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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