The Girl with No Hands

We begin, as is so often the case, with a foolish father.

Guys. Only make deals with clearly defined terms. Endless wealth in exchange for “the first thing that greets you” or “what your wife carries” is not a god bargain. “Oh,” you say, “I’m sure she’s just carrying her purse.”

No. You idiot. Why would a creature able to provide endless wealth want a random woman’s purse? Your wife is pregnant.

This particular father receives wealth in exchange for what stands behind his mill, reasoning that the only thing back there is the apple tree.

Think, man, think! Why does the strange old man want your apple tree?

The strange old man promised to come back in three years for what he’s owed, which, to the surprise of no one but the miller, is the miller’s daughter.

Three years pass. The miller’s daughter, who is beautiful and pious and clean, washes herself and then draws a circle around herself with chalk. Because of this, the strange old man—who, by the way, is the devil—is unable to approach her.

He demands that the miller keep water away, so that she cannot clean herself, and the miller, being a coward as well as an idiot, complies.

The girl weeps on her hands, making them so clean that the devil still cannot claim her. He demands that the miller chop off her hands, which he does. She then weeps on the stumps, cleaning them as well, and the devil gives up on the whole thing—this girl is just too clean for him.

The miller at least feels bad about maiming his daughter, and promises to take good care of her from now on, but understandably, she just wants to get away from him.

She wanders until she reaches the royal orchard, which is surrounded by a moat. She prays, and an angel dries the moat so that she can reach the orchard, where she eats several pears.

The gardener witnesses this and reports it to the king. The king comes along the next night, meets the girl, and falls in love. He marries her, and has new, silver hands made for her.

It’s all going well until the king has to go to war, leaving his pregnant wife behind in the care of his mother.

Now, this seems like an ideal set-up for an evil mother-in-law, but she’s actually cool. The problem here is the devil, who’s still mad he didn’t get the miller’s daughter.

She has a son. Mother-in-law writes a letter to the king, letting him know. The devil replaces the letter with one claiming she’s given birth to a changeling. The king is a little freaked out by this news, but writes back that they should continue taking good care of his wife, and he’ll be home as soon as he can. The devil replaces the letter again, with one that says the king’s wife and child should be put to death.

The mother-in-law is not cool with this. She attempts to talk her son out of this plan with several letters, all of which are intercepted by the devil. In the last, he demands that after they kill the girl, they should cut out her tongue and eyes to keep as proof that it’s been done.

Mom-in-law has eyes and a tongue taken from a doe to show her son when he comes home, and sends her daughter-in-law and grandson into hiding.

They leave the palace. The queen prays, and an angel comes to care for her and the baby. Her hands grow back. They just—they just grow back. Like, that’s a thing that happens. Because of “the grace of God and her own piety.”

Seven years pass.

Meanwhile, the king has come home, and he and his mom have talked, and while they’re not quite sure who switched out all their messages, clearly they’ve been sabotaged. The king goes off in search of his wife and son, vowing to neither eat nor drink until he finds them.

God keeps him alive through the nearly seven years of dehydration and starvation. Eventually, he reunites with his wife and son, all the misunderstanding are cleared up, and they live happily ever after.

I hate that her hands grow back. That wasn’t a detail I remembered going in, and I am not a fan. There’s no good reason for it. It contributes nothing to the plot; it’s just something that happens in the background.

Disability is never a part of living happily ever after. It’s always cured in the end, unless you’re evil, in which case you probably deserve it. The girl’s hands grow back. Rapunzel’s prince goes blind, but only until she weeps on him, and her tears restore his sight. (Whether that prince is good or evil is a whole different conversation, but that’s not relevant here.)

It feels…icky. A similar kind of icky as the fact that nearly all of the antagonists, and zero of the protagonists, in Basile’s fairy tales are black. It says certain kinds of people don’t get happy endings. And it’s a problem.

So that kind of sucks. But on the bright side. The mother-in-law. I love the mother-in-law. So, so often, this character is evil. There are several similar stories where, instead of the letter being switched out, the mother-in-law writes a letter lying about the birth in the first place. And so, so often, even when the mother-in-law is right about something (like it being creepy to keep a corpse in your bedroom and call it your wife), the narrative still acts like she’s evil.

This is a good mother-in-law! She argues with her son and is applauded for it! She protects her daughter-in-law and grandson! She rocks! I love her! We need more good mothers-in-law!

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Untitled Beauty and the Beast Retelling

 Mira weeps.

She has not, these last few days. She has not let herself. But now she’s alone, in her private hollow in the woods, and no one will search for her for a quarter hour, at least.

A twig snaps. 

Mira looks up. Standing before her is a great beast, seven feet tall at least, his antlers adding another foot or two. He has glossy dark fur, and a snout the looks somehow like both a bear’s and a deer’s. Horrifying and majestic, like a forest god of old.

“Hello,” he says.

She stares at him for a long moment before recovering her manners. “Oh! Hello.”

“You’re upset.”

“Um. Yes.” She really does not want to explain the situation to a monster in the woods.

He stares at her for nearly as long as she stared at him, when he first spoke. “You want to get away,” he says at last, half a question. It sounds like an offer.

“Oh, yes,” Mira says, her need for escape overwhelming both reason and fear. “But I can’t. my family is depending on my marriage. We need the bride price desperately.”

“And do you want to be married?”

She thinks of Ralph, of his bright smile and soft hands. She thinks of Ralph three days ago, when he— “No.”

The creature nods. “What is your bride price? I will pay it double, and take you away, and you needn’t be my bride.”

She studies the monster. He has no reason to help her, and she has no reason to trust him. He may be lying, about her not being his bride. He may plan to eat her instead.

She cannot stay here.

“You’ll have to speak with my father,” she says.

He nods.

“I am Mira. What shall I call you?”

He doesn’t answer for a long moment. “I don’t have a name,” he says. “You may call me Beast; it is what I am.”

-

The Beast speaks with her father in the doorway; his antlers prevent him from fitting inside. Not, Mira thinks, that her father would be inclined to let him in regardless. He closes the door on him, rudely, to discuss his offer.

“You can’t mean to marry a monster.”

“You can’t mean to turn down the bride price he offers, not with Mother sickly, and your only son still in diapers.”

“Young Ralph has—”

“Ralph will offer you half what the Beast has. We’ve made him no promises. Take the better offer.”

“I am not so desperate for gold that I would—”

“I’ll not marry Ralph, Father. Accept the Beast’s offer, or I’ll go with him anyway, and bring shame on the family.”

“He has bewitched you. Mira, child. He’s a monster. He’s—”

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The Brave Little Tailor

 I have a very clear memory of writing about this story, which is odd, because I can find no evidence that I’ve ever done so.

(I do not have the energy to put in images, but I’ll try to remember to post some another time, because I have a fantastic illustrated copy of this story.)

Tailors are weirdly frequent fairy tale protagonists, but this is probably the best-known, and for good reason; this is definitely one of the best tailor stories around.

We begin with our tailor putting some jam on a piece of bread, then forgetting all about it while he gets caught up in his sewing. This attracts flies. He grabs a piece of cloth and swats at them, killing seven flies in one blow.

The tailor feels this is a very impressive feat. He makes a sash to wear, embroidered with “Seven in one blow,” so everyone he meets will know about it.

(This is pre-sewing machine. He’s hand sewing. Can you imagine how long that would take? To make it look nice? To make it large enough to be easily read from a distance? This is some impressive work.)

The tailor decides this town is just too small for someone with his impressive fly-swatting skills. He sets off to seek adventure in the wider world, bringing with him only his sash and a piece of cheese, which he puts in his pocket.

(I killed 4 flies in one blow with a flyswatter, once. But I decided to keep my day job.)

On his way out, he finds a bird stuck in a bush, and puts that in his other pocket.

This bird is alive, but apparently content to sit motionless in a strange, small, dark place for an unspecified amount of time.

The tailor meets a giant, who will be the first of many characters to interpret “seven in one blow” as referring to men. This misunderstanding initiates multiple rounds of showing off.

The giant picks up a rock and squeezes it until water comes out. Which…isn't how rocks work, but okay.

The tailor takes out his cheese, and squeezes it until way more water comes out—apparently this is a soft cheese, which raises some concerns about his pocket storage, and apparently it also looks enough like a rock to fool the giant.

The giant picks up another stone and throws it as far as he can.

The tailor takes the bird out of his other pocket and throws it; the bird flies away, much farther than the giant’s. The giant believes the bird is a stone, too, and I am having some concerns about his eyesight.

Next, they carry a felled tree together. By which I mean, the giant carries a tree, while the tailor sits in the branches, and every time the giant glances back, the tailor jumps down and pretends to be doing his share.

Eventually, the giant takes the tailor home, where he meets several other giants. He’s invited to spend the night, but is intimidated by the size of the bed the giants offer, so he slips out in the night and sleeps on the floor in the corner.

The giant smashes the bed to pieces, confident he’s smashed the troublesome tailor along with it. And this, friends, is why we always check for a body.

In the morning, when the tailor turns up alive, all of the giants run away in terror.

He proceeds to a local palace, where his sash is again misinterpreted, and he’s invited, as a great warrior, to take a special position in the royal army.

He accepts. The other soldiers are terrified to work with a man who could kill seven of them with one blow, and tell the king, “either he goes or we do.”

The king is unwilling to lose his entire army, but he’s afraid to upset such a dangerous man by firing him. Instead, he decides to set an impossible task to get rid of him.

Two giants are wreaking havoc. If the tailor can kill them, the king will give him half the kingdom and his daughter’s hand in marriage.

(This is a very frequent offer, and I find it baffling. Generally the daughter is this situation is the king’s only child, which means that if you marry her, you’ll eventually get the entire kingdom, as the new king, when your father-in-law dies. So why are we dividing the kingdom now? That seems like a huge mess, politically. You split the kingdom in half. Does it eventually get reassembled when the old king dies? Or does his half go to someone else? If we have a king splitting his kingdom in half every time a giant needs to be killed, or a princess needs to be rescued, how many kingdoms are we going to have in a few generations? Is this why there are so many princes and princesses in fairy tales? Is the continent just littered in dozens of broken-up kingdoms each covering a couple miles? This is not sustainable.)

Of course, the king is expecting that the giants will kill the tailor—he has no intention of actually giving him his daughter or half his kingdom.

The tailor finds the giants sleeping, hides in a tree, and starts pelting them both with stones. Each giant thinks the other is attacking him, and they fight and kill each other. The tailor, of course, takes the credit.

The king sets another impossible task—to capture a unicorn.

The tailor gets the unicorn to chase him, runs almost into a tree, and darts out of the way. The unicorn gets its horn stuck in the tree.

A third impossible task—to catch a wild boar.

Again, the tailor gets it to chase him. He runs into a conveniently located chapel. The boar follows. He jumps out a window. The boar is not able to follow. He circles back around to close the door, and the boar is contained.

The king is out of impossible tasks. The promise must be kept. A wedding is planned.

The princess is not a fan.

It is after the wedding that we learn of the tailor’s only weakness—sleep-talking. His new wife learns from the sleep-talking that he used to be a tailor, and apparently she and the king feel this justifies them in getting rid of him, as if his former profession somehow cancels out the giant-slaying and unicorn-capture.

They plan to have the tailor kidnapped in the night and thrown on a ship that will take him far, far away.

But the tailor’s squire overhears, and tattles.

The next night, when the kidnappers are supposed to come, the tailor pretends to sleep, and pretends to sleep-talk, this time about all of his terrifying feats. The kidnappers run away, successfully terrified, and the tailor allegedly lives happily ever after, though I have some concerns about his relationship with his wife and father-in-law.

There is a variant where the final scene ends with something other than sleep-talking—I think a bucket of fish gets dumped on the princess? But I cannot find it right now, which is driving me absolutely insane. Just know it’s out there somewhere. Hopefully I’ll track it down eventually.

The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh

 This is one of my favorite kinds of stories—enchanted bride/groom without the bride/groom. The transforming power of non-romantic love is just so fantastic.

The Laidly Worm is an English fairy tale, collected by Joseph Jacobs. We open with a widowed king who has two children. These children are named Childe Wynd and Margaret. I’m gonna assume that each parent named one child here, because this looks like wildly different taste in names.

Childe Wynd, the oldest child, and the son, sets off to seek his fortune. Which, like, what fortune? Isn’t he the heir to the throne? That’s a built-in fortune; why is he seeking one elsewhere?

Of course, the real reason he’s off seeking his fortune is so that he’ll be safely out of the way for what happens next. Which is that his father remarries, and his new wife is, as is so often the case, a witch.

It’s all going well enough until someone comments on Margaret’s beauty, which, of course, her stepmother is deeply offended by.

She turns Margaret into a laidly worm, who can only be turned back by three kisses from her absent brother.

Which seems like a great way to guarantee your spell will be broken—I mean “get your brother to come kiss you” is a lot easier than “get someone to fall in love with you in your monstrous form” or “get someone to share a bed with you for a year without ever seeing your face” or any of the other, more traditional ways to break this kind of spell.

Margaret wakes up the next morning, in her bed, as a laidly worm. (Laidly, by the way, just means ugly. And we’re taking, like, serpent, not earthworm.)

Margaret’s maids all run away, and she slithers out of the palace, settling in at Spindleston Heugh.

At this point, Margaret begins terrorizing the countryside, devouring everything she comes across, and so the locals consult with a warlock. He figures out that the worm is really the princess—apparently this is news despite the worm being found in the princess’s bed—maybe they assumed it ate her? But how did they think it got into the palace in the first place without being seen?

Anyway, he tells them the enchanted princess is just hungry, and if they give her the milk of seven cows, she’ll be a good snake. Also, her brother can break the spell.

So. Margaret drinks a lot of milk, and just sort of hangs out, being a snake. I’m really impressed with the problem-solving here. Instead of rushing right to “kill the monster,” we took the time to figure out what was actually going on, and work out a peaceful solution. Margaret didn’t mean to hurt anyone; she was frightened and hungry and confused. And instead of fighting back, we’re feeding her.

Childe Wynd comes home. The stepmom sends some storms to sink his ships, but they can’t be sunk because they’re made of rowan wood. She sends Margaret to attack the ships when they reach shore, which is the first indication we’ve seen that she can control Margaret as Worm. Childe Wynd sails away again, and approaches from the other side. As soon as they’ve successfully landed, the stepmom loses all power over Margaret.

And this is where things get really weird.  Because Child Wynd runs and Margaret, sword drawn.

Like, dude. You’re here to rescue her? It’s common knowledge in the community now that the worm is Margaret, and I get that you’ve been away a long time, but weren’t you briefed on the situation? I find it very unlikely that someone came to get you so you could save your sister, and failed to mention that she had been turned into a worm. Decapitation is not a standard rescue method.

Margaret is like, “wait, no, kiss me.”

Wynd hesitates.

Margaret says, ‘seriously, you gotta kiss me three times.” (But, like, in rhyme.)

He doesn’t actually question this, despite not seeming to know who she is. He kisses her three times. She turns back into his sister. They go to the castle, find the stepmom, and touch her with a rowan branch. This turns her into a toad. She hops away, Wynd becomes king—no word on what happened to his dad—and he and Margaret live happily ever after.

Allegedly, the toad is still hopping around in the neighborhood. So, like, be careful if you’re inclined to frog kissing. Don’t wanna unleash a witch.

Trauma, Villainy, Therapy

 Is anyone else disturbed by the implication in pop culture that we can create evil through torture?

The orcs in Lord of the Rings. The demons in Supernatural.

These are creatures that have become monsters because they were hurt. And this is something that goes beyond, like, brainwashing. These are creatures who are inherently evil, who used to be good or at least normal, until their fundamental natures were changed by pain, and now they're irredeemable.

That is so deeply concerning. That is so very far from okay. The idea that sufficient pain cannot only take away everything you are, but take away any chance that you could ever be in any way worthwhile again?

It's not exactly wrong that having been hurt makes you more likely to cause hurt, in some cases. You're injured, you're frightened, you're traumatized, and so you lash out in preemptive self defense. You cause pain to avoid experiencing it, because you'll be punished for not punishing others, or because anyone who can get close can hurt you, and hurting them instead keeps them far away. And the fact that you've been hurt before doesn't justify hurting others, even if it sometimes explains it. But hurting others because you've hurt before doesn't make you evil. Hurting others doesn't make you evil at all—people hurt each other all the time, through accident or carelessness, in moments of selfishness that they regret later, in impossible situations where someone is inevitably going to be hurt, and you just have to decide who, or how much.

The idea that you can render someone truly evil—not careless or selfish or deeply afraid, not inclined to do bad things because the consequences are unbearable, or because they don't know better, but evil—that if you just hurt someone enough, they will come to find joy in hurting others—I'm letting this sentence run on and on because I just don't have words for how bad that is.

Sometimes, you are a Good Guy, and you are in a Bad Situation. Sometimes it's kill or be killed. Sometimes it's kill or let someone helpless and relying on you be killed. I get that. But in situations where we have villains who were tortured into evil, the good guys generally seem to be aware of the whole torture situation. And despite this knowledge, it never seems to occur to them that these characters are anything but pure evil. That they may be acting under duress, or that they may have been so hurt by the torture that they don't understand the full weight of the atrocities they're committing, beyond the fact that committing them will spare them from further pain.

Why are we not trying to spare them, in a fight where we can afford to? Why are we not taking them alive? Why are we not trying to help them?

Orcs don't need death; orcs need intensive therapy.

If you see someone working for the Bad Guy, and you know that that person was not previously evil, and that they've undergone significant torture, then your duty as a Good Guy is to knock them out and drag them to the hospital!

It just really concerns me that there are multiple fictional worlds where the second most evil creature you're likely to encounter is only evil at all because they were hurt by the most evil one.

Real life people, in the here and now, get tortured. Torture is a real thing that really happens.

How do you think it would feel? To go through something like that. To be rescued. To be safe at home again. It's over. It's over. Maybe it comes back in your dreams every night. Maybe it's never over, not really. But right now you're safe on your couch, and you turn on the TV.

And you see someone there who's been through what you've been through. But they don't get to go home. They don't get to recover. They get to be irredeemably evil. The thing that happened to you happens to them, and it turns them into a monster.

How would that feel?

I read somewhere that part of the reason the Silmarillion wasn't released in Tolkien's lifetime was that he wasn't satisfied with the origin story he'd given the orcs. I hope that's true. I mean, he's Catholic! The theological implications there...

If evil is created by pain, does that not imply that each small hurt we suffer makes us somehow worse? That those who have endured the most are worth the least?

(That absolutely does not hold up, theologically speaking—did Christ not suffer? And Job? Moses? David? Joseph? Peter? Paul?)

Anyway. No one is fundamentally, irredeemably evil, and if they are, it’s not because they’ve suffered. Get Orcs Therapy.

Frog Princesses and Bear Princes

 One of you commented that it would be nice to see comparisons between enchanted bride and enchanted bridegroom tales. And at first I thought I’d do Frog Prince versus Frog Princess. Then I thought a little more about it, and, well. There’s not much to compare.

Both stories feature frog love interests. And that’s pretty much it?

I’ve found an Italian variant (https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type0402.html#schneller)  of The Frog Princess that includes the throwing-frog-at-wall element. In The Frog Prince, the princess throws the frog at the wall meaning to kill him, because she’s annoyed. In this story, the prince is startled by the frog hopping onto him in the middle of the night, feels horrible about it after, and really begins the relationship from that point. The throwing is the catalyst for transformation in The Frog Prince, and not in The Frog Princess.

(As an aside, there’s a German story (https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type0402.html#jungbauer) where the frog and the man definitely seem to be planning marriage, but after she’s transformed, she gives him her fancy estate, tells him to marry whoever he likes, and leaves. I thought that was interesting.)

So. The enchanted bridegroom story I really want to compare with The Frog Princess is East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

Specifically, we’re working with the Russian variant of The Frog Princess, which has a second half.

In East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the girl looks at her bedfellow’s face, which ruins her chances of breaking the spell, and he is whisked away to a land East of the Sun and West of the Moon to marry a troll princess. The girl goes on a quest to find him, enlisting help from three old women and the four winds. At the troll princess’ palace, she wins her prince back with her mad laundry skills. This story is far from the only one to follow this pattern; a girl often spoils a curse-breaking by doing something she was never told she shouldn’t do, usually LOOKING AT HER BOYFRIEND’S FACE, HOW DARE SHE, and then has to go on a difficult journey and complete strange tasks to win her guy back.

Before we get into the comparisons, a brief recap of the first half of the Russian version of The Frog Princess. Our man Ivan is forced by his father to marry a frog, due to an arrow landing near her in a very strange choose-your-bride-by-archery arrangement. His older brothers get to marry human women.

Ivan’s father the king sets up a competition between the three brides. Ivan tells his frog the tasks, then leaves. When he’s gone, she throws off her frog skin, becoming a beautiful young woman, and calls upon a horde of servants to complete the task. (Which, by the way, is why this isn't my favorite Frog Princess variant—other frogs complete the tasks themselves, and complete them as frogs, too.) The last task is to present herself at a ball for the king to judge her beauty, and she shows up as a beautiful human woman.

This is where the Russian story deviates from others. In other variants, we live happily ever after from here. In this version, Ivan runs home while the former frog is at the ball, finds her frog skin, and burns it.

In his defense, burning the skin is more often than not the correct move when dealing with enchanted love interests.

But in this case, if he’d let her keep the skin for a littler while longer, she’d have been freed, but now she must go to the palace of Koschei the Deathless, in a faraway land no one knows the road to.

Which makes this the only story I know of where the male protagonist screws up and has to go on a quest to rescue his animal bride.

He gets the help of an old man, an enchanted ball, and several wild animals. Instead of winning her back with laundry, Ivan has to kill Koschei the Deathless. Which, actually, is very similar to The Giant with No Heart is His Body. Koschei can only be killed by a magic needle, which is inside a hare, inside a trunk, in an oak tree that Koschei is always watching. His animal friends help Ivan get the needle, Ivan uses the needle to kill the bad guy, and he and the frog princess live happily ever after.

It's just so nice to see the male protagonist mess up and go on a quest about it. I feel like the girls have to do that pretty often, but the guys usually either do everything right, or don’t face any consequences for their actions. They go on a lot of quests, but they’re usually self-motivated, and the princess is a reward they pick up along the way. Except, I guess, for the Sweetheart Roland types—not Sweetheart Roland itself, but stories of that type, where the princess says ‘just don’t do this one thing,’ and he does—in Sweetheart Roland the consequence is amnesia, but it a lot of them the princess just vanishes, and he has to go and get her back. But I do like this version where, like, he wasn’t just being absolutely stupid about it.

If your wife says, just please don’t do this one thing, or you’ll lose me, and then you do the one thing, I don’t have a ton of sympathy for you.

If you start to get creeped out by the stranger in your bed, and try to look at his face, like, you’re in the right here! That’s a reasonable thing to do. No one ever told you not to. Granted, the bear said, ‘don’t be alone with your mom,” and she did, and the mom got into her head about the stranger in her bed, but, like. Looking was reasonable! It’s weird that she didn’t look earlier! I am on her side here.

If you discover that the frog you’ve married is actually a woman, and you’ve grown up with stories of people being freed from enchantment by the burning of an animal skin, finding her animal skin and burning it is reasonable! That is a logical solution to come up with. I like it when people mess up by just doing their best in weird situations, rather than by being stupid.

I am a little bummed that Ivan didn’t do any laundry, though. I feel like that could have added something to the story. Especially since we’ve already determined that his wife doesn’t do her own chores. Someone in this relationship should know how to do laundry.