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.

VISIT PATREON.COM/KONGLINDORM FOR EARLY ACCESS TO POSTS.

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. 

VISIT PATREON.COM/KONGLINDORM FOR EARLY ACCESS TO POSTS.

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!

VISIT PATREON.COM/KONGLINDORM FOR EARLY ACCESS TO POSTS.

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?

VISIT PATREON.COM/KONGLINDORM FOR EARLY ACCESS TO POSTS.