on you be killed. I get that. But in situations where we have villains who were tortured into evil, the good guys generally seem to be aware of the whole torture situation. And despite this knowledge, it never seems to occur to them that these characters are anything but pure evil. That they may be acting under duress, or that they may have been so hurt by the torture that they don't understand the full weight of the atrocities they're committing, beyond the fact that committing them will spare them from further pain.

Why are we not trying to spare them, in a fight where we can afford to? Why are we not taking them alive? Why are we not trying to help them?

Orcs don't need death; orcs need intensive therapy.

If you see someone working for the Bad Guy, and you know that that person was not previously evil, and that they've undergone significant torture, then your duty as a Good Guy is to knock them out and drag them to the hospital!

It just really concerns me that there are multiple fictional worlds where the second most evil creature you're likely to encounter is only evil at all because they were hurt by the most evil one.

Real life people, in the here and now, get tortured. Torture is a real thing that really happens.

How do you think it would feel? To go through something like that. To be rescued. To be safe at home again. It's over. It's over. Maybe it comes back in your dreams every night. Maybe it's never over, not really. But right now you're safe on your couch, and you turn on the TV.

And you see someone there who's been through what you've been through. But they don't get to go home. They don't get to recover. They get to be irredeemably evil. The thing that happened to you happens to them, and it turns them into a monster.

How would that feel?

I read somewhere that part of the reason the Silmarillion wasn't released in Tolkien's lifetime was that he wasn't satisfied with the origin story he'd given the orcs. I hope that's true. I mean, he's Catholic! The theological implications there...

If evil is created by pain, does that not imply that each small hurt we suffer makes us somehow worse? That those who have endured the most are worth the least?

(That absolutely does not hold up, theologically speaking—did Christ not suffer? And Job? Moses? David? Joseph? Peter? Paul?)

Anyway. No one is fundamentally, irredeemably evil, and if they are, it’s not because they’ve suffered. Get Orcs Therapy.