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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The Peasant's Wise Daughter

 I have always adored this story. I’m not sure why, because it also makes me kind of mad? But it’s fantastic.

Once a peasant and his daughter were granted by the king a piece of land. When they worked this land, they found in the soil a golden mortar. The peasant wished to give it to the king, to thank him for the land, but his daughter advised against this. If he was given the mortar, she said, he would certainly then demand the pestle to match.

Well, the peasant took the mortar to the king anyway, and the king demanded the pestle. He put the peasant in prison, refusing to release him until he’d produced a golden pestle.

Dude. You gave him an entire plot of land. That pestle could be anywhere on the property. There’s no telling how deeply it’s buried. It might be buried on the next plot over. Or it might not have been buried with the mortar at all. But if it was, how on earth is this man supposed to track it down while in prison?

In prison the man refused to eat or drink, only saying, over and over again, that he should have listened to his daughter. The king asked him about his daughter, and he explained the advice he’d ignored. The king was impressed by her wisdom, and demanded to meet her. He said that if she could answer his riddle, he would marry her.

Because who wouldn’t want to marry a jerk who imprisoned her father for the terrible crime of giving him a gift?

The girl was instructed to come to the king neither naked nor clothed, neither riding nor walking, neither on the road nor off it.

So she stripped, wrapped herself in a fishing net, and had a donkey drag her to the palace in the ditch on the side of the road.

And after this whole spectacle, where half the kingdom saw her dragged down the street mostly naked, the king married her and released her father from prison.

Doesn’t it just seem like this is going to be the happiest, healthiest marriage ever?

Years passed. A man had a horse who gave birth in the night, and the next morning the foal was found standing with his neighbor’s oxen. The neighbor insisted that the oxen had birthed the foal, and that it therefore belonged to him. This dispute was brought before the king, who gave the foal to the neighbor with the ox. Because apparently the king is an idiot as well as a jerk.

The horse owner went to the queen for help. She set him to casting a fishing net on the dry land in front of the palace, and acting as if he was catching fish. When the king had him questioned about this, the man said, "It is as easy for me to fish on dry land as it is for an ox to have a foal."

The king was quite certain this whole thing wasn’t the man’s own idea, and demanded to know who had told him to do it. The man refused, so the king had him tortured until he admitted he talked to the queen.

This man is never mentioned again, and it is unclear whether he ever got his foal back.

The king went to his wife, enraged that she had betrayed him.

Betrayed him? By, firstly, having a brain in her head, and secondly, daring to point out that he doesn’t? Dude, if you’re going to be that stupid and unfair, someone’s gonna call you on it. You’re the one who wanted a wise wife.

He sent her back to her peasant father’s hut. (Seriously? Her dad still lives in a hut? He couldn’t give his father-in-law a room in the palace?) But she could take home her one favorite thing from the palace with her.

So she had the king drugged, and called some servants to take him to the hut while he was sleeping.

Which, like, on the one hand, that’s really sweet. He’s her favorite thing! But on the other hand, why? I haven’t been impressed with his behavior so far. If I was her, I’d be happy to get kicked out, so I wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore.

When he woke up in the hut, and realized how much she loved him, they went back to the palace, and lived happily ever after. Unlike her dad, who still lived in a hut, and the horse owner, who may or may not have his foal back, but either way, had to recover from being tortured.

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Snow White and Rose Red

 This story is completely unrelated to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, although it does also prominently feature a dwarf. I have no idea why the brothers Grimm decided to have two protagonists named Snow White. I know we do often see overlapping names in folklore, but usually the name in question is, like, Hans. Snow White is not exactly the kind of name you just use because it’s a popular name in your culture and the first one you thought of.

Snow White and Rose Red are two little girls who live in the woods with their mother. One winter night, a bear knocks at their door and asks permission to warm himself at the fire, which their mother allows. The two girls have a great deal of fun playing at the hearth with the talking bear, and he returns every night for the rest of the winter. In the summer he has to leave, to protect his treasure from wicked dwarves, but promises to return.

That summer, the girls meet a dwarf whose beard is stuck in a tree. They cut him loose with some kitchen scissors, despite his horrible manners, and he runs off with a bag of gold. Some time later they find the same dwarf in danger of being pulled into the river because his beard is tangled in a fishing line. He’s dreadfully rude to them, but they still help cut him loose. He grabs a bag of pearls and runs away. They then find him about to be carried off by an eagle, and rescue him again. He insults them and runs off with a bag of jewels.

Later they find him admiring all his jewels. A large bear appears suddenly, and the dwarf is very afraid. He offers the bear all his jewels, and then suggests that the bear eat Snow White and Rose Red.

The bear kills the dwarf with one blow. The girls have started to run away, but the bear calls after them, and they recognize his voice—it’s their bear. His bearskin falls off, revealing him to be a handsome man.

He explains that he’s a prince who was cursed by the dwarf, and the spell was broken by his death. Also, the dwarf stole the gold, pearls, and jewels from him.

When the girls grow up, Snow White marries the bear and Rose Red marries his brother.

This is one of those stories that was just fun and cute the first time I read it, but the more times I come back to it the more questions I have.

First of all. The dwarf. Was he just, like, stupid? If you are cursing a man to be a giant wild animal, then your death should absolutely not be the way to break the curse. You are asking to get murdered. Why would you make someone bigger and stronger than you, and then tell him that to be free, he just has to kill you? It took him a single blow. The dwarf was clearly not at all challenging to kill.

How long was the bear enchanted? Was it just a matter of finding the dwarf so he could kill him? This seems like a pretty easy spell to break.

At first I thought maybe the dwarf had an enchanted beard. He was so upset when the girls cut off bits of it to free him those two times—I thought maybe it was a Samson situation, and his strength was in his hair, so he wouldn’t be vulnerable to bear attacks until after they rescued him. But the beard never comes up again after the second time he yells at them for saving his life.

The other big thing is the timeline. Before I reread this story to make this post, I had remembered that the story started when the girls were kids, and that the bear turned into an adult man at the end. But I guess I had thought the story was set over a longer period of time? Like, they met the bear when they were little girls, but they were older by the time the spell broke.

(I’m willing to assume that we kind of put a pause on a character’s aging while they’re under a transformation spell, so I’m not generally bothered much by age gaps in transformation stories—like, the years you were alive while you weren’t in your own body don’t have to count. You go back to exactly the body you left, so you aren’t physically older, you still have the, like, brain chemistry of a younger person, and it’s not like you had a lot of opportunity for emotional/mental/social development while you were cursed.)

But if he was already an adult man when he was cursed, and he met these girls as children, that’s a little weird. But then maybe my original mis-remembering would have been weirder? Marrying a woman you watched grow up is not great; is marrying a woman who you hung out with for a single winter when she was a child better?

I think the thing that really throws me here, though, is the fact that they’re still little girls when the spell breaks. Like, him watching them grow up as a bear seems less concerning than him watching them grow up as a man. Especially if we’re pausing the aging while he’s a bear. If he was cursed at 20, then he might meet the girls when he’s 20 and they’re 10, but then if he knew them as a bear for years, by the time the spell breaks all three of them would be basically 20. But if they spell breaks when he’s still 20 and they’re still 10, then by the time they’re 20, he's 30.

It just says the spell breaks, and they get married “some time afterwards.” How much time afterwards? And, like, do they spend that in between time together, or does the prince go home, and meet them again years later, when they’re adults? I just…I worry about this timeline. I need to know details.

But these are the things I think about when I’m deliberately overthinking it. (The timeline, anyway. I’m always lowkey bothered by the dwarf’s poor curse planning.) Generally I think this is a really cute little enchanted bridegroom story, where no one betrays each other, or lies to each other, or kidnaps each other, or has to go on a whole huge redemption quest after screwing up. Although does it still count as an enchanted bridegroom story when the bride plays no part in the spell-breaking? Like, is ‘you must obtain a bride to break the spell” what qualifies it as an enchanted bridegroom story, or can we just count anything where someone is enchanted and sort of acquires a bride in the course of spell-breaking?

Anyway. I just think it’s sweet. Though giving the dwarf an enchanted beard would have brought it all together a little better.

(In the retelling that is on my list of things to write, the bear is cursed when he’s a kid and he meets the girls when he’s still a kid, which is a little to negate any age gap concerns, but mostly because it worked better for my timeline and because I thought ‘little boy figuring out how to be a bear’ was just more fun? I feel like the three of them can just have a much more interesting time if they’re all the same age and there’s no adult supervision.)

(BTW there is a retelling of this story called The Shadow of the Bear, by Regina Doman, which I haven’t read in years, but remember enjoying very much. It has two sequels based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Sleeping Beauty, which were also great. I think there are several more books that are technically in the same series, but these three all have the same characters, and the others are about someone else. They are quite Catholic. But I very much do not enjoy Christian Fiction, as a genre, and still liked these. So if you’re looking for new fairy tale retellings to read—I think there’s a lot more retellings of this story now, but this was the only one I could find for many years, and I haven’t gotten around to reading any others.)

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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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