The Goldener/The Wild Man/Lousehead

 So this whole story type is weird. Or at least, the categorization of it is. The variant I had read that made me want to make a post was “King Goldenlocks,” from Schonwerth. But I knew I’d read several other versions previously. And it has been incredibly difficult to find any of them. (I have the same issue tracking down specific Impossible Task stories. This is the problem with spending 30 years reading every fairy tale you can find, in 5 library systems and dozens of websites that no longer exist. Finding them a second time is also an impossible task.)

Eventually I wound up with Iron Hans, from the Grimms. Except that, despite having nearly identical plots, Iron Hans and King Goldenlocks are two entirely different tale types according to the Aarne-Thompsen index. Which has just made tracking down variants even more difficult. What interests me is the “Goldener” aspect, not the “Wild Man” aspect. In both Iron Hans and the Goldener story type, a young man gets a job in a palace and has to cover his beautiful, distinctive hair, then manages to marry a princess and save a kingdom. The Aarne-Thompsen classification of Iron Hans is, bafflingly, based on the wild man (Iron Hans), who helps the prince, not on anything about the prince himself. And multiple “Goldener” stories, though certainly not all, also include a wild man.

Anyway. Now that I’ve spent 2 paragraphs complaining. The story. I’m gonna go through King Goldenlocks, with some occasional side information from Iron Hans. If you know of any other variations on this story type, please share in the comments; so far I’ve tracked down Fat-Frumos with the Golden Hair from Romania. What I’m interested in particularly is the prince who covers his hair, and everyone thinks he has lice or some weird skin disease on his scalp. (I always think of this story as “Lousehead”—I’m not sure when or why I started doing that, since the only story I can find that’s actually called “Lousehead” is one from Schonwerth, which does feature the boy hiding his hair, but lacks most of the plot points this story type usually features.)

There a wild man in the woods. (In Iron Hans his name is Iron Hans. I suspect that this is because Hans is sort of the default name for the Grimms, but I’m choosing to believe that the frog prince’s buddy had some adventures between the open heart surgery and the spell break.)

The king has the wild man captured and locked in a cage in the garden. Now, the capturing and locking up was justified, because he was, like, killing people when they wandered into the woods. But displaying him like a zoo animal? Not cool. 

He eventually convinces the small, golden-haired prince to free him. In King Goldenlocks, the king then plans to execute his child for the crime of freeing the wild man, and some servants help him escape. In Iron Hans, after freeing him the prince begs Hans to bring him along, because he’s afraid he’ll get a beating if he stays, and Hans agrees.

In Iron Hans, there’s then a whole story arc where they live in the woods together, but then the prince disobeys instructions and plays in a golden stream. (Which turns his hair gold—like, gold-gold, not blonde-gold, and kind of makes the next bit make more sense?) Iron Hans sends him away.

He gets a job at a palace in a neighboring kingdom, either after leaving Hans or after the servants sneak him away. He wears a cap or kerchief to hide his (usually natural) golden hair, and this is a very important aspect of the story, because everyone thinks he’s hiding something gross under there, and looks down on him because of it.

Which. Like. I get that this is the heart of the story. The cap is his donkey skin. His hair is the glass slipper. But it makes no sense.

Firstly, this isn’t his kingdom. Secondly, everyone thinks he’s dead. Thirdly, it’s not like his hair is purple. Does he think everyone he meets is going to be like, “hey, that kid is blonde, he must be the dead prince of Other Kingdom”? Surely, there are other blondes around.

Of course, this is coming from Schonwerth, who is notable for his stories having undergone significantly less editing than most folktales have by the time we read them in 2024. (Which to be clear is not a criticism! This is the primary reason that I adore Schonwerth.)

At some point the prince—now working as a gardener—starts preparing bouquets for the youngest princess, each of which he ties off with a strand of his golden hair.

(Or she catches him with his hair down, but the little bouquet hint is more fun.)

Now we get into the detail that really makes King Goldenlocks stand out from other stories of this type. While the princess tends to fall madly in love with the prince/gardener as soon as she realizes he's blonde, generally they don’t actually get together until he’s proven himself to her father and his identity has been revealed, at the end of the story.

Here, the princesses (three of them) are all set to get married, and the youngest refuses to marry anyone but the gardener, so the king lets her. And then she goes to live with him in his little hut at the edge of the palace grounds. We don’t bring new son-in-law into the palace. We send youngest daughter to live in poverty. It’s unclear how much of the truth our gardener reveals to his new wife. It just doesn’t really come up in the story at all.

From this point we move on to the usual plot of this story type. The kingdom is in trouble. Only the lice-ridden garden can save it, not that anyone would believe that. There’s generally three incidents where he secretly saves the day, though the specifics vary from story to story.

In King Goldenlocks, the king—the gardener-prince’s father-in-law—falls ill, and can only be healed by apples from paradise. All three sons-in-law set out too find them. The gardener-prince meets the wild man he once rescued in the woods, gets directions, and finds the magic apples. He is then convinced to give these apples to the other two sons-in-law, but in exchange they have to get the mark of the gallows on their backs. Which seems like pretty obviously a bad idea that will have consequences at some point, but I guess these princes aren’t the brightest. They get credit for saving the king.

The same thing happens all over again not long after, except this time the cure is snake milk, and they get the mark of the rack.

(The weird thing about this version is that it seems like they just asked him if they could please have the apples and the milk? And he agreed? When everything is revealed at the end, these two princes will narrowly avoid being hung or put on the rack when King Goldenlocks begs for mercy. But, like, they didn’t do anything wrong as far as we’ve seen. They didn’t steal the apples from Goldenlocks, and if they told any elaborate lies about how they got them, it doesn’t come up in the story. Usually in stories like this, the other two princes steal the cure, and lie about it, and are rightfully punished when the truth comes out. They literally just asked him for the apples. He could have said no, instead of making it into this whole big thing.)

Our third incident is when the country goes to war. The other sons-in-law are rich and powerful and can call upon armies to help them. Our guy is, as far as anyone knows, just a gardener. In some variants of the story, he begs to be allowed to help too, and is given an old lame horse and rusty set of armor to ride to war in. In this version, his wife insists that he mustn’t go at all.

Either way, he goes to the wild man and gets some decent—even enchanted—equipment, and is the deciding factor in their side winning the war.

He’s injured in battle, and the king, who doesn’t recognize him in his armor, bandages his wound with his own kerchief, which he later recognizes binding a wound in the same spot on his gardener son-in-law.

At this point, everything comes out, and also our guy’s crappy bio-dad dies and he becomes king, and everyone lives happily ever after.

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The Clever Bride

 Today we’re going to talk about another Schonwerth story, this one from the smaller, illustrated collection White As Milk, Red As Blood instead of The Turnip Princess. It’s called “The Clever Bride.”

A young man and his mother live in a castle in the middle of a lake, having cut themselves off from the rest of the world in grief after the father/husband’s passing. After many years, the mother tries to  convince the son to take a wife, but he doesn’t want to marry.

At night, he looks out his open window to the lake, and imagines what his bride might be like.

He’s woken by a beautiful woman who spends the night with him. After that, a beautiful woman spends every night with him, though he’s not entirely sure it’s the same woman every time, since she only comes at night.

He decides it doesn’t matter. He’s in love.

His mother is still pressuring him to marry, and the mystery woman refuses to marry him.

Mom arranges a wedding. Bride lays down in the bed to find a water maiden there between her and her new husband, who drives her to the edge of the bed.

For the next year, our guy thinks he’s sleeping with the new bride, but actually he’s sleeping with the water maiden, until finally the bride dies of grief.

It is unclear what, exactly, she’s grieving about, or why this man is so bad at telling women apart, or why she didn’t just try to talk to him.

The same thing happens with ten more women. Which raises lots of questions. Such as: why do people keep agreeing to marry this man? What do he and his mother think is happening here? What does he think happened to that mystery girl? Is everyone in this story just profoundly stupid?

The twelfth bride consults a witch. The witch tells her not to enter the bedchamber until after the witching hour, not to enter the bed before her husband, and to keep the bedroom window closed. She also gives her a magic spell to say and some herbs to throw under the bed.

She does as the witch says. No one invades her marriage bed. A year passes, a son is born, and on the witch’s recommendation, the wife doesn’t let him out of her sight for twelve days. At his christening on the thirteenth day, everyone can hear little voices saying “I want that too,” but can’t see anyone speaking.

The wife has twelve children, and the same thing happens every time. After the twelfth child is christened, she demands to know who’s speaking.

Twelve children appear, pale and beautiful, transparent like water, with silken hair and bound feet. The priest immediately baptizes all of them, and each one falls dead after being baptized. Before the last one is baptized and dies, he explains that all of them are our guy’s children, each with a different water maiden. The children are neither human nor spirit, but with their baptism are released from this in-between state, into death. The twelve water maidens will be rewarded for loving the guy, with three hundred years of beauty and youth.

The end.

Okay. First of all. That priest. I feel like maybe, maybe we can give him a pass on the first two kids. But when two children die in front of you immediately after baptizing, that is a pattern, and it is time to put the baptizing on hold. The correct time to collect all of that information was before child number three, not before child number twelve.

If a child dies immediately after baptism, you need to sit down and think for a minute. Are your actions causing the deaths of children? Do these children absolutely need to be baptized right this second? Are there any alternative options? Should you maybe at least figure out who and where the parents are before you continue?

And our guy. He was sleeping with twelve different water maidens? He couldn’t tell them apart? Like, it said he wasn’t sure it was the same woman every time, but twelve? Seriously? How can you claim to love a woman and not actually realize she’s a full dozen women? That’s ridiculous.

How are these children still children? The youngest one would have been conceived sometime before their dad married his twelfth wife. Since his twelfth wife has now had twelve children of her own, the oldest water children, at least, cannot possibly qualify as children anymore.

Unless they don’t age at human rates, which is possible given their parentage. It’s unclear exactly how good a deal those three hundred years of youth and beauty are; maybe they already have a life span in the hundreds?

Or unless all twelve of them were conceived within a couple years or even months of each other, shortly before wife number twelve? I guess that’s entirely possible since they all have different mothers.

Why exactly are we rewarding the water women for any of this? I mean, I guess they didn’t do anything wrong, exactly. There was some tricking of the guy, but, like, he was stupid. I’m not prepared to hold them responsible for how utterly oblivious he was—he’s apparently shared his bed with a total of twenty four women, and couldn’t tell any of them apart. So not the villains of the story, but I don’t think they did anything worth rewarding.

The only innocents in this story are his twelfth wife and all twenty four of his children, half of whom just died.

I guess the other eleven wives didn’t do anything bad, either, but they were pretty stupid, too. It’s hard to feel bad for women who died of grief because they weren’t sleeping with their husband, while their husband was under the impression that he was sleeping with them, and all they had to do was have a conversation.

Everything about this story is so frustrating. I feel so bad for those twelve dead water kids.

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Th Turnip Princess

 So this story is from Schonwerth—it’s actually the title story for the first-ever Schonwerth collection published in English—and like most of Schonwerth, it’s wild.

(BTW, this story was published in the Guardian when the book was announced, so it’s online for free, but, like, don’t bother reading it. It’s not the same translation, and it’s basically nonsensical. I thought I could use that version for reference, to work on this post when I didn’t have my physical book on hand, but that didn’t work.)

We start with a prince. He’s wandering around in the woods, as princes tend to do. (Seriously, don’t they have any sort of royal responsibilities? Why are they always in the woods?) He sleeps in a cave, and when he wakes up he meets an old lady and her pet bear.

The old lady likes him. Wants to marry him. He’s not interested, which is fair. You meet a lot of old women, wandering in the woods, and asking for some food, or help carrying something, is reasonable. You say no, you get cursed for being rude. But asking for a wedding is a little much, and I support the prince’s right to refuse.

However.

He just, like, stays? He continues hanging out in this woman’s cave, with her pet bear, taking advantage of her hospitality. It says he’s unable to leave. There is no indication as to why. In fact, one paragraph later, he will leave, with no difficulty. So I kinda think he’s just sick of the princely wood-wandering, and taking advantage of this poor old lady.

One day the prince and the bear are chilling out in the cave without the old lady, and the bear just…starts talking? Did the prince know already that the bear could talk? I sure didn’t, but he seems to be taking it in stride.

The bear tells him that if he pulls a nail out of the wall, and then sets it under a turnip, the bear will be set free and the prince will get a beautiful wife.

He doesn’t even think about. Just immediately yanks out the nail and runs for the nearest turnip field. The bear turns into a man with a crown as soon as the nail is out, and the prince doesn’t even talk to him, doesn’t ask any follow-up questions or anything. Straight for the turnip field.

Where, out of nowhere, a monster appears!

No further details are provided. The monster has no relevance to the larger story. He runs into the prince, the prince drops the nail, he grabs the nearest object to steady himself, and that object happens to be a thorny bush.

He pricks himself on the thorns, and bleeds so much he passes out.

No wonder he was hiding out in the cave. This dude can’t handle a bush. What would have happened if he’d run into a bear that wasn’t domesticated? What would have happened if he’d run into a squirrel in a bad mood? Why did the king let him go out into the woods alone?

Anyway. He passes out. When he wakes up again, he’s not in the turnip field, and also he’s grown a beard. So, a reasonably long nap. (The next story in this Schonwerth collection also features a man who wakes up to find he's been out long enough to grow a beard. We might talk about that one later.)

This dude is not concerned that an extended period of time has passed and he's somehow been moved while unconscious. He doesn’t spend any time trying to figure out where he is or what’s happened. He just immediately starts searching for a turnip field.

Apparently, he really wants a beautiful wife.

Doesn’t have the nail anymore, though.

Eventually, he finds a single turnip. Since he doesn’t have the nail, he puts a branch under it instead. Which, somehow, sort of works. He goes to sleep on the ground next to the turnip, and when he wakes up it’s turned into a bowl/large nutshell, with a nail sitting inside of it. Further examination of the inside of the bowl/shell reveals the imprint of “the entire body of a wondrously beautiful maiden.”

How can he tell how beautiful she is from a dent she left in a nutshell? How large is this nutshell? Is it still roughly the size of a turnip? Is he not concerned about accidently stepping on and murdering his Thumbelina-esque future wife?

None of these questions will be answered.

The prince returns to the cave, and I would love to know when and how he figured out where he was and how to get back.

The cave is abandoned, and the nail is sitting on the ground.

Which makes no sense, because didn’t he already find the nail in the turnip bowl?

Anyway. He picks up the nail and puts it back in the wall. The old woman and the bear materialize out of thin air, and the prince starts yelling at the old lady, demanding to know what she did with the alleged beautiful maiden.

Dude. You have no reason to believe this lady has anything to do with any of this. You got the tip from a talking bear when she wasn’t even there. You didn’t follow the instructions, you lost the nail, and the only evidence you have that this beautiful maiden even exists is a weird indent in a turnip. You need to chill.

The woman says, “I’m right here. Why do you keep rejecting me?”

The prince ignores this. The bear tells him to pull the nail out of the wall. He pulls it out halfway.

The bear turns halfway into a man. The old lady turns halfway into a beautiful maiden.

He pulls it out the rest of the way. They transform the rest of the way. Apparently, the turnip step is no longer needed. They destroy the nail, the prince marries the girl, and they go back to his kingdom, where they live happily ever after.

I have. So many questions.

What is the connection between the bear and the woman? What happens to the former bear when the other two go home and get married? Why were they cursed in the first place? Who cursed them? Was the monster in the turnip field in any way connected to the others? Did whoever set the curse send the monster to prevent it breaking? Was the monster the one who set the curse? Why does this girl even want to marry the prince? He wasn’t very nice to her when she was cursed. Why are there two nails? Why is the turnip not involved in the spell breaking for round two? Why did the bear turn back into a bear, when he was human last time we saw him? If all it took to break the spell was taking a nail out of the wall, why didn’t the girl or the bear just do it themselves? How did the girl go from being an old lady, to being Thumbelina in the turnip, back to being an old lady?

None of these questions will ever be answered. But speculating is fun.

The Enchanted Trunk

(This month I am reposting relevant blogs in preparation for the release of my upcoming short story collection - every blog shared is about a fairy tale that inspired one of the stories.)

So we’ve got a king. This king is the father of a rambunctious little boy. He’s also the owner of a magic flying trunk. You see where this is going, right? Insert prince in trunk, insert trunk in tree halfway across the world.

Now for all his rambunctiousness, our prince is apparently quite a sensible little boy, because the first thing he does, upon finding himself alone in a strange land, is climb down from the tree and go to learn a trade. He becomes a cobbler, which is convenient as he can continue to replace the fantastic red shoes he arrived in as his feet get larger.

In this new kingdom, there is also a king. He has a daughter, and because he sucks, she gets to spend her life locked up in a tower, Rapunzel-style.

But our boy has a flying suitcase, so visiting is not a problem. At least not until the king notices his daughter is a lot happier than someone in complete solitude should be, and tars up the windowsill, Cinderella-style.

(Whoever gave this man a fairy tale collection should be shot.)

Naturally, one of the distinctive red shoes gets stuck on the sill and left behind. And proving once and for all that he is a despicable sneak, the king announces that he’s had a change of heart and is going to let his daughter marry whoever was clever enough to get up into her tower.

Then, when our shoemaker prince comes forward to claim his footwear, the king preps to have him and the princess burned at the stake.

(Have I mentioned that he sucks?)

Well, you can probably guess what happens next. Deus ex luggage! The trunk flies in, grabs the kids, and whisks them away, back to the prince’s parents. After a decade or two, they’re pretty glad to see him, and everyone lives happily ever after.

14/10. Ridiculous. Magnificent.  Great work, Schönwerth. Excellent first impression.

(Order The Shoemaker Prince to read a story inspired by this fairy tale, and 13 more!)

12 Turtles

Today we’re gonna talk about a story I found in my collection “The Turnip Princess,” which is all stories compiled by Schonwerth. (Guys they’re amazing.)

So it’s a pretty basic story. Think “The Boy Who Set Forth to Learn What Fear Was.” Same basic pattern. You’re trying to win the hand of a princess, so you go and spend a long weekend at the local haunted castle.

There are a lot of things that can happen when you spend three nights in a haunted castle. Demons might go bowling, with your head as the ball and your ribs as the pins. They might roast you on a spit. They might peel off your skin. The ghosts come. The ghouls come. Every night you die, and if you’re brave enough you wake up in the morning alive.

Each night it gets worse. The third is the climax. And on this particular third night, in this particular story, there appear twelve turtles the size of washbasins.

In order to win the princess, you must kiss each one of these twelve turtles.

Now, fairy tales tend to have a lot of euphemisms, granted, but I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here. Schonwerth and his translator tend to be pretty direct. All this dude has to do on his final night in the haunted castle is kiss some turtles.

Which brings us to the next thing about Schonwerth. He actually did that thing we like to pretend the Grimms did, where he wandered around collecting stories from random people across the country. And then he just wrote them down. Didn’t edit, didn’t clean them up, just wrote them down.

So these ridiculous stories he’s telling are all stories that someone told to him. Educated people, uneducated people, old people, children, mothers and fathers, people from the city, people from the country—we have no idea who.

For this particular story, I like to imagine it being told by a small child. A girl of six, perhaps.

“And then the demons boil him into soup!” she tells Schonwerth, very excited.

“Oh? And what happens next?”

She pauses, considering. “And then there are turtles.”

“And what happens with the turtles?”

“He’s gotta kiss ‘em!”

I just love Schonwerth so much, guys. There’s so much personality in his stories, and not even his own personality, a good chunk of the time.  I’ve talked a lot over the years about collective storytelling, about folklore as a conversation we’re having throughout history. Men like Schonwerth make our conversation partners feel like real people again. And it’s beautiful.

The Enchanted Trunk (Schonwerth)

So we’ve got a king. This king is the father of a rambunctious little boy. He’s also the owner of a magic flying trunk. You see where this is going, right? Insert prince in trunk, insert trunk in tree halfway across the world.

Now for all his rambunctiousness, our prince is apparently quite a sensible little boy, because the first thing he does, upon finding himself alone in a strange land, is climb down from the tree and go to learn a trade. He becomes a cobbler, which is convenient as he can continue to replace the fantastic red shoes he arrived in as his feet get larger.

In this new kingdom, there is also a king. He has a daughter, and because he sucks, she gets to spend her life locked up in a tower, Rapunzel-style.

But our boy has a flying suitcase, so visiting is not a problem. At least not until the king notices his daughter is a lot happier than someone in complete solitude should be, and tars up the windowsill, Cinderella-style.

(Whoever gave this man a fairy tale collection should be shot.)

Naturally, one of the distinctive red shoes gets stuck on the sill and left behind. And proving once and for all that he is a despicable sneak, the king announces that he’s had a change of heart and is going to let his daughter marry whoever was clever enough to get up into her tower.

Then, when our shoemaker prince comes forward to claim his footwear, the king preps to have him and the princess burned at the stake.

(Have I mentioned that he sucks?)

Well, you can probably guess what happens next. Deus ex luggage! The trunk flies in, grabs the kids, and whisks them away, back to the prince’s parents. After a decade or two, they’re pretty glad to see him, and everyone lives happily ever after.

14/10. Ridiculous. Magnificent.  Great work, Schönwerth. Excellent first impression.

New Year, No Spoons, Schonwerth

I had a lot of big plans for things to launch in the New Year, but alas, I forget to take into account that the changing of the calendar would not make me magically cease to be mentally ill overnight. I haven’t so much as caught a glimpse of a passing spoon in weeks.

Also, I’ve got a largish project going for a client, so that’s going to slow me down even when my brain does get itself back in order.

So what I have for now is this: There are a few fairy tale rants I threw together before Christmas and New Year’s, and a couple poems, which will all be trickling out slowly as I try to work up the energy for writing more. For those of you supporting me on Patreon, Lindworm is almost completely posted. I know it’s been a bit of a hassle to read on this platform, but once the last chapter is up, I’m planning on posting the entire thing as a PDF; please feel free to bug me if I forget, as I have been beyond spacey these last few weeks.

My hopes are still to release another poetry collection by this summer, and it will be a full book, more like Goodbye or Avalanche than like thin. Please remember that while I have novels, and not only Lindworm, that I intend to publish, I am waiting until I have saved enough money to buy my own ISBNs and start a publishing company. I appreciate your support, both on Patreon and in buying my poetry books, as I work toward that goal.

Lastly, we need to talk about Schönwerth.  Franz Xaver von Shönwerth collected fairy tales in Bavaria in the 1850s, and five hundred of these were discovered in an archive in 2009. I’ve got the first English translation, which contains a fairly small selection of the whole, but every single one of them is amazing. They follow a lot of the patterns that most folktales share, but the deviations are delightful and absurd, and I figured you guys should have a heads-up because I’m planning on talking about these stories a lot.