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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