 Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett, is a recently published fantasy romance which plays with many fairy and folktale tropes. The main character is a socially awkward Cambridge professor and "dryadologist" - in this world, faeries are real and well-known, with a thriving field of study surrounding them. Written in diary format, it follows Emily's field research in the remote northern village of Hrafnsvik, where she intends to make her name with an groundbreaking study of some little-known fairy folk. Things soon get complicated as she deals with dangerous fae curses, the local humans, and a handsome academic rival.
The book gets off to a slow start, but once it got going, I enjoyed it a lot. The interplay between Emily and Bambleby is hilarious and eventually turns into a compelling romance. I loved how authentic the rich, dark “fairy tale” mood felt. While original with its own interpretations of folklore creatures, the story feels based in a well-rounded understanding of folklore. For instance, Fawcett infuses a changeling story with more plot significance, elaborating on why the faerie child was left. Emily Wilde's world isn't just a mix of mythical creatures running around, but an element of fairy tale. There are familiar themes and motifs, and this is something acknowledged in the story; Emily holds an unorthodox belief that faeries and the events around them follow the rules and logic of stories in a way that’s alien to humans. There’s also a sense of fairies being inherently local to specific countries and climates. This folkloresque tone is one that I don't always find in modern fantasy; Holly Black's fairy books tend to capture it well. I was amused by the book's scholars and researchers of Faerie, with Emily’s frequent footnotes giving hints into their academic papers, conferences, and drama. In this world, fairies are all real, so there is a whole branch of science blending naturalists with folklorists. I was reminded strongly of rivalries and controversial theories in the real-world folklore field. The dashing, flamboyant Wendell Bambleby has gotten into trouble for falsifying data in his studies - something not too far off from reality in some cases. One thing that stands out to me is how the characters classify creatures under specific names, such as “brownie” for helpful house spirits and “kelpie” for water horses. This is a real approach among folklorists and it has flaws, since these words are rooted in specific traditions and were never meant to be used as generic labels. This is not a big deal in fiction and I’ve used words in this way myself, but it bears mentioning. If you liked Holly Black's Folk of the Air and Spiderwick Chronicles series, or Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, then this is one to check out.
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 Illustration by Hugh Thomson, for Highways and Byways in Devon and Cornwall In my list of favorite mermaid books I mentioned A Comb of Wishes, a children's novel released in 2022. I was struck by the many less-popular mermaid motifs that the author, Lisa Stringfellow, wove into the story. There is one story in particular that the plot is built around. As Stringfellow explained, “I wanted my main character to have that trope of making a wish on a mermaid's comb.”
The book revolves around a young girl who finds a mermaid's comb and has the chance to make a wish, but discovers that there is a steep price and mermaids are dangerous, vengeful creatures. Around pages 37-39, she hears the story setting up the background: "The seafolk have been round long before these islands were settled. Coming up out of the water at night, they sit on the rocks and twist their thick hair. Then, they tuck in their combs… One time, an old fisherman came upon a sea woman sitting on a rock in the moonlight. Quick as a flash, she jumped back into the water. But she dropped her comb and the old man picked it up, because he knew it held powerful magic… The old man called out to the sea woman, ‘Mami Wata! Mami Wata!’ And up she come… When the old man showed the sea woman her comb, she asked, ‘What you want from me?’ He said, ‘My wife is sick. I want the power to make her well.’ The sea woman nodded and said, ‘Rake me comb across the water. Then, you throw it back to me. You will have what you want.’ The old man walked into the sea and raked that comb across the water… When he threw it back, the sea woman sank beneath the waves and disappeared. He thought for sure that he had been taken for a fool… But lo and behold!... The old man woke up the next day with his brain full! He knew all types of herbs and healing spells and he was able to make his wife well.” This story has its spark of inspiration in a well-known Cornish tale. "The Old Man of Cury" appeared in Robert Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England (1865). An old man finds a mermaid trapped in a tidepool, having been distracted by admiring her reflection until the tie went out. She begs him for help and promises him three wishes, so he carries her on his back to the water. He wishes not for wealth, but for the ability to help people by breaking witches' spells, charming away diseases, and the ability to locate stolen goods so he can return them. She agrees and leaves him her comb; from then on, whenever he wants to see her, he can come to the shore and rake it through the water to summon her and she'll teach him the magic and charms he requested. She even offers to take him to her watery realm and make him young again, but he prefers to remain on land. He passes on his magical knowledge to his descendants. A darker and more elaborate version of the story featured in William Bottrell's Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (1870). Bottrell was Hunt's contemporary and one of his most prolific contributors for Popular Romances, but wrote with a much different style, emulating the drolls or storytellers of Cornwall. Bottrell himself was a droll, and his stories are much longer and more detailed. Quite a few stories appear in both Hunt and Bottrell. Bottrell begins the story of "The Mermaid and the Man of Cury" by introducing the storyteller, Uncle Anthony James. Bottrell explains that this was a favorite story and it was often altered "by adding to the story whatever struck his fancy at the moment." Bottrell's version has a similar start as Hunt's, and takes place at the same location. The old man is introduced as Lutey, a fisherman and smuggler. Walking on the shore one day, he hears a woman crying out for help, and discovers a mermaid trapped in a tidepool. Her name is Morvena, or sea-woman. She gives him her comb, which has the power to summon her, and begs him to take her to the sea; she needs to get home, since her abusive mer-husband may eat their children. As he carries her in his arms towards the water, she offers him three wishes. She is pleased by his unselfishness when, rather than requesting money, he asks instead for the ability to help others by breaking witches' spells, commanding spirits, and for these gifts to continue in his family. The mermaid gets flirty and entices him to come down into the ocean with her. He is almost under her siren-like spell when the sound of his dog barking distracts him, and he's able to break free. The mermaid swims away, while promising him that she will return in nine years. Returning home, Lutey discovers that he now has the abilities of healing and wisdom he asked for. Nine years later, while Lutey is fishing with a friend, Morvena returns. Lutey, accepting his fate, goes with her and is never seen again. From then on, every ninth year one of his descendants is always lost to the sea. The story had some popularity. A version probably derived from Hunt's appeared in Arthur Hamilton Norway's Highways and Byways in Devon and Cornwall (1898), and a Bottrell-esque version in "The Sea Maid and the Fisherman" showed up in The Dublin University Magazine in 1871. A version titled "Lutey and the Mermaid" appeared in Mabel Quiller Couch's Cornwall's Wonderland. Couch was specifically retelling Cornish folktales that she'd read, in a simpler style more appropriate for children. Although Couch's version is extremely close to Bottrell's to the point of near-identical descriptions, there are a few lines that make me think she also drew on Hunt. (Hunt: "He thought the girl would drown herself . . . He looked into the water, and, sure enough, he could make out the head and shoulders of a woman, and long hair floating like fine sea-weeds all over the pond, hiding what appeared to him to be a fish's tail." And Couch: "At first Lutey thought she had drowned herself, but when he looked closely into the pool, and contrived to peer through the cloud of hair which floated like fine seaweed all over the top of it, he managed to distinguish a woman's head and shoulders underneath, and looking closer he saw, he was sure, a fish's tail!") In Hunt's version, there's a logic to the mermaid's comb that isn't quite as apparent in Bottrell's version. Hunt's fisherman uses the comb in the act of fulfilling his wish and keeps it as proof. In Bottrell's version, the comb is shown as proof after the encounter but otherwise isn't all that important. It's not clear if Lutey ever uses it to see the mermaid. But all of this is very interwoven. Bottrell may have been the one who gave Hunt “The Old Man of Cury.” Not only do both of their collections feature the story type, but Bottrell notes that he heard many versions of the story from Uncle Anthony. Hunt, in his collection, quotes a letter about Uncle Anthony which may have been from Bottrell. The differences are easily explained by Bottrell’s mention of the way the story changed from telling to telling. (Incidentally, Hunt’s other major contributor was Thomas Quiller-Couch - Mabel Quiller-Couch’s father.) Stringfellow’s reimagining keeps the basics and the ominous sense surrounding mermaids, while weaving it with Caribbean folklore to make a new story. She makes the comb a main focus. The fisherman doesn't just want to help people in general, but has a specific goal of healing his wife - paralleling the main plot, where the protagonist Kela is trying to get her dead mother back. Bibliography
Over the past year or so, I’ve been on the hunt for mermaid fiction. I’ve been through a lot of lists, and here's my own list of some favorites so far. There are many, many, MANY books on mermaids out there. The books here are ones that particularly stood out as both enjoyable and memorable for me this year.  Brine and Bone by Kate Stradling (2018): a retelling of The Little Mermaid. Stradling does something I've seen in a few other places by telling the story from the perspective of the other maiden - the human girl who steals the prince's heart. In this version, Magdalena is the prince's childhood friend and the girl he always really loved. What this book does a little differently is that it treats mermaids as fae. This connection often gets lost in modern fiction, but old stories of mermaids and fairies really do overlap a lot. The "little mermaid" is eerie and alien, and the human characters are rightfully fearful of her. But Magdalena surprisingly finds some common ground with the mermaid. My only complaint is that it's pretty short and and I would have liked to see it go even more in depth.  Mermaid’s Song by Alida van Gores (1989): In an underwater society torn between two races, the mogs and the oppressed merra, a merra-maid named Elan learns to use her magic and competes for the coveted post of guardian to the Sea-Dragons. The competition will decide the fate of the entire ocean. If you want to read an adult fantasy with a committed treatment of an underwater mermaid world, this is for you. Magic is kept fairly low-key, so the oceanic society feels refreshingly practical, with little details reinforcing that this is not our world - for instance, nobody sleeps in beds, and instead they essentially tie themselves to things. The entire story takes place underwater, which is surprisingly rare for a mermaid book! That said, there were a few uncomfortable themes that kept me from completely enjoying it. For instance, rather than the characters fighting for true equality, the merra are the rightful ruling class and the mogs need to get back to being subservient laborers.  All the Murmuring Bones by A. G. Slatter (2021): Mirin O’Malley is one of the last descendants of a formerly prosperous family, whose wealth came from regular human sacrifices to the merfolk. When Mirin’s grandmother plots to marry her off to her creepy cousin and start up the sacrifices again, she runs away to search for her missing parents. Mermaids, rusalki, selkies and other mythical water creatures are more of a backdrop here, ominous figures who haunt Mirin. However, the main plot is interspersed with short, folktale-esque stories that I really enjoyed. I also liked the themes of healing and making amends, and was thoroughly rooting for Mirin by the end.  Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (2017): A marine research ship heads out into the ocean to investigate a mysterious disaster and prove whether or not it was caused by mermaids, as rumor has claimed. Turns out the mermaids are all too real - and the research expedition is about to turn into a bloodbath. Despite an underwhelming ending, this B-movie horror in book form is compulsively readable. I just really loved the plot of scientists discovering mermaids. Grant’s faux-scientific patter about mermaids with mimicking abilities and bioluminescent tentacle-hair feels believable, at least to me as someone who knows nothing about marine biology. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, then this and its prequel, Rolling in the Deep, are both worth a read.  The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre (1997): A dark, dense, intricate historical fantasy where a captured mermaid is brought to the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV. (The mermaids or sea people here have two leg-like tails.) Naive young noblewoman Marie-Josephe learns to understand the "sea monster's" musical speech, sparking an ethical dilemma and a mission to free the imprisoned sea woman. The novel is very much about personhood, touching on misogyny, slavery and treatment of people with disabilities, extending through the image of the sea woman whom authorities are ready to discount as a mindless animal that can be killed and eaten. There’s some good “mermaid” worldbuilding sprinkled in, too; the novel is an expansion of McIntyre's short story, “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea.” It can be hard to follow at times; there's a huge cast and everyone in the French court has multiple names and titles. (This book got an absolute travesty of a film adaptation, and I’m still mad about it. JUSTICE FOR COUNT LUCIEN!)  Emerge by Tobie Easton (2016): Another Little Mermaid retelling - sort of. In this universe, unbeknownst to humans, The Little Mermaid was based on a true story and the heroine’s actions left the undersea world of merfolk in turmoil. In modern times, a mermaid named Lia Nautilus lives in disguise as a human, shielded from the war going on in the deep. When she learns that her human crush is in danger, she turns to forbidden siren magic to save him. This cheesy, fluffy teen romance, the first of a series, was a surprise favorite for me. I was initially put off by the cartoony worldbuilding and puns (in one early eyerolly moment, a hot guy is called a “total foxfish”). But Easton commits to it and clearly put a lot of thought into a world with shapeshifting mermaids, underwater architecture, and magic. Lia’s plight is compelling, and I found myself enjoying the trilogy even more as it went on.  A Comb of Wishes by Lisa Stringfellow (2022): Kela, a young girl grieving her mother’s death, finds a mermaid’s comb. The mermaid offers her a wish in exchange for its return, and there’s only one real option for Kela: for her mother to be alive again. But there’s a steep price for wishes, and when the comb is stolen before Kela can return it, things quickly start to go wrong. This middle-grade novel was a joy to read. Stringfellow blends the Caribbean setting with touches of mermaid stories from around the world (from "The Little Mermaid" to "The Old Man of Cury" and "The Soul Cages"). Mermaids are more of a mystical force here than in most of the other books on this list, but this book is firing on all cylinders with lyrical writing and a compelling, emotional plot. Some of these books I honestly didn't expect to like so much - I originally ignored Emerge because of the punniness, A Comb of Wishes because it was a kids' book, All the Murmuring Bones because it sounded like the mermaids were barely in it. It was exciting to be able to add them to the list. Looking at this list, I realize that most of them are set primarily on land or have human main characters; this is a common theme. Writing an underwater setting can be a challenge because it rules out so much of society and technology that we take for granted.
I'll continue to read mermaid books as I find them - because I like mermaids, but it's also fun to observe the popular image of these beings from folk and fairy tales. The Little Mermaid is a very popular subject for retellings. If you have a favorite mermaid book, drop it in the comments!  I’ve always taken an interest in the names given to fairies in folklore and literature. Frequently the most famous fairies are kings and queens, like Oberon, Titania and Mab of Shakespeare. One name that was frequently given to a fairy queen at a certain point, but doesn’t get used as much anymore in pop culture, is Proserpina. The Roman goddess of the Underworld and equivalent of the Greek Persephone was recast as a fairy queen. There's a general trend of gods being downgraded to fairies across history. We see something similar with the goddess Diana’s name attributed in medieval times to pretty much any legend of nightly witch rides. In Dr. Samuel Harsenet's Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures (1603), the god Mercury is "Prince of the Fairies" as well as Jupiter's son. I want to delve into the idea of Proserpina as a fairy.
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Merchant’s Tale” (The Canterbury Tales, dated 1387-1400), Pluto and Proserpine show up as the rulers of the fairies, hanging out in a garden. It's been suggested that these characters set the model for Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania. In both works, the fairies are deity-like beings who take an interest in human love affairs and may sometimes magically interfere, and there's a focus on a disagreement between the fairy rulers. This might even have been the spark for later writers to use Proserpine as the fairy queen's name (Green p. 202). “Proserpyne” or “Proserpyna” is the benevolent fairy queen who guides the hero of The History of The Valiant Knight Arthur of Little Britain, with English translations dating to the mid-1500s. It originally came from French and goes back even further. In this story, there are actually four fairy queens, and she's their chief. Her role includes fairy godmother, fairy lover, supernatural helper and tutelary spirit motifs; blessing newborns, aiding the hero (flirting with him and then setting him up with her human doppelganger Florence), even pulling some changeling-style antics to take a woman's place (although she does it to help). Fairy queen Proserpina shows up in Thomas Campion’s poem Hark, All You Ladies (1591). Here she is a kind of love- and fertility-related spirit and leader of a troop of fairies who, in classic fashion, pinch people black and blue. And in RIchard Johnson’s The Most Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendome (1596), Proserpine is a fairy queen who rules in the underworld and whose fairies lead human travelers astray. She also aids in childbirth and foretells children's futures - a very fairy godmother/Greek Fates thing to do. Proserpina did show up in her more goddess-like roles in literature. For instance, in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-1956), she and Pluto are mentioned in a more negative light as the rulers of Hell and parents of the villainess Lucifera. But it seems like, for a small space here, we have a spate of stories where this Roman goddess simply is the fairy queen (and, with her, Pluto is the fairy king). In many ways this makes sense. Fairies are often tied to death and the afterlife in folk belief, and live in subterranean realms. In many cases, fairies actually are the dead. Proserpine/Persephone does hit on a lot of these trends, plus she's associated with nature and the seasons. But Proserpina was quickly overshadowed by Shakespeare's fairy queens, Titania and Mab. Especially Mab. She absolutely trounced Titania in the popularity department, stealing top billing as empress of all the fairies and also stealing Titania's husband Oberon. This was the time of tiny, comedic fairies being popular. A Midsummer Night's Dream's Titania was a seasonal goddess; Romeo and Juliet's Mab was a comedic mite tailor-made for the fashion of literary fairies. Proserpina, like Titania, just doesn't fit that mold. A more fitting role for her is seen in Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia (1627), where fairy ruler Queen Mab appeals to her as the "Queen of Shades" for witchy magical help. Just as there are many reasons why Proserpina would fit, there are also plenty of reasons this one didn't stick. Proserpina is clearly an outside influence, a famous Roman goddess, a foreign name slapped onto an ostensibly local story of fairies. Even Titania's name originally comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Mab, an English nickname, may have felt more natural and local. Or maybe people intentionally wanted to move away from Proserpina's darker associations of death, witchcraft and pagan religion (Nichols 404). Fairies were being sanitized. They were cute and funny. In more heroic, less comedic plays and poems, they were often used as metaphors for the royal family. All in all, it makes sense why this worked out like it did, but I also think Proserpine deserves a little more attention as a somewhat popular fairy queen character. Although her appearances are literary, many of them show hints of contemporary fairy beliefs. Sources
Blog posts  Imogen, by Herbert Gustave Schmalz There is a problem with sorting folktales. As Christine Goldberg put it: "Folktales present a paradox. Theoretically, tale types should stay separate; in fact, sometimes they do not.”
The Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Tale Type Index, created to sort fairytales by types, is very useful but is still a numbering system for something that was never meant to be numbered. Oral tales often overlap and blend, and some stories seem to pair together more easily and often. Linda Dégh believed that there might be a common origin for some tales that frequently interwove - she was talking specifically about tale types 403 (The Black and the White Bride), 408 (The Three Oranges), 425 (The Search for the Lost Husband), 706 (The Maiden Without Hands) and 707 (The Three Golden Sons). As she put it, "their variants cross each other constantly and... their blendings are more common than their keeping to their separate type outlines." (emphasis added) I think ATU 709, Snow White, may be a neighboring member of this story family. The origins of Snow White are actually a bit of a stumbling block. There are so many overlaps with other tales. Christine Goldberg again: "Variants of AT 709 incorporate motifs that also appear in other tales: the child taken into the forest, as in “Hansel and Gretel”; the heroine put to sleep by a pin prick, as in “Sleeping Beauty”; the treacherous teacher or the jealous sisters, as in AT 510-511 (“Cinderella”); the house in the woods, as in “The Seven Ravens.” Such admixtures have troubled folklorists since Ernst Boklen’s Sneewittchenstudien (1910, 1915).” (Goldberg 105) Some folklorists seem dismissive towards the Snow White tale, characterizing it as a recent and shoddy patchwork. The collector Joseph Jacobs, also citing Boklen, described it as "obviously a late product combining many motifs from different, more primitive, or at least earlier formulæ." Sigrid Schmidt also leaned towards this amalgam theory and suggested that Snow White is classed under Other Tales of the Supernatural in the ATU index “because it does not fit properly into the Tales of Magic.” (I.e., number 709 is much farther down the ATU list than the fairy tales that seem most similar.) This is a chicken-or-the-egg question for me. Is Snow White a late hodgepodge? Or is it simply closely related to these other tales? One question is a little easier - Sigrid Schmidt's passing mention that Snow White is in a weird spot in the ATU numbering system. In fact, it is located smack in the middle of several similar tales about persecuted maidens. I think this is obscured by the fact that most people judge it by the Brothers Grimm version. I've previously discussed Snow White's similarities and frequent overlaps with ATU 451, "The Brothers Turned into Birds/The Maiden in Search of Her Brothers." The scene of Snow White finding the dwarves’ house is exactly like the girl finding her bird-brothers' house in "The Seven Ravens." “The Twelve Wild Ducks” begins with the same opening as the Grimms’ Snow White. The Snow White-esque story of “Udea and Her Seven Brothers,” which has sometimes been subdivided as ATU 709A, begins with the brothers driven out when their sister is born, as happens in many bird-brother tales. Now I'm going to look at Snow White's similarities to the stories of persecuted maidens, located in the early 700s of the ATU system. These stories are often characterized by the heroine going through two periods of persecution: first in her family home, and later in her husband's home. The Maiden without Hands (ATU 706) Persecution of heroine: A man promises his daughter to the Devil. Or tries to force his daughter to marry him. Essentially, there’s some kind of drama or jealousy. Banishment and disabling: This culminates in the girl being mutilated (in the most famous versions, her hands are cut off) and fleeing into the wilderness. Marriage: A king finds her in the wilderness and marries her. Persecution of heroine and her children: While he is away, she gives birth to a child. However, an enemy (often someone involved in the hand-chopping incident) frames her for murdering her child or giving birth to a monster, and fakes an order of execution from the king. The girl flees into the wilderness with her child, where her mutilation is healed. Reunion: The king finds her and their family is reunited. The Three Golden Children (ATU 707) Marriage: A king marries a girl who has said she will bear beautiful children. Banishment/Persecution of heroine and her children: She gives birth to the promised children - often two or three of them - but her jealous sisters (or rival co-wives?) replace the babies with animals and accuse her of infidelity. The queen is imprisoned or banished. Her children are cast into a river or killed, but either escape death or are resurrected. Reunion: The children return and reveal the truth. Rivals punished, family reunited. Our Lady's Child (ATU 710) Persecution: A girl is adopted by the Virgin Mary (probably a stand-in for a pre-Christian goddess), but disobeys one of her commands. Banishment and disabling: The girl is cast out into the woods and left unable to speak. Marriage: A king finds her in the wilderness and marries her. Persecution of heroine and her children: She gives birth to children, but her godmother takes them away and makes it look like she murdered them. Reunion: When the girl is about to be executed for the murders, the godmother relents and returns her children and power of speech. The family is reunited. (This plotline is extremely similar to ATU 451, “The Brothers Who Were Turned into Birds.” It's just missing the brothers.) Snow White (ATU 709) Persecution: A queen becomes jealous of her stepdaughter and attempts to have her killed. Banishment and disabling: The girl flees into the wilderness. She finds shelter with some friendly men, but her stepmother attacks multiple times and is eventually successful in putting her into an enchanted sleep. Marriage: A prince finds her, awakens her and marries her. Common Themes These stories frequently feature the motif of “The Calumniated Wife,” where a woman is falsely accused and punished. (This also shows up in "The Brothers Turned into Birds," already mentioned as a close neighbor to Snow White.) The villain is often a woman motivated by jealousy: sisters, mothers, stepmothers, mothers-in-law. There are hints here of older stories about polygamy and rival wives. I think polygamy, rather than mother-daughter rivalry, may be the true root of the Snow White tale. Verrier Elwin - who collected numerous Indian examples of ATU 707 with rival wives as the villains - suggested that this story was intended as a moral tale about the dangers of polygamy, and thus didn’t appear in Europe. This ignores that there very much are European stories about polygamy - like the early Snow White tale "Sun, Moon, and Talia," and even some positive portrayals of polygamy in Celtic Snow Whites. Often, the heroine is disabled in some way by the time the king first meets her. The heroine of “The Maiden without Hands” is physically mutilated, but made whole by the conclusion of the story. The heroine of “Our Lady’s Child” - as in “The Brothers Turned into Birds” - becomes unable to verbally communicate, and regains the ability to speak at the climax. Snow White falls into a deathlike sleep and is later awakened. The Grimms’ Snow White story does feature the heroine exiled to the wilderness, but lacks the “Persecution of heroine and her children” segment. However, other versions frequently include it. In "Sun, Moon, and Talia," after the king awakens Talia and brings her and her twin children home, his first wife tries to murder and eat them. The Greek "Maroula and the Mother of Eros" runs through the Snow White plot of jealousy and a sleeping curse, and then the heroine Maroula is framed for the murder of her twins and cast out. However, she meets a monk who restores her children to life, and her husband finds her again. Grimmer versions follow the Calumniated Wife pattern, but lack the resurrection for the heroine's children - such as in "The Magic Mirror," from Romania, and "The Magician's Mirror," from Lesbos. Scottish Gaelic tales frequently show overlap between "Snow White" and "The Girl without Hands," as seen in "Lasair Gheug, the King of Ireland's Daughter." Here, the heroine's mother frames her for murder and forces her to swear an oath of silence, followed by the heroine being cast out and having three fingers chopped off. She gets married and endures a sleeping curse. In the end, she works out a way to tell her story without breaking her oath. The "Calumniated Wife" motif also shows up in Shakespeare's play Cymbeline, which has elements of both "Snow White" and the tale type “The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity.” Princess Imogen is falsely accused of adultery, and her husband tries to have her assassinated. But the killer takes pity on her and helps her flee, after which Imogen takes refuge in the woods and accidentally takes a sleeping potion sent by her wicked stepmother. Charlotte Artese suggests that Shakespeare noticed similarities between “Snow White” and “The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity,” which both include the exile of the persecuted woman, and intentionally combined the two stories in Cymbeline. This is the most likely option, based on what we know about Shakespeare. However, there are some ATU 709 tales where the plot kicks off when the Snow White figures is accused of infidelity - namely Alexander Afanasyev's "The Magic Mirror" from Russia, and "Rumanah," an Egyptian Hebrew tale. And remember the Scottish Gaelic "Lasair Gheug." It’s entirely possible that Shakespeare knew a British version of ATU 709 where the heroine is falsely accused of some crime. That would have been even closer to the Wager stories. Conclusion I leave this post with a few final thoughts. The ATU numbering for Snow White actually makes perfect sense because it is grouped with other tales of persecuted, exiled maidens. This is even clearer when you look at similar tales outside the Brothers Grimm. Studying these tales, it’s impossible not to notice how often Snow White stories intersect with tales of false accusations, forced silences, and lost children - and, eventually, the chance for the heroine to tell her tale and receive justice. There is something interesting in the way that Afanasyev's "The Magic Mirror," "Lasair Gheug," the Italian "The Young Slave," and the Malay "Syair Bidasari" - among others - all reach a resolution when the Snow White-like heroine is able to find a way to tell her story despite the villain’s power over her. Afanasyev's is particularly fun here, with the heroine smacking people with a ladle. Overlapping and merging is what folktales do, and some in particular seem to naturally pair together. Although there are still many questions about its history, I don't see how this indicates that Snow White should be considered a later story. Other Blog Posts Bibliography
 Dahut's father pushes her into the sea. Today I want to talk about a little corner of overlapping folktales. These stories follow a young woman who, out of lust or greed or maybe just foolhardiness, is enticed to open a gate and allow enemy forces into her home. Her home is destroyed and she meets an ironic death. Also, there's a connection to myths of mermaids and flooded cities.
A basic traitorous-daughter story, without the floods and mermaids, is the legend of Tarpeia, the daughter of the Roman commander at a time when Rome was under siege by the Sabines. Tarpeia secretly offered the Sabine leader a deal - she'd let his soldiers inside in exchange for what they bore on their left arms. She thought she was making a deal for their precious golden bracelets. However, when she opened the gate and waited eagerly for her reward, the Sabine soldiers instead threw their left-handed shields onto her and she was crushed to death. Arthur A. Wachsler made a connection from this and similar tales to Aarne-Thompson type 313, "The Girl as Helper in the Hero's Flight." In both cases we have a female character who betrays her father for the sake of a male outsider whom she helps on a mission. However, this doesn't quite work. The fairytale - and even mythical parallels such as Medea and Ariadne - are focused on the adventures of the hero, and the girl is at least initially a heroic figure who winds up abandoned and forgotten for her troubles. (The fairytale version gets her man back.) Tarpeia-style tales are harsher parables in which the girl is both villainous and foolish, and promptly gets herself killed. A specific strand of these more moralizing tales include a theme of water and transformation. I have found three examples so far: Scylla of Megara, Dahut, and Lí Ban. Scylla of Megara: from Ovid's Metamorphoses The guarded city: The city of Alcathous, ruled by King Nisus, is under attack by King Minos. However, Nisus has a lock of purple hair that makes him invincible. Opening the gate: Nisus's daughter, Scylla, sees Minos from afar and falls madly in love with him. That night, she sneaks into her father's bedroom and cuts off the purple lock, destroying his gift of invulnerability. She then sneaks out of the city and goes to Minos's war camp, where she presents him with the hair (and maybe even her father's head). Disturbed, Minos immediately leaves in his ship. Immersion and transformation: Scylla leaps into the sea after Minos and tries to climb onto the ship. Her father, who has transformed into an eagle, attacks her. As she falls from the ship, she is transformed into a sea bird or ciris. It's important that Scylla's flight and transformation take place on the sea. Also, although there's no direct connection between the characters, note that the most famous Scylla of classical mythology was a sea monster. Dahut of Ys: from Brittany The guarded city: King Gradlon rules the city of Ys. The city is shielded from floods by a dike, and Gradlon alone holds the key to the sluice gate. Opening the gate: Gradlon’s daughter, Dahut or Ahes, is a wicked, unchaste young woman. One night, while meeting with her lover (who in some versions is the actual Devil), she steals her father's key and opens the sluice gate. Immersion and transformation: Gradlon wakes up to find the city flooding. He and Dahut flee on his horse, but the waves are about to overtake them. Gradlon throws Dahut off his horse, and as soon as she falls into the water, the flood stops. The city of Ys is lost but can sometimes still be seen beneath the waves, and Dahut becomes a Mari-Morgan (Breton for mermaid) and people often hear her singing. (Jean-Michel Le Bot points out that "mari-morgan" is also a term for monkfish (Lophius piscatorius) in some areas of Brittany.) The earliest accounts of Ys do not mention Dahut, whose first known appearance was in 17th-century monk Albert Le Grand's Vies des Saints de la Bretagne Armorique. This first mention is pretty brief, with Dahut dying. Subsequent versions fleshed out more details, and the modern version of the tale is highly literary. Matthieu Boyd has a good rundown of the evolution of the story, including recent retellings which make Dahut a heroic figure. Amy Varin makes a shaky argument that Dahut was originally a sovereign goddess who bestowed kingship on her chosen consort (most of her evidence is unrelated legends of mermaids or otherworldly maidens who married humans). Lí Ban: from Ireland The guarded city: A man named Eochaid comes to a place with a spring well. He builds a house there, and sets a woman to tend the well so it doesn't overflow. Opening the gate: One day, the woman fails to cover the well. Immersion and transformation: This causes a flood which creates the lake known as Lough Neagh, drowning Eochaid and all of his children except for two sons and Lí Ban. Lí Ban survives in her chamber underwater and is transformed into a salmon or, in some versions, a mermaid. Centuries later, she encounters monks and tells them her story. She receives the name Muirghein. The parallels from Lí Ban to Dahut are fainter, but there are indications that these stories share some root. The cognate name Morgan/Muirghein is particularly striking. Amy Varin suggests that - based on the parallels in story structure - Lí Ban herself is the woman who fails to cover the well. Compare another variant of Lough Neagh's origin, recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis in the Topography of Ireland. “Now there was a common proverb . . . in the mouths of the tribe, that whenever the well-spring of that country was left uncovered (for out of reverence shown to it, from a barbarous superstition, the spring was kept covered and sealed), it would immediately overflow and inundate the whole province, drowning and destroying the whole population. It happened, however, on some occasion that a young woman, who had come to the spring to draw water, after filling her pitcher, but before she had closed the well, ran in great haste to her little boy, whom she had heard crying at a spot not far from the spring where she had left him. But the voice of the people is the voice of God; and on her way back she met such a flood of water from the spring that it swept off her and the boy, and the inundation was so violent that they both, and the whole tribe, with their cattle, were drowned in an hour in this partial and local deluge. The waters, having covered the whole surface of that fertile district, were converted into a permanent lake. A not improbable confirmation of this occurrence is found in the fact that the fishermen in that lake see distinctly under the water, in calm weather, ecclesiastical towers . . . and they frequently point them out to strangers travelling through these parts, who wonder what could have caused such a catastrophe.” (Spence, p. 188) This type of flood myth is common and a few Celtic variants stand out as caused by a woman. In a Scottish story, the ancient witch known as the Cailleach had a well in Inverness which needed to be kept covered at night. She tasked her maid, Nessa, with caring for the well. But one evening, Nessa was late to cover it, and by the time she got there, water was flooding from the well. Nessa ran away, but the Cailleach - watching from a mountain - cursed her never to leave the water, and Nessa was transformed into the River Ness (connected to the Loch Ness). Every year on the anniversary, Nessa briefly appears in human form to sing sadly. (There is a similar tale of the River Boyne, where the flood is caused by an "attendant nymph" who foolishly walks withershins three times around the well.) (Hull, 249-250). Sir John Rhys collected some stories of Glasfryn Lake, which he identifies as a Welsh "Undine or Liban story". A woman named Grassi, or Grace, committed the same misstep of leaving a well uncovered and causing a flood. Grassi either became a weeping ghost haunting the field by the newly made lake, or was transformed into a swan by fairies. Rhys also noted that the Glasfryn family had a mermaid on their coat of arms, and theorized that the well maiden was originally named Morgen or Morien, to fit with the Lí Ban model. One of the oldest parallels is the Welsh story of the drowned city Cantre'r Gwaelod, dating to the 13th-century Black Book of Camarthen . . . maybe. The problem here is that the original poem has been translated in many contradictory ways. Some translations place the blame on Mererid, a well maiden who neglected her duties. Other translations state that the culprit was Seithennin, a male drunkard who failed to close the sluices. Or it was both Mererid and Seithennin. Or maybe neither of these are characters in the first place, and we’re looking at generic nouns which have been misread as names. We don't know! (Celtic Review, pp. 338-340) Overall, in general there are two distinct stories.
You might even go back as far as the Assyrian myth of Derceto or Atargatis. In Diodorus Siculus’s rendition of the story, the goddess Derceto offended Aphrodite, who retaliated by making her fall for a certain young man. Derceto had sex with him and gave birth to a child, but was ashamed. To hide what she’d done, she murdered her lover and abandoned the baby. Finally, she flung herself into a lake, where she was transformed into a fish with a human head. It doesn’t map onto the story exactly, but here we do have a woman who falls into lust (like Scylla and Dahut), commits a betrayal, and instead of drowning meets a watery transformation. Dahut is a particularly interesting case. She may not have originally been part of the story of Ys. Was the well maiden motif added later to the story of King Gradlon and his flooded city? And could John Rhys be right that the original name of this figure was something like Morgan, "sea-born"? Sources
 Serena Valentino's Fairest of All (2009), one of many retellings from the evil queen's point of view Some time ago, a book of collected fairy tale retellings was published. Anyone who picked up this book would have found a nontraditional version of Snow White. The author had written it from the wicked stepmother’s point of view, telling the story of her life. It was also historical fiction, the magical elements replaced with scientific explanations. This is nothing too out of the ordinary for modern readers. This description suits books such as Gregory Maguire’s Mirror, Mirror (2003) or Donna Jo Napoli’s Dark Shimmer (2015).
But the retelling I’m talking about was published in 1782. “Richilde,” by Johann Karl August Musäus, appeared in the first volume of his collection Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Folktales of the Germans). Musäus wrote that he collected these stories from the German folk, but this is not the style of the Brothers Grimm and later folklorists; instead it’s more of the highly literary style of Charles Perrault and Giambattista Basile. It is also the first existing example that we have of the German fairy tale of Snow White, published a generation before the Brothers Grimm got to it. It’s definitely a hefty tale, almost more like a novelette, and the English translation I found was written in older language that takes some getting used to for modern readers. But its ideas and themes fit in strikingly well with modern renditions of the story. Snow White researcher Christine Shojaei Kawan at one point considered this the earliest literary version of the tale, but later apparently had second thoughts as she claims that it doesn't fit with the folktale all that well and can't be considered authentic. There is, for instance, no scene where the Snow White figure has to flee into the wilderness. I would have to agree with Kawan that this is a retelling more than it is a straightforward fairytale. But what a retelling! Honestly, Richilde does not work as a standalone piece. It makes much more sense when understood as a reimagining from the villain’s point of view. From studying "Richilde," it’s clear that Snow White was already very well-known - proving the Brothers Grimm were right when they considered it one of the most popular German fairy tales. As is common for fairy tales, we got elaborate literary adaptations before anyone set to the task of transcribing the original folktales. The fairy tales of Perrault and Basile and the French conteuses are very similar cases, and one of the Grimms' tasks was actually to preserve the folk tales before they could be forgotten and lost in adaptation. But back to the story of Richilde. The tale begins with her birth as the much-wanted child of the Count and Countess of Brabant. She grows up beautiful and, due to realizing from the magic mirror that she’s the fairest girl in the land, extremely vain. It explains how she meets her husband: needing to marry, she asks the mirror to show her the most handsome man in the land. Problem is, he's already married - but not for long, as he is quite flattered by this glamorous younger woman's attentions, and divorces his wife to be with her. The plotline stays mostly with Richilde, leading to some hilarity. When Richilde realizes that her husband’s abandoned daughter Blanca has grown into the fairest maiden in Brabant, she arranges to have her poisoned. But then Blanca keeps popping up alive again, with no explanation, and it’s driving Richilde nuts as she scrambles to fix the situation and figure out what went wrong. I love this scenario so much. There is a mysteriously powerful mirror, created through the mysterious and wise arts of Albertus Magnus (a real historical figure and the subject of many legends), and given to the young Richilde as a gift. The mirror doesn’t talk, but does show images when a rhyming chant is said. In a particularly nice touch, the more evil Richilde’s actions become, the more it rusts until it’s ruined. It’s clearly a magic mirror, complete with moral judgment, but there is at least some handwaving about how it could be Magnus’s practical scientific arts. There are three murder attempts via poison, and the first is an apple or pomegranate with one half poisoned. So it does seem that the poisoned fruit was particularly deep-rooted in German folklore. Although Kawan complained that Richilde fails to hit the correct beats of the full folktale, this is where we have the sympathetic executioner, the equivalent of the fairy tale’s huntsman: Richilde’s Jewish court physician, Sambul, who is tasked with creating these poisoned gifts. Here, the story is surprisingly tolerant for an 18th-century German book, or at least subverts antisemitic expectations. Sambul ultimately turns out to be the real hero of the story. I should be clear that there are still antisemitic elements. It feels especially uncomfortable that Sambul is the victim of the most violence in the story. But as the story nears its ending, it is revealed that Sambul has a strong conscience and has been working against Richilde all along even at the risk of his own life. He substituted harmless sedatives for the poisons, so that Blanca appeared to die but actually woke up a while later. And at the very end, the focus is not on Blanca and her husband’s wedded bliss, but on Sambul being rewarded and going on to live in happiness and prosperity. There is an equivalent to the Grimms’ dwarfs: Blanca, who has been consigned to one of her father’s castles, is attended by court dwarfs. This is another historical twist. These are not mystical woodland or subterranean creatures, but ordinary people, and many historical nobles employed court dwarfs. However, there is still a blurring of lines here. The court dwarfs are apparently skilled smiths and craftsmen, whipping up a coffin with a window - the equivalent of the fairy tale’s glass coffin - and the red-hot iron shoes for Richilde. This hints that these characters were inspired by mythical dwarfs, who were metalworkers in Nordic myth. There is a handsome prince figure: Gottfried of Ardenne, a young nobleman who comes across Blanca’s castle, hears her story, and is at the right time to bring forth a holy relic in an attempt to ward off sorcery just as she wakes up. Richilde attends their wedding having been tricked into thinking that she is the bride, which is a neat little explanation for why she’d be there, and shows her all-encompassing vanity. Before the ceremony, Gottfried tells her of a woman who murdered her daughter out of jealousy, and asks her what punishment is suitable. Richilde, bored and annoyed by what she sees as a delay to her wedding, says that the mother should be forced to dance in burning iron shoes - and then Blanca appears and Richilde realizes to her terror that she has just named her own fate. This scenario of the villain being tricked into choosing their own fate is a classic one, also seen in the fairy tale of “The Goose Girl.” A Danish oral variant of Snow White, "Snehvide," also ends with the stepmother choosing her own execution. In Richilde’s case, her punishment is surprisingly merciful. Instead of dancing until she dies, as in the Grimms’ Snow White, she is only left with burns and blisters on her feet, and people actually put a salve on her feet before throwing her into the dungeon. The Brothers Grimm’s first draft of the Snow White tale was pretty different from the one we currently have - biological mother as villain, biological father as rescuer and breaker of the curse. In many ways, the modern version more closely resembles Richilde. SOURCES
 “Ondine’s Curse” is the name of a rare form of apnea, a condition in which people stop breathing. According to various medical texts, it's based on an old Germanic legend - the story of Undine or Ondine, who cursed her faithless lover to stop breathing. Except . . . this doesn't sound anything like the story of Undine, which isn't even exactly a legend. What's going on here?
The Backstory As I've described before on this blog, "undines" originally came from the writings of 16th-century philosopher Paracelsus. The word was evidently his original creation, referring to water elementals or nymphs. Combining the medieval legends of "Melusine," "Peter von Stauffenberg," and various folktales about fairy wives, Paracelsus wrote that undines could gain a soul by marrying a human. However, such relationships were fraught with danger; these water-wives could all too easily be lost to the realm they'd come from, and if the mortal husband took another wife, the water-wife would come back to murder him. This story was passed around and adapted by various authors. Most famously, it found form in the 19th-century novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Undine is a nymph who marries the knight Huldbrand and gains a soul as a result. However, he ditches her for a human lover - which, by the rules of spirits and the otherworld, means he must die. Although Undine still loves him, she is forced to kill him on the night of his second wedding. She appears and embraces him, weeping. "Tears rushed into the knight's eyes, and seemed to surge through his heaving breast, till at length his breathing ceased, and he fell softly back from the beautiful arms of Undine, upon the pillows of his couch—a corpse." Undine then states mournfully, "I have wept him to death." So where did things go off track? This novella became extremely popular, inspiring many adaptations. There were plays, operas, ballets. Even Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid took inspiration from it. One play adaptation, Ondine, by Jean Giraudoux, came out in 1938. In this version, the characters are named Ondine and Hans. Although Hans betrays Ondine with another woman, she still loves him and attempts to stop her people from executing him by running away. However, her efforts are of no avail, and Hans is condemned to death by the king of the water spirits. The former lovers get the chance to say goodbye. The tormented Hans tells Ondine, “Since you went away, I've had to force my body to do things it should do automatically. I no longer see unless I order my eyes to see... I have to control five senses, thirty muscles, even my bones; it's an exhausting stewardship. A moment of inattention, and I will forget to hear, to breathe... He died, they will say, because he got tired of breathing..." As the two share a final kiss, Hans dies and Ondine's memories of him are erased. Losing the Way In 1962, a California-based doctor named John Severinghaus and his colleague Robert Mitchell worked with three patients who all shared similar symptoms. After operations on the brain stem, these patients could not breathe automatically. They had to consciously decide to breathe, and they needed artificial respiration when asleep. Severinghaus and Mitchell wrote a paper about their studies, coining the term "Ondine's Curse" for the phenomenon. They stated briefly: "The syndrome was first described in German legend. The water nymph, Ondine, having been jilted by her mortal husband, took from him all automatic functions, requiring him to remember to breathe. When he finally fell asleep, he died." This is a garbled version of Giraudoux's play. They were clearly inspired by Hans's speech, and as pointed out by researcher Fernando Navarro, they use Giraudoux's spelling, "Ondine." But you can see the play being misunderstood and slanted here, misremembered just a little. Their summary was soon picked up, gaining a life of its own as other medical professionals repeated and mangled it further. Many versions simply repeat some variation on Severinghaus and Mitchell, but we see an emerging image of Ondine as a forceful figure who delivers judgment on her traitorous husband. She, not the ruler of the water spirits, curses Hans. Across various versions, she is angry, a purveyor of revenge or punishment (Navarro 1997). Usually the husband or lover is unnamed, but Hans remains a common moniker (as in Naughton 2006). Some retellings get much more elaborate, with their own mythology. A popular variant explains that if a nymph ever falls in love with a mortal and gives birth to his child, then she will become an ordinary mortal, subject to aging. Nevertheless, the nymph Ondine falls in love with a human, and he with her. One version names him Lawrence (Coren 1997); another calls him Palemon, borrowing from Frederick Ashton's 1958 ballet adaptation Ondine (Mawer 2009). Lawrence/Palemon/whoever swears to her that “My every waking breath shall be my pledge of love and faithfulness to you." However, after she bears his son, Ondine begins to age, and her beauty fades. Her shallow husband dallies with other women. When Ondine catches him in bed with a mistress, she is enraged. With the last of her magic, she calls down a curse which mocks her husband's broken vow: as soon as he falls asleep, he'll stop breathing. Her husband inevitably falls asleep from exhaustion and dies. This variant upends the original worldbuilding. In Fouque’s novel, marriage grants Undine a soul, but she remains otherworldly and powerful. Huldbrand rejects her out of fear and resentment. However, in this variant, marriage transforms Ondine into an ordinary woman, and that's why her husband strays. Some of the shorter retellings are so clumsily phrased that they mix up vital information. One skips over the husband's infidelity: "[T]he beautiful water nymph . . . punished her mortal husband by depriving him of the ability to breathe automatically. Without the benefit of tracheostomy, the poor wretch, having forgotten how to breathe, died in his sleep." (Vaisrub 1978) Another makes Ondine the cheater in the situation! "Ondine, a German water nymph, invoked a curse upon her jilted husband so that he would forget to breathe (and die) when he fell asleep." (Swift 1976, as cited in Navarro 1997) Or was Ondine the one who was cursed? "[T]he water nymph Ondine was punished by the gods after falling in love with a knight by being condemned to stay awake in order to breathe." (BBC 2003) In some versions, Ondine is a succubus-like serial killer: "...a water-spirit of German mythology called Ondine who could cause the death of her victims by stopping their respiration." (Taitz et al 1971, as cited in Navarro 1997) "Ondine was a mythological water nymph who exhausted her human lovers." This author quotes Giraudoux's play, but labels Hans as just "one victim"! (Sege 1992) And sometimes the nature of the curse itself changes to a perpetual sleep, as in one dictionary where Ondine is "A water nymph who caused a human male who loved her to sleep forever." (Firkin 1996) The story goes completely off the rails in one article on spine surgery: "Ondine, a shepherd in Greek mythology, was cursed for his misdeeds by being put into a sleep from which there was no awakening." (Fielding et al, 1975, as cited in Navarro 1997) Critics were rightfully outraged at this summary, which manages to get every single detail wrong. The writers were following blindly in the footsteps of a very confused 1968 article which evidently mixed up Undine with the Greek myth of Endymion. The mistake is so wildly far off that I'm honestly impressed. Conclusion This is what happens when a bunch of people start retelling a story they've never read. The heart of the modern character Undine – carrying through to her spiritual successor, the Little Mermaid – is that she loves her husband. Her love is self-sacrificing and all-forgiving. The medical myth around “Ondine’s Curse” inverts this, making her a vindictive wife, a vampiric seductress, or a sheep-tending Greek man. One article examines the history but concludes lackadaisically, "Whether Ondine kissed or clasped her husband to death depends on the version of the tale, and one can never know who cursed whom" (Tamarin et al, 1989). That's not true, though! This isn't like traditional oral folktales where there really are multiple unique variants and no one can determine an original. This is more like saying that we can never really know whether Dorothy's slippers were silver or ruby in The Wizard of Oz. At what point does urban legend or commonly-repeated misconception become folklore? Can Ondine be considered a myth or legend, as it is often called? Perhaps it has become something of an oral folktale in the medical community. But given that it came specifically from literature, I hesitate to call it that. This is part of a larger issue surrounding the story of Undine. It left its stamp on Western culture, but the work itself has become pretty obscure. For instance, many readers take jabs at Hans Christian Andersen for the theme of souls and salvation in The Little Mermaid, calling it tacked-on or a case of preachy Christian moralizing. But that plotline wasn’t original to Andersen – it was his response to Undine. Scholars such as Oscar Sugar, Ravindra Nannapaneni, and Fernando Navarro have put significant work into tracing the fragmented and confused medical legend of Ondine's Curse. Many of them have argued against using the name at all, calling it a misnomer. From the other side, psychology professor Stanley Coren complained that the term was losing favor because of political correctness and "language sensitivity, where labeling people as suffering from some form of curse is seen as being insensitive rather than colorful." However, Coren says this right after weaving an elaborate summary which bears almost no resemblance to the real story. He also incorrectly attributes the coining of the term to the 1950s. And the vast majority of critics don't complain that it's mean to call a medical syndrome a curse; instead they focus on the fact that the name is fundamentally a bad fit. On the literary level, Ondine neither causes the "curse" nor experiences it, and Hans's experience goes way beyond apnea. You could get pedantic and say "Well, it's named after the play, not the character" but clearly it has not been taken that way. On the medical level, the shifting definitions lead to inconsistency on what the medical condition is. As Nannapaneni et al point out, the name "Ondine's Curse" has come to be used inconsistently for all sorts of conditions related to respiration. Not ideal for a medical term. They suggest that “this wide and nonspecific usage reflects a lack of awareness of the origins of this eponymous term.” These days, the condition is typically known as Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome (CCHS); however, the name "Ondine's Curse" is still around in casual language, and is apparently here to stay. References
Other Blog Posts  Syair Bidasari is a story with many parallels to the Brothers Grimm story of Snow White and the worldwide tale type of ATU 709. A syair is a traditional Malay poetry form, and Bidasari is the name of the heroine. Going through it piece by piece, we find many things which seem very different on the surface from Snow White.
We don’t know the date of origin or the author. The oldest extant manuscript dates to the 1810s, with the oldest surviving reference from the previous decade. A similar syair was dated to the 1650s, so this may very well be one of the earliest versions of Snow White that we have today. Julian Millie found that the story was known throughout Southeast Asia, ranging from Indonesia to the Philippines. It was adapted into music and theater, and translations were published in English, German and Russian. Syair Bidasari is an epic poem with intricate language and structure, and it’s been impossible for translators to do it full justice in English. It also keeps going after Bidasari marries the king. See, she was a lost princess adopted as an infant by a kindly merchant. After her wedding, her biological family tracks her down, and there are endless reunions and celebrations and a long digression where her brother slays a monster and marries the princess it was holding captive. (This kind of elaborate runtime is not unfamiliar for old literary fairy tales; compare the original French novella that was Beauty and the Beast, which takes a deep dive into fairy politics and Beauty’s Surprise Secret Backstory as a lost princess. Adaptations immediately dropped that part, with good reason.) Bidasari is not a folktale, but it does seem based on oral tradition. And we can see traces of that tradition continuing in folklore collected much later - in the Indian tales “Princess Aubergine” and “Sodewa Bai,” and the Jewish Egyptian story “The Wonder Child.” These stories vary in some details. “Sodewa Bai” even has a bit of a Cinderella motif, with the prince finding her because of her tiny slipper. But they generally stick to the same plot - this very specific strand of ATU 709. REMOVABLE SOULS One of the most intriguing differences from the European Snow White is how the death-sleep works. European heroines are usually invaded in some way, a foreign body intruding on hers - a bite of apple stuck in Snow White’s throat, a splinter in Talia’s finger. It must be removed in order to awaken her. But in these Asian and Middle-Eastern versions, something is stolen from the heroine and must be returned to her. And here we have the motif of the removable soul. Bidasari’s soul is inside a golden fish, which is nested inside two precious boxes and kept in a pond in her family’s garden. Aubergine’s life is tied to a magical necklace, hidden inside a tiny box, inside a bumble bee, inside a red and green fish. In “Sodewa Bai” the heroine is born with a necklace, in “The Wonder Child” with a glowing jewel; if she doesn’t have her magical item with her, she’ll fall asleep. In all of these cases, the object is worn as a necklace. This resembles ATU 302, "The Giant who had no heart in his body." In these stories, the owner of the removable soul is typically a villain who has nested his heart or life force inside several different things, sometimes animals or insects, sometimes and egg. The hero must seek out the life source to destroy it. It seems like the hero being the one with the removable soul may be common in Indian tales. In "Chundun Rajah" (from the same collector who published "Sodewa Bai"), it's a man who suffers the daily death when his soul-necklace is stolen. Is the soul-necklace in these stories a unique folk tradition variant? Or was the legend affected by the fame of the epic poem adaptation Syair Bidasari? I do find it intriguing that it made it all the way into Jewish storytelling in Egypt. THE VILLAIN A major theme in these stories is the rivalry between two wives. Bidasari faces Queen Lila Sari, who is driven by her fear that the king will marry someone else and lose interest in her. You can feel for Lila Sari at first, when her devoted husband states that he would take another wife if he found someone more beautiful. However, then she turns to torture and murder. (Bidasari, in contrast, holds no deep resentment towards Lila Sari and is content to be one of several wives.) The Punjabi tale of “Princess Aubergine” gets even more horrifying. When the queen tries to magically force Aubergine to confess where her life is kept, Aubergine claims that it is tied to the queen’s son - and the queen promptly murders her own offspring. This continues until the queen has killed all of her own children. Aubergine is attempting to shield herself by appealing to the queen’s maternal instincts and humanity, but the queen has none - weeping afterwards only because she’s enraged that Aubergine still lives. There are particularly strong similarities between “Princess Aubergine,” “Sodewa Bai,” and the 17th-century Italian “Sun, Moon and Talia,” which is also close to Snow White - although the plot is reversed and fragmented, with the enchanted sleep plot wrapped up before the contest with the jealous queen. In all three stories, the villain is an older first wife, and the heroine gives birth to the king's child in her sleep. There's an unspoken focus on fertility. This is especially clear with Talia, who gives birth to twins, while the queen trying to kill her is childless. In “Princess Aubergine,” the queen has seven sons, but she murders them all, effectively becoming anti-fertile. Here, we're starting to see a particular theme becoming prominent - and I want to compare this to what we know about Snow White's villain. A STEPMOTHER OR A RIVAL WIFE? Maria Tatar examined the Snow White tale in The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters, from the premise that the story is inherently about a rivalry between a beautiful maiden and her cruel mother: a story not only about beauty and aging, but about family dynamics at their most dysfunctional. However, quite a few of the stories Tatar collects are not about mothers and daughters at all. At one point, she notes of Chinese tales that "it is something of a challenge to find stories directly representing mother-daughter conflict" (p. 165). Searching for ancient versions of "Snow White," Graham Anderson wrote that "[c]lose family tensions tend to be toned down in the romances, and their role supplied by external rivals instead" (p. 53). Dropping the "requirement" that Snow White stories must include a wicked mother allowed Anderson to open up the playing field to more stories. But this is begging the question. Who says that close family tension is an inherent part of the folktale? What if the wicked mother is the newer version? We can actually track the development of some Snow White-like tales where it does seem like this is the case: by changing the character relationships, a story of bigamy is transformed into a story of more general jealousy. Charles Perrault's "Sleeping Beauty" is an adaptation of "Sun, Moon, and Talia" where, instead of a rival wife, the evil queen is the king's mother. The villain is also the prince's mother in "The Wonder Child," published in the 1990s, and the prince's stepmother in a 1965 film adaptation of Bidasari. In "Snow White," of course, the villain is a mother (or stepmother) who feels threatened by her daughter's superior beauty. But even in the German versions, this isn't so straightforward as it seems at first glance. In the Grimms' earliest draft, titled "Snow White, or the Unfortunate Child" (the one where Snow White is blonde), not only is the villain Snow White's biological mother, but her father is the one who rescues her. He discovers the glass coffin, grieves over his daughter's "death," and causes her to be woken (he has doctors in his entourage, fortunately). At the end Snow White marries a previously unmentioned prince, and the queen is executed at their wedding. In another variant from the Grimms' notes, the story begins with a count and countess riding through the woods when they encounter the lovely heroine; the count takes her into the carriage with him and the countess becomes instantly jealous. In the earliest versions, the king is an important character, but in the most famous version he has been almost completely erased from the story. Still, commentators have suggested that the magic mirror is a stand-in for the now-absent king, judging between the beauty of his wife and daughter. In stories like these, we start to see a different side to the Snow White tale type: it's not about jealousy over beauty in general, but a contest for the affection of one specific man. In the German "Richilde" (1782), the villain first seduces Blanca's father away from his wife, and then attempts to seduce the Prince Charming figure who's in love with Blanca. Further afield, in "The Hunter and His Sister," a Dagur tale from Mongolia, two women grow jealous of their husband lavishing attention on his sister. And I'm not even getting into the apparent doubling of the jealous mother figure in other tales. In the Italian "The Young Slave" and "Maria, the Wicked Stepmother, and the Seven Robbers" and the Scottish "Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree," the heroine's mother puts her into a death-sleep, and the heroine's lover (or uncle) takes her home only for his mother or wife to awaken her via jealousy or curiosity. Going further afield again: in a search for "Snow White" tales in Africa, Sigrid Schmidt found many tales which showed marks of colonizing European influence, and even some late tales which were directly derived from the Brothers Grimm. Schmidt suggested that a purer African parallel to "Snow White" can be found in the tale type "The Beautiful Girl." It is not the same tale, but its similarities bear noticing. These stories follow a young, innocent girl who is remarkably beautiful. The other local girls become jealous - perhaps especially when a man proposes marriage to her even though she's still too young, or when a group of herdboys point her out as the loveliest. The other girls take her out into the wilderness, where they trap her and leave her for dead. She is later rescued. There is no prince in this story, nor is there a death-sleep, but Schmidt argues that the Beautiful Girl goes through a metaphorical death before being rescued. Also, Schmidt did find versions in which the Beautiful Girl is murdered and later resurrected. Notably, there is no familial relationship between the heroine and the villains. Also, the Beautiful Girl is rescued because people hear her singing (sometimes even in versions where she's dead). Compare this to Syair Bidasari, where Bidasari is able to awaken during the night and tell the king her story. CONCLUSION Syair Bidasari and these other Indian or Middle Eastern tales have their own elements which are quite different from European tales of type 709. Most notable is the consistent motif of the magical necklace containing the heroine's life. However, by comparing and contrasting these with European variants, I suspect we can get a hint of what an ancient version of Snow White may have looked like. What if the most ancient versions of Snow White were something closer to Syair Bidasari - a story where an older woman and a younger woman vie for their husband's attention? From there, it could have split into various versions. In some, the older woman might be the heroine's mother. In others, the older woman might be the love interest's mother. Or there might be a totally different relationship between characters. What do you think? SOURCES
-Pogany-illustr-p014-Fedelma%26swanskin.jpg) Illustration from "The King of Ireland's Son" "Swan Lake" and "The Little Mermaid" are the same story.
But wait, you may say. The Little Mermaid is a Danish fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen about a mermaid. Swan Lake is a Russian ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, about a princess turned into a swan by a curse. In fact, both stories take inspiration from the Fairy Bride or “Quest for the Lost Bride” tale, categorized as Aarne-Thompson-Uther 400. In the Fairy Bride tale, a man takes an otherworldly creature as a wife. They live together for a while, possibly having children, but one day she leaves him and returns to her own world. This is similar to stories with a mortal woman and supernatural husband, like "Cupid and Psyche" or "East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon." However, while human brides usually get their supernatural husbands back, in ATU 400 - despite the title of "The Quest for the Lost Bride" - it’s less certain that a mortal husband will succeed. Many versions end with him never seeing his fairy wife again. The earliest known example is the Hindu story of Urvasi, found in the Rig Veda (c. 1200 B.C.E.). There are different types of the Fairy Bride story: A) It’s a story of spousal abduction. A man discovers a beautiful maiden - a selkie or swan maiden with a removable animal skin, or a mermaid with a magic cap. He hides the magical garment, trapping her in human form. She inevitably regains the garment and escapes as fast as she can. B) The marriage is consensual, but there is some taboo the husband must not violate (never strike his wife, never spy on her while she’s bathing, etc.). He invariably violates it, and she leaves. The most famous example is Melusine, first appearing in the Roman de Melusine by Jean d'Arras (1393). She marries a man and their union is happy at first; she builds castles for him and bears many sons. But she makes him promise never to look in at her while she's bathing. Inevitably he does so, and sees her as a half-serpent or a mermaid. When he publicly calls her a serpent, she turns into a dragon and flies away. In many versions the idea is that if he had kept his promise, she would have been freed from her curse. There's a related folktale where a young man encounters a woman who's been turned into a serpent or half-serpent by a curse. If he can kiss her three times, she will be freed and he will receive riches and her hand in marriage. Before he can kiss her a third time, he is overcome by fear and runs away. He soon regrets his cowardice, but is never able to find her again. In fact, in some versions this woman is Melusine. The maiden-turned-serpent freed by a kiss appears in many medieval sources. The story gets a tragic, inconclusive ending in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (14th century) but a happy ending in the French romance Le Bel Inconnu (12th century) and Italian Carduino (14th century). The gender-swapped version would be the medieval story of The Knight of the Swan (tragic ending). In a further variant of B, the taboo is taking another wife. This appeared most prominently in the medieval poem of Peter von Staufenberg (c.1310). Peter's nymph mistress showers him with good fortune but gives him one condition: he must never marry anyone else, or he'll die three days after the wedding. However, other people put pressure on Peter to marry a human woman, with many telling him the nymph is a demon, and he eventually gives in. At his wedding feast, the nymph's leg appears through the ceiling. Three days later, Peter dies. The later story "Melusine im Stollenwald" combines this with Melusine and the Serpent Maiden tales; a man named Sebald promises to kiss Melusine three times to break her curse, but she becomes progressively more serpentine and dragon-like, and his courage fails him. Years later, at his wedding feast to another woman, the ceiling cracks and a drop of poison falls unseen onto Sebald's food. He eats it and dies. A snake tail is seen through the ceiling, implying that the poison is Melusine's venom. Paracelsus, a Swiss philosopher, worked both Melusine's and Peter von Staufenberg's tales into his descriptions of elemental beings in A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits (published in 1566). He dubbed the water elementals "undines." German author Friedrich de la Motte Fouque spun this into a novella, Undine, published in 1811. There's another work that probably inspired Fouque: the successful Viennese play Das Donauweibchen (1798), which follows a knight named Albrecht torn between his mortal wife Bertha and water nymph lover Hulda. The plot is very different from Undine, but the love triangle, setting, and names are similar. Fouque's plot runs as follows: Boy meets water-fairy. A knight named Huldbrand goes traveling through the woods, where he meets and falls in love with the mysterious Undine. It turns out that she’s a water-spirit, and she gains a human soul by marrying him. The fidelity test. Fouque uses two taboos, straight from Paracelsus: first, the husband must never scold his nymph wife near the water or she’ll return to her own world, and second, if he ever takes another wife, the nymph will return and kill him. The doppelganger. Huldbrand reconnects with his first love Bertalda. Bertalda is, in a way, Undine's sister; she’s the long-lost daughter of Undine’s human foster parents. The tragic ending. Huldbrand breaks the first taboo by bringing up Undine's inhuman origins and berating her, causing her to disappear. He then breaks the second taboo by marrying Bertalda. Undine appears after the wedding and drowns him with her tears. When he is buried, she becomes a fountain flowing around his grave. Now we come back to "The Little Mermaid" and "Swan Lake." These stories map onto the same points as Undine. The Little Mermaid We know from Hans Christian Andersen’s letters that he was inspired by Undine when he developed the concept for “The Little Mermaid” (1837). Like Undine, the mermaid is motivated by her desire for a soul. It hits generally the same beats as Fouque's novel: Boy meets water-fairy. The mermaid saves a prince's life and falls for him. The fidelity test. The mermaid can earn a soul by marrying the prince, but if he marries someone else, she will die. The doppelganger. The prince mistakenly attributes his rescue to a human girl who physically resembles the mermaid. The tragic ending. The prince marries the other girl. On the wedding night, the mermaid is given the option to escape death by killing him. She refuses and melts into sea foam, but is resurrected as an air spirit. Swan Lake Around 1870, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky worked on an unsuccessful opera version of Undine. He destroyed most of the score, but recycled part of Undine and Huldbrand’s duet for the music of "Swan Lake," which debuted in 1877. It didn't initially do well, but in 1895 it was brought back and reworked with a simpler plot. Tchaikovsky died shortly before the new version could be completed. Boy meets water-fairy. In the 1877 version, Prince Siegfried hunts some swans until they reach a lake. There he discovers that they are fairy maidens in disguise. Odette, the leader, is the daughter of a knight and a fairy, and is in hiding from her murderous stepmother. Her grandfather, a sorcerer, gave her a magic crown to protect her, and allows her to fly freely in swan form at night. (In the updated 1895 version, Odette and her companions are humans transformed into swans by the evil genie Rothbart - a minor character in the original.) The fidelity test. Marriage will permanently protect Odette from her stepmother. Siegfried promises to marry her. (1895: Siegfried’s oath of love to Odette will break the curse, but if he marries someone else, he dooms her to remain a swan forever.) The doppelganger. Rothbart's daughter Odile, a girl who looks physically identical to Odette (played by the same ballerina). The tragic ending. Siegfried is tricked into proposing to Odile, betraying Odette in the process. Realizing his mistake, he runs back to the lake, where he tears off Odette's crown in an attempt to keep her with him. She dies in his arms and the lake swallows them both. (1895: Instead of the crown scene, Siegfried and Odette drown themselves rather than live without each other. This breaks Rothbart's power.) Inspirations and Themes Swan Lake and The Little Mermaid are not adaptations of the Undine story. They are unique works by modern authors, and Undine was just one of many inspirations behind them. Andersen was familiar with many mermaid stories. "The Little Mermaid" is unusual among the tales listed in this post, because it's entirely from the "fairy bride's" point of view. Her backstory, her feelings about immortal souls, her journey. Unlike Undine or Odette, who depend on their men to complete a test, she bears the knowledge of her test alone; her prince never has any idea what's really going on. The ending of her story, where she refuses to kill the prince, is an intentional reversal of Undine (and, in turn, "Peter von Staufenberg"). Undine easily gains an immortal soul but is still forced to obey her deadly otherworldly nature. The Little Mermaid earns a soul by rejecting that side of herself no matter the cost. "Swan Lake," on the other hand, combines Undine with the traditional swan wife folktale. There are plenty of theories about Tchaikovsky's inspirations, and plenty of European swan-shifter myths. There's the Irish story of the Children of Lir, where the main characters are transformed into swans by their wicked stepmother, and similarly "The Knight of the Swan" which, as already mentioned, has its own similarities to Melusine. (When I first started working on this blog post, the Wikipedia page for Swan Lake claimed that a fairytale called "The White Duck" could have inspired the ballet; however, the stories have nothing in common. I'm not sure where this claim came from and it's been removed anyway at this point, but I wanted to document it for posterity.) A likely influence is Johann Karl August Musäus's 1782 novella "Der geraubte Schleier" or "The Stolen Veil," itself a retelling of the swan maiden folktale. The main character, Friedbert, encounters a hermit named Benno. (“Benno” is the name of Siegfried’s best friend in Swan Lake.) The dying hermit shows him a magical pool, visited occasionally by fairies or nymphs in swan form. The nymphs gain their powers of transformation from golden crowns with attached veils. If a nymph’s crown/veil is stolen, she’ll be trapped in human form. Benno the creepy stalker hermit failed, but Friedbert succeeds in stealing one of the veils. He gives shelter to the stranded swan maiden, Callista, and convinces her to marry him. But when his mother unwittingly exposes his lies and returns the veil, Callista is furious and immediately takes off in swan form. Friedbert searches across the world until he finds her again. Despite her initial anger, she still loves him, and is so impressed by his tireless search for her that she forgives everything. So this is why Siegfried rips off Odette's crown in the original ballet - he is trying to invoke the trope that you can capture a swan maiden by taking her garment. However, Odette's crown was actually protecting both of them. Although it was later edited out, Tchaikovky's twist feels almost like a rebuttal of the way "The Stolen Veil" rewards Friedbert's selfishness. Tchaikovsky was probably also familiar with Russian fairy tales about swans. A different tale type, ATU 313 or "Girl Helps the Hero Flee," often has overlap with swan maiden tales. One example that Tchaikovsky could have encountered was "The Sea Tsar and Vasilissa the Wise" in Alexander Afanasyev's collection of Russian tales, published in the 1850s and 1860s. In this story, a prince spots the Sea Tsar's daughters as they transform from spoonbills into women. He steals the clothing of one princess, Vasilissa; however, unlike the typical fairy bride story, he relents and returns it to her, letting her fly away. Vasilissa later aids him with various magical tasks when he is imprisoned by her father. The Sea Tsar finally allows the prince to choose a bride from among his twelve identical daughters, and Vasilissa leaves clues for the prince to recognize her. Reunited, the prince and Vasilissa return to his kingdom together. In some versions, the prince then breaks a taboo and gets amnesia, and Vasilissa must crash his wedding to another woman so she can trigger his memories. The plot is very different, but notice the (double!) threat of the prince mistakenly marrying a doppelganger. Conclusion Abduction variants of the Fairy Bride tale are about control. Marriages are thinly disguised kidnappings; wives are captives who will take any opportunity to escape. On the other hand, consensual variants are about a test of trust, commitment, or courage. If the male partner passes this test, he can lift the fairy bride to a higher state of existence. Freedom from a curse for Odette, Melusine or the serpent-maiden; a human soul for Undine and the Little Mermaid. It's not a one-and-done test, either; it is long-term. The serpent maiden needs repeated kisses. Undine gets her soul early on, but Huldbrand still needs to continuously honor their vows and be a good husband. Researcher and professor Serinity Young found that the earliest recorded fairy bride stories are of divine women who lift their mortal husbands to a higher state of existence. For instance, the celestial maiden Urvasi promises her husband immortality in heaven. Young proposes that the fairy bride story in its oldest form was about marriage by abduction; Urvasi tells her mortal husband that she was miserable in their marriage, and other early versions similarly focus on the fairy bride's unhappiness and feelings of being trapped. Young suggests that as women lost social status, fairy bride stories were recast in more romantic terms. I wonder if they also blended with a separate story tradition of a cursed beast-bride or snake maiden. In addition to making the male character more sympathetic, the romantic versions also reverse the power dynamic. The mortal man is now the one holding redemptive, transformative power. This culminates in the extreme of "The Little Mermaid," written in a modern Christian European context. The Mermaid is the pursuer in her relationship, going through incredible suffering on her quest, while the prince rejects her as a romantic partner. She is the one seeking both marriage and immortality. However, despite these changes, the mortal man’s fallible nature remains from the older stories. The love rival twist is especially interesting to me. Peter von Staufenberg and Huldbrand bend to societal pressure by marrying human women, taking the easy way out. Swan Lake's Siegfried and the Little Mermaid's prince have a different dilemma. Despite good intentions, they look only at the surface, failing to truly perceive the women they love. SOURCES
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Researching folktales and fairies, with a focus on common tale types. Archives
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