Sleeping Beauties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Snow Queen: Story the Seventh: Of the Palace of the Snow Queen and What Happened There at Last

The final part of the story begins by taking us back to Kai, who we haven’t seen in four sections. He’s in the Snow Queen’s palace, which is all made of snow, consisting of one hundred rooms, all of them empty.

The Snow Queen sits at the center of a frozen lake called the Mirror of Reason. We find Kai blue, nearly black, with cold, but the Snow Queen’s kisses prevent him from feeling it. He’s building shapes from fragments of ice, which seems to him, due to the glass in his heart and eye, to be very important. He’s made many impressive figures, shapes, and words, but his goal is to form the word eternity—the Snow Queen has told him that if he does, he will be his own master, and she will give him the whole world and a new pair of skates.

The Snow Queen tells him that she must go spread snow in the warmer countries, and leaves Kai in the Mirror of Reason alone, still working on his puzzle.

Gerda finds him here. She never actually encounters the Snow Queen, which is one of the things I’ve done differently for my retelling.

Gerda’s prayers calm the icy winds, and she runs to Kai and hugs him. He doesn’t react, and she begins to cry, her hot tears melting his frozen heart and washing away the piece of glass. She sings the hymn that they learned in part two, and Kai cries as well, dislodging the glass from his eye.

He recognizes Gerda, and realizes how cold it is. Their reunion is so joyous that the ice shards get up and dance, then lay themselves out spelling the word eternity. Gerda kisses Kai, as the Snow Queen kissed him, warming him where she froze him. They walk out of the palace together, and the winds still, and the sun shines, and the reindeer is waiting for them with a friend who feeds them fresh milk before they return to the Finland woman.

The Finland woman gives them directions home, and the Lapland woman gives them new clothes. They leave the reindeer in Lapland, and continue on foot. They meet the robber girl, who’s set off on her own, and she tells them that the prince and princess are travelling, the crow has died, and his wife is in mourning. She promises to visit Kai and Gerda if she’s ever in the area, and rides away.

Kai and Gerda return home to their grandmother, where they find that they’ve both grown up while they were away. The Snow Queen’s palace fades from their memories like a bad dream, and they sit among the roses like they did when they were children. Their grandmother reads a verse about becoming as little children, and they think of their hymn, and it is summer.

The Snow Queen: Story the Sixth: The Lapland Woman and the Finland Woman

Gerda and the reindeer reach Lapland, where they meet n old woman in a small hut dressing fish, she tells them that the Snow Queen was in Lapland, but has now moved on to Finland. She writes a note on a piece of stockfish for Gerda to deliver to a woman she knows in Finland, and Gerda and the reindeer are off again. 

They reach the Finnish woman, who lives in a very hot house. She reads the message and cooks the fish. The reindeer, apparently, recognizes the woman; he says she can tie all the winds together, and asks her to give Gerda the power of twelve men, to face the snow queen. She says this wouldn’t be useful, but does read off a bunch of magic words. The reindeer asks again that she give Gerda strength, and the old woman explains that Kai has enchanted glass in his eyes and heart, and is therefore quite content where he is. She explains that Gerda’s own purity and innocence will be a more powerful tool than any enchantment she could cast, and sends the two of them on their way again.

Gerda forgets her boots and mittens here, and they haven’t the time to go back for them, so she’s dropped off barefoot in the Snow Queen’s garden. The reindeer leaves her there, as instructed by the old woman, and Gerda makes her way from the garden to the palace alone. She’s attacked by the Snow Queen’s guards, snakes and bears and porcupines made of ice. But she forges ahead, repeating the Lord’s prayer over and over again as she walks, and each time she repeats it an angel appears, until she has an army of them, fighting the ice creatures and rubbing her bare feet and hands to keep them warm.

The Snow Queen: Story the Fifth: The Little Robber Girl

This section opens with Gerda’s coach being attacked by robbers, and all the men the princess sent with her being murdered—a somewhat jarring turn of events, since there’s no real violence in the story before or since. The leader of the robbers, a woman with a beard, wants to kill and eat Gerda. She’s stopped by her daughter, who bites the mother, twice, gets into the coach with Gerda, and drives it off. She steals Gerda’s muff and boots, listens to her story, and promises that none of the other robbers will kill her—because if she causes any trouble, the robber girl will kill her herself. 

They reach the robbers’ home, a dilapidated castle full of badly treated animals, primarily birds, but also some dogs, and one reindeer. The robber girl enjoys ticking the reindeer with a knife, which, understandably, terrifies him. She falls asleep with one hand wrapped around Gerda, and one around her knife.

While she sleeps, the animals tell Gerda they’ve seen Kai, riding north toward Lapland in the Snow Queen’s sleigh. In the morning, she tells the robber girl, who sends Gerda off with the reindeer, her boots, and a pair of her mother’s mittens, as she wants to keep the muff.

This is a pretty good arrangement for the reindeer, who gets to escape the robber girl and her knife, and finally return home to Lapland.

The Snow Queen: Story the Fourth: The Prince and Princess

This section is one of my favorites. 

Having escaped the enchantress, Gerda comes across a crow. She asks him if he’s seen Kai, and he says he might have.

The crow describes the princess of this land, and exceedingly clever young woman who’s read every newspaper ever written. The princess wished to marry, someone both handsome and clever, and many suitors came. On the first two days, all the suitors were too star struck to say anything to impress the princess. But on the third day, a young man came who was handsome and clever and charming, and he won her heart and her hand. 

This, the crow thinks, may be Kai, and Gerda agrees, for he is handsome and clever, with bright eyes and long hair, poor clothing, and new boots that creak, and he arrived at the palace carrying something on his back, which may have been a knapsack, but may also have been a sled, for the crow did not get a good view.

The crow takes Gerda to the palace, where she is introduced to his crow girlfriend, who lives inside. They take her up a back stairway to the princess’ bedroom, where she and the new prince are sleeping, in two separate beds. Gerda holds up a lamp to the prince, who wakes, and turns, and is not Kai.

The princess wakes as well, and Gerda and the crows explain the whole story. The crows are given a position in the court as a reward for helping Gerda, but warned not to sneak anyone else into the royal bedroom in the middle of the night. Gerda is given the prince’s bed to sleep in, and the next morning, a new pair of boots, a muff, and a coach and escort to continue her search for Kai.

There’s just a lot going on in this section. I love the story of the prince and princess, and the little detail that she’s read every newspaper ever written, which I leaned into heavily for my interpretation of the character. I love the detail of dreams following people through the palace, and the revelation that Gerda’s grandmother can speak crow. I love that we acknowledge how lonely Gerda is, how hard this journey is. And I love that this is the first section where we really see other characters being kind to her, and helpful. I love her faith in Kai, her confidence that he’s worthy of marrying a princess, and that he’ll welcome her with open arms, even though he hasn’t exactly been nice lately. It’s just a good section.

The Snow Queen: Story the Third: The Enchanted Flower Garden

In part three we learn that everyone has given Kai up for dead since he rode off with the Snow Queen. Gerda, mourning her lost friend, shares her sorrows with the sun, with the sparrows. But they don’t believe her. They don’t think Kai is dead, and Gerda starts to have doubts, too.

Months have passed by now, and spring has come. Since everyone thinks that Kai’s drowned, Gerda goes to the river to ask for him back, offering her new red shoes in exchange. The waves keep bringing the shoes back to her, so she decides she needs to get farther into the water to drop them in.

Conveniently, someone’s left a boat on the shore, but Gerda doesn’t really know how to operate a boat, and once she’s deposited the shoes in the river, she can’t get back to shore. She continues downstream for quite some time, until a woman with a flowered hat fishes her out.

This woman is an enchantress, and wants to keep Gerda as her own child. She steals her memories, and hides all her rosebushes under the ground, so they won’t remind Gerda of home, and the rosebush she shared with Kai.

(This is one point where my story deviates significantly from the source material—I wanted my Gerda to set off in search of Kai immediately, rather than waiting until spring, so she spends a winter with the enchantress instead of a summer.)

Gerda stays with the enchantress for several months, through the spring and summer, and into the fall. She doesn’t remember Kai. She knows something is missing from the garden, but she doesn’t know what. At last, she spots the one rose the enchantress has forgotten to hide—the one painted on her hat—and all of her memories have returned.

She weeps for Kai, and her tears bring forth the roses the enchantress sent under the ground. They assure her that Kai isn't dead—if he was dead and buried, they would have seen him underground. Which doesn’t totally make since, as he’s supposed to have drowned, but whatever.

The flowers don’t know anything else about Kai.

Realizing that she’s lost months of time to the enchantress, and it’s now autumn, Gerda, now barefoot, sets off again in search of Kai.

The Snow Queen: Story the Second: A Little Boy and a Little Girl

 So part two is where things really get going. It’s where we meet Kai, Gerda, the grandmother, and the Snow Queen. This is the only section that really focuses on Kai, before he spends the next four sections missing.

I did take a lot of inspiration from this section for my book—the snow bees, the shared garden with the rose bush, the houses right close together. The emphasis, moving forward, on roses or bees. Kai’s skill for mimicry and mathematics.

This section opens by introducing us to Kai and Gerda. Then it introduces us to the idea of the Snow Queen, in a story that comes from Kai’s grandmother. She’s telling the children about snowflakes, describing them as snow bees, and Kai asks if they have a queen, like real bees. Grandma tells him that they do—the Snow Queen.

It’s important to note the grandmother doesn’t describe the Snow Queen as a villain or a threat—just the queen of the snow bees.

It’s unclear why Kai threatens to melt her on the stove—he doesn’t have the mirror shard to make him cruel yet, and she isn't described as someone who needs to be done away with. Maybe it’s just him being a little boy; they can be jerks sometimes.

Kai sees the Snow Queen in his window that night, and the next day, spring comes. In the spring, the shards of our evil, enchanted mirror from part one fly into Kai—one in his eye, one in his heart. These instantly distort the way Kai sees the world, and make him cruel. They also, oddly, instill in him a love for snowflakes.

When the winter comes again, Kai is taken by the Snow Queen. For a given value of “taken.”

She rides through the town square on her sleigh, and Kai hooks his sled (Gerda’s, actually—he borrowed it) onto the back. He doesn’t ask for permission to do this. He doesn’t interact with her at all until she’s ridden back out of town, pulling him along. At this point he considers unhooking himself, but she signals that he should stay, so he does.

At one point, he becomes afraid, and tries to pray, but he can’t remember how. He can only remember math.

Eventually, the Snow Queen brings him up into her sleigh. She kisses him, which completes the process, already started by the mirror, of freezing his heart. Then she stops kissing him, saying any more would kill him--apparently your heart can only freeze so much before it’s unsafe.

I don’t think this is, like, creepy. The kisses aren’t…inappropriate. We aren’t meant to read anything into them. Especially taking into account the equally non-romantic kisses we’ll see in part seven. These kisses are just the method by which the ice is spread.

Kai’s gotten over his gear by this point, and he no longer feels cold. We close out part two on him bragging to the Snow Queen about all the math he can do, as they ride off into the winter together.

The Snow Queen: Story the First: Which Describes a Looking Glass and Its Broken Fragments

 

This first part of the story is very different from the following six—it contains none of the same characters or settings, but it serves to explain the significance of everything that happens next. It’s vital to understanding Kai, to understanding the Snow Queen, and to understanding the themes of the rest of the story.

In this section, a demon makes a mirror that distorts every good thing it reflects, and amplifies everything bad. The demons rejoice that this mirror allows others to see the world as it truly is, and fly it to the heavens to see how it reflects the angels. But they drop it, and break it, at fragments of the enchanted glass fly all over the world. Some of these fragments land it people’s eyes or hearts, corrupting and changing them, and two of these, we’ll learn in the next section, land in Kai—one in his eye, and one in his heart.

Though he won’t be mentioned again, the devil who made the mirror is the true villain of the story—not the Snow Queen. The Snow Queen is…incidental. For Kai, this is a story about the world—represented by the enchanted mirror—corrupting a child. If there were no mirror shard, he would never go away with the Snow Queen. This broken mirror is the driving force behind the story.

The first part is vital, fundamental, and pretty straightforward, so I don’t have much to say about it today. Be sure to read the actual text, which I’ve posted here, and check back in next week for part two.

The Black Bull of Norroway

 So despite having "Norway" in the title, this is a Scottish fairy tale. It does, however, have a lot in common with one of the best known Norwegian fairy tales around. Which is why I decided to talk about it today.

Our heroine is the youngest of three sisters, as our heroines often are. They all go to a washerwoman for a sort of mystical matchmaking session, and the oldest two go off with some men in nice carriages who come by her door, while our girl sees a black bull riding past, and because this is a weird sort of matchmaking gig, she gets dropped on the bull's back, and off they go.

They have a long journey, during which she eats out of his right ear and drinks out of his left, until they arrive at a castle, where apparently the bull's older brother lives. She's given a magic apple, and then they move onto another castle, where another brother lives, and give her a pear. In a third brother's castle she gets a magic plum. Then they ride on to a glen, and the bull leaves her there, with instructions not to move at all, while he goes to fight the Old One.

The bull tells her that if everything turns blue he's won, and if everything turns red, the Old One has. So she sits by herself in the glen, waiting, which isn't my idea of a good honeymoon, until everything turns blue. She's really excited, though I'm not sure why - it hasn't exactly been a fantastic marriage so far. Anyway, she's excited, so she moves around a little (just, like, uncrossing her legs), against the bull's express orders, and consequently, he's unable to find her again.

Our girl wanders long and far in search of him - again, not clear on the why. She doesn't owe him anything and we haven't seen them bonding in any way. Why not just go home?

But she wanders. She comes eventually to a glass hill, too slippery to climb, and meets a smith who promises to make her special glass-climbing cleats if she works for him for seven years. And she agrees, which, again, no clue why - she hasn't been given any indication that her missing bull is up the hill. And she walked around the entire base searching for a way up, so she could have just kept going.

After seven years she climbs the hill in her special shoes, and meets another washerwoman. This one is apparently a little less magical, and not a fantastic person.

She tells our girl about a knight who will marry whoever washes his dirty clothes. Which is where we really start getting "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" vibes - it's the return of the magic laundry. The washerwoman can't wash the clothes. Her daughter can't wash the clothes. But our girl falls madly in love with this knight - um, honey, what about the bull you've been doing all this work to find? - and she's able to wash his clothes, through the purity of her love or something, idk.

The washerwoman lies to the knight and tells him that her daughter washed the clothes, a wedding date is set, and our girl is devastated. She gets out her magic apple, finds a bunch of jewels inside, and gives them all to the washerwoman's daughter in exchange for a night with the knight before their wedding. The washerwoman drugs him, so he sleeps straight through her speech about the seven years of hard work she's put into bringing about their reunion, and, okay, when and how, exactly, did she figure out that her bull and the knight were the same person? Because this is literally the first time it's come up in the text. I mean, it was obvious to us, but it shouldn't have been obvious to her, right?

I'm so confused.

Things move forward predictably from here - she makes the same deal with the pear and the plum, eventually someone tells the knight about all the noise someone's making in his bedroom at night, and he doesn't take the drugged drink on the final night. He's reunited with our girl, and they burn the washerwoman and her daughter (details on this move not provided) and live happily ever after.

This story...this story is just...wow.

I have so many unanswered questions. There are so many plotholes. This is such a mess.

Why are we choosing husbands based on who (or what) walks past a washerwoman's door first? Why does the bull have to fight an Old One? What does that even mean? Why can't he find her again if she moves at all, and for how many hours or days was she expected to hold completely still? Why did he have to leave her in the middle of nowhere, instead of one of the THREE castles we just visited?

Why did she feel the need to go after him instead of just going home? Why was she so determined to climb the glass hill, when she's fully capable of walking around it, and we have no evidence that the bull is even up there? If shoes that can climb that hill are worth seven years of labor, why are the washerwoman and her daughter just chilling up there? They can't possibly be getting a lot of business.

How did the knight get up there? Why is his clothing magically dirty? Is it from his fight with the Old One? Has our girl actually met him as the knight, or just heard about him? How does she know who he is? When does she figure out who he is? Why are we, the audience, not kept up to date about this discovery?

I just - it's a mess. I give up.

Story and Memory

Let’s talk today about fairy tales and their softening over time. 

Now, I mean this, not in the sense that in the Grimm brothers and Perrault people are getting raped and having their limbs chopped off, and in Disney they’re not, but on a more personal level. Maybe a better way to put it is, let’s talk about story and memory.

Human memory is flawed. We frequently remember things as better, or worse, or simply different from how they really were. For fairy tales, I default to remembering them as better. I think it’s because, despite all the research I’ve done and everything I’ve learned about fairy tales over the last 15 years or so, some subconscious part of me still thinks fairy tale=good, sweet, happy.

So the other day I was reading King Thrushbeard. And, like, I’ve always known that King Thrushbeard was, let’s say...questionable. But I’ve also always been a sucker for anything involving secret identities - superheroes, Beasts, The Princess Bride, the Scarlet Pimpernel.

I’m not going to get into the details of King Thrushbeard here, because I just did that over here, which was my whole reason for reading it in the first place. Anyway, I knew it had some not great aspects, but on my reread, this little section here absolutely blew me away with how bad it was.

Kindly. He said it *kindly*. Like, F you, dude.

I’ve experienced this kind of in-memory softening of a fairy tale before, the first time I reread Perrault’s version of Riquet of the Tuft after many years. And again, you can read what I’ve said about this story here. But basically, I remembered it as this beautiful story about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, because I had very clearly remembered this line:

But what I hadn’t remembered was this line:

Where, for some context, the princess is saying “I agreed to marry you, an ugly man, when I was a total idiot. Surely, now that I am no longer a total idiot, you cannot expect me to keep such a promise.” ie, marrying an ugly man is something only a total idiot would do. She only agrees to marry him when he tells her that she has the power to make him hot. Which I feel just really undercuts the meaning of the line I remembered above; in context it seems as worthless as the morals Perrault likes to include at the ends of his stories, which often have nothing to do with the stories themselves. (Either that or they’re outright stupid - often both).

So. All this to say, I don’t think I’ll be reading my kids (if I ever have kids) a lot of fairy tales. I think I’ll be telling them, as I remember them, because I trust my own memory to produce a nicer story that Perrault or the Grimms can. Which, I suppose, is why oral tradition is so important. A fundamental part of folk tales is making them your own.

White Bears

So the other day I was flipping through my Kay Nielsen-illustrated “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” collection with my mom, because she’d never seen the illustrations before, and they’re some of my favorites. And we weren’t actually reading the stories this time; we were just there to look at pretty pictures. 

The book starts with the titular “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” and therefore some illustrations of white bears. And then we keep going through a few more pages, and suddenly there’s another illustration of a white bear, and at this point I’m thinking “oh, right, ‘White Bear King Valemon.’ Huh. It’s kinda strange that there would be two Norwegian enchanted bridegroom stories where the bridegroom is specifically a white bear.”

And then I flip to the next page, and, granted, at this time I haven’t read “White Bear King Valemon” in a few years, but the next illustration was not at all consistent with what I remembered. So I went back a few pages to discover that this set of white bear illustrations was actually for “The Blue Belt,” and this collection didn’t even include “White Bear King Valemon.”

So let’s talk today about the enchanted bridegroom subset “white bears in Norway.”

Now, the reason I'd forgotten about the white bear bit of "The Blue Belt" is that it's largely inconsequential, just another crazy element in a story packed with crazy. The main character is never actually turned into a bear, but does convincingly disguise himself as one to meet the princess he loves in secret, allowing him to collect insider information to win her hand. The main thing about this story is that, as irrelevant as his white bear disguise is to the plot as a whole, it has resulted in a couple of fantastic illustrations that can easily be used for bear-based enchanted bridegroom stories. But primarily we're here to talk about "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" and "White Bear King Valemon," which are very similar but also completely distinct stories. You can read all about "East-West" here, and this post will be mainly running through how "King Valemon" is different and why we care.

So first off, this is another of those stories where youngest kid is best kid and therefore wins, and specifically the kind of story where it's not something you really want to win - in this case, the right to be kidnapped by a polar bear. All three sisters are princesses, and the bear deemed the older two unworthy to be kidnapped, possibly because they had brains in their heads, which our girl does not seem to.

Bear whisks girl away to palace, joins her in bed at night in human form. And, okay. Remember how in "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," the girl and the enchanted bear have to share a bed for a year, and we really don't know exactly what all they're doing in that bed?

In "White Bear King Valemon," we know exactly what they're doing, and it's exactly what you think. She lives with the bear for three years, and in that time she has three babies. All of whom the bear whisks away immediately. Which, dude, yikes.

I mean, ambiguous bed-sharing with a stranger for one year is already a little, um...well. But getting knocked up by a stranger? Three times? And having all the babies kidnapped by the same white bear who kidnapped you? Who you may or may not have gathered by now is also the stranger who knocked you up? (My money's on not gathering that, because our girl doesn't strike me as the brightest, so far.) Again, yikes. I'm just, like, I'm at a loss for words. "Yikes" is all I've got, guys.

Why does she keep having sex with this man? Does she have a choice? Is this consensual? Why isn't she questioning this man about what on earth is going on here? Why is she not having an enormous fight with the bear and demanding her children back? Why is she allowing herself to become pregnant again when she knows that the baby is going to be taken away by the bear? What does she even think the bear is doing with the babies? 

There comes a time when you just have to say, okay, either the sex stops or we explore period-appropriate alternatives to birth control, because I refuse to bring another child into this world to be eaten by a bear.

After three years and three stolen babies, the girl convinces the bear to let her visit home. Where her mom does the whole "You're doing what? With who? You haven't even seen his face?" bit, only she's even more justified in her concern than the East-West mom, because her daughter is reproducing​ with this man and then allowing her grandbabies to be taken away and possibly eaten by a talking bear​. Like, yes, mom, you tell her; she should absolutely be gathering more information about this situation. There is a time and a place to go with the flow, and that is not​ here and now, sweetheart.

So she goes back with the white bear and lights her little candle, and he wakes up when the tallow drips on him and acts like this is some great betrayal, and not the sensible thing she should have done two and a half years ago when she realized she was pregnant the first time.

He is, like in East-West, just one month from the curse being broken, and I would like to just take a moment to say that is not fair, the troll who cursed him is not playing by the rules, everyone knows the time frame in situations like this is a year and a day, what is this slightly over three years crap?

Bear switches from hot guy back to bear and runs off to where he's supposed to meet the troll or whatever, idk - the girl grabs his fur and tries to go with him, but falls off in the forest somewhere.

She does her best to catch up with him on foot, and on the way she meets three little girls, living with three old women, and each of these girls gives her a gift; these gifts are what she will trade to the troll for three nights with the white bear - well, with King Valemon, now that his bear-curse is over. He's drugged on the first two nights, and they can finally talk on the third, just like in East-West. But instead of Fun With Laundry, in this story they make a trap door for the troll to fall through when she's walking down the aisle. Which. Lame.

With the troll handled, King Valemon takes our girl home, but on the way we stop to collect the three little girls who helped her. Because those are their kids, who he, get this, "had taken so they could aid in her quest." The quest that didn't exist yet at the time, because he hadn't been taken by the troll yet, and had no reason yet to suspect that she would look at his face - I mean, the girl was having babies with him and not bothering about the face, so I would have considered it a safe bet that she would continue not bothering, and taking the babies was definitely overkill.

Also, like. She lived with him for three years and had three babies. After three years, she visits her parents, and then she looks at him with the candle; this all seems to happen pretty quickly. Which means the oldest girl might, maybe, possibly be as old as three, but probably she's younger. We should have an age range of infant to toddler here. And yet all three are described as little girls, not babies, and all three seem able to effectively communicate. So that's a bit of a plot hole. Gotta love timeline inconsistency. 

In conclusion: "East of the Sun, West of the Moon"? Beautiful, meaningful story, perfect, magnificent, 25 out of ten. "White Bear King Valemon?" Garbage story full of garbage characters who make garbage decisions, not worth the paper it's printed on, only redeeming feature is mom not putting up with her daughter's absolute idiocy.

Riquet with the Tuft, Catherine Bernard’s Version

So this story opens with a really pretty, really ugly princess being born, much like Perrault’s. Now I said in the last Riquet post that Perrault ripped off this version, but we’re not actually totally sure which story was first. Anyway. Our princess here is named Mama. She’s too stupid to even realize she’s stupid, until she meets a super ugly dude named Riquet, who informs her of the problem, and then says he can fix it if she agrees to marry him at the end of a year. (Too stupid to know she’s stupid, btw, makes her more stupid than the Perrault version, who was just smart enough to realize she was stupid.)

She agrees. A year passes, she becomes smarter and smarter, and she falls in love with another man, named Arada. And then the time comes for her to marry Riquet, who in this version is the king of the gnomes. 

Mama doesn’t want to marry him anymore, and he says that’s fine, she doesn’t have to, but she can’t keep on being smart unless she does. Mama figures she’ll lose her boyfriend Arada either way—obviously if she marries someone else, but he wouldn’t like her anymore if she was stupid again, so she still couldn’t be with him if she rejected Riquet.

She elects to lose her boyfriend and keep her mind by marrying Riquet. But he’s ugly, and all the other gnomes are ugly, and she hates everything about being with him.  She sends out a message to Arada, letting him know what’s happened, and he comes to join her in gnome land.

For a while Mama and Arada are happy sneaking around together, but eventually Riquet catches them. Now, he doesn’t want his wife cheating on him, but he also doesn’t want a stupid wife, so his main method of managing the situation is gone. He decides to take away her intelligence during the day, so she’s only smart when they’re together at night.

She retaliates by drugging him every night, and hanging with Arada while she’s smart and Riquet’s sleeping. But of course, they get caught again.

This time, Riquet puts a spell on Arada, so that he looks just like Riquet. Mama gets to keep her brains, but instead of a hot boyfriend and an ugly husband, she has two identically ugly husbands, and everyone is miserable forever.

Which is probably why I prefer Perrault—not a big fan of unhappy endings.

Beauty and the Beast: Dream Prince

I’m going to take some time today to talk about one of my (many) favorite aspects of the original Beauty and the Beast, which I’ve somehow managed to go all these years without covering.

The Superman love triangle.

Is there some sort of official name for this phenomenon that I haven’t bothered to look up? Probably.

But you know what I’m talking about. Lois likes Clark, but she’s really hung up on Superman. So this poor guy is in competition with himself for her affections.

In “The Beauty and the Beast,” the beauty is living with a beast who proposes to her every night, and every night she says no. But she’s growing increasingly fond of him, and one of the main things preventing her from saying yes is her Dream Guy.

Now. A brief explanation of the beast’s situation here. Part of his curse is that he seems as dumb as the beast he looks like. So he’s sort of trapped inside his own head, and it’s not possible for the beauty to really get to know him.

But he’s visiting her in her dreams, as a prince - as his real self. And she’s fallen in love with the dream prince, who she hasn’t connected with the beast.

So she’s refusing to marry him because she’s in love with the person he’ll become as soon as she says yes.

Basically, it’s a mess.

And ultimately she does agree to marry the beast, when it seems he’ll die if she doesn’t. At which point we have two options.

She agreed to marry him because she does care for him deeply, even if she’s not in love with him, and has decided that she’d rather keep him alive than keep waiting on a man who might be only a figment of her imagination. In which case everything is gonna be great when he changes; she saved the beast she’s fond of, and now gets to marry the man she loves.

The beast’s near death has made her realize that it’s him she truly loves, not a man who may only be a figment of her imagination. And as soon as she realizes she loves the beast more than the man, the beast ceases to exist forever and is replaced by the man. Which is a major bummer, and much awkwardness is bound to ensue.

It’s a worse situation than Superman’s; once he comes clean to Lois, it’s all good, because Clark and Superman are the same person in different clothes. But while the beast may be fundamentally the same person he always was, the terms of his curse prevent him from acting like himself while he’s a beast. Which means that the two people the beauty is torn between are, in a way, simultaneously the same person and two different people.

And it’s just - honestly I’m not sure I see this working out well. If you’ve fallen for this big, kinda ugly guy who’s a little slow, a little dumb, are you going to be happy with a whip-smart hottie? And if the girl you like was always nice to you when you were slow and ugly, but is suddenly all over you when the spell breaks, if she agreed to marry you, but is clearly delighted when this causes you to become a radically different person from the one she agreed to marry, how are you going to feel about that?

Overall, it’s this “seem like a beast” clause that continues to be problematic. Because if you love someone, it shouldn’t really matter what he looks like, right? But if the spell changes how you act, that’s...it’s just difficult. That fairy who cursed him knew what she was doing; he is thoroughly screwed over.

 

 

Transformation Through Love

I've talked before about the transforming power of love, and specifically about the transforming power of love in "Prince Lindworm." But that was a 20+ page academic essay, and who wants to read a 20+ page academic essay? (Although, if you do, it's here.) So let's talk about it again, in a more casual setting. 

We've gone over the bizarro transformation sequence before, but let's run through it again for anyone who's new here: Girl forced to marry snake monster with history of eating wives. Girl wears 10 shifts under her wedding dress. Lindworm asks girl to take off shift, girl demands lindworm take off skin first. Lindworm complies, repeat 10 times. Girl whips nasty mass of skinless lindworm with whips dipped in lye. Girl dunks nasty mass of skinless, whipped lindworm in tub of milk. Girl embraces nasty mass of sticky, skinless, whipped lindworm. Lindworm turns into hot guy.

Now, the majority of the transformation process is extremely violent. It also sort of matches up with the Catholic sacrament of penance, which is consistent with the whole story being a Christian allegory, which you can read about here. And transformation through violence is certainly an established pattern in folklore, as we see most prominently in The Frog King, but also in more minor forms in a number of stories from throughout Europe. Which I will talk about more in a future blog.

But today we're going to focus on that last step. On that embrace.

There are a few things to keep in mind here. Firstly, hugging a dragon-thing that wants to eat you? Really gross and unpleasant. Secondly, hugging any sort of creature that has, through various abuses, become a quivering mass of exposed muscle and veins, likely bleeding profusely? Really, really gross and unpleasant. Thirdly, is "embrace" a euphemism? Maybe. Let's not dwell on the logistics of that. Fourthly, this girl is the lindworm's third bride, which probably means she's the third shot at transformation. An old woman in the forest told her what to do; there's no reason to believe she didn't give the same instructions to the two brides the lindworm ate, even if the text doesn't spell this out; there's a strong tradition in folklore of three people speaking to a mysterious old woman, and the first two ignoring her and dying.

So, my theory: the first two girls may have ignored the instructions entirely, but even if they didn't, they wouldn't have been able to complete the last step. Because it's the last step that makes our heroine remarkable. The last step is a kindness. To take up in your arms a disgusting, suffering thing, which would have destroyed you given the chance, to provide comfort - that takes a special kind of person.

A lot of weird, creepy things went into making the lindworm a man. But ultimately, the thing that changed him was one moment of kindness.

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Transformation Through Violence

There are a lot of enchanted bridegroom stories out there. And there are a lot of different ways for the spells to be broken. Although a lot of them are at least…subtly sexual in nature. Sometimes, as in the case of the original French novel “Beauty and the Beast,” it’s literally sex that breaks the spell, although this often gets sanitized in translation to an agreement to marry. In stories like “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” it’s sharing a bed for a full year without seeing the enchanted bridegroom’s face. 

In fact, this is also an element in “Prince Lindworm”—she embraces him, and when they wake in the morning he’s a man. More about that later, although we won’t get into the sex, exactly, because that’s not really my thing.

But before that part, she makes him shed more layers of skin than can possibly be healthy, then whips him. With lye. Which, just. Ouch.

(And after that there’s the part where she dips him in milk, which has clear baptismal elements, but why milk? I still don’t know. Someday I’ll figure that one out.)

So here we’re going to talk about the transformations that are about violence instead of sex or love. There are stories like “Hans My Hedgehog,” where no harm is actually inflicted on the enchanted bridegroom, only on whatever facilitates his transformation—in most of these variants, it’s an animal skin, which is burned by the bride figure in the story. Also, in most of these stories, the bridegroom has the ability to go back and forth between forms, and it’s the bride who gets fed up and puts a stop to the transformations. It’s probably no surprise that transformation-through-violence stories feature brides who are a little less friendly and sympathetic than most.

But the only fairy tale I know of that features such explicit violence as a catalyst for transformation (though I’m sure there are others out there; I can only know so many stories) is “The Frog Prince”—you can read what I’ve written about that in the past here.

This does, of course, include variants of what we’re going to call the Frogged Bridegroom, specifically. (There are a surprising number of frog-based enchanted bridegroom stories. Which, for the record, should not be confused with frog bride stories—eventually I’m going to make a post about the Russian “Frog Princess.”) So we’ve got the German “Frog King” and the Scottish “The Well of the World’s End,” among several others, but we’re going to focus on those two, as they’re the ones I have hard copies of on hand at the moment.

In “The Frog King,” the frog tries to get in bed with the princess, and she responds by picking him up and flinging him into the wall. Which, for a frog, is pretty much a death sentence. But instead of going splat, he turns into a hot dude who, inexplicably, decides to marry her. (I mean, I guess his eagerness to get in her bed while still a frog indicates a certain romantic interest, but for me, a crush would not survive attempted murder. Although, does it count as murder when the victim is a pervy amphibian?)

In “The Well of the World’s End,” a girl agrees to do whatever a frog asks for one night in exchange for a favor. This frog also gets in bed with the girl, but her subsequent violence isn’t an understandable reaction to that skeeviness—the last thing the frog asks her to do before the night is over is chop off his head. Which she does, and, bam! Handsome prince. (Gonna make a full blog about this story too—it has a lot more nuance than “The Frog King.”)

So there’s a significant difference, obviously, between these two stories—one girl is attacking her enchanted bridegroom, and one is doing something she’s been asked to do to help him. And “Prince Lindworm” exists, weirdly, in the middle.

Is our girl’s initial attack a response to unwanted sexual advances? No, because she was given instructions on what to do before she even met the lindworm. But also, sort of, maybe? I mean, she knew she was going to be marrying the lindworm, so unwanted sexual advances are likely a given. And the fact that he was willing to shed several layers of skin—certainly more than his body seems able to handle—just to get her naked is…well, that’s a little worrying.

But does the lindworm want to be attacked because he knows it’s an avenue for transformation? Maybe. We don’t know. Probably not? As far as we can tell his plan is just to spend the rest of his life marrying and eating a girl every few months. Which doesn’t seem really sustainable. The thing is, he knows his parents are the king and queen. So presumably he knows that he should be a human. Is he attempting to provoke the girls by threatening to eat them, knowing that a sufficiently violent response is going to restore his true form? Again, probably not. But maybe.

The question, I think, is why does violence trigger a transformation? Love, I get. And sex, as an indication of love, yeah, sure. But why violence?

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

So, as bizarre and nonsensical as “Prince Lindworm” seems to me at times, I think it actually makes more sense than the frog stories—it combines the violence with these other elements in a way that makes the whole thing more complex and meaningful. (And this is the second time in this post I’m going to link to my Lindworm as an Allegory post.)

(Reminder that you can preorder my book based on "Prince Lindworm" here!)

Growing Up Beastly

As you probably know by now, I’m kind of obsessed with Beauty and the Beast. And I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the nature of the Beast, and especially on his origins and on the idea of the Beast as a victim. (Like this post in my Sexual Abuse in the Folk Tradition series, and this post and this one about why we don’t curse children.) 

Today we’re going to talk about a slightly different Beast, from a different variant of this story type. This is, of course, Prince Lindworm.

Like our usual beloved Beast, it’s not the lindworm’s fault that he’s a lindworm, although for slightly different reasons—his mom screwed up, and he was born a lindworm. This enchanted bridegroom has literally never been unenchanted; there’s no natural state for him to return to. He’s always been a beast. (Sort of like Hans My Hedgehog, actually; maybe I’ll come back to that in another post.)

Before the lindworm gets transformed into a man, he eats two princesses. Which is…not great. However. He is a lindworm. Which is a kind of dragon. Which is, you know—I mean presumably they have dietary needs that differ from a human’s?

I have so, so many questions about this story that are not addressed in the original text. But the main one is what on earth did the lindworm think was going on here? So. Several points.

Firstly. There is a distinct possibility that he’s sort of a baby lindworm. (At least in the early Danish version. In the later version incorrectly attributed to Asbjorsen and Moe, we have a clearer timeline.) The queen gives birth while the king is at war. The lindworm slithers away, and reappears as the king is coming home from war.

Is this a war that’s lasted fifteen to twenty years? Did the king come home from the first war, stay home for several years, then go fight in another war that he’s returning from when the lindworm approaches him? Did the queen give birth to a fully grown lindworm that met the king a few months later? Did the queen give birth to a baby lindworm that was an adult by the time the king got home, either because lindworms grow faster than humans or because magic? Did she give birth to a baby lindworm that’s still a baby? How old is this lindworm?

Secondly. How did the lindworm know the king was his dad? Because he clearly did. He just slithered up one day and said “Hey, I’m your son. I wanna get married.”

Who raised this lindworm? Who told him who his real parents were? The text says he burrows under the bedchamber as soon as he’s born, and doesn’t mention him having any further contact with the queen or with anyone else.

Thirdly. Did the lindworm even know he was under a spell? Dude’s been a lindworm for his entire life. He knows his parents are human, but, like, do lindworms have access to comprehensive sex education? For all he knows, all lindworms might have human parents. Is he aware that he’s not supposed to be a lindworm? Even if he is, does that necessarily mean he wants to stop being a lindworm?

Fourthly. What was his ultimate goal here? He demands brides. He eats them. He demands more. Why?

Personally, I know nothing about lindworm culture and tradition. Maybe they’re, like, reverse black widows or praying mantises, and eating their wives is just, like, what they do. Or maybe he was just really hungry—though surely there would be people other than his new wives available to eat.

Why did he want to get married? Did he ever intend for a wife to survive past the wedding night?

Fifthly. The transformation. Did he see this coming? Again, did he even realize it was a possibility? When this chick starts demanding that he molt out of season and then whips him and bathes him in milk, what does he think is happening? Does he realize it’s a transformation spell? Was he expecting it or hoping for it? Does he think it’s just a bizarre human wedding tradition? Did the other two girls try to break the spell too, and do it wrong?

Shedding ten layers of skin in a row is gonna be pretty incapacitating for any sort of reptile. Once he’s done that, there’s no defending himself from things like the whipping. If the other girls tried to break the spell too, but skipped the shedding step and went right to whipping, he might have eaten them in self-defense.

Sixthly. The aftermath. So our lindworm is now a handsome prince. Okay, now what? What does that even mean? He’s literally always been a lindworm, with, as far as we can tell, lindworm behaviors and a lindworm palate. You aren’t turning him back into a prince—you’re turning him into a prince. Even if he always knew he was under a spell and it would someday be broken, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s like, inherently, fundamentally, a lindworm. He grew up as a lindworm, doing lindworm things.

He has no idea how to be a person, much less a prince. Walking, gesturing, chewing food—all exciting new experiences.

I mean, on the bright side, the king and queen didn’t actually miss out on their only child’s babyhood, after all—they still get to have all those fun experiences, just with an adult man who’s on his third wife and ate the first two.

I just, like, I don’t get how this whole thing is going to work. I have questions. I have concerns. I have many, many concerns.

Th circumstances are wildly different, but ultimately I think he’s a victim, too. Brides for lunch and all.

It’s not his fault he’s a lindworm, and while he was a lindworm, he did, presumably, what lindworms do. And now he’s a man, whether he wants to be or not. So he’s lost everything he’s ever known and been, and now he has to learn how to be a different kind of creature, from scratch, twenty years too late. (And depending on that whole king-at-war timeline, he may have just transitioned over night from a baby dragon to an adult man, which….yikes.)

What is the learning curve going to be like here? Let’s assume he’s not going to try to eat any more people, because of the sizing issue if nothing else—lindworms are probably a lot bigger than men. (How does he feel about the bride eating, looking back? Does he feel guilty? Does he shrug it off as a lindworm thing that he did when he was a lindworm? Is it all just kind of awkward?) Is he going to eat—or try to eat—a few cats or rats or lap dogs? How many months or years will it take him to remember he has to step out of bed in the mornings, instead of trying to slither and falling in a heap on the floor? When molting season comes around, is he going to try it and sprain something? (Or will molting forever be associated with terrible, terrible trauma after that bizarro transformation sequence?)

This guy has been totally screwed over since literally the moment of his conception. And for the stupidest reason. He didn’t insult someone, didn’t turn down their advances or refuse to share or help. His mom ate too many flowers. That’s it. That’s the whole reason he’s a monster, the whole reason two innocent girls are dead.

(Also, on the subject of those flowers, he should have been a girl. The queen ate the girl flower first, then the boy flower; she should have had a girl. I think I’ve done everything I’m going to with this story, but if you want to write a retelling where the lindworm is a girl, hit me up in like five years when my publishing company has expanded a little and I’ll publish it for you.)

(I wrote a book about the crazy aftermath, and you can get it here.)

Born a Monster

While animal bridegrooms are an extremely popular folktale motif, it’s fairly rare to encounter bridegrooms who were originally born non-human. (This is particularly interesting as it is much more common for brides to be born nonhuman—see “The Little Mermaid,” anything about selkies, “Undine,” “Melusine”—there’s also a distinct aquatic theme here, but I’m getting off-topic.)

There are only two other stories like this that come to mind: “The Pig King” (Italian and French) and “Hans My Hedgehog.” (German) (I am sure there are other stories out there that fit into this category, but there are hundreds of thousands of fairy tales in the world, and I can only read a small percentage of them, and can remember even less.)

“Prince Lindworm” differs from these other two born-a-monster stories in that his reason for being a monster is slightly more traditional. Monster bridegrooms are generally turned into monsters as a punishment—usually for a fairly minor offense, such as general rudeness or turning down romantic advances. The lindworm is a lindworm because of his mother’s minor offense of eating too many flowers. There’s no punishment involved in Hans’ or the Pig King’s monstrousness; their parents wanted desperately to have children, and someone magical heard their pleas and said yeah, okay, sure—but with a fun little twist. (Although Hans’ dad totally brought it on himself by saying “I want a kid so bad I wouldn’t even care if he was a hedgehog.”)

All three stories involve the beast marrying before his transformation. But while Hans and both versions of the Pig King remain beasts at least part-time for some time after their marriage (we’re talking months, here), the lindworm is transformed on their wedding night. Hans and French pig are the types of characters that can only be permanently freed from their animal forms when the animal skins are destroyed. Which their wives handle, having become extremely fed up with this whole bestiality situation. The terms of transformation for the Italian pig are just that he be married three times. (Which, by the way, no one actually knew about. The terms and conditions were totally secret in this situation. And personally, if I didn’t know about the 3 weddings deal, I probably wouldn’t have kept getting married after multiple spouses attempted to kill me, but whatever, you do you.)

Prince Lindworm just feels more like an enchanted bridegroom story than the others—partly because of the consequences-for-your-actions element of his lindworm-iness, but mostly I think because of the transformation sequence? And the role the main girl plays.

Hans’ bride comes off more like a Brave Little Tailor girl than an enchanted bridegroom girl; you don’t really get the sense that she’s saving him from enchantment. He won the right to marry her through tailor-typical feats, and their relationship is something that she endures until she figures out she can make it a little more bearable by trashing his hedgehog skin.

The pig king’s bride lying with him every night when he’s not wearing an animal skin is actually pretty common in folklore, with the best example being “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”—and of course there’s “Cupid and Psyche” there, too. But I do feel that a fundamental part of those stories is the journey that the girl goes on after seeing his face. “The Pig King” just feels—I don’t know.

I think an important part of enchanted bridegroom stories is the step where the girl does something to save the beast—whether that’s going on a journey to find him, initiating a bizarro transformation sequence, or searching frantically through the palace to find him and marry him before he dies of sorrow.

I don’t know. I just think that "Prince Lindworm" is better than the other born-enchanted stories I’ve encountered. It just feels right.

I can’t think of a good ending, here. Whatever. Remind me to come back to that whole girls-more-commonly-start-out-non-human thing sometime when I have the energy to spare for anything non-Lindworm related. (Even when bridegrooms are born monsters, they’re still distinctly enchanted, born from normal humans. Brides are more likely to be just naturally nonhuman, which is—there’s something significant in that, I’m sure, and I actually meant it to be a part of my seminar paper five years ago, but the professor made me narrow my focus, which was probably a good idea as the paper was still like 25 pages long.) 

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Prince Lindworm and Prince Marcassin

So the Italian “The Pig King” (Straparola) was, at one point, I don’t remember when or where, advertised to me as the closest equivalent to “Prince Lindworm.” And I finally got around to tracking it down, as well as the longer, more detailed “Prince Marcassin,” which is a very similar, but expanded, French story by Madame D’Aulnoy.

I have the full text of “The Pig King” from the library, and the Surlalune text of “Prince Marcassin,” as I was unable to find it in English anywhere else, and we’re just going to go through the stories, and then compare them to Prince Lindworm at the end.

Now, “The Pig King” and “Prince Marcassin” are two separate stories, but they’re so similar that for the purposes of today’s blog, we’re mostly going to treat them as one. I’ll let you know when we run into significant differences.

(Marcassin is, according to google translate, French for wild boar.)

Both of the pig stories are the type where three siblings undertake a task, and only the youngest succeeds, by virtue of being an all-around better person. I’m not a big fan of this in cases where the task is “survive a marriage.” (The only other story like this I can think of right now is the Grimms’ “The Sea Hare;” you do see this in Bluebeard variants like “Fitcher’sBird,” but that’s a lot less distressing since the groom is explicitly the bad guy. Generally I just don’t love it when the protagonist lives happily ever after with a spouse who killed their older siblings. It’s awkward.)

So. Now that that little tangent is out of the way, let’s take it from the top. Barren queen longs for a child, takes a walk, falls asleep. Three fairies come by and decide to give her one, but to make him (temporarily) a pig. In “The Pig King,” the queen sleeps through the fairies’ visit and never knows about it. In “Prince Marcassin,” she dreams of the fairies’ visit, but only hears what the first two fairies say, about how she’ll have a son, and misses the pig element added by the third.

Nine months after this little nap, she gives birth to a pig.

I do think the relationship between mother and son here is really sweet. She just loves her monster baby. I’m reminded, a little, of that ancient piece of pottery featuring Pasiphae and the young Minotaur (see here).

She gave birth to this pig. She raised him. She loves him. He rests his muddy head in her lap. He roots around for truffles and brings them home for her. He’s kind of just treated like a normal prince, and we all dance around the awkwardness of the pig situation. (In “The Pig King” the dad is pretty on board with this arrangement too; in “Prince Marcassin” he sort of humors his wife but makes it clear that he feels the correct thing to do when one births a pig is to cast it into the sea.)

When Marcassin falls in love with a girl who doesn’t feel the same, Mom tells him he can do better. Unfortunately, when she says that, he says, “No, Mom, I cannot do better. Like, seriously, come on, I am literally a pig.” So she arranges the marriage. And when that goes wrong, another marriage.

In “Prince Marcassin,” the first wife kills herself on the wedding night rather than be married to a pig. The second wife attempts to kill him, and he kills her in self-defense. In “The Pig King,” he ends up killing both of the first two brides in self-defense.

This is the point where the plot begins to differ significantly. In “The Pig King,” the third bride agrees to marry the pig. They have an extremely muddy wedding night, which they both survive. She stays apparently happily married to the pig for some time before he decides to show her that he can cast off his pig skin and become a hot guy at night. After this, they stay even more happily married until they have a (normal, human) son. Finally, the bride can’t bear to keep the secret anymore, and tells her mother-in-law about the nighttime-shapeshifting. They destroy the discarded pig skin, and he stays a hot guy from then on.

(Let’s just take a moment here to appreciate how sensible the third bride is. Like, yeah, this dude is a pig, but he’s also the king and queen’s only child, and therefore the future king. This means two absolutely critical things. 1) if you can handle being married to a pig, you get to be queen someday. 2) even if your attempt to kill your unwanted husband was successful, you would be in big, big trouble afterwards. Fate worse than pig-marriage. So bride number 3 here definitely made the right call. Although, to be fair, it does appear that the marriage was actually consummated prior to even the nighttime-only transformation, so. Well. I also would not want to have sex with a pig. But murder is not the answer.)

In “Prince Marcassin,” after being forced to kill his second wife in self-defense on their wedding night, Marcassin says, “Screw this, humans suck; I’m gonna go live like other pigs,” and takes off into the woods to befriend some more normal wild boars.

He does, however, write letters home so everyone knows he’s okay.

The mother of his first two (deceased) brides has now moved out into the countryside with her one remaining daughter. Prince Marcassin encounters this third daughter while living like a pig, and somehow convinces her to come live with him? In the woods? Where he’s just being a standard wild boar?

And they live together in the woods until she gets pregnant. Which. I have concerns. I have so many concerns.

This girl’s two older sisters died after being forced to marry this pig. While he was living like a man. Now he’s living like a pig, and she’s run away from home to have sex with him in a cave in the woods?

I do kind of love how the French fairy tale writers don’t pull their punches. A lot of stories from a lot of cultures sort of imply that maybe some sex is going on behind the scenes in enchanted bridegroom situations, but the French ones just come out and say it. This girl’s been lying with a pig and now she’s pregnant. Villeneuve’s Beast doesn’t ask “Will you marry me?” every night; he asks “Will you sleep with me?” There’s just something refreshing about that refusal to dance around the issue.

But still. Deeply, deeply concerned.

Killing yourself or your pig groom is not a good solution to the problem. But neither is running away with him and letting him knock you up! Surely there must be some sort of acceptable middle ground in this very messed-up situation.

Anyway. Eventually she finds his discarded pig skin, figures things out, and gets rid of it, and they go home to the palace and live happily ever after. (At which point Marcassin mentions that he’s been discarding the skin every night? And we’re supposed to believe that this girl just never noticed? Like, it doesn’t matter how dark it is, she’s gonna notice a difference between a pig and a dude when they’re sleeping together.)

It’s kind of a messed up story.

So, onto the Prince Lindworm comparison: literally all these stories have in common is the born-already-enchanted element and the three brides. Even the circumstances of the brides’ deaths and the success of the third bride are totally different. They were fun to read, though.

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The Missing Half

So if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve probably heard me talking about Prince Lindworm, and not just recently, as I prepare to release my book. I’ve been obsessed with this story for a long time, I’ve written several blog posts and essays about it, and it’s even the source of my username on many websites—konglindorm. 

But today, I’m going to talk about something new: the second half of the story.

I honestly didn’t know until very recently that this story did not end with the lindworm being transformed and everyone living happily ever after. I’ve been working for a long time on my own translation of the story, from a 100+ year old Danish book, and last month I finally reached the end of it.

And then saw that there were three more pages.

Now, I’m preparing to publish my first novel, and I don’t have the time or the energy to translate another three pages. But I did a quick read-through, enough to get the basic idea, and I did some more research. Then I ran it through Google translate, which produced something that’s…pretty rough, but it’s useful to having something in English to glance back at as I work on this post.

So it’s not relevant to my retelling at all, and it’s actually a really common fairy tale type that I’ve encountered many times before, but I’m really excited about this. Quick recap, before we start: Barren queen wants baby. Queen is instructed to eat one flower if she wants a son, another if she wants a daughter, but not, under any circumstances, both. Queen eats both. Queen gives birth to lindworm. Lindworm eventually demands bride. Eats her. Demands second bride. Eats her. Demands third bride, third bride does some really weird stuff that somehow turns him into a human. Great rejoicing, etc., etc.

Now on to part two. I’m gonna be honest; some really weird stuff happens here. Which shouldn’t be surprising, coming from the same fairy tale that brought us “To turn a snake into a man, make him molt ten times, dip some whips in lye, whip him a bunch, and dunk him in a tub of milk.” My understanding of the story is hindered somewhat by lack of a complete and accurate English translation, but it looks like at some point our girl helps break the spells on two other enchanted princes by feeding them her breast milk? It’s, um. It’s something, and something I’ll need to fully translate eventually to understand better. I think I’m missing a fair amount of context and nuance.

(Between the two halves, I ‘m thinking I need to do a lot of research on the healing properties of milk in folklore. Is that a thing? Does it come up elsewhere? This story is Danish; anyone from Denmark know if there’s some cultural element to this or something?)

But for now we’re going to focus on the main thing, the basic plot of the second half.

Our girl gets pregnant. Lindworm and his dad go off to war, leaving pregnant girl with Lindworm’s mother the queen. Now, normally, that would cause some trouble in the fairy tale world, because usually, old queens are not fond of their daughters-in-law, and often try to frame them for horrible crimes.

But not our queen. She gave birth to a monster. Her only heir was a dragon, and he was eating people. Then our girl came along and turned him into an upstanding member of human society. This queen loves her daughter-in-law. So we need a different bad guy.

Our girl gives birth to twins. She sends a letter to the lindworm, letting him know. Normally, in this story type, the queen swaps it out with a letter saying she gave birth to something else, but not our queen, so that role is filled by the Red Knight. No information on who this dude is, what he has against our characters, or why it’s his job to run letters back and forth between the palace and the war zone.

He gets rid of the letter saying our girl had twins, replaces it with a letter saying she had puppies. Lindworm gets the letter, thinks, “well, that’s super weird, but who am I to judge, my mom didn’t give birth to a human either.” Sends back a letter saying, “Okay, we’ll sort that all out when I get home.”

Red Knight was apparently hoping for a less go-with-the-flow type answer, because he replaces that letter with one telling the queen to set our girl and her babies on fire.

The queen gets the letter, and I guess she’s probably thinking that maybe the transformation didn’t quite work after all, maybe her son still has some monster in him, because what the heck, dude? I’m not burning my grandbabies.

So she doesn’t know when the lindworm is coming home, and she’s afraid of what he’ll do to his family when he does; she sets our girl up with some supplies and sends her and the babies out into the world where they’ll be safe.

(This is when she turns a couple birds into princes by nursing them, and apparently hangs out with them in their palace for quite some time. Not clear on the nature of their relationships, a little concerned, will update you guys someday when I’ve sorted it all out; if anyone’s read this entire story in Danish and fully understands it, or if you’ve encountered a complete English translation, please do let me know!)

Lindworm comes home, looking for his wife. Queen is pissed at her son. Son isn’t sure what she’s so upset about; he thought he was pretty chill about the whole gave-birth-to-puppies thing. Queen isn’t sure what puppies have to do with anything, but setting your family on fire is in no way chill. They argue for a while, eventually get to the bottom of things, Red Knight is in big, big trouble. Lindworm goes looking for his wife and kids. Eventually finds them hanging out with these two other princes.

This is where Google translate really breaks down on me, and things just make less and less sense, and I can’t go down to the source material with my Danish-English dictionary and sort it out right now; I’m on a bit of a tight schedule. But it’s looking like the Lindworm and the two other princes sort of fight over our girl, all three of them drink her milk (it seems like it’s been long enough that she shouldn’t be producing milk anymore; it also seems like these two dudes are drinking her milk regularly? I am so concerned about so many things.)

Somehow the conflict is resolved, the other two princes marry other princesses, and our girl and the twins go home with the lindworm.

Now, there’s a lot to unpack here, obviously, and a lot of it is going to have to wait until another time. It is nice to know that King Lindorm is consistently just absolutely bizarre through both halves.

But what I really, really like about the second half is that some new dude is our bad guy, and the queen is fully and firmly on our heroine’s side.

Before I made any effort at even the crappiest translation of the second half, I did some research on what it was about. And I was so concerned about it as soon as I found out what story type it was, because some sort of mother figure is almost always the bad guy. (Shout out to the Grimms for not doing that in “The Girl Without Hands,” too.) And it just seemed really awful that the queen would turn around and try to sabotage our girl after she fixed the lindworm. So I was really relieved to find the Red Knight in my first quick skim-through.

I’m just really impressed with Grundtvig, Adjunct Levisen, and Maren Mathisdatter for deviating from the norm here.

(Another notable deviation, aside from “The Girl Without Hands,” listed above, is the French fairy tale “Bearskin,” by Marie-Madeleine de Lubert; I doubt it’s a coincidence that women were definitely involved in the telling/recording of 2 of these 3 stories where people are not out to get their daughters-in-law.)

Also, like. Can we just take a moment to appreciate the incredible stupidity of the Red Knight? The lindworm was born as a giant snake monster, and for some reason Red thinks he’ll be shocked and horrified that his children were born as puppies? The lindworm is pretty much the only person in the world who has no right to be upset by that. He, of all people, should know that these things just happen sometimes, and they’re totally fixable, though not, perhaps, without bloodshed.

(Also, also. As I said above, I don’t know who the Red Knight is or what he has against our characters. It’s possible that the text does tell us and it just didn’t come across in my incredibly quick and crappy translation. But my theory is that he’s somehow connected to one of our two dead and eaten princesses. In which case he’s entitled to be upset, even if he’s handling it poorly.)

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Prince Lindworm: Version Comparison

Over the years, I have managed to find three different versions of King Lindorm—the one that appears in Svend Grundtvig’s Gamle Dansk Minder i Folkemunde, the one that appears in Andrew Lang’s Pink Fairy Book, and the one that appears in the Folio Society’s East of the Sun and West of the Moon. (There is no indication of where this story came from originally or who translated it, so we’re just going to call it the Folio version here.)

 I’ve talked a lot before about the origins of this story; the earliest version, Grundtvig’s, is from Denmark. The Folio Society attributes theirs to Asbjørnsen and Moe, in Norway, which we know is incorrect as it doesn’t appear in any other edition of their work. Lang attributes his version to Sweden.

So today, we’re just going to work our way through the three versions and compare/contrast. 

They all start the same way. Queen wants baby, queen can’t have baby, old woman tells her how to make it happen. Lang’s version deviates most from the others in the beginning. In the other two versions, the queen encounters the old woman while out on a walk; in Lang’s, the old woman comes to the palace and seeks out the queen specifically to impart her wisdom.

In both Gruntvig’s version and the Folio version, the queen is to eat only one of two differently-colored roses that will grow up overnight under a two-handled cup left in the garden. Very specific, perfectly identical. The lindworm comes because the queen eats both roses.

In Lang’s version, the queen is to take a bath in her room. Two red onions will appear under the bathtub afterwards, and she is to peel and eat both. Her mistake is that she eats the onions without peeling them. (Note that in this version the queen is not given the option to choose the gender of her child.)

Another little deviation in Lang’s version is that the queen apparently doesn’t know she’s given birth to a lindworm? Her waiting woman tosses the lindworm out of the window as soon as it’s born, and the queen doesn’t notice it at all.

Lang and Folio both feature a normal, human prince born after the lindworm. In Gruntvig’s version the lindworm is an only child. Since Gruntvig’s version has no siblings, he approaches the king directly to ask for a bride. In the other two, he waits until the prince goes out to find a bride, and then goes up to him and says, “Hey, I’m your secret brother, and since I’m older, I get to get married first.”

Here, again, Lang’s version deviates significantly. The other lindworms both marry (and eat) two foreign princesses, then a local shepherd’s daughter selected by the king. Lang’s lindworm marries and then eats an unspecified number of slave women before a wicked stepmother offers up her stepdaughter as a bride. Specifically, she tells the king that her stepdaughter would like to marry the lindworm, and the king apparently doesn’t question this? He for some reason finds it believable that a young woman would volunteer to marry a monster who’s already eaten multiple previous wives, without asking for any kind of compensation for her family or anything?

And, okay, Lang is going full German-Cinderella here. After the stepmom screws her over, girl goes to her mom’s grave, where she’s given three nuts. This is what happens in the place of her meeting an old woman and getting instructions in the other two versions.

Lang’s main girl goes through similar basic wedding prep steps to the others, with no indication of where she got the idea from; while the other girls have a tub of lye, tub of milk, whips, and ten gowns/shifts, Lang’s girl has the tube of lye, only seven shifts, and three scrubbing brushes. After they go through the whole take-off-your-shift-take-off-your-skin situation, Lang’s girl just, like, scrubs all the lindworm-iness out of him? She just scrubs until he turns into a dude.

The other two versions, of course, have the much more complex and disgusting transformation sequence of dip whips in lye, whip lindworm, dunk lindworm in milk, take lindworm to the bed, embrace.

The Folio version ends immediately after this, with the girl and the transformed prince living happily ever after. The other two stories continue.

In the second half of Lang’s version, the old king dies, the lindworm becomes king, the lindworm goes to fight in a war, and the girl’s stepmother steals a bunch of letters and tells a bunch of lies that result in the girl and her two young sons fleeing the palace until the lindworm comes to find them. During this time, the girl uses her magic nuts to save a man named Peter.

In the second half of Gruntvig’s version, the old king and the lindworm both go off to war, it’s a character called the Red Knight who switches the letters, and while she and the babies are away, our girl somehow uses her breast milk to help two other men who’ve been transformed into animals? IDK, I don’t have a full English translation yet, but what we do have to work with is seriously weird.

Lang’s version definitely deviates significantly from the others; it has no points in common with Grundtvig’s aside from the most basic plot—barren queen, ignoring food instructions=lindworm, brides eaten, transformation involving shedding/undressing and lye, heroine flees into the woods with children due to mail-tampering, saves someone else before reunion with lindworm.

The Folio version deviates from Grundtvig’s only in that it ends halfway through and includes a second prince.

Today is the first time I’ve read through Lang’s version in several years, at least, and somehow, despite its differences from the others, it feels the least unique? I was definitely first drawn to “Prince Lindworm,” as a child, because despite falling into my much-beloved Enchanted Bridegroom category, it felt very different from any other story I’d read. The beast as a snake-like creature, the brides being eaten, the unsettling transformation sequence—it was all just great. This was the Folio version, that I was reading as a child. But when I first encountered the second half of the story in Grundtvig’s version, it was also delightfully unique and bizarre, even if I can’t fully understand it. The lindworm’s mother—the girl’s mother-in-law, often a villainous figure—is 100% on her side, and the main person to try to help her through what happens next. And the milk situation is just—well, it’s something.

Lang’s version, despite being the same basic story, just feels bland and unoriginal. There’s an evil stepmother, which is just, sort of cliché, you know? The transformation sequence has been cut down and seriously sanitized. And then the situation where he marries an unspecified number of slave women in the place of two princesses—well, I have a number of issues with that.

Firstly, the number three is so often symbolic in fairy tales, and to replace the three total marriages with an unspecified number is lame, but that’s a dumb, nitpicky issue. The marriages to slave women indicate that this is a country that holds slaves, which I don’t love. But my big issue with this is that a significant part of the charm of the other versions is just the absolute, idiotic absurdity of marrying your monster son to a second princess after he eats the first. Like, you know what’s going to happen now—the same thing that happened last time. He’s gonna eat the princess and another powerful king is going to be rightfully angry with you. Marrying him instead to someone who won’t be missed lowers the stakes and raises the rationality in a way that bores me, and also implies that some potential brides are worth less? Like, with the first couple brides as princesses, we know they matter even though we never properly meet them, because their deaths put the threat of war over our heads—which is probably why the king and the lindworm go off to war shortly after the spell is broken in Grundtvig’s version. “A whole bunch of random slave girls died with no consequences and then we met our main character” just seems sort of…cheap.

So! While I did enjoy reading Lang’s version, I don’t think I would have fallen in love with this story if it was the first I encountered. I think the other versions are both more absurd and more meaningful.

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