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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