 "The Pink" or "The Carnation" (Die Nelke) is a fairytale collected by the Brothers Grimm. In this story, a childless queen prays for a child. One day, an angel tells her that she will have a son with the power to wish for anything. This prophecy comes true, and the queen and king are happy. However, the greedy royal cook decides to kidnap the child. One day while the queen naps with her son during a trip to the royal menagerie, he steals the child and leaves animal blood on the queen’s robes, then tells the king that she negligently allowed their son to be killed by an animal. The king believes him and has the queen walled up in a tower. She only survives because angels bring her food every day.
Meanwhile, the cook takes the little prince out into the wilderness and tells him to wish for a wonderful castle. The cook keeps the boy there. As the boy grows up, the cook decides he needs a companion, and tells him to wish for a beautiful maiden. Again, as he wishes, the maiden appears (created by him? summoned from somewhere else? No idea!). The boy and girl immediately become close. However, the cook eventually decides there’s too much risk that his crimes will be discovered. He orders the maiden to stab the boy and bring him the boy's heart and tongue, or die herself. He has no way to back this up, as the maiden clearly realizes, because she instead serves up a deer's heart and tongue (shades of Snow White here) and tells the prince to hide. The prince turns the cook into a black poodle and forces him to eat flaming coals. Some time later, the prince decides hey, this is probably a good time to go check on Mom. However, the girl is frightened of the journey. At her request, the prince turns her into a pink or carnation - thus the title of the story - and takes her along. He also brings the poodle-cook. He stops at the tower to tell his mother that he's on the way to rescue her; then he goes to the castle and announces himself to the King as a huntsman. He offers the greatest hunting game ever, and uses his wishing powers to do so. With all the fine game meat, the King is very pleased and throws a banquet, insisting that the huntsman sit at his side. Once they're at the banquet, the huntsman reveals himself as the lost prince and explains his whole story. He restores the cook to his true form, and the King has him thrown into the dungeon and executed. The prince restores the maiden to her true shape, and everyone is astonished by her beauty. The King has the Queen freed, but she dies soon after from her ordeal, and the King dies of a broken heart. The prince and the maiden are married and presumably rule the kingdom. Analysis This story is categorized in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther system as Type 652, The Boy Whose Wishes Always Come True. The tale was collected in Zwehrn, and the Grimms noted a few other variants, with or without the flower transformation (Hunt). I remember reading this and thinking it was kind of a weird story, then forgot about it. Despite being a Grimm story, it's very obscure. However, when I looked into it, I learned that the scattered versions collected are surprisingly widespread. In a Lower Saxon version, in which a king’s twelfth child is born; the king chooses the first beggar who visits to be godfather (shades of “Godfather Death”), and this godfather declares that the boy will have whatever he wishes. The court jester, Kio, is hiding and overhears this. As the little prince grows older, Kio realizes that he really does have the ability to wish for things, and steals him away to a foreign land. He tells the boy, Lietchen, to wish for a wealthy house, lands and servants for him, and tells him to transform a lily into a woman. Kio marries the woman, who is thus the boy’s foster-mother. Lietchen eventually begins asking his foster-mother about their past; equally curious, she asks Kio, who tells the whole story. Liechen is spying and listens; he immediately transforms the woman back into a lily which he returns to its garden, and turns Kio into a poodle. He returns to his homeland where he presents himself at the castle as a kitchen boy and catches the king’s attention. After an astoundingly blasé mention that yeah, the king used to have a son named Lietchen ("He probably drowned, for I haven't been able to find any trace of him"), the boy reveals all and Kio is executed by burning (Schambach-Müller, pp. 291ff). This is very close to a version mentioned in the Grimms' notes with a beggar godfather, a spying dwarf, and the dwarf's wife being a pivotal character; however, that one skipped any flower transformations and the dwarf's wife drops out of the story. It actually makes more sense for the villain to wish for a wife for himself, rather than instigating his own defeat by telling the boy to wish himself a friend and companion. Jacques wrote in about this story, and informed me of a French version, “Le Chien Canard” (“the duck (fetching) dog”). In this version, collected as "Le Vieux Soldar" by Lemieux, the king looks for fairy godmothers for his newborn son. Two bless the child with beauty and intelligence, but a third is angry at not being invited and curses him with the ability to wish. This is unusual in making the wishing a curse rather than a gift, which does seem apropos considering what happens next, and is probably the result of some mixing with "Sleeping Beauty." Here the kidnapper is an old soldier who has long served the king; the queen is accused of cannibalism. Once the boy is older, the soldier has him wish for a castle full of mirrors; there the soldier hunts all day and forces the boy to be a servant. When the boy becomes uncooperative, the soldier has him wish for a princess. The soldier makes the princess his servant and orders her to kill the boy. She refuses, and the soldier kills her. He has the boy wish for a second princess, who meets the same fate. A third princess is much quicker on the uptake, and helps the boy figure out that he, not the soldier, is the one with the power to make wishes come true. (At least one French-Canadian version gives this a touch of "Blackbeard" when the princess discovers the bodies of her predecessors - Dorson, p. 443). When the soldier returns home, the boy turns him into a hunting dog and they all return to the king for the typical conclusion. There is no flower transformation in this version. Ulrich Marzolph noted a variant, "The Story of Hasan, the Youth Whose Wishes Are Fulfilled," in one manuscript of The Arabian Nights. Here, mermaids grant a childless couple a son with magical wishing powers. However, their greedy slave kidnaps the infant and replaces him with a puppy. The boy, Hasan, grows up to marry the daughter of the sultan, who gets the slave to tell the whole story. As soon as Hasan learns the truth about his past, he transforms the slave into a dog and the princess into a mule and travels with them to find his parents, after which he restores the princess to human shape and they are married. Marzolph links the story type to the 14th-century Dutch drama Esmoreit, and attributes its popularity to the Grimms' "The Pink" (Marzolph, 215). Esmoreit is not a magical tale, but it is a "Calumniated Wife" story type. The Queen of Sicily is imprisoned on charges of infanticide, while her infant son Esmoreit is sold away by a scheming relative and raised in Damascus. A princess named Damiette raises him and serves as a kind of foster-mother/sister, but falls in love with him when he grows up. So that they can be together, she explains that he's not actually related to her and encourages him to track down his birth family. The queen is freed, the culprit is punished, and the couple gets married (Salingar 47-48). "The Pink" always struck me as a weird story. Some of these variants clear up fuzzy plot logic and make more sense. For instance, the boy doesn't know that he controls the wishing magic, or doesn't know about his birth parents, and the girl helps him dig out the truth. The Grimms, as well as commentators Bolte and Polivka (pp. 121ff), focused on the plot point of the girl transformed into a flower, comparing it to stories like "The Myrtle" in The Pentamerone. In those stories, a prince falls for a girl who emerges from a flower, or a flower that turns into a girl. He hides the flower in his room to spend time with the girl whenever she emerges, but some jealous women find out and try to destroy it. However,t he only real similarity to "The Pink" is the flower/girl transformation. And as you can see from the other variants I've mentioned, the flower is not a particularly common part of the story. For instance, one list of nine collected French-Canadian versions included only one with the flower incident, that being a fleur-de-lys (Dorson, p. 429). That list was not exhaustive, and there's at least one other French flower version, with a rose ("Roquelaire, voleur de l'enfant du roi"). But this is still in the minority. It would be more accurate when analyzing this tale to focus on the villain's transformation into a dog. This incident, which resonates across pretty much all the variants I've found, returns him forcibly to his original role as a servant. In "Hasan, the Youth Whose Wishes Are Fulfilled," it is a karmic echo of the way the servant replaced the infant Hasan with a puppy. In the case of the soldier in "Le Chien canard," the transformation turns his hobby on him, with the avid hunter becoming a hunting dog. Reading "The Pink" after my recent posts, it jumped out at me that this is actually pretty close to the Perseus family of stories. ATU 707 and ATU 708, “The Wonder-Child” I just went over this story type in my post on "Le Chat Noir" (see "Cinderella's Cat Child"). The overarching plot is extremely similar, with a queen giving birth to a wonderful child. She usually predicts what will make the child special, and here it happens in a more roundabout way through the angel's declaration that she passes on to the king. Then there's an antagonist - frequently a cook - who frames the queen for her child's death, smearing animal blood on her clothes while she sleeps. Here, the wicked cook is a man, but in many Type 707 stories it's the queen's jealous sister(s). This leads to the queen’s unjust imprisonment. And as the typical ending goes, the lost child confronts his father at a feast, where he exposes the truth and has his mother freed and the villain violently punished. The flower girl also reminds me of the swan maiden in "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", who just shows up on the island at an appropriate time to become the prince’s love interest and magical helper. There are also strong parallels to some other story types: Type 313, "The Girl Helps the Hero Flee" This type should really be named "The Heroine Saves the Boy." In these stories, the hero winds up in the villain’s stronghold, where a maiden—often the villain’s daughter—uses her magical powers to escape with him in a chase full of transformations. Here you get stories like “The Master Maid,” “Nix Nought Nothing,” or in the Grimms’ collection, “Sweetheart Roland” and “Foundling-Bird.” (Incidentally, “Foundling-Bird” also has a cook as the villain.) In "The Pink," the boy is the one with the supernatural powers. He's even the one who creates the villain's castle, and the girl arrives through his wish. She has no powers of her own, but she does use similar trickery to conceal the prince and trick the cook. She's summoned (created??) by the hero in the first place. She’s too scared to even leave the castle. She does still have a hint of action when she tricks the cook and contributes to his demise. Maybe, as in "Kio," she was originally created from a flower, and that's why she's so timid? However, in Dorson's version of "The Duck-Dog," the beautiful girl from England is savvy, rebellious and clever. She's the one who discovers the boy's true power and directs him in how to use it against their captor. "There, my old rogue... You killed two women, but you didn't kill me." There's no transformation chase specifically in "The Pink", but there is a faint parallel when the prince turns her into a flower. Compare “Sweetheart Roland,” where at the end of the transformation chase, the girl turns herself into a flower believing that she’s been forgotten, only to later be reunited with her sweetheart. However, as previously mentioned, Type 652 stories don't actually feature flowers all that frequently. "The Pink" is somewhat of an outlier. In quite a few versions of Type 652, the villain intends for the girl to be his wife, but she prefers the boy. Type 313 girls are typically the villain's daughter, and thus similarly connected to him. You could also compare Esmoreit, where the love interest initially serves a sisterly or motherly role. ATU 675, "The Fool Whose Wishes All Came True" A foolish or lazy young man receives the boon that whatever he wishes will come true. After the local princess mocks him (often in a suggestive scene that involves the man riding on a log), he wishes that she will become pregnant, and it comes true. The king is furious at this apparent scandal, and when he determines that the fool is the child's father, he puts all three—fool, princess and baby—into a chest or a boat and sets them out to sea. The fool then uses his wishes to bring them to an island and create a beautiful castle. This soon attracts the attention of the princess's father, and with the fool's new rise in status, everyone is reconciled. The main similarity is the boy with the power of wishing, but there are also a ton of parallels to the ATU 707/708 family here. There’s the Perseus-like plotline of the princess who mysteriously becomes pregnant, and who is then cast into the sea with her child. As in “The Wonder-Child,” there’s a miraculous landing on an island where the small family prospers and eventually wins the admiration of the king back home. There’s also the fact that the fool often receives his powers from a fish, frog or other aquatic creature—much like ATU 707 stories, where a fish is frequently involved in the marvelous child’s birth. (Maybe all stories are secretly Perseus? I'm mostly joking, but there are some tales that seem rooted into the basic fairytale code. Others are Cinderella and "East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon.") Thank you to Jacques for suggesting this post! Sources
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 Danaë, by John William Waterhouse In the myth of Perseus, he and his mother Danaë are cast into the sea in a chest - a theme that's come up a lot in the fairytales I've been examining lately. In this case, they're pulled ashore in the nets of a fisherman named Dictys. He takes them in as family and becomes their protector and a father figure to Perseus. Dictys may not be active for much of the story, but he plays a pivotal role. His brother Polydectes happens to be the king of Seriphos, who desires Danaë against her will. To get rid of Perseus, now a young adult, Polydectes sends him off to slay the Gorgon. At the end of the story, after getting rid of the scheming Polydectes, Perseus sets Dictys up as the new king.
Other than this, there isn't much information about Dictys. His name literally means "Netter" - very simple. A few different parentages have been given for him, and he has a wife named Clymene. Or does he? Clymene appears in one source, Pausanias's Description of Greece, which mentions “an altar of Dictys and Clymene, who are called the saviours of Perseus.” Pausanias does not say that they are married – and in fact, for centuries it seems that scholars presumed Clymene and Dictys weren't personally connected to each other at all (see for example Frazer, 1913). Clymene (“Fame”) is a name for multiple characters in Greek mythology, several of whom are ocean goddesses. An Oceanid named Clymene, daughter of Ocean and Tethys and mother of Atlas, is named in Hesiod's Theogony. Another Oceanid Clymene was the mother of Phaethon by Helios. In the Iliad, a Clymene appears among the Nereids who grieve with the sea goddess Thetis. Many scholarly sources point one of these Clymenes being Perseus’s savior, suggesting that she was a sea goddess or nymph who “brought Perseus’ chest safely into Dicty’s fishing net” (Ogden p. 107). Along similar lines, Lucian’s Dialogues in the Sea (ca. 170 AD) has Thetis and a Nereid named Doris push the chest into the nets (Ogden p. 25). One theory holds that Lucian might have gotten this plot point from Euripides’ lost play Dictys (Karamanou pp. 48, 50, 52, 54, 155). Nereids have a place in the story of Perseus; Clymene is a Nereid. So Clymene and Dictys, the saviors of Perseus, are the goddess who protected him in the sea and the fisherman who pulled him ashore. With that explanation being fairly well-established, where did Clymene as Dictys’ wife come from? Wikipedia will inform you that they were a married couple - and anything stated on Wikipedia, once released into the wild, is near-impossible to slow down. Dictys has an unnamed wife in some modern children's storybooks, those being The Heroes Or, Greek Fairy Tales for my Children by Charles Kingsley (c.1856) and Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang (1907); also an anonymous retelling in The Theosophist from 1909. Alternately, one revisionist version has some absolutely wild takes, with Dictys being secretly married to Danaë and thus Perseus' biological father - avoiding any hint of the hero being illegitimate (Barrett 1877). The first source I can find where Dictys and Clymene are identified as spouses is John Edward Zimmerman’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology from 1964, with a very brief mention that Dictys "was the husband of Clymene" (Zimmerman, p. 86). No elaboration. Zimmerman must have gotten the link from Pausanias, but he cites Apollodorus, who did not mention Clymene. However, in the first book of his Library, Apollodorus described Dictys's mother as a "Naiad nymph," and in the second book, shortly before the story of Perseus, Apollodorus mentions a Clymene, daughter of Catreus and wife of Nauplius. Could a wire have gotten crossed here? Either way, the trend really seems to have picked up in the 21st century; it appears in Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities from 2013, and Patrick Hogan’s A Student Commentary on Pausanias Book 2 (2018, p. 128). In Susan Sales Harkins' 2008 children's book Perseus, a kindly Dictys and Clymene serve as adoptive parents to Danaë and grandparents to Perseus (pp. 16-17), very similar to Kingsley's and Lang's versions from the early 1900s. And in Claire Heywood's angsty The Shadow of Perseus (2023), Klymene is Diktys' wife and the mother of his children; her friendship with Danae grows strained when Diktys dies and her family can no longer provide for Danae and her son.* Also worth a mention: in the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans, Danaë dies and Perseus is raised by a family of fisherfolk (although his adoptive parents are named Spyro and Marmara). conclusion With Dictys' and Clymene's names mentioned in tandem, it does make sense that someone might imagine they were married. A wife for Dictys would fall in line with folktales about a fisherman and his wife receiving a marvelous infant from the sea. Plus, although Dictys acts as Perseus’s father figure, and although he is exiled royalty much like Danaë , he does not marry her. Polydectes sees her as eligible for marriage, and Perseus, not Dictys, is the male protector he needs to get rid of. Yes, Danaë was loved by Zeus, but plenty of Zeus’s lovers went on to have husbands. One explanation could be that Dictys is much older than Danaë; he steps into the role of father that she didn’t get from Acrisius. Similar, and overlapping, is the idea that Dictys could already be married. It's even possible that Clymene could be a Nereid and the wife of a fisherman; I've mentioned the genealogy where he's the son of an unnamed Naiad (Apollodorus, 1.9.6). And although much later, a 12th-century work references him as a son of Poseidon (Tzetzes on Lycophron, Alexandra 838). On the other hand, maybe Danaë did marry Dictys. One reconstruction suggests that Euripides' play ended with Dictys and Danaë as king and queen of Seriphos (Collard and O'Sullivan, 256). That's theoretical. More importantly: Clymene is mentioned in only one source, and she isn't even identified as Dictys's wife there. Nowhere else does Dictys appear with a female companion, let alone a wife. This doesn't seem to become a trend at all until the Victorian era. Also, a minor note, but Dictys the fisherman, who catches Perseus's chest in his net, is named "Netter." Polydectes, the king who demands many wedding gifts including Medusa's head, is "Receiver of many/much" (Ogden, p. 50). With such on-the-nose names, why would the humble fisherman's wife be named "Fame"? Notes * Heywood’s novel casts Perseus as a toxic, violent man-child. It’s not the first or the last retelling to villainize Perseus. Also, it removes all supernatural elements, which means it follows in the steps of other rationalizations – like Pausanias’s 2nd-century explanation where Medusa is a Libyan war leader, and Fulgentius’s 5th-century explanation where Perseus is a pirate and Medusa a wealthy queen, and John Malalas' 6th-century Chronicle where Perseus is a power-hungry wannabe wizard and Medusa is a random wild-haired maiden who becomes a passing victim of his rampages. Perseus becomes a brute and a thug in basically all of the rationalized versions, because when you take away Medusa being a Gorgon she is left as an ordinary, even innocent, woman (Ogden, 125). So although I personally dislike the approach, Heywood is still following in an established thought pattern. Sources
See Also  In 1893, Marian Roalfe Coxe created an exhaustive index of Cinderella-type folktales. It's a pioneering work in the field, and as is typical for folktales, some of the stories get weird. One of them that especially stuck with me is “Le Chat Noir” – a story from Brittany, which goes in an almost Puss in Boots-like direction when the heroine gives birth to a kitten.
As the story goes: the beautiful Yvonne is mistreated by her stepmother, who favors her own ugly daughter, Louise. The stepmother has Yvonne’s beloved pet cow slaughtered. Mysteriously, beside the cow’s heart they find two little gold shoes, which the stepmother greedily claims for her own daughter’s troisseau. It so happens that a wealthy prince has heard of Yvonne’s goodness and beauty and comes courting. The stepmother takes advantage of this, gets the wedding set, and then on the wedding day, she locks Yvonne up and substitutes Louise. However, they are forced to cut off Louise’s toes and heels to get the golden shoes to fit her. As soon as the prince gets a good look, he walks out of the wedding in disgust, humiliating the family. The stepmother vows revenge on Yvonne, because clearly this is all Yvonne’s fault. She visits an old friend - a witch - who tells her to kill a black cat, make it into stew and serve it to Yvonne, who will die within the day. The stepmother carries out these instructions. However, Yvonne doesn’t die; she only falls ill and is sick all night, throwing up, which the narrator suggests may have saved her life. The frustrated stepmother turns to harassing Yvonne and her father until they decide to leave the country and sail away; then the stepmother tricks Yvonne’s father and unties the ship, causing it to drift away with Yvonne aboard alone. Yvonne lands on an island, where she makes her home. Fortunately, there’s an abandoned hermitage and plenty of food for her to live on. Less fortunately, after three weeks, she begins to feel ill, and realizes that she is pregnant. She gives birth to a black cat. Although startled, she decides "It was God who gave him to me; I must therefore receive him, without complaint, as coming from him, and treat him as my child, since that is his will." She treats the cat like any other baby and raises him lovingly. After a few months, he begins talking like a man and tells her he's going to cross the sea and get some food from the nearest town. Although she's nervous to let him go alone, she makes a satchel for him and he swims to the nearest town. There, he goes to the house of Monsieur Rio – first to steal food, and then to warn Monsieur Rio of an assassination attempt and rescue him from being framed of murder. In exchange, the cat asks Monsieur Rio to marry his mother. Rio really doesn’t want to marry a cat, but he’s honor-bound – and then absolutely dazzled when the cat brings in the lovely Yvonne. With Yvonne and Rio married, the cat asks that they visit Yvonne’s family. Her father is overjoyed, her stepmother and stepsister less so. At the welcome feast, the cat calls out the witch and has a battle of sorcery with her, before blowing fire and burning both her and the stepmother to ash. He then asks Monsieur Rio to cut him open. Rio of course doesn’t want to, but is finally convinced. When he does so, the cat becomes a handsome prince, who announces himself as the greatest magician ever. Analysis The story leaves many questions. The prince from the first half of the tale vanishes never to be heard from again, with Yvonne marrying Monsieur Rio instead. It’s not clear why the stepmother’s death spell causes pregnancy, although perhaps it is implied to be divine intervention, with Yvonne also happening to find a welcoming home on the island, and specifically relying on God when questioning why she just gave birth to a cat. Divine intervention might also explain why the cat is a wizard. This is actually two tale types stapled together – not uncommon in oral storytelling. The first section is a standard Cinderella type. The second part is an example of ATU 708, “The Wonder-Child.” In "The Wonder-Child," a typical plotline is that the heroine’s stepmother turns to magic and puts a spell on the heroine, so that she gives birth to a monstrous son. In "Le Chat Noir," the pregnancy seems to be a random side effect and Yvonne ends up marooned almost incidentally, but in most versions, it is intentional - the stepmother sets out to have her stepdaughter impregnated out of wedlock and thus disgraced and exiled - or even murdered for dishonoring her family. The stepmother, relying on social norms, intends to destroy the heroine's future, family connections, and social standing. And it almost works. But the heroine's child turns out to have magical powers, which he uses to find his mother a suitable husband and restore her to society, reconcile her with her family, and expose and punish the stepmother. "The Wonder-Child" is one of the tales closely related under the umbrella of the "Calumniated Wife" motif, listed right after Type 707, "The Three Golden Children." (So this is another story loosely connected to the Perseus type, which I looked at in a previous post.) In Calumniated Wife stories, the woman is often accused of giving birth to animals or monsters. The implied accusation is infidelity and even bestiality; hence, the harsh punishments placed on her until her true children return to expose the truth. In “The Wonder-Child,” she actually does give birth to an animal or monster through her enemy’s machinations. Her shame is compounded in “The Wonder-Child” because she’s a young, unmarried woman. Other Versions The combo with Cinderella in "Le Chat Noir" is unusual. The common thread seems to be the evil stepmother; I would guess this is why the storyteller connected them, consciously or unconsciously. A more straightforward version of ATU 708, “Le Chat et les Deux Sorcieres,” appears in the same collection as “Le Chat Noir.” This begins more simply with the stepmother consulting the witch. A Roma version, “De Little Fox,” has a fox who at the end transforms into a beautiful angel and flies away. In a South Slavonic story, “Der Sohn der Königstochter,” a jealous queen mixes ground-up bone from a graveyard into her daughter's coffee; this results in the birth of a son who is spotted all over (Krauss, no. 41). And in a Tuscan tale, a wicked stepmother consults a beggar-woman for a pregnancy-causing potion made of the blood of seven wild beasts. The potion works and her daughter is sentenced to death for supposed promiscuity, but the executioners spare her and leave her in the forest, where she gives birth to a seven-headed dragon. She names the dragon Meraviglia (Marvel or Wonder), and he grows up taking good care of her and eventually getting her a king for a husband. At the end, her stepmother is punished and the dragon turns into a man (Archivio, p. 524). Slavic variants I mentioned in my post on Perseus that in types of "The Three Golden Children," there are three routes the story can take. I looked at one popular route, where the children are replaced with animals and thrown into the water, but survive and go on a quest for magical items, then come back to prove their mother’s innocence. In another, the mother and baby are thrown into the water together in a barrel, wash up on an island, and the son later builds a palace to get his father’s attention. This version seems especially widespread in Slavic variants. The most famous version is Alexander Pushkin's 1831 fairy tale "The Tale of Tsar Saltan," where the queen's evil sisters falsely claim that she's given birth to a monster; she's set adrift with her son, who grows swiftly to adulthood. In a repeated motif, he turns into an insect to sting his aunts. (Here is a Soviet cartoon retelling with subtitles. And I had no idea, but the classic "Flight of the Bumblebee" comes from the opera adaptation of this story!!) Again, the sole difference here is that the son is falsely said to be an animal - suggesting a merging into "The Wonder-Child," where he is an animal. And there are examples which hit a middle ground, or where ATU 707 and 708 blend together. Walter Anderson, studying traces of a lost Russian manuscript from 1900, was able to reconstruct summaries of several tales. In one, wicked sisters replace their marvelous nephews with a puppy, a kitten, and an ordinary baby boy. However, when the mother is blinded and thrown into the sea in a barrel with the boy, he turns out to not be so ordinary after all - growing swiftly to adulthood and using his magic powers to will them to land and restore her sight. In some similar stories, like the Siberian “The Tsarevna and her three children” and the Bashkir “The Little Black Dog" (Berezkin) the rescuer role goes to the animals, such as a puppy or kitten, who were exchanged for the kidnapped biological children. This connects to stories where one or two of the queen's children not only remain with her in exile, but rescue their lost older brothers and perhaps free them from a spell by giving them their mother’s milk (Cosquin). It's also the same scenario again of the cat child - the animal used to doom the heroine, which instead ends up saving her and genuinely taking on the role of a beloved child. Analysis In "Le Chat Noir," the animal hero is a child born through black magic and wicked machinations. In "The Little Black Dog," the animal hero is switched for the heroine's real child. The themes blend across versions, but it's always the result of the villain's machinations, and the goal is the humiliation and destruction of the heroine. But the heroine does one thing that the villains don't expect. She accepts and loves her child - whether it's a cat, a dog, or a stranger child substituted for her own baby. Yvonne tenderly cares for her cat child; the maiden in the Tuscan tale names her seven-headed dragon son "Wonder." And then this child ends up not just saving his mother, but bringing her happiness and prosperity that she could only have dreamed of. The motif is similar to “Tatterhood.” This fairytale also begins with a woman consulting a mysterious beggar for magical help, leading to a supernatural pregnancy which results in a loud, ugly, chaos-causing child. Despite initial appearances, this child is a protector and sorceress who saves a family member and ensures her marriage to a king, before revealing her true, beautiful form. The motivation here is sisterly rather than motherly love, and the mother isn't all that great, but it's still an interesting parallel. The moral inherent across these stories is that when the unwanted, off-putting child is accepted, they end up saving the family. Sources
See Also  Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast begins with a prologue explaining the Beast's history. A prince selfishly refused to grant shelter to an old woman, who turned out to be an enchantress. Turning him into a beast, she left him with a rose, which “was truly an enchanted rose, which would bloom until his 21st year. If he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return, by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time.”
Later, the Beast’s servants - cursed into the forms of household objects - throw a joyful welcome feast for Belle. In the showstopper “Be Our Guest,” they explain, Ten years we've been rusting, Needing so much more than dusting. Based on these two segments, readers did some basic math and went… wait, was the Beast cursed at age eleven? Did the Enchantress curse a literal child? Time in Disney’s BatB is squishy. We don’t know specifically how long Belle is at the castle. It seems like she passes the winter there, but it gets a little confusing when you try to nail down, say, how long her father is searching for her. The Beast is about twenty-one at the time of the story - more specifically a “twenty-year-old guy” trapped in the body of a monster (Solomon, p. 91, emphasis added), since being in your twenty-first year would mean you're twenty. Similarly, Belle is somewhere in her late teens to early twenties. The art book Tale as Old as Time describes her as seventeen (Solomon, p. 62), and this is the age usually passed around fandom spaces, but her voice actress, Paige O’Hara, described her as “the oldest Disney princess. She’s the only one who they ever created to be in her 20s” (Chi, 2016). This is backed up by supervising animator Mark Henn (Mallenbaum, 2016). So if they've been isolated for ten years, then the Beast had to have been eleven, or even ten, when cursed - right? But then we hit a different problem: visually, the original film tells us that he was a young adult when he was cursed! The stained-glass sequence at the beginning, and a portrait of the prince which Belle discovers in the castle, both show him as a young man. I don’t believe the animators would have flubbed the prince’s visual age in such important sequences, and I don’t think they would have been misleading, either. They should be taken as just as important as the conflicting dialogue. And then there’s Chip, a child teacup who is definitely younger than ten. Did the Enchantress curse everyone who would ever be born in the castle in the future? How exactly does a teapot give birth? There’s also a cursed ottoman-dog who doesn’t look ten years old either at the finale of the movie. Fans have suggested a number of solutions:
Different Disney works take different approaches. A 1997 direct-to-video sequel, Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, shows the prince looking around eleven or twelve when he’s cursed. On the other hand, the live-action 2017 remake changes the song lyric to “Too long we've been rusting,” removing the problem. The Broadway adaptation also removes the math problem. In fact, there may be an answer in the film’s development. Lyricist Howard Ashman “envisioned the prologue as a fully animated sequence in which the audience would see a seven-year-old prince rudely refuse to give shelter to an old woman during a storm. Revealing herself to be a beautiful enchantress, the woman would chase the boy through the castle hurling bolts of magic that would turn the servants into objects. Eventually her spell would change the prince into the Beast boy, who would press his face against one of the castle windows screaming, ‘Come back! Come back!’” Directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale “hated the idea.” Wise said, “The only thing that I could see in my head was this Eddie Munster kid in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit” (Solomon, p. 63). This led to a rather fiery disagreement, but the directors eventually won out and the film ended up with its stained-glass sequence. Although Ashman shaped the film into the masterpiece it is, this is one point where I’m glad someone countered him. As Kristin of Tales of Faerie points out, “Why would you ever punish a seven year old with a curse that could only be broken by falling in love?” and she adds that it creates entirely the wrong tone for the curse. This still applies for an eleven-year-old. In my opinion, the story simply works best if the prince is a young adult when cursed, and that's what's indicated by the film's visuals, too. Still, this might be the reason for the discrepancy between the song lyric and the finished prologue. The lyric is really the only reason there's a numbers problem; everything else matches up. Maybe they'd already recorded the song. Personally, I never felt like the timeline needed that much scrutiny. It’s a fairy tale, and fairy tales are bonkers. The animated film is very different from the original 1740 novella of Beauty and the Beast, in which the prince is cursed by an evil fairy angry that he turned down her romantic advances (after she tried to groom him as a child!). There, the focus is on Beauty learning to see past his appearance. Disney’s version is a modernized fable, more about Beast learning to become a better man, but still feels timeless - and, in a way, outside time. But yes - it does have plot holes. Sources
 Periezade will turn to stone if she looks back - illustration by John D. Batten in Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights I’ve been on a Perseus research kick lately, and read through Edwin Sidney Hartland’s The Legend of Perseus, an exhaustively researched, occasionally surprisingly sarcastic three-volume series examining the concepts of this story and similar fairy tales across the world.
The myth basically goes like this: a king named Acrisius hears a prophecy that his daughter Danae’s child will kill him, so he locks Danae in a bronze chamber. However, the god Zeus visits her in the form of a shower of gold, and fathers her son, Perseus. When Acrisius discovers this, he shuts his daughter and grandson in a chest which he casts into the sea. But they survive; the chest washes ashore and a fisherman rescues them. Years later, the local king sets his sights on Danae, and tries to get rid of Perseus by sending him off to fight the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turns people to stone. Perseus receives advice and magical weapons from the gods, sneaks up on Medusa by using a shield as a mirror, and slays her. On the way back, he runs across a princess named Andromeda, who’s being served up as human sacrifice to a sea monster named Cetus after her family angered Poseidon. Perseus slays Cetus as well as Andromeda’s wicked suitor Phineus, and takes Andromeda as his bride. Returning home, he uses Medusa’s head to petrify Danae’s unwanted bridegroom. As for Acrisius, his prophecy comes true via a freak frisbee accident. This is one of the few Greek myths that’s actually pretty positive all around, and probably the most fairytale-like one out there. The villains are punished, and the heroes are decent people who get a happy ending. (The one bump is the backstory of Medusa; the earliest variants indicate that she’s simply a horrifying monster, the offspring of even more ancient and horrifying monsters, but the Roman writer Ovid wrote up a version in which she was a beautiful girl changed into a beast for the crime of being raped (!). Even though it's probably not at all what the older storytellers envisioned, this version - which makes Medusa a sympathetic and tragic figure - is currently the most well-known backstory.) The myth has given rise to quite a few big-name adaptations:
One of the most interesting facts about the Perseus myth, though, is that it seems to be two separate stories mushed together. There's Perseus's birth, and there's his quest to slay Medusa, which serves as an origin myth for protective amulets known as gorgoneia. But the Andromeda sequence feels random - not connected to the rest of the plot at all. Different versions are super inconsistent on whether Perseus kills the sea monster with a sword or with Medusa's head. Plus, the major players in the Andromeda segment, and only the Andromeda segment, have constellations named for them - Perseus, Andromeda, Cetus the sea monster, and Andromeda's parents. Nobody else gets a constellation, unless you count Pegasus the winged horse. The Andromeda story is a star origin myth! Maybe these were separate stories about Perseus that eventually got combined; we don't know. Tumblr user amorphousbl0b pointed out the star connection and also an interesting key similarity - through both parts, Perseus is a defender of women. In the Medusa story, he protects his mother from an unwanted suitor; similarly in the Andromeda segment, he saves Andromeda from her cowardly and vicious fiancé Phineus (who also happens to be her uncle). This myth is full of classic fairy tale tropes. The wonder child with the miraculous conception, an unwanted child who survives being thrown out into the water, a prince raised in poverty, the princess and the dragon, otherworldly helpers with advice and magical gifts, and monsters. There are some fairy tales which hit all the same plot beats as Perseus; Hartland recounts one from Tuscany where there's a witch in place of Medusa, a helpful old man with a flying horse in place of Athena and Hermes, and one-eyed women who are pretty much exactly the Graeae (pp. 11-13). However, remember that there are kind of two halves to the Perseus story - and there's an answer to this too in some popular folktale types. The Blood Brothers In ATU tale type 303, "The Blood Brothers," a childless couple is blessed with the birth of twins (or, occasionally, triplets) after the wife ingests magical water, fish, or fruit. Sometimes the blood brothers are identical boys born from different women who both ate the magical food. (For example, in the Brothers Grimms' "The Gold-Children", a fisherman gives his wife and horse pieces of a talking golden fish to eat, after which the wife gives birth to golden twin boys, the horse gives birth to golden twin foals, and two pieces of fish buried in the earth produce two golden lilies.) As young men, the brothers set out to make their fortunes. One brother discovers a city where a princess is about to be sacrificed to a dragon. He, of course, slays the dragon and marries the princess. At this point, things go wrong; he may run up against a rival for the princess’s hand, or be captured by a witch. (In "The Gold-Children," a witch turns him to stone.) However, his brother had a token to warn him if any danger occurred, and comes to the rescue. At first Hartland's description of this story seemed like a stretch to me, but there are real parallels. First is the supernatural birth. According to Hartland, because the mother in this story is married, the miraculous birth has to be more remarkable to have the same impact; so where in some stories we might have a virgin birth like Danae’s, in others we have a married woman giving birth to twins or triplets. Often the boys are the sons of a fisherman, or have some link to water or the ocean; compare Perseus and his mother being rescued from the sea by a fisherman. There’s often a gold or celestial motif, with the boys having golden markings or stars on their foreheads, or being born after the wife eats a golden fish, which matches with Zeus appearing as a golden shower. Or sometimes there is a mysterious supernatural father. This story follows the Andromeda track, with a wonder child growing up to save a princess from a dragon. If there’s a rival who tries to kill the hero and/or steal the credit for the dragon-slaying, this parallels Phineus, Andromeda’s other suitor. The Three Golden Children Then, on the Medusa track, there's ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children." Here, a king overhears three sisters gossiping. The youngest boasts that if she married the king, she would bear wonderful children with stars on their foreheads, golden hair or arms, or other markings along those lines. The king takes her up on it and makes her his queen. However, when her prediction comes true, her jealous sisters frame her for infanticide or claim that she has given birth to animals. From here, there are typically three routes the story can take (Goldberg, 2016). In one route, the children are actually killed, but come back in a transformation sequence. In another, typical of Slavic variants, the mother and her son(s) are thrown into the sea together in a barrel like Danae and Perseus, and wash up on an island where the son or sons later build a palace to get their father’s attention. In the third route, the sisters steal the children and cast them into the water in boxes or baskets; then, the queen is imprisoned on the sisters' false accusations. However, the children are rescued and raised by a servant, or merchant, or fisherman, etc. The children (in the most famous variants, two brothers and a sister) grow up, but then an old woman (usually sent by their wicked aunts) tells the girl of magical treasures such as a singing tree and a talking bird. The girl begs her brothers to get her these items, and they agree, leaving her with tokens that will tell her if they're in danger. A magical helper typically shows up along the way to offer advice (an equivalent to Athena, Hermes, and the Graeae). However, the treasure is guarded by magic which turns the two older brothers to stone. Back home, the younger sister sees their tokens change, and charges out, guilt-stricken, to rescue them. In "The Sisters Envious of Their Cadette," from Antoine Galland's edition of The Arabian Nights, phantom voices mock and threaten anyone who climbs a certain mountain. When the brothers turn around to fight or flee, they are turned into black stones. On the way to save them, younger sister Periezade wisely plugs her ears. Compare Perseus looking in a mirror to fight Medusa – it's the same effect of don’t turn around, no matter what. In the end, the sister wins the treasures and restores her brothers along with all the other adventurers who were petrified. The siblings return home with their trophies, which serve the additional purpose of leading them to the king, revealing the truth, and vindicating and saving their mother. In this story, too, there’s a woman at the heart of the quest. For Perseus, there's Danae threatened with forced marriage. For ATU 707, there's the little sister tricked into asking for magical items, and - although the siblings don't know it yet - the falsely-imprisoned mother. I've always been fond of both Perseus and Periezade as fairytale heroes, and was delighted to realize that their stories have these parallels. One interesting note is that both ATU 303 and ATU 707 have the plot of the "life-token" and the sibling rescue, which Perseus doesn't really have a match for. And so on These are widespread stories, with infinite variations. An Irish version seemingly combines Medusa and Perseus's grandfather Acrisius. The mythical Balor was a giant with an eye that destroyed everything he looked at, and there are many folktales of how he was defeated. In one specific folktale collected in the 19th century, Balor locks up his daughter Eithne in a tower to keep her from bearing a son prophesied to kill him. One of his enemies gains access to Eithne anyway; Balor tries to drown the resulting baby triplets, but one survives and grows up to kill him. Or sometimes Medusa is the love interest! This seems to be a minor trend in ATU 707 variants from Eastern and Southeast Europe, where the brother is the main hero, and the final task is to fetch a beautiful woman with magical powers who becomes his bride and helps reveal the truth about their family origins. In a variant from Epirus (a region now part of modern Greece and Albania) "the beauty of the land" (E Bukura e Dheut, a stock character from Albanian lore) lives on the other side of a river; many have pursued her, only to turn to stone. With help from his winged horse, the hero takes her home and marries her. This story gives the vibe that the beauty is somehow trapped in this isolated state, and is grateful to the hero when he frees her (Von Hahn, 287, notes to story no. 69). In a Nogai tale, "Sarygyz, Mistress of the Djinni", the final quest is to fetch the titular character, who lives near a cemetery and turns people to stone. With advice from a talking horse, the boy wins her as his bride. In a note reminiscent of Medusa’s serpent hair, the key is to arrive while Sarygyz is washing her hair; then she revives her victims by shaking her hair. I've found some references to similar sorceress-brides in a Dargin version, "Арц-Издаг" ("Silver Izdag"), and in a story from Chechnya where "Malkha-Azani" is a sorceress with an enchanted mirror, living beyond nine mountains, who petrifies any men who approach her palace. More research needed - probably with some translation services - but it's very intriguing to see how a Medusa figure can play a different role. The same thing happens in the Greek story of the Tzitzinæna, although she takes a more motherly role to the heroes once she's tamed (Legrand, p. 77ff). In these variants, there is a theme that the hero must call the sorceress and get her to acknowledge him, and this is the most dangerous part of his journey where he might turn to stone. A winged horse is also common in these types - similar to Pegasus. These stories are incredibly widespread, and with Perseus you can get just a hint of how ancient they are, too. Editing to add: We know that the classical myth of Perseus has signs of being two separate myths about Perseus combined. Maybe there is a clue how that happened in these fairytale types – one about a miraculously born child who grow up to slay a dragon and save a princess, and the other about a miraculously born child who survives drowning and goes on a quest for a magical item to save his mother. SOURCES
Further reading  There's recently been a boom of The Little Mermaid retellings. However, many “adaptations” of The Little Mermaid seem more inspired by Disney than Andersen. This is part of the way Disney adaptations have swallowed and replaced the tales and traditions they're based on. I remember browsing reviews for a Little Mermaid retelling and seeing one baffled reader ask where Flounder was.
For a quick rundown: in Andersen, the little mermaid is a withdrawn, introspective girl fascinated by the human world. Unlike other mermaids, she isn’t interested in collecting human trinkets. She is motivated by her love for the prince and her desire for an immortal soul like humans. Her appearance is left fairly vague, but she’s pale with long hair and blue eyes. The sea witch is a fairly neutral character, ominous but apparently fair-dealing. The mermaid's tongue is cut out as price for her transformation, and she also experiences agony whenever she walks, but she has no time limit for winning the prince. The mermaid's most important family relationships are with her grandmother and sisters. In the end, the prince marries someone else and the mermaid is doomed by the terms of her bargain; given the chance to survive by killing the prince, she refuses. Due to her noble actions, she is resurrected as an air spirit with a new chance at Heaven. In Disney, Ariel is an adventurous mermaid fascinated by the human world. Unlike other mermaids, she’s obsessed with collecting human trinkets. She’s motivated by her love for the prince and her desire to explore. As an animated film, the characters have colorful appearances and there are talking fish and animals. The sea witch and the other girl are combined into the villainous, octopus-tentacled Ursula, who wants to take over the ocean. Ariel must give up her voice in a mystical bargain and has a short timeframe in which to win her prince's heart. Her most important family relationship is with her stern and controlling father. In the end, Ursula is defeated in a huge battle, and Ariel reconciles with her father and marries her prince in a huge wedding attended by both humans and merfolk. Overall, Andersen has an intense internal battle with the mermaid weighing her own survival against that of the man she loves. Ariel’s dilemma is more straightforward and external. Both versions have received criticism as a story about a girl who silences and changes herself for a man. Despite their flaws, there are also things to defend. I like Andersen’s tale as a story of sacrificial love, and the mermaid earning her own salvation is a plot twist which went against CENTURIES of pagan mythology being demonized by Christian authorities. Likewise, Disney’s adaptation was a landmark moment in how they wrote their movie heroines, with Ariel much more active and independent than their previous animated princesses, and setting the stage for their movies today. Her motivations go beyond winning Eric, to exploring and gaining knowledge. For many people, Disney today is synonymous with fairy tales and their versions have eclipsed any other. In modern retellings of The Little Mermaid, heroines are not infrequently given names similar to Ariel, and fiery red hair is common. (Before Ariel, the mermaid was more often depicted as blonde - as in Rankin-Bass's stop-motion The Daydreamer (1966), an animated Soviet adaptation from 1968, and the 1975 Japanese anime.) Julia Ember’s The Seafarer’s Kiss (2017) and Sarah Henning’s Sea Witch (2018) are both origin stories for the Sea Witch which include explaining why she has tentacles - a detail originated by Disney. To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo (2018) shows a Disney influence despite its gritty, action-oriented tone, with a red-haired mermaid battling a tentacled sea sorceress and winning happiness with her prince. Granted, there is some cultural awareness that Andersen’s original is the “dark” version. But even this is frequently oversimplified. I’ve encountered many people thinking that Andersen’s tale ends with the mermaid dying or even committing suicide. This isn’t helped by adaptations which mimic Andersen but change the ending to be more tragic; one egregious example is the pointedly titled "The Story of a Mermaid Who Should Have Left Well Enough Alone" in Alex Flinn's Bewitching (2013). Disney itself has recently been publishing a lot of retellings, with some new takes on The Little Mermaid being Poor Unfortunate Soul by Serena Valentino (2016), Part of Your World by Liz Braswell (2018, with a 2023 graphic novel edition), Prince of Song and Sea by Linsey Miller (2022) and Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Córdova (2023). The live-action remake, released in May 2023, came with its own tie-in books. So a person browsing the shelves of a bookstore or library will be encountering Andersen-inspired books, Disney- published and licensed books, and books that draw on Disney without being officially licensed. It’s harder for me to think of adaptations which stay away from Disney’s ubiquitous influence. One example is Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen (2021) , which shows a few traces of inspiration from Andersen but weaves a new and original story based in West African mythology. (Although I am still iffy about whether yumboes are from folklore.) One case that I want to touch on is the Japanese animated film Ponyo (2008) in which a goldfish named Ponyo transforms into a human to find Sosuke, the human boy she’s smitten with. There’s the threat of Ponyo possibly turning into sea foam, but it’s a very gentle, child-friendly film. The Studio Ghibli website described it as “Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid' transferred into the setting of Japan today, with the Christian coloring wiped away” (Fraser). At the same time, Ponyo has red hair and controlling father. Not influenced outright by Disney - Miyazaki intentionally avoided watching The Little Mermaid while working on Ponyo - but certainly existing in the same sphere. Ponyo was, at least in part, inspired by creator Hayao Miyazaki’s memories of reading Andersen at age nine: "when he read that the little mermaid "didn't have a soul, and would turn to sea foam," he "couldn't accept it," and in fact, has not "accepted it to this day"" (Cavallaro 103). Personally, I agree with Miyazaki! Other authors as early as Oscar Wilde with “The Fisherman and His Soul” (1891) also pushed back against the soul theme. But it’s vital to remember that Andersen was also pushing back against a long tradition: Christian medieval thought’s “fairies and mythical creatures are demons or fallen angels and can never reach Heaven”. That eventually led to Paracelsus's “well, they can go to Heaven by marrying a human." Andersen effectively said "Screw that, they can earn their own redemption." Thus, it’s frustrating to read writings on Miyazaki's Ponyo which blame Andersen for writing “a moralizing tale about the metaphysics of the Christian soul” (Oziewicz). I do want to take a moment to also express my appreciation for Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which is a classic. I grew up with this film so I have a lot of fondness for it. I love the animation, the songs, the characters. Ariel sharing a name with the air spirit in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a very clever touch. Andersen’s story is beautiful and heartbreaking, Disney’s story is joyful and fun, and I like both of them a lot. Yet at the same time, I’m frustrated by the way Disney more or less replaces every fairy tale it touches. The Little Mermaid is so iconic that it’s deeply ingrained in any related storytelling. It seems like any story about a mermaid becoming human will be described at some point as a retelling of the Andersen tale or the Disney movie. But there’s something in the meta and the background of Andersen’s fairytale that I think has gotten lost, and that’s the concept of a siren-mermaid, a soulless and even demonic being who’s supposed to be a deadly temptress luring men to their deaths, who is instead noble and heroic and self-sacrificing. Even The Little Mermaid’s immediate predecessor in Undine (1811) gains a human soul through marriage but is still constrained by her nature to the point of killing her husband; Andersen’s heroine defies her nature, selflessly spares the thoughtlessly cruel prince, and as a result earns her own soul. I think the problem with The Little Mermaid is that it did its job of humanizing the Mermaid so well that we’ve kind of forgotten the genius of the story, that she was a monster who refused to be a monster. OTHER BLOG POSTS
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 Tatterhood is one of my favorite fairy tales. It begins with a queen who performs a ritual in hopes of having a child, and winds up with two daughters. One is beautiful and sweet, and the other is Tatterhood: an absolute force of chaos who's ugly, rides on a goat and wields a wooden spoon. She's named for the ragged hood she wears.
"One Christmas eve . . . there arose a frightful noise and clatter in the hallway outside the queen's apartment. . . . it was a pack of trolls and witches who had come there to celebrate Christmas.” Tatterhood fights the trolls off; however, when her sister peeks in to see what’s going on, she ends up with her head stolen and replaced with a calf’s head, kicking off a quest to the land of the trolls to set things right. So this technically makes this fairy tale a Christmas story. This is a Norwegian tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. A Scottish equivalent, "Kate Crackernuts," doesn't involve a troll-infested Yuletide; however, a similar troll incident appears in another Norwegian tale, also from Asbjørnsen and Moe. This is is "The Cat on the Dovrefjell," where trolls again wreak havoc on a certain home every Christmas Eve (and here are driven off by a traveler's pet bear). So we have this Norwegian motif of trolls on Christmas. Many cultures had traditions that the darkest, coldest part of the year was associated with supernatural happenings. The Wild Hunt, consisting of ghosts and/or demons, might ride at night. Children born during this time might become werewolves; it was a time for fortune telling; animals might talk on Christmas night. The folk figure Frau Perchta or Frau Holda would visit homes with a retinue of child-ghosts known as the Heimchen. Moving into Catholic lore, Saint Nicholas would show up to bestow gifts accompanied by the devilish Krampus. (Modern incarnations of the Krampus often show up as opponents or ideological opposites of Santa Claus, but in the original traditions, the Krampus and similar figures are servants and companions of jolly old Saint Nick. Complementary rather than opposed.) People prepared their homes and left out food offerings for Frau Perchta and her crew, to avoid punishment or earn blessings . . . which is probably how we get to leaving out milk and cookies for Santa Claus. Although Frau Perchta was supposed to disembowel people who didn't appease her, and the worst you'd get from Santa is coal in your stocking. This was, again, the darkest and coldest time of the year, a time of transition - and a time when people would be stuck inside trying to stay warm and entertain themselves during the long nights. Thus, winter nights were a perfect time for spooky stories. This tradition that became especially popular in England, with ghost stories specifically at Christmas being a trend in the 18th and 19th centuries. This led to such works as Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in 1843, where spirits and ghosts visit an old miser on Christmas Eve in a socially conscious fable. Dickens went on to publish quite a few Christmas-themed ghost stories in magazines, although A Christmas Carol remains by far the most famous; he really shaped the trend and got it going, with other authors such as Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle writing such stories. But today, the only well-known remnants - at least in the U.S. - are A Christmas Carol and Andy Williams's 1963 song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” which mentions "scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmasses long, long ago." Sources and Further Reading
 This post was supposed to go up months ago, but the last half of 2024 was nuts and I haven't had as much time to devote to the blog as I would like. Posts may be slower for a while, but I hope to still get some research done.
But without further ado, let's get into the subject of Duke Magnus Vasa - a historical figure whose story has become entwined with folktales of fairy brides. Thank you to Jeanette Wu, who suggested this topic and a wealth of sources along with giving feedback on an earlier version, and Toovski for help with some of the translations! In folklore, there are four main things that could happen to someone who encountered the otherworld: death, remaining in the otherworld forever, escape to safety, and escape but with permanent effects, such as madness. This plays out in a family of related Scandinavian ballads. Death and "Elveskud" “Elveskud” (“Elf-Shot”) is one of the most popular old Scandinavian ballads, with about seventy known variants and many different names. It tells the story of a knight - usually named Olaf or something similar - who encounters a group of dancing elf maidens. One of them urges him to join her; in many versions, she offers him rich gifts if he’ll do so. He refuses, for he is to be married the next day. In some versions, Olaf continues to hold firm with loyalty to his fiancée; in others he is enticed or forced to dance, accepts a gift, or consents to a kiss. But no matter what he does, all the ballads lead to the same outcome: the Elf-queen kills him. She curses, strikes, or stabs him, and he returns home to die. In turn, his mother and/or fiancee die of grief. Themes vary by location. Danish versions are more likely to focus on dancing, which Lynda Taylor compares to the danse macabre, the dance of death (Taylor, 2014). Swedish versions are more likely to have Olaf stand firm against the elf maiden’s wooing. In Icelandic versions, the themes of marriage and fidelity may be replaced with Christian faith, with Olaf rejecting the elves as pagan. The first known written version appears in Karne Brahe’s Folio, c. 1583, and Danish historian Svend Grundtvig places it around 1550. Grundtvig theorized that the ballad family originated in Brittany; in a Breton ballad, "Seigneur Nann,” the supernatural being is a korrigan (here, the spirit of a stream). The closest English equivalent is “Clerk Colvill,” about a young man entranced by a mermaid (although for some variety, this song’s mermaid is apparently a maiden with the ability to shapeshift into a fish, closer to the selkie side of the mermaid family). Francis James Child compares the story of Peter von Stauffenberg (English and Scottish Ballads, Volume 1, p. 298; The English and Scottish popular ballads, 377). In this medieval legend, Peter is convinced to give up his fairy lover in order to take a human wife, and is promptly executed by the jilted fairy. Child argues that, like Peter of Stauffenberg, Clerk Colvill was originally romantically involved with the mermaid, and that her actions are not just caprice but the revenge of a betrayed lover. I don’t entirely buy this, but the parallels are intriguing. The fairy laying a curse of impending death on Peter at his wedding is the main parallel to the Elveskud narrative; there’s the same choice between living with the fae or dying among humans. Oblivion and "Sir Bosmer" The Danish “Herr Bosmer i elvehjem” (Sir Bosmer in Elfland) is an example of a different but similar ballad type. Here, a young knight dreams of a mermaid who asks him to come beneath the river/sea, or an elf who tries to bring him beneath the mountain. In most versions, she offers him a drink that causes him to forget everything about his old life and loved ones, so that he stays with her forever. (If you subscribe to the theory that elves are inspired by the dead, then this is essentially the same ending as Sir Olaf.) A couple of Swedish versions are “Ungersven och Havsfrun” (Young Sven and the Mermaid) and "Herr Olof" (Sir Olof). Escape, "Elvehøj," and "Herr Mannelig" These are the neighboring ballads with (usually) triumphant, happy endings. In “Elvehøj” (Elf-hill), a young man falls asleep by an elf-mound, where some elf-maidens try to enthrall him. He has a narrow escape when he’s awoken by a rooster’s crow (or, sometimes, by his sister who was previously enchanted and is now an elf-maiden - so again, shades of the dead and the underworld). Versions of this ballad date to at least the 17th century. One example with the crowing rooster is “Hertig Magnus och elfvorna” (Duke Magnus and the Elves), collected by Geiger and Afzelius. There is more of an equal dialogue in the Swedish ballad “Herr Mannelig,” where a mountain troll tries to woo a young man with descriptions of the extravagant gifts she’ll give him. Herr Mannelig refuses, saying that he would say yes except that she is a troll and/or a heathen. The song ends with the fleeing troll's sobs that “Had I got the handsome young man / I would have avoided my torment.” This version of the song approaches Type 5050, "Fairies' Hope for Christian Salvation" - a close relative of the soulless mermaids found in such stories as “Undine” and “The Little Mermaid” (which are descended from the murderous-fairy-bride motif in Peter of Stauffenberg!). In a more violent and less triumphant variant, “Hr. Magnus og Bjærgtrolden” (“Sir Magnus and the Elf-Maid"), Magnus responds to the elf-maiden’s courtship and offer of gifts by reviling her as ugly and chopping her up with his sword; she then transforms into a raging fire (Prior, pp. 343-346). Names and endings are traded between variants of all these ballads. (For one overlapping example, there’s a version of Herr Mannelig where the troll gives him a drink that causes his heart to burst - (Grundtvig, p. 420). One recurrent name is Magnus, bringing us to the case of Duke Magnus Vasa of Östergötland. Born in 1542, Magnus was the third son of King Gustav Vasa of Sweden. While his brothers would eventually take the throne (with lots of rebellions and murders and scandals involved), Magnus was affected by mental illness which became apparent in the years following his father’s death in 1560. One of the royal family’s residences was Vadstena Castle on the shores of Lake Vättern, an area already famous for the religious community founded there by Saint Bridget of Sweden. Construction on the castle began in 1545, and in 1552, it hosted Gustav’s wedding to his third wife, Katarina Stenbock. In creating duchies for his sons around 1560, Gustav named Magnus the Duke of Östergötland. Magnus had taken up residence in Vadstena Castle by 1561. There was a certain point where Magnus’s brothers considered him the next in line for the throne; marriage alliances were considered, including the prospect of Mary Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots!!) as a bride. But Magnus’s condition gradually became impossible to ignore. In 1563, his older half-brother, King Erik XIV, mentioned his illness in a letter and sent his own physician to visit Vadstena Castle. 1563 was also the year that another brother, Johan, was imprisoned for treason, and this seems to have taken a heavy toll on Magnus (Roberts, p. 227). Better periods allowed him to travel and attend royal family events. But at other points, he had to be under constant care and had violent outbursts. Regardless of their disagreements, his siblings’ letters all indicate their concern for him. In February 1566, while Magnus was staying at Vadstena Abbey, Erik gave instructions that he be well-cared for and not allowed to do himself harm. Erik himself would also show signs of mental illness, beginning with paranoia and escalating to stabbing a political opponent during a mental breakdown. Erik was eventually deposed and died in prison (possibly by poison), while Johan took the throne. Magnus apparently had difficulty understanding that Johan was now king. Magnus never married, but had a couple of children out of wedlock. He died in 1595 and was buried in Vadstena Abbey. So where do mermaids come in? There's a short legend that one day, Magnus dove from his window into the Vadstena Castle moat. He was rescued unharmed, but claimed that he had been trying to reach a beautiful mermaid who was calling him from the water. This story has become a classic tourism bit, circulated in many travel books and collections of folklore - Hans Christian Andersen heard it when he visited Sweden (although that was after he wrote “The Little Mermaid”). I wrote in to Vadstena Castle’s website, and heard back that there is no clear source for the mermaid anecdote. We don’t know where exactly this story stemmed from, only that people have been telling it for quite a while. It’s also gotten garbled along the way; in Hans Christian Andersen’s recollection of the anecdote, the mermaid resembles Mary Stuart, and it ends with the fall into the moat and no mention of survival. There would have been more confusion for people unfamiliar with the tradition; one American author wrote that the mermaid-hallucinating Magnus “threw himself into the moat below, forever making the princely castle a dreary tomb," evidently missing the memo that Magnus didn't drown (Stone, p. 179). The earliest printed references I know of are from the early 19th century. In 1816, Afzelius and Geijer collected the song "Hertig Magnus och Hafsfrun," a version of "Herr Mannelig" from Småland: Duke Magnus looked out through the castle window, How the stream ran so rapidly; And there he saw how upon the stream sat A woman most fair and lovelie, "Duke Magnus, Duke Magnus, plight thee to me, I pray you still so freely; Say me not nay, but yes, yes!" She promises him gifts like a ship, a horse, and gold. When he refuses, she threatens him with a curse of madness: "O gladly would I plight me to thee, If thou wert of Christian kind; But now thou art a vile sea-troll, My love thou canst never win." "Duke Magnus, Duke Magnus, bethink thee well, And answer not so haughtily; For if thou wilt not plight thee to me, Thou shalt ever crazy be." (Keightley's translation) This is clearly influenced by Magnus Vasa, and the collectors described the moat anecdote in connection to it. This connection also shows up in the writings of Clas Livijn, a Swedish poet who in 1806 wrote a romantic libretto titled Hafsfrun. This three-act, Goethe-influenced opera was directly inspired by the story of Duke Magnus and a folk song that Livijn remembered hearing in Östergötland (as a child?). "It has slipped my memory; only the mermaid's invitation: "Duke Magnus! Duke Magnus! be betrothed to me, For I would have you so gladly," his subsequent answer: "Would you be a Christian woman," and the refrain: "Cold, cold weather is blowing from the lake," have indelibly attached themselves and floated vividly before me" (Arwidson, p. 125). Livijn describes the song as less well-known, and mentions mysteriously that there are "other strange legends" about the Lake Vättern mermaid. The opera plays out as an extended variant on the song. In the first act, the mermaid Hulda lures Magnus to Lake Vättern and tries to entice him under the water to her father’s castle. However, his servants rescue him. In the second act, Magnus returns to the lake in search of the mermaid, and she rises from the water on a golden ship with her maids. Livijn pulls lines from the folk song here as the mermaid invites him to her realm. Although knowing that he is damning himself, the smitten Magnus agrees to go with her and drinks from the horn she offers (oh, hi, Sir Bosmer!). Just as he is entering her realm of trolls and other magical creatures, a knight saves him. The third act features a nightmarish midnight ballet, where Hulda and her maids invade Magnus's castle and compete against his courtiers for him. Magnus flings himself from the balcony with Hulda, is caught by an angel, and dies in its arms, while Hulda and her maids vanish into a storm (Mortensen, pp. 120-124). Hafsfrun was the first major romantic poem in Swedish; however, it was only published posthumously in 1850 (Livijn, p. 27). (Livijn's choice of name for the mermaid is interesting; not only is there the Germanic goddess-like figure Hulda or Holda, but there's also the water nymph Hulda in the 1798 Viennese play Das Donauweibchen, which probably influenced the novella Undine.) From these two sources, we can guess that by the early 1800s, the Duke Magnus version of the ballad was pretty well-known. There may also be less fantastical versions of the moat story. I’ve found a couple of websites making vague reference to an incident where Magnus accidentally fell into the castle moat while inspecting a new drawbridge, but I’m having trouble tracking down anything more specific or any concrete sources. (Here's a blog post, in Swedish, with a longer comedic version where Magnus becomes stuck on the drawbridge and is repeatedly dunked into the water.) Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck yet with finding more on potential moat incidents. Duke Magnus in Folk Songs As mentioned, quite a few versions of “Herr Mannelig” and "Elvehøj" name the hero Magnus. Magnus’s legend also inspired fictional works: besides Livihn's Hafsfrun, there was Ivar Hallstrom and Frans Hedberg’s irreverent comic opera Hertig Magnus och sjöjungfrun (1867). Unlike Livijn’s supernatural, atmospheric libretto, this is a farce where a fisherman disguises his daughter as a mermaid to trick a delusional duke into falling in love with her. And in 1909, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius produced a "Hertig Magnus" song more closely inspired by the legend, pulling in some historical context: Baron Magnus at his window Of the waves of Vettern dreaming, Watches them surround his castle, in the moonlight palely gleaming. Sorrow hath his soul enfoulded, [sic] that his father's life is going, And that blood in brothers' quarrels, in red rivers should be flowing. But these references begin several centuries after Magnus's death. Svend Grundtvig considered the song corrupted and altered, a later combo of the folksong with the Duke's story: “It is, however, in its form even younger than our Danish recipes and has undergone a noticeable distortion, in order to better agree with a folk legend about a mad Duke Magnus, son of Gustav the First, which has obviously been quite foreign to Visen from the beginning." (Grundtvig, p. 420). It’s easy to see how 16th-century Europeans would have attributed mental illness to the influence of fairies (and I include mermaids as a category of fairy). Folk belief blamed fairies for all kinds of illnesses and deaths. Even the title of “Elveskud,” or Elf-shot, is a reference to this. "Elf-shot" or invisible arrows fired by elves were blamed for mysterious pains, paralyses, and strokes. Other references spoke of fairies “blasting” people or livestock. This is the fate that Sir Olaf meets, with the elf-maiden striking him a painful blow. On a less fatal note, many stories described people escaping abduction by fairies, but never being the same afterwards. In a characteristic tale from Småland, a girl is recovered from her troll captors, but "every now and then her mind seemed to wander, and from that time on she was twisted and bent; the cause of this was that she had had to carry so many heavy loads for the trolls" (Lindow, p. 99). There aren't records of the Elveskud or related ballad traditions until well into Magnus’s life, so there's some chicken-or-the-egg here, but I'm inclined to follow Svend Grundtvig in the idea that references to Duke Magnus were added onto the original ballad later. But how did Duke Magnus get wound up in the Elveskud song tradition, exactly? Why would his legendary dive after a mermaid be connected to a song about a man who refuses a mermaid or elf-maid? And why would Duke Magnus be adopted into the version of the ballad family that typically has a happier ending? The fact that he, but not his brother Eric, was adopted into the story - and the fact that his legend isn't that similar to the ballad plot - suggests the theory that it was the name. There were likely already ballads about a man named Magnus meeting an elf-maiden or mermaid, ballads that could end in either escape or a more tragic fate (remember the one where the elf-maiden turns into a raging fire, and the one where his heart bursts). People familiar with stories of fairy-caused madness would have easily connected Duke Magnus. Even with the many questions, this shows an interesting side to the tradition, with a look at how real people can be drawn into folktale. Via "Peter von Stauffenberg," it's even part of the same story family as the Little Mermaid and related tales. Bibliography
See Also  Illustration from The Mermaid's Gift, and Other Stories Over the past couple of years, I have been reading every mermaid book I can get my hands on (and watching a few movies and shows). This started because I wanted to write a mermaid story and was interested to see what kind of stuff was already out there. Mermaids are more popular as a subject for novels and movies than ever before, with a boom in YA novels around the early 2010s, and now another push, with Disney's remake of The Little Mermaid spurring interest in the genre. And in reading, there are some plots that stand out as especially popular. This is not an exhaustive list, but kind of some categories.
Human/Merperson Romance: This is everywhere in stories about mermaids. It lends itself to plotlines about starcrossed lovers. Most of the time when I pick up a mermaid book, it involves a romance between a human and a merperson. This has a looong pedigree in folklore.
The Little Mermaid Retellings: A specific flavor of Human/Merperson Romance. "The Little Mermaid” is deeply tied to modern mermaid mythology; Andersen’s story is the most influential work of the core mermaid canon, eclipsing stories that came before it. This is The Mermaid Story. Typical points: a merperson falls in love with a human they saved from drowning, and makes a Faustian bargain to become human, possibly losing their voice. This can have a tragic Andersen-esque ending where their love is never returned, or a happy Disney conclusion. Disney character references are common.
OMG, I'm a Mermaid!: The main character transforms into a mermaid or discovers her previously unknown mermaid identity. This can range from books for young kids to serious adult works. It's nearly always a female protagonist - although, rarely, a boy (see The Vicious Deep by Zoraida Córdova or Disney's The Thirteenth Year). This story type usually features secret identity shenanigans with the mermaid attempting to hide her nature from humans. There are a few subgenres:
The Captive Mermaid: This comes with imagery of the mermaid in a tank, perhaps shown off in a zoo or a circus sideshow, or studied by scientists. The main thing is that she is somehow contained on land for human scrutiny, in a place where she doesn't truly belong and where she is essentially vulnerable. However, she's often not the main character. Instead, it's a human bystander who sets out to free her and might even have originally been one of her captors. Even if it doesn't actually happen, the threat of being captured for study or display plays a role in many mermaid works.
The Deadly Mermaid: In a number of stories, the mermaid character is a powerful antagonist whom the human protagonist must defeat through strength or wits. This is also a very old concept, one of the most ancient recognizable mermaid tropes.
All of the examples so far have ancient roots (even "The Little Mermaid," although literary in origin, is firmly based in folklore and myth). So it's not surprising that they would be threaded through modern books as well. But there's one idea I very much like that I have barely seen: the story just about mermaids. This is probably for a few reasons; it’s difficult to imagine a serious underwater world and have it be relatable. Mermaids are the Other, and we are much more interested in mermaids as they relate to us. So you're most likely to find stories about merfolk who enter the human world, or humans who temporarily visit an underwater world. Humans visiting an underwater world is pretty common - and found in such stories as Sadko, or the Catalan story of The Girl-Fish - and sometimes paired with a temporary transformation into a mermaid, as in the October Daye series or L. Frank Baum's The Sea Fairies. But examples that truly focus on just mermaids are pretty rare.
A few other tropes come to mind, but these are the ones that have stood out to me the most. Have you noticed any popular trends in mermaid books? Share them in the comments.  In “Cupid and Psyche” and “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon”, the heroine breaks a taboo, loses her husband, and has to travel the world and complete daunting tasks to find him - but she does eventually win him back.
In “Beauty and the Beast,” Beauty returns home to visit her family, but stays too long (forgetting the Beast's instructions and thus breaking a taboo). The Beast nearly dies due to her absence, but she returns just in time to swear her love. This revives him and breaks his curse. But there are a couple of versions that don’t end so happily. One is “The Ram,” a French literary tale by Madame D’Aulnoy (1697). This story resonates with many different fairy tales. Returning from war, a king greets his three daughters and asks about the color of their dresses. The first two say that the color represents their joy at his return, but the youngest, Merveilleuse, chose her dress because it looked the best on her; the king is displeased, calling her vain. Then he asks about their latest dreams. The first two dreamed he brought them gifts, but the youngest dreamed he held a basin for her to wash her hands. The king is furious at the idea he would become her servant (ATU 725, "The Dream" - like the Biblical story of Joseph). He decides to get rid of her (“Love Like Salt”, “King Lear”). He orders the captain of the guard to kill her and bring back her heart and tongue; instead, the captain warns her to flee and brings back the heart and tongue of her pet dog (“Snow White”). Bereft, Merveilleuse travels until she discovers a splendid kingdom inhabited by sheep, ruled over by a royal ram. The Ram explains that he is a human king, cursed after he refused to marry a wicked fairy (“Beauty and the Beast”). But the time limit of his curse will soon run out, so if Merveilleuse just hangs in there a little while, she’s guaranteed a handsome king husband. She also gets to ride in the Ram's pumpkin coach ("Cinderella"). Eventually they hear that Merveilleuse's sister is to be married; the Ram agrees that Merveilleuse should attend the wedding, but asks her to return afterwards. She attends the wedding in splendor, amazing the king and courtiers who don't recognize her, before returning home (shades of “Cinderella” again). Similarly, she attends her second sister's wedding. This time, the king catches her and offers her a basin of water to wash her hands; her dream has come true. Recognizing her, he repents of his wrongdoing and makes her the new queen. Meanwhile, the Ram begins to fear that Merveilleuse has left him. He runs to her father's palace, but the guards - knowing that he will take Merveilleuse away - refuse to let him in. When Merveilleuse finally steps outside, she finds him lying dead of a broken heart, and is stricken with grief and guilt. The end. (A depressing and very racist intro, in which the heroine’s slave girl and pets foolishly sacrifice themselves in an attempt to help her, sets up for the tale’s eventual tragic ending.) D'Aulnoy's story was fairly well-known and was translated into other languages for both children and adults. Some English translations go further and have Merveilleuse die at the end, too (possibly due to mistranslation - in D’Aulnoy’s version, we may assume Merveilleuse reigns on her own as queen). Others alter it to have a happy ending; Sabine Baring-Gould, for instance, introduces the plot point that the Ram must sit in a king’s throne and drink from a king's cup to break his curse, and the heroine (renamed Miranda) is able to gain this favor during her reconciliation with her father. This turns the story on its head, making the family reunion the solution to the problem rather than the issue that breaks the couple apart. There is also a Portuguese tale, “The Maiden and the Beast," which runs much more like the familiar "Beauty and the Beast." Rather than a rose, Daughter-No.-3 requests "a slice of roach off a green meadow". A roach is a fish, so she’s asking for an impossible thing, a fish from a grassy field. The Beast is only heard as a voice, never appearing in person. The biggest divergence is the ending. During her stay at the Beast’s castle, the girl returns home for three days for her oldest sister's wedding, then again for her next sister's wedding, and finally for the death of her father. She even takes rich gifts back with her, making the family wealthy. However, on the third visit, she is warned that her sisters will sabotage her. Sure enough, they sneakily let her oversleep and take her enchanted ring, causing her to forget everything. When she finally remembers, she rushes back to the enchanted palace and finds it deserted and dark. In the garden, she discovers a huge beast lying on the ground (the first time the Beast has appeared in person). He bitterly reproaches her for breaking his spell, and dies; the heartbroken girl dies a few days later, and the surviving sisters lose their money. It’s never mentioned what this Beast’s deal is, whether he’s a man under a curse or what. However, much like other versions of Beauty and the Beast, the context makes it clear that this is a fantasy version of an arranged marriage; the father knows full well that he is trading his daughter for the "slice of roach." The moral...? There's a prevailing theory that "Beauty and the Beast" is a moral lesson about accepting an arranged marriage and learning to see the good in an unfamiliar spouse. These tragic stories show what happens when the heroine accepts her new spouse but still fails to completely take on her new role as wife. She’s distracted by her family, who are unwilling to let her go. You could make a case that these stories are about the danger of female disobedience (and, for “The Ram”, something about the whims of fate). However, it doesn’t seem right to blame the heroines for disobedience. Merveilleuse and the maiden both fully intend to comply with the Beast character’s request. However, both are thwarted by their own innocent forgetfulness and by household members fighting to keep them home (the Maiden’s sisters interfering with her return, and Merveilleuse’s father locks the palace doors in order to keep her there, followed by the guards keeping the Ram out). It’s different from the older sisters’ jealous sabotage in “Cupid and Psyche” or “Beauty and the Beast.” In these tragic versions, the family members are, ultimately, acting out of misguided love - fearing the husband-monster-interloper, wanting to keep a beloved youngest child with them rather than let her become a married woman in a household of her own. Do you know any Beauty and the Beast stories that end tragically? Let me know in the comments! SOURCES
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Researching folktales and fairies, with a focus on common tale types. Archives
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