The Witch in the Stone Boat

It's really rude to climb aboard someone's boat without permission.

This week's tale comes to us from Iceland. They have some unusual and wonderful stories and The Witch in the Stone Boat is no exception. This story, like so many others, only happens because the king doesn't pay any attention.

We start off commonly enough with royal families not caring that much about family. The king tells his song to go marry a faraway princess because she's pretty and the prince agrees. That's quite the recommendation. Then, once the princes gets there and marries the princess, he agrees not to leave this kingdom until he gets word that his father has died. Wow. It's a shame that both the prince and this princess have such frail fathers. As is typical in fairy tales, their mothers are either dead, or so unimportant that we never hear of them. I have one more complaint about the prince, who becomes a king. He is supposedly very in love with his wife, but doesn't notice when she's replaced. When the witch walks over to him, instead of saying, "Who are you and why are you holding my child?" the king goes along with it and only wonders why his wife has become so mean.

The queen, on the other hand, is doing what she can to save herself. Although she was unable to do anything against the witch in the stone boat, she was able to bargain with the witch's brother. I wonder if the witch was just trying to get herself and her brother married. I could understand that would be an important goal in this time, but she's going about it in the most ridiculous way. In any event, it is only because the queen negotiates to come to the surface world three nights before marrying the three headed giant that the king even notices that anything is wrong. It is the king who cuts the queen's chain, which causes the death of the giant, but that is only after he had no way to misunderstand what was happening. It's a good thing for him that he married her. I'm not so sure about the reverse, but at least they love each other.

The moral of this story is to either keep witch repellent on you when you're going sailing, or to marry an observant man.