 "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
0 Comments
 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 |
About
Researching folktales and fairies, with a focus on common tale types. Archives
August 2026
Categories
All
|
Writing in Margins
RSS Feed
