Read Your Source Material

 Not to, like, gatekeep fairy tale retellings, but how many authors who've retold Beauty and the Beast do you think have actually read Beauty and the Beast? This is a story that's been around for 280 years, and I have never read a retelling that was not very clearly influenced by variants that have only existed for the last 70 years. That's a quarter of the history of this story.

I've read so many BATB retellings, and so many of them are so, so good. I'm not complaining about any of these specific books. Just, like, the trend in retellings, and the fact that it's apparently normal not to even read the source material before writing an entire book about it. It's just...weird. I mean, it's not just me, right? That's weird.

There's dozens if not hundreds of variants of Cinderella, and I wouldn't expect someone to read every single one of them. But Beauty and the Beast isn't a folktale. It has a clear origin point. I wouldn't expect a reteller to read every version of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, or even necessarily to track down and read the earliest documented version. But I would expect you to read The Little Mermaid, or The Wizard of Oz. Not read a picture book based on The Little Mermaid, or watch the MGM movie. Read the books. Because those aren't just fairy tales, they're also books that have authors.

I think, because it was written so long ago, pre-copyright laws, and because it became so popular, people have largely forgotten that Beauty and the Beast is also a book that has an author.

The source material is right there. Why wouldn't you read it? And it's not just Villeneuve; as I read more and more retellings that are clearly influenced by the Shirley Temple version, I'm starting to doubt that all of these authors have even read Beaumont or Lang.

You are welcome to tell your version of Beauty and the Beast exactly the way you want to, obviously, regardless of how it relates to any other versions. But why wouldn't you want to read the original first, and at least see if it has any ideas to offer? If you don't want to bother tracking it down, I have already tracked it down for you, and it’s here. And if you don’t want to take the time to read something so much longer than the average fairy tale, even reading something like the detailed summary on Wikipedia is useful.

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Sleeping Beauties

 As is the case with most fairy tales, there are several versions of Sleeping Beauty from several different regions. Today we're going to focus on four of them—the story of Troylus and Zellandine from Perceforest (recorded circa 1340, French), Basile's "Sun, Moon, and Talia" (recorded circa 1635. Italian), Perrault's "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" (recorded 1697, French again), and the Grimm's "Little Briar Rose" (recorded 1812, German).

Look, we're here because I was mad about the accusation that classic fairy tale heroines are passive losers. And I'm specifically mad about Rapunzel and Cinderella. But the thing about Sleeping Beauty is that she kind of is a passive loser.

Okay, no. We're not going to call the traumatized teenager a loser. But she is passive!

The thing is, no one else is that active either, except for the villains, in the versions that have villains.

Sleeping Beauty isn't a romance. Technically the pre-Basile version we’re going to briefly touch on is, but the Basile version is a tragedy, though I don’t think Basile actually realizes that. Later versions removed all of the elements that made it tragic, but they didn't really add much in to replace it. So what we get is a story where nothing really happens beyond certain people showing up in certain places at certain times.

Which is fine. I like Sleeping Beauty. There's not a lot of action, or romance. There's not a lot of anything. But it's magical and fun and there's nothing wrong with it. Plus Tchaikovsky wrote some great music for it.

Anyway. Let's break down our versions, from oldest to newest.

Quick pre-Basile rundown, first. Enchanted sleep is a common issue in folk stories, enough so that it features in two of the five to ten best-known fairy tales of our time. But this particular enchanted sleep seems to be a clear inspiration for Sun, Moon, and Talia, so it's worth noting.

Perceforest is a French chivalric romance. The author is anonymous, and it consists of eight volumes and over a million words. I have only read the pieces relevant to Sleeping Beauty, about twenty pages. Zelladine is a young woman who is cursed at birth by the goddess Themis to prick her finger on a piece of flax and fall into an enchanted sleep, to be woken only when the splinter is sucked out. The goddess Venus promises to look after Zelladine and arrange for the sucking.

The sleeping maiden is locked in a tower, where she is eventually found by her boyfriend, a man with whom she has already exchanged rings. He is pretty much forced by Venus to sleep with her; she tries to convince him to do it, and he refuses, so she enchants and compels him. He then has to leave, but swaps their rings back as a sign, or promise, or something.

Nine months later, still asleep, she gives birth to a baby who sucks the splinter out of her finger, so thanks, Venus, for the most convoluted solution possible. Eventually Troylus and Zelladine are reunited and live happily ever after.

So, like, this is messed up. But also it was orchestrated by the gods, Troylus had no more choice in what happened than Zelladine, and they do love each other and are able to move past it.

Now on to Basile, who removes all the elements of this story that make it vaguely okay-ish.

Talia, our sleeping beauty, falls asleep in the same way, minus the specific details of being cursed by a goddess. Some time later, a married king stumbles upon her in an abandoned manor, rapes her, then goes home and forgets all about it. Nine months later she gives birth to twins, one of whom sucks out the splinter and wakens her.

The king remembers her, goes back, finds her awake, and tells her what happened, at which time, bafflingly, “their friendship was knitted with tighter bonds.” He spends a lot of time sneaking out to visit her, until his wife gets suspicious, gets the story out of his servant, and summons them to the palace. She asks the cook to kill the children and serve them to the king for dinner, but he hides them and cooks lamb instead. The queen then tries to throw Talia into a fire, despite her attempts to explain about the rape, but the king gets there in time to stop it, throws his wife in instead, gets the kids back from the cook, marries Talia, and lives happily ever after.

Perrault. A princess is cursed to prick her finger on a spindle and die. Another fairy changes the curse to a hundred year nap, until a king’s son comes to waken her.

Note: there is no longer a splinter. The curse is now on a time limit instead.

When the princess falls asleep, the “good” fairy puts all the rest of the palace to sleep as well, except for the king and queen, who go off to another palace they can rule from instead. Which, like—I guess at least she didn’t leave the kingdom without any leadership, but the princess is going to wake up long after her parents have died, and those other sleeping people in the palace might very well have had families who weren’t in the palace at the time.

The fairy grows a thornbush around the palace to protect the sleepers. A hundred years pass. A prince hears the story of a sleeping princess and decides to investigate. The thorns pull back to clear a path for him, and she wakes up, the hundred years having passed, just as he comes upon her. He does literally nothing. He just happens to be present at the exact moment the hundred years are up.

They get married and have two kids, but she just…stays there? He keeps coming and going from his own kingdom to visit her. Which seems convoluted and unnecessary. Eventually his father dies, he becomes king, and he brings his wife and kids home. He then goes to war, leaving them in the care of his mother, who happens to be an ogre. She wants to kill and eat them, the cook switches them out and hides them. Eventually the king comes home, the family is reunited, and the evil mother-in-law is cooked in her own pot.

Grimms. A princess is cursed to prick her finger and die. Another fairy changes the curse to a hundred year sleep, no mention of a prince. The girl pricks her finger, the entire palace falls asleep, and an enchanted thorn bush grows around it.

A hundred years later a prince comes looking for the sleeping maiden he’s heard about, and the thorns, which have killed many other adventurers, clear a path for him. He finds the sleeping princess, and kisses her—just a kiss, no funny business here—and she wakes up. Based on the terms of the spell, it seems reasonable to conclude that he happened to kiss her just as the hundred years passed, and not that his kiss woke her. They get married and live happily ever after.

So. It looks like what we have here is a chivalric romance that was adapted to give the male lead more agency, which accidently turned him into the villain, and then the only way the next couple writers could think of to clean up that mess was to remove everyone’s agency entirely and make everything a matter of circumstance.

In conclusion: later versions of Sleeping Beauty feature very passive male and female protagonists. However, I will happily take these over the version where a young woman is raped, groomed by, and married to an awful, awful man. Also, Venus sucks.

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Beauty and the Beast: Reasons for Curses, Changing Trends: Part II

 Where we left off last week, the earliest example of our current version of the curse was Robin McKinley’s Beauty, and for a long time, I couldn’t find anything else.

Did Robin McKinley singlehandedly change the story? Or, I guess, change it with the aid of Disney, taking the idea and running with it?

The late 1970s seems like much too late for a something that’s such a fundamental part of our understanding of the story now. And Robin McKinley’s mention of the Beast being rightfully punished is so casual—it doesn’t feel like she’s introducing an exciting new variation to a classic story. It doesn’t have enough importance to the overall story to make sense as a new element.

I found one other variant with a good fairy/bad prince—the picture book Beauty and the Beast, with text by Marianne Meyer and art by Mercer Meyer. This was originally published in the same year as Beauty—1978. It remains an extremely popular version even today, still in print, still spotted in bookstores. It’s possible that this was at least a significant influence on the current pop culture version of the story.

But Meyer's book came out 2 months before McKinley's—there's no way they influenced each other.  McKinley's would have been completely finished long before she had access to Meyer's. Which means there must have been another, earlier source than influenced them both, unless they both came up with the same change independently, which seems unlikely. The odds of two independent writers making the same change to the same well-known story in the same year, with no outside influences are pretty low.

It took me several more weeks to find any promising potential sources. And when I did, it was on Wikipedia. But don’t worry, I only started there. The primary sources have been located, and the accuracy of the Wikipedia article has been confirmed.

Henri Pourrat published over 1000 French fairy tales in the 1940s and 1950s, which were translated into English in the 1950s. Which means his works could easily have been available to and influential for a young McKinley and a young Meyer, twenty years before they wrote their books.

Pourrat’s version is called Belle-Rose, or The Lovely Rose, depending on the translation. It doesn’t deviate enough from the standard Beauty and the Beast to warrant its own post, so I’m just gonna highlight some key differences. The mother is alive. The beast is described as having a muzzle like a mastiff, paws like a lizard, and a body and tail like a salamander, with skin as wrinkled as a turkey’s neck and as slimy as a frog’s. So, like, this dude is gross. Spell is broken when the daughter of a poor man touches him without being asked and without shuddering.

And the important part: the casting of the spell. As the Beast puts it, “All I could think of was revelry and battles; nothing did I know of pity and charity. Beggars disgusted me, with their rags and their sores. One day, when I mocked at a poor man who asked for bread at the door, I beheld myself changed into a Beast.” (translated by Mary Mian).

So. Here we have not just a very clear bad prince, but one whose curse will look very familiar to anyone who’s seen the Disney movie. Even if this didn’t influence McKinley and Meyer, I very much suspect it influenced Disney.

After I found this story, I was ready to give up. Nothing else had panned out. But there was one version of Beauty and the Beast I wasn't able to access.

Shirley Temple had a fairy tale TV show - Shirley Temple's Storybook - which ran from 1958-1961. The first episode featured a version of Beauty and the Beast starring Charlton Heston. This may or may not have once been released on VHS, but if so I can’t find it. It was never released on DVD. It doesn’t seem to be available online. I can’t find a script or detailed summary.

A book associated with the first season of the series came out in 1958. For a while it looked like I wasn't going to be able to access that, either. It was difficult to find a library willing to send it to me. I was ready to give up on the whole thing and just assume Shirley Temple's version wasn't noteworthy. But I just got the book today. And this is what it says about the spell:

"A magician cast a spell over me and condemned me to remain in that form...Because I was proud and thoughtless, vain and selfish, he made me look as I really was."

If the book features a good fairy and bad Beast, the TV show it's based on almost certainly does as well.

Things get a little weird when we try to work out who actually made the change; Shirley Temple wasn't writing her own scripts. The book attributes the story to Andrew Lang, but this is not Andrew Lang's version. I read Lang's version from multiple sources just to make sure there wasn't a fluke; Andrew Lang absolutely did not write the Shirley Temple version.

The IMBD page for the TV episode lists the writers as Lang, Beaumont, and Joseph Schrank. This element of the story certainly didn't come from Lang or Beaumont, so it looks like we can probably trace this whole thing back to Joseph Schrank.

Shirley Temple's Storybook is a much more likely source of the shift than Belle Rose, although I do still suspect it influenced Disney somewhat. I'm so glad I kept investigating the Shirley Temple thing. This was a very popular show at the time, and the book is a picture book published by Random House, with Shirley Temple's name on the cover, which means it was likely much more popular and more widely available than the Pourrat translation. This version was likely watched and read by children, was likely the first exposure to the story for many, which means it would easily be accepted and remembered as How The Story Was Supposed To Be. Robin McKinley would have been six when this came out. Mayer would have been 13.

So. If you've ever wondered, like me, why everyone keeps vilifying our completely innocent Beast, you can blame Shirley Temple. 

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Beauty and the Beast: Reasons for Curses, Changing Trends: Part I

 So—I’m sure this will come as a shock to all of you—I’ve been thinking about Beauty and the Beast.

Specifically, about the nature of the curse.

In the original novel, he’s being punished for not responding favorably to unwanted sexual advances. In modern pop culture, he’s being punished for just sort of generally being a jerk. So over the course of 280-ish years, we’ve flipflopped from good prince/bad fairy to bad prince/good fairy.

When, exactly, did this change take place?

Let’s break it down.

I started with two obvious ends of the timeline.

Villeneuve’s 1740 La Belle et la Bete: good prince/bad fairy

Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast: bad prince/good fairy

But it certainly didn’t start with Disney.

The first bad prince/good fairy version I could recall off the top of my head was Robin McKinley’s 1978 Beauty. Robin McKinley is awesome, and you should all read Beauty, but I doubt she single-handedly brought about this change.

I thought, briefly, maybe this has been here since nearly the beginning. Maybe when Beaumont altered and abridged the original novel in 1756, specifically to act as a moral tale for young girls, she thought “if you are naughty you become ugly” would be a good lesson.

Nope. She doesn’t go into details, but specifies the Beast was cursed by a wicked fairy.

So. Let’s look at some other Beauty and the Beast milestones.

In Andrew Lang’s 1889 Beauty and the Beast, in The Blue Fairy Book, we’re told by the Beast’s mother that Beauty has released him from a terrible enchantment, but no further details are provided. So that’s a wash. I was looking at Lang as a likely candidate for the shift, since the color fairy books were quite popular, and we already know he's not a super reliable source of information on fairy tales. He is the guy who claimed Prince Lindworm was Swedish, a claim which has absolutely no supporting evidence or basis in reality.

Moving on.

In Cocteau’s 1946 live action movie La Belle et la Bete, the Beast is cursed because his parents didn’t believe in spirits. Which I think we can count as good prince/bad fairy.

Does that mean that the shift happened sometime after 1946? The 1946 movie and the 1991 movie are the probably the biggest pop culture moments for Beauty and the Beast in the 19th century, and they use two different versions.

I need to go to the library. We’ll pick this back up after some research. In the meantime, please let me know if you remember any pre-1978 versions with a bad prince and good fairy!

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Hans My Hedgehog

 This is another story I could have sworn I already wrote about, but again, no evidence.

A man and a woman have no children. Their friends make fun of them for this, which means they have crappy friends, and one day the man announces his determination to have a child, even if it was a hedgehog.

It is unclear why he would suggest such a thing, or what made it actually happen, but shortly after, his wife gives birth to a baby whose top half was hedgehog, and whose bottom half was human.

They name him Hans, because all male characters in Grimm brothers stories are always named Hans.

When Hans is eight, he requests some bagpipes, which his father buys for him. He then requests that his rooster be shod, so that he can ride away on it and never come back.

Hans’ parents do not enjoy having a strange hedgehog son, and are glad to be rid of him, even though he is a small child and should not be alone in the world. And when I say he is a small child, I mean both that he is only eight years old, and that he is able to ride a chicken like a horse. He may have half a human body, but apparently it is not human sized. He should make friends with Thumbelina.

Also. Not clear on why the rooster needs to be shod. I don’t really see the benefit of horseshoes for that type of foot.

Anyway. Hans, his bagpipes, and his rooster set off into the woods, along with some pigs and donkeys. Over the years, these pigs and donkeys grow into a large herd, and Hans sits in a tree with his rooster, watching over them and playing his bagpipes.

A king becomes lost in the forest, and asks Hans for help getting home. Hans agrees on the condition that he be given the first thing that greets the king when he gets there. The king agrees, even offering to put it in writing—his reasoning for this is that surely the hedgehog man can’t read, which is a strange assumption to make when you already know the hedgehog man can talk and play the bagpipes.

However, it turns out he was correct about the reading, because the king just writes whatever he feels like, and Hans doesn’t catch it.

I’m sure it will come as a surprise to no one that the king is immediately greeted by his daughter.

However. A second king gets lost in the forest, and makes the same deal with Hans, and also is greeted by his daughter. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t think to draw up a fake contract. He actually does sign away his daughter.

Hans has been too busy with his pigs and donkeys to collect his princesses so far. But now he goes back to his father, has all the pigs slaughtered, takes his earnings from the butcher, has his rooster re-shod, and is off again. He promises his father he’ll never come back—a promise he's already broken once by coming back this time, but whatever. I support breaking promises to people who abandon their eight ear olds.

He goes to claim his first princess. When the king’s men see him coming they open fire, per the king’s instructions, but Hans on his rooster flies over them to collect the princess. Apparently it doesn’t matter that the contract was fake, because the king lets Hans take her.

However, Hans is mad that the king tried to cheat him, and that the princess doesn’t want him. He sticks her all over with his quills in retaliation, and sends her back home.

At the second kingdom, Hans is welcomed in, and although she’s a little freaked out by his appearance, the princess is determined to keep her father’s promise, and marries him.

On his wedding night, Hans removes his hedgehog skin, revealing himself to be an ordinary young man beneath it—and presumably a young man of ordinary size. This raises some logistical questions which will sadly never be addressed.

He has the skin thrown into a fire. This does result in his body, despite being no longer attached to the skin, being burned badly, but the burns are treated, and he is forever after an ordinary young man.

Also, he reunites with his dad again and invites him to live in the palace. No mention of mom. Hans and his princess live happily ever after.

I have. So many questions.

Why was he born half hedgehog? Could he have taken off this skin at any time? Had he ever taken it off before? How did he know it was removable? How did he know burning it would free him? How was an entire man’s body contained in the skin of a creature small enough to ride a rooster like a horse? How did a rooster survive for so many years? Why did the rooster need to be shod? Why were Hans’ parents so awful? Why did he wait so long to do this? Was he just, like, fine with being a hedgehog man until he met a girl he didn’t want to stab with his quills?

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Bearskin

 This is a weird one. It’s kind of Beauty and the Beast vibes, but technically the dude isn't under a spell? Also there’s a deal with the devil.

We start with a young soldier, who has nothing to do and nowhere to go when the war is over. He asks his brothers for help, but they refuse, so he sets off into the woods with nothing but his gun and the clothes on his back.

There he meets a strange man with a green jacket and horse hooves for feet.

This man offers him as much money and property as he can possibly desire, as long as he proves himself brave—which he immediately does by shooting a bear that runs out to attack him—and promises not to wash himself, comb his hair, cut his nails, or say the Lord’s prayer for the next seven years. He must also wear a jacket and cloak the man gives him for this time.

Our soldier is a sensible young man, who realizes he’s speaking with the devil, and so he agrees to these conditions as long as they won’t cost him his salvation. The devil says that if the soldier dies during the seven years, he’ll take his soul, but if he lives, his soul remains his own, and he will be rich and free for the rest of his life.

He agrees.

The devil gives the soldier his green jacket, which contains bottomless pockets of money. Then he skins the bear, and gives the soldier the bearskin as a cloak. He says the soldier should sleep on the bearskin, and not use any other bed.

From this point on, we’ll be calling our soldier Bearskin, because that’s what the story calls him.

The first year or so goes pretty well, but as time passes, he gets to be seriously gross. With his long, long fingernails (you’d think they’d break, eventually), his nasty, matted hair and beard, and his unwashed skin, he looks like a monster. But he’s filthy rich, so there’s that.

In his fourth year as Bearskin, he meets a crying man at an inn, who explains, when asked, that he is extremely broke, likely bound for prison since he can’t pay for his room at the inn, and has three daughters to care for.

Bearskin is a cool dude, so he gives the man a whole bunch of money. The man is overjoyed, and invites Bearskin home to meet his daughters, and marry one of them.

The older two daughters are disgusted by him, but the youngest agrees to marry him, reasoning that he must be a good man to have helped them, even if he looks gross.

Bearskin takes a ring off his finger, breaks it in half, writes his name inside one half, and writes her name in the other. And I have many questions about the logistics, here. What is this ring made of?

He gives his bride-to-be the half with his name, and keeps the other. He explains that he must wander for three more years, and if he doesn’t come back in that time she is free, but if he does come back they’ll be married.

The older sisters are really mean about it, but the youngest keeps her promise and waits for her nasty future husband.

Bearskin, in the meantime, travels the world and uses his bottomless pockets to help people in need. When the seven years are up, he returns to the place where he met the devil.

The devil isn't happy to find him still alive, which, like, dude. Take some initiative. There’s no evidence you’ve tried to kill him. We’ve got a young, healthy man who’s proven himself to be a brave and dangerous soldier; did you really think he was just going to keel over all on his own, and the soul would be yours?

Maybe he thought the bad hygiene would get him. It’s gotta put you more at risk for disease.

He removes the bearskin, bathes, shaves, brushes his hair, and cuts his nails. He returns to his fiancée’s home, where no one recognizes him.

He reveals himself. He kisses the youngest daughter. Her sisters are so upset by this turn of events that one drowns herself and the other hangs herself, which seem like major overreactions. The devil takes their souls, and therefore feels he came out pretty well in this deal, after all.

Bearskin and the youngest daughter live happily ever after.

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The Mother of the Beast

 I just want to take a moment today to go over yet another horrifying, heartbreaking element of the Beast’s suffering in the original Beauty and the Beast. I recently read the translation in the Gutenberg book I’ve linked here, to confirm it was legit before sharing, and I noticed a detail that I’d missed on my previous readings.

The Beast’s mother—his bio mother, not his creepy foster mom who wanted to marry him—was present when he was cursed. The fairy was attempting to ask her for her son’s hand in marriage, and she and her son both said no.

A quote from the fairy, to the queen: “I warn you that if you acknowledge to anyone that this monster is your son, he shall never recover his natural shape.”

Can you even imagine? You trusted this woman to take care of your son while you were at war. You love your child so much, and you’ve been separated from him for years, doing your duty as queen, protecting your subjects. You miss him. You miss him so much. And this is the woman you trusted to raise him.

She makes this outrageous suggestion, and you realize that you should never have trusted her, that she’s been grooming your son for who knows how long, and the only good thing about this situation is that at least she’s not very good at grooming, because your son clearly doesn’t like the idea any more than you do.

So you say no, because what else could you possibly say, and then she turns your baby into a monster, and then she forces you to sever ties with him if there’s to be any hope of the spell ever breaking.

I often go years at a time between rereading things like this, and this detail had completely slipped my memory, and I have spent all this time thinking, “What is wrong with this poor Beast’s mother? We know she’s alive, because she shows up at the end; why wasn’t she here earlier? Why wasn’t she here the whole time?”

Well, it turns out there’s nothing wrong with her, and she wasn’t here because the fairy was very thorough with the curse.

All this time with an evil fairy, separated from his mother, and the Beast gets her back so briefly before the fairy separates them again, and he’s all alone, all alone for so long.

And the way the fairy phrases things, it sounds like her primary concern isn't depriving the Beast of companionship from the mother figure who hasn’t just propositioned and then cursed him, so much as she’s worried the spell will break too easily if people know there’s a spell, which of course they would if the queen was like, “Hey, everyone, this is my kid, he’s a monster now.”

But the fact that the fairy is just thinking about the logistics of the spell, and not about the Beast’s emotional state—it’s almost worse, somehow? Like, deliberately causing more emotional distress to a person, when your whole goal in life right now is to cause him emotional distress, that’s one thing. But you have raised this guy from childhood, and you don’t even think about how hard this is going to be? Like, hurting someone on purpose is terrible—and she is very much also doing that—but so is spending several years with someone and not even thinking about how this is going to hurt. If she’d thought about the separation from his mom hurting him, she would totally also have done it for that reason. But she didn’t think about it.

So now our guy has been propositioned by the woman who raised him. He’s been very briefly reunited with his mother. (And also very briefly fought in a war, that’s a thing that happened, too.) He’s been turned into a monster, he’s been trapped inside his own mind by the curse clause “I command thee to appear as stupid as thou art horrible.” And now he's been separated from his mom.

I was thinking, well, if we get to the point, several years down the line, where it’s becoming clear that the spell isn't going to break, maybe we could just accept the consequences of breaking the fairy’s rules. Like, the Beast could go home, and the queen could tell everyone what happened. And then the spell wouldn’t break, but he can be home, and everyone will know who he really is, and can treat him accordingly.

But then there’s the ‘stupid as thou art horrible’ clause. If the queen acknowledges him and renders the curse unbreakable, he will forever be trapped inside his own head, unable to properly express himself because he has to appear significantly less intelligent than he is. This isn't just physical. Which means we can’t afford to give up on the remote possibility of the spell someday breaking.

Also, as far as I can tell he’s the only kid, the queen’s only heir. Even if the people will accept being ruled by a monster, he won’t be able to utilize his skillset to rule effectively until the spell, with that stupid clause, is broken. So even if they didn’t have to be separated for the Beast’s sake, they would have to be separated for the kingdom’s sake.

This just makes me so sad. She didn’t want to abandon her son. Abandoning him was the only thing she could do, if she wanted him to have any chance of breaking his spell. If she’d kept him close, if she let people figure it out, he’d never be free. So she set him up in the property that reminded her of her deceased husband, the estate she wanted to retire to when she was finally done with her war, and she left him. Because she had to.

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The Grateful Beasts

 This is a Hungarian fairy tale, coming to us today through Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book.

Once a poor family sent their three sons out to seek their fortunes. Each boy was given a loaf of bread on departure.

As I’m sure will surprise no one, given how fairy tales in general work, the youngest son was much kinder and more handsome than the others, and his brothers hated him for it. His name was Ferko.

The three brothers travelled together for a while, until Ferko fell asleep. At which time the others came up with an absolutely insane plan to torture him.

Step one: eat his loaf of bread.

Step two: convince him that he ate his own loaf of bread in his sleep.

Step three: wait for him to get really, really hungry.

Step four: offer to share their bread, but only if he allows them to break his legs and put out his eyes.

Step five: profit???

After several days of hunger Ferko, for a few small bites of bread, gives up both eyes and both legs.

Dude, what?

Apparently, according to Wikipedia, this is a thing that just happens sometimes, in this story type, but I’ve read a lot of stories and this is the first time I’ve encountered it.

I just—I just—

Ferko. Honey. No. I know you’re hungry, but you gotta think long-term here.

You’ve got two loaves of bread between the three of you, and nothing else to your names. Your brothers clearly take delight in inflicted upon you grievous injuries. Obviously this bread is not going to last for any significant period of time, and then what’s going to happen? Are you expecting your evil brothers to cart you around after maiming you? Clearly they will leave you to die.

The correct course of action in this situation would be to immediately separate from your brothers and find another food source.

But no, Ferko decides to let them torture him for a couple bites of probably-stale bread. And then, shockingly, they abandon him.

Lying on the forest floor, blind, legs both broken, Ferko conveniently overhears some birds talking about a nearby magic lake that can heal any injury or illness. So he drags himself there, and his legs and eyes are restored.

He fills a bottle with magic water, and makes his way through the forest, healing a variety of injured animals as he goes.

Eventually he makes his way to a palace, where his brothers now work. They’re terrified he’ll tell the king how evil they are, so they convince the king Ferko is an evil magician who wants to kidnap the princess. It is not at all clear how they convince the king of this. However, he decides the best way to resolve the situation is to set three impossible tasks; if Ferko fails the tasks, he’ll be put to death, and if he succeeds he’ll be exiled.

Dude. This is not at all an appropriate solution to this problem. If he’s not a magician, he won’t be able to complete the tasks. If he’s not a magician, the accusation against him isn't true. So he’s going to be put to death for being innocent? And if he proves by completing the tasks that he is indeed a powerful magician, and therefore a potential threat, you’re just going to…let him go. Right. great plan, buddy. What could go wrong?

With the assistance of his magically-healed animal friends, Ferko succeeds in the first two tasks. The princess watches and falls madly in love. The king and Ferko’s brothers watch and get angrier and angrier.

The final task is to gather up all the wolves in the kingdom, because the king and the brothers are idiots. We’ve pissed off a powerful sorcerer? Clearly the next step in eliminating him is to encourage him to summon an army of dangerous animals.

All the wolves are gathered. All the wolves are set on the king and the brothers. The king begs Ferko to stop them. He offers Ferko half his kingdom. He offers Ferko his whole kingdom. He offers Ferko his daughter’s hand in marriage.

The wolves eat the king and the brothers. Ferko marries the princess, becomes the new king, and lives happily ever after.

Between the insanity of letting yourself be horribly injured for a slice of bread, and the insanity of planning to kill someone only if he proves himself not to be a threat to you—

This story is just full of stupid, stupid people. I love it!

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Rapunzel Saves Herself

 Okay, I'm sorry, I'm still not over this. I can’t even remember which one of those “brave girl” books did this. And whichever one it was, I'm sure it’s a great book. However. The back cover. All I remember is the back cover. The back cover is talking about all these strong, brave, action-heroines, who are so much better than losers like Rapunzel, who just sat in her tower waiting to be rescued.

It did say the same kinds of things about some other well-known fairy tale heroines, but it's Rapunzel that's really bothering me. (The topic of Cinderella as survivor of abuse has been thoroughly discussed by other authors. Snow White doesn't do much, but Snow White is a small child. Sleeping Beauty doesn't do much, but, like—there's a lot to say about Sleeping Beauty, okay? Maybe we'll come back to that.)

But Rapunzel. Rapunzel rocks, guys. She is not at any point waiting around to be rescued.

This girl has been locked in a tower by her mother figure for a long time. At least since she was twelve, but depending on the version, possibly as long as her entire life. Since being put in the tower, she hasn't interacted with anyone but her witch mother. If she was living on the ground as a small child, it's likely that even then she had very limited exposure to any other people.

My point is, for Rapunzel, living in a tower is normal. She is not waiting around to be rescued; there is never any indication that she feels she needs rescuing. This is her home. Who knows what Mother Gothel—the only other person in her life—has told her about this. Maybe she thinks all young women live in towers. Maybe she thinks the ground is toxic, and Gothel can only safely walk it because of her magic powers.

We don't know how large this tower is. We don't know how much time Mother Gothel spends in the tower with her each day. We don't know what items Rapunzel has in the tower to entertain herself. Maybe she's bored and lonely, but maybe she's not. Or maybe she is, but doesn't recognize her general dissatisfaction with life as boredom or loneliness, because she's never known anything else, and boredom and loneliness are just a normal part of her life.

Could she benefit from a rescue? Yes. Is she aware of that? Not as far as we know.

The prince comes. The prince—I need this to be very, very clear—the prince does not, at any point, make any attempt to rescue Rapunzel. No rescue occurs. No one ever rescues Rapunzel.

The prince finds an isolated and naive young woman locked in a tower. And he takes advantage.

He doesn't offer to help her. He does get her pregnant.

This is, as far as we know, the first man Rapunzel has ever met. She clearly doesn't know what pregnancy is, so I think we can safely conclude that Mother Gothel was not providing comprehensive sex education. I'm not going to go into this aspect of the story too deeply; I have previously done an entire post about this in my Sexual Abuse in the Folk Tradition series. But the prince was not a savior. The prince was a selfish man taking advantage of a woman without the knowledge, resources, or experience to go against him. If she wasn't in the tower, she wouldn't be a convenient and consequence-free source of sex, so the prince is not motivated to get her out.

Rapunzel gets pregnant. Rapunzel doesn't know what this means beyond the fact that her size is changing. She asks her mother for larger clothes. Her mother deduces that she's pregnant, chops off her hair, and kicks her out of the tower.

She then tricks the prince into coming back, and throws him out the window into a bunch of brambles, which blind him. I feel he had this coming.

So. Rapunzel has exited the tower. No one has rescued her from the tower. She has been involuntarily expelled.

From there, a pregnant woman, who doesn't even know what pregnancy is, must learn for the first time, completely alone, how to navigate a world much larger and more complicated than her tower. She figures it out. She learns to interact with other people for the first time. She learns how to support herself, and then her two children. Money. Shelter. Food. All things she has to handle alone. She has to learn who she can and can't trust. What plants are and aren't safe to eat. Any local laws. Would a girl raised alone in a tower have any concept of something like theft? Or would she just pick up whatever she wanted, and get in trouble for it?

Rapunzel saves herself, not from the tower but from the aftermath. Mother Gothel abandons her to whatever fate might await her on the ground—starvation, being eaten by an animal, being taken and abused by another man like the prince or worse. And she survives, and she succeeds. By the end of the story she has a little house and two happy, healthy children.

Rapunzel saves the prince. And presumably lives happily ever after with him, which, frankly, I'm not a fan of. But the only time anything resembling a rescue occurs in this entire story is when she finds him, lost and alone and blind, and restores his eyesight with her magic tears, giving him the ability to find his way home again. (Which he does, taking her and the kids along.) No one saves Rapunzel. Rapunzel saves herself, and her children, and then saves her creepy ex, too. Rapunzel is absolutely the hero of this story, and she deserves better than to be remembered as a passive princess who sat around waiting for rescue.

Fairy Tale Heroines

 Last time I went through the folklore section at the bookstore—my favorite place to be—I noticed that there were, like, eight different books of fairy tales about 'brave girls.'

Which. Like. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad these books exist. 'Brave girls' are, conceptually, great. Fairy tale collections based on a theme (rather than the more common collections based on a region or collector) tend to include at least a couple more obscure stories, and are a great resource especially for non-European stories, which are a little harder to find. I have nothing against these specific stories or authors.

But based on the back cover blurbs, some of these authors/editors/whoever seem to think that they're bringing something new and exciting to the table. And this doesn't apply just to these books I just saw, several of which at least appear to be a series, which justifies the quantity of books on the topic. But books and internet posts periodically pop up announcing the brand new concept of "feminist fairy tales," all of which have been around for a hundred plus years.

"Look, we've got fairy tales with strong female characters—no one's ever done that before!"

Dude, six of you are doing it this year, and other people have been doing it for centuries.

Like, you went through a whole bunch of stories from a whole bunch of cultures, picked out your favorite heroines, and compiled them for us. That's great! But don't pretend you had to slog through a bunch of misogynistic crap to find these rare outliers. Some fairy tales are about boys, and some are about girls, which is only right and fair, but if any given story is about a girl, she'll usually be doing something worth telling a story about.

We've got girls who sacrifice themselves to save their families. Girls who go on epic quests to save the men they love. Girls who recognize that their parents are evil, and give up everything to help their victims escape. Girls who flee their dangerous homes and learn to support themselves. Girls who outsmart their serial killer husbands. Girls who risk being burned at the stake, being boiled alive, being eaten by monsters.

Sure, there's a handful of wimpy girls, among the better-known fairy tales. But less than people like to claim.

Cinderella didn't take a lot of initiative until someone else came to help. But she survived in an abusive environment for years, which is plenty hard, and who did help her? Other women, whether it's a godmother or the ghost of her mom.

Sleeping Beauty mostly sleeps. But it's not like anyone else is doing anything, either; the prince just wanders through a thorn bush and plants one on her. And that's in the later versions. Earlier on, she keeps two newborns alive alone in the woods for an unspecified period of time, and survives the machinations of a woman who wants her and the babies eaten. (Granted, she also marries and allegedly lives happily ever after with that woman's husband, who also raped her, but you can't win them all. I think it's pretty brave of her to keep going through all of that, to focus on protecting her children when she doesn't have the resources to escape their father.)

Rapunzel just hangs out in a tower all day. Except, when she gets thrown out of the tower, pregnant, she learns all on her own how to navigate an unfamiliar world, finds a way to support herself and the babies (why do all these princesses keep having twins?), and eventually saves the prince, who's just been wandering around, blind and lost, for months or years.

Snow White mostly sleeps, too. But I would like to remind you that in the most popular version of the story (Grimms), she is literally seven years old, so I feel like we can cut her some slack.

The little mermaid pines over a guy and then dies. Okay. The little mermaid also gives up everything she's ever known for a chance at a new life and an immortal soul, and when she fails, she's given an out, which she doesn't take because it involves killing the man she loves. Did the man deserve that? No. Was it brave of the mermaid to stick to her morals in the face of certain death? Yes.

The princess and the pea I'll give you. The princess from The Frog Prince, too. They didn't do anything particularly brave.

But there are so many stories about brave girls. There are probably at least as many stories about girls as there are about boys, if not more. And very few fairy tale girls, whether they're protagonists or love interests or background characters, can really be described as weak.

It depends, I suppose, on what you think makes someone strong or brave. Do a lot of girls in fairy tales fight dragons? No. Though to be fair, there aren't actually a lot of fairy tales with dragons in them. Gretel pushes the witch into the oven. The white bear's lassie crosses the world for him, then defeats the trolls with laundry, which may not be as exciting as a sword fight, but fight smarter, not harder, right? Gerda crosses the world and faces witches and robbers for a guy she doesn't even get along with, who everyone else has given up for dead. The girl in Fitcher's Bird outsmarts her serial killer husband, resurrects her dead sisters, and burns down his house, with him and all his evil friends inside. (Fitcher's Bird does appear in one of the collections I just saw.)

Girls fight witch mothers and ogre fathers. Girls keep their vows of silence in the face of certain death, because the alternative is to doom their brothers to lifetimes as birds. Girls marry serial killers on purpose, and spend years telling them bedtime stories, knowing their creativity is the only thing keeping not only them alive, but also the next girl, and the next, and the next. Girls stand up for the things they believe in and the people they love. Girls fight back. Girls outsmart the enemy. Girls survive.

 So many of the French salon stories were inspired by the real-life struggles their author faced; do you want to look a lady who spent years locked in a tower in the eyes and say, "hey, I think Rapunzel was a coward, actually"? In real life, bravery doesn't look like fighting dragons nearly as often as it looks like getting up and going on, day after day after day, no matter how hard it gets. And fairy tales have more to do with real life than people like to think, sometimes.

These stories were circulated orally for hundreds of years, and while there are definitely fantastic elements (they are fairy tales), they also reflect the real lives of their tellers—you can see this with the regional differences in common tale types. And while it's impossible to tell who made up a story in the first place, or what kind of people most often did the retelling, it is worth noting that when fairy tale collectors bother to mention where they heard something, they very often heard it from a woman.

You don't need to be the woman who brings fairy tales to the girls. We already have them. They've been for us all along.

Brave girls are great. Stories about brave girls are great. But don't throw away hundreds of years of history to pretend that brave girls are your exciting new idea, and don't tell all the little girls reading your books that the princess who stabbed a dragon one time is braver than the one who suffered every day, in all the mundane ways, to do the right thing.

(Also. Side note. The contents pages contained a lot of stories I've never heard of, so I may be getting them from the library soon. The contents also included lots of stories I have heard of, but am willing to believe many others haven't, especially with a target audience consisting mostly of children. But I specifically read the words, on one back cover, "Discover the story of Dorothy." Like, everyone has already discovered that story, right? Kids still know about The Wizard of Oz, right? Please tell me kids still know about The Wizard of Oz.)

(Also also. One blurb said the reason we don't know very many of the fairy tales with strong heroines is because the fairy tales were recorded by the misogynistic Victorians. Like, first of all, the Victorian era was a fairly late stage of fairy tale recording. We have the Italians in the 1600s, the French in the 1700s, and then the various Northern Europeans in the 1800s. Then Lang in the 1900s and Disney in the 1900s-2000s. And also, don't be acting like the 1800s dudes were doing some disservice to female characters. The Grimms eliminated so much rape from the folktales they worked on. While they're nowhere near as feminist as the earlier stories by female salon writers, the Victorian writers (Grimm, Andersen, Asbjornsen and Moe) definitely give their female characters more agency and less trauma than people like Perrault and Basile. I mean, look at Bluebeard (Perrault) versus Fitcher's Bird (Grimm). Don't be blaming the Victorian folklorists for this.)

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The Golden Crab

 The Golden Crab is, as I’m sure will surprise no one who’s spent any time here, another enchanted bridegroom story. It’s Greek, though I read it in The Yellow Fairy Book. (I’m currently reading it cover to cover, so expect a lot of Yellow Fairy stories for a while. The plan is to move on to the Arabian Nights next.)

Once there was a fisherman who caught a golden crab. He brought the rest of the day’s catch to the king, as was his habit, but kept the crab at home on a shelf in his cupboard. Eventually the crab revealed that he could speak. The fisherman and his wife began feeding him, and in return he began filling his empty plates with gold.

In time, the crab informed the fisherman that he would like to marry the local princess. The fisherman passed  this information to the king, who concluded, reasonably, that the talking, golden crab was likely an enchanted prince.

I love it when they’re genre-savvy. Unfortunately, it’s not gonna last.

The king assigns the crab a few impossible tasks, the crab pulls them off, and a wedding is held. After the wedding, the crab reveals privately to the princess that he is indeed an enchanted prince, crab by day, human by night.

Has he been turning into a human every night for however long he’s been living with the fisherman? How did he not notice that?

Also, he can turn into an eagle whenever he wants.

A year passes. The princess has a son. So, like, clearly something is going on here—humans and crabs cannot typically reproduce together.

The queen remains weirded out by this whole situation. Which, honestly, that’s fair. What sensible person wouldn’t be weirded out by her human daughter marrying and having children with a crustacean? But she talks to the king about it, and says they should see if maybe their daughter is interested in having a different husband.

Instead of saying, “honey, it’s fine, I’m pretty sure our son-in-law is an enchanted prince,” the king agrees with her, and throws a tournament to find a new husband for his daughter. Who is already married, has a son, and has specifically said that she does not want any husband other than her crab.

For some reason—presumably plot convenience—this is a nighttime tournament. The crab prince in his human form participates, disguised, but warns his wife not to tell anyone that she knows who he is.

We have another situation here like in The White Goat, where the real problem is Mom getting violent. When the princess—the already-married princess who has a child with her husband—fails to express interest in any of the suitors, the mom hits her, at which point she admits that her husband is out there, winning the tournament.

Mom responds to this by finding the crab shell and throwing it in the fire—which isn't totally unreasonable, since that’s the key to breaking some enchantment spells. But it doesn’t work. The crab prince never comes home from the tournament.

Following this, the princess falls ill. The only thing that makes her feel better is having stories told to her.

One day, an old man comes to the palace with the following story:

Once, while chasing after his dog, the man stumbled upon a hidden palace. While he was there, twelve eagles flew in, and all transformed into men. He listened to them all talking, and one mentioned his wife, and her cruel mother who burned his golden shell.

There’s no indication that this man is aware the princess was married to a golden crab; he just thinks this is an interesting story.

The princess gets the man to take her to the palace, and reunites with her husband. He has three months left on his enchantment, so she stays there with him until it’s over. Then they go home and live happily ever after.

So. First of all. The king. He hears about a talking, golden crab, and immediately concludes that he must be an enchanted prince. The crab then performs three impossible tasks in a display of incredible magical power. The crab then gives him a grandson. And somehow, after all that, the king thinks it’s a good idea to just set the crab’s wife up with someone else? Like, dude. You have enough information to know this is a bad idea. The human grandson supports your enchanted prince theory, and even if that theory was wrong, it’s been thoroughly proven that whatever else he might be, the crab is a powerful sorcerer. Why are you rocking the boat here?

Next. The queen. Why are you angry—like, really, violently angry—that your daughter is not cooperating with your attempts to convince her to cheat on her husband, the father of her child, and a known powerful sorcerer? Ma’am. Your daughter is being smart in this situation, and you are being remarkably stupid. The time to intervene in this relationship was BEFORE THEY HAD BEEN MARRIED FOR A YEAR. There is no way this will end well. You are so lucky this story didn’t end with your violent death.

And then we have the baby. Dad abandons him for unspecified curse-reasons. Mom abandons him for three months, which I guess isn't super long and she knows it’s temporary, but, like, does he know it’s temporary? Last time was saw him he was an infant—how much time has passed? How old is this kid now? Is he still a baby? Does he understand what’s happening? The princess did send the man who brought her back with a note for her parents, but I don’t trust these people to adequately explain the situation to a small child.

Finally. The crab prince. Exactly what is the nature of the curse he’s waiting out? The crab shell’s already been burned, so presumably he’s not turning into a crab anymore. And he told us earlier that the eagle thing was totally voluntary. But then the book says that when the three months are over he ceases to be an eagle? Did the crab curse transfer into an eagle curse in the absence of a crab shell? Who are these other eleven men who can transform into eagles? Are they cursed, too? Who’s going to rescue them?

Overall, I did very much enjoy this story, even if some characters made some stupid decisions, and some questions were left unanswered.

But I really want to know more about those eleven other eagle men.

 

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The Emperor's New Clothes

 Okay. Okay. So. The Emperor's New Clothes. Here's the thing about the Emperor's New Clothes.

If the clothes were real. If they were real. They would still be invisible to the unworthy. That is literally the whole point of them. So if the tailor was telling the truth, and if the Emperor was worthy, if the clothes were real and he saw them, there would still be other people who didn't.

To anyone of insufficient competence/wisdom/etc, the emperor is going to be perceived as naked.

And he knows this. This is the point.

What is this man thinking? Did he seriously look at this empty loom, and think, "Well, I'm not worthy, but no one can know that, and surely every single other person I might encounter will be worthy, and therefore no one will see me naked"?

Like, dude. Is your self esteem really so low that you think every single person in your empire is better than you?

Just, why. Why. Why would anyone ever deliberately choose to wear an outfit that is specifically designed to be invisible to a not-insignificant number of people?

Sir. Sir, please. Someone is going to see you naked. Someone is absolutely going to see you naked. The whole point of it is that someone is going to see you naked. And not, hopefully, someone like your wife. You want your wife to be worthy, right? The unworthy will see you naked. If they are not worthy to see your outfit, why should they be worthy to see your naked body? This does not make any sense. Think, sir. You must preserve your modesty from the unworthy!

Do not buy clothing that is invisible to anyone. Invisible clothing is never the right move. I do not care how big an ego boost it may be that you personally can see the clothing. Other people cannot. And if they can't see your clothes, they can see what you have underneath. Say no to invisible clothes!

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The Crow

 This story is—well. It’s really something. It’s Polish; I read it in Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book, but I did double check the origin through other sources, as Lang is not always accurate in his attributions.

It’s like if you started with a standard enchanted bridegroom story, and then just took out everything that made it make sense.

We start where we often do, with three beautiful princesses, the youngest of whom is the kindest. (Though we see no indication that the others aren’t also kind.) One day she comes across an injured crow, who tells her that he's an enchanted prince, and if she leaves everyone and everything she knows and loves to live in an abandoned castle with him, she can save him. There’s only one livable room in the castle, and it’s haunted, or demon-possessed, or something, and if she makes any noise when the monsters try to torture her all night, the crow’s suffering will double.

So naturally she goes with him.

Honey, why?

You have no evidence that he’s telling the truth. You have a loving, wealthy family; you’re not trying to get away from or provide for them. No one has threatened your father’s life. This is a Bad Move.

(In the enchanted palace, strange beings try to boil her alive in a giant cauldron.)

So, like, you know the thing you get in stories like Cupid and Psyche, where the heroine’s evil older sisters visit and try to screw everything up for her?

One of our girl’s sisters visits. She does not try to screw things up. Despite the fact that in this case I am begging someone to screw things up and get this poor girl out of this deeply concerning situation. She sleeps over for one night, and she screams, understandably, when the boiling starts. This of course causes the crow to suffer, so the princess sends her home.

She stays in this torture chamber for two years. Two. Years. Then the crow tells her he’s got one year left on his enchantment (it’s a seven year curse, the breaking of which doesn’t actually seem to be contingent on her presence in the castle), which means that she must go out into the world and become a maidservant. Apparently this (UNLIKE HER TIME IN THE TORTURE CASTLE) is necessary for him to become human again. Why? He doesn’t tell us.

I just. Like. This is—this is a standard step in the enchanted bridegroom plot. Girl goes into the world, works, and suffers. But usually there’s a reason for it. Just like there’s usually a reason for her going with the beast in the first place. Usually her sister visiting the palace would have led to her going out and suffering, but this story frames these two events as completely unrelated. The sister’s visit seems to have been toward the beginning of the two years.

Why is this happening? I want to know why this is happening.

So she spends a year working, and gets treated pretty badly throughout, until suddenly a handsome dude appears and claims to be the crow. They go back to the castle, which is no longer abandoned or haunted, and live happily together for a hundred years.

It doesn’t make sense. It’s like someone just looked at the outline of an enchanted bridegroom story, identified the key events, and somehow failed to realize that they’re supposed to be connected somehow.

Things don’t just happen. That’s not a story. There’s no reason for anything that happens. No stakes. No motivations. No explanations.

Why did the crow need someone to live in his palace and be tortured? Why did she agree? Why did the crow need her to be a maid for a year? Why did she agree? Why did her father the king not at any point interfere in this mess?

This is just…I don’t know what this. Girls, if a talking crow invites you back to his haunted castle, just say no.

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