The Six Swans

Guys, can you hurry up? I'm burning, here.

Today, we're meandering back toward the known path with this story. The Six Swans is a fairy tale that has a female protagonist who does more than look pretty. There are several stories like this in the world's folktales, thank goodness. Go ahead and read this story here.

As usual, we do have the moral that if you look pretty, things will turn out well for you. It was because the princess looked so nice that the king in that land took her away to marry her. It is interesting to note that we are not told how she feels about this marriage until nearly the end of the story when she calls the king "dearest husband", and we just have to take it on faith that she means this genuinely. She also has three children and she didn't die in childbirth, so it's a win all around.

However, let's look at the other side of this. This princess got what she needed through hard work. She was too afraid to tell her father that her stepmother had bewitched her brothers, but she went after them. On her own. Once they tell her the way to set them free, she gets to work right away. This is a princess. She could have come home and gotten someone else to do it, or gotten the king to make her stepmother do it as punishment for transforming the boys in the first place. She takes personal responsibility for this quest and starts making shirts out of flowers. She's got six years to do this, which makes me wonder how well preserved the flowers would be, but I assume part of the spell keeps them in good enough shape to make a garment. She is dedicated enough not to speak, even when her mother-in-law accuses her of eating her own children. I'm impressed by our protagonist's dedication, but also very confused by the mother-in-law. How did she decide on cannibalism, of all things, as the way to defame her daughter-in-law?

In the end, we learn one overwhelming truth: don't give strangers your necklace, or they'll want everything else you have too.

Have a story you want me to talk about? Leave me a comment below! It doesn't have to be a Grimm fairy tale. I'll be expanding to the folk tales of other cultures soon.

The Juniper Tree

All this for an apple?

So far, I've looked at standard fairy tales. Most people know those stories, and those versions of them. Today, I want to take us down a less well-traveled road. Around the Victorian era, someone decided that fairy tales should be for children, so they cleaned up what they could, and completely erased others. Like this story. The Juniper Tree has murder, cannibalism, and some more murder. Not exactly something you want the nanny reading to your children before they go to bed. The link to the version I'm talking about is here.

Let's begin with the women in this story. In the most obvious aspect, you have the stepmother as the villain. She kills her stepson and makes her daughter think that she had killed the boy instead. Then they hide the body in a stew. Which the father eats all of. Crafty, but in a gross way. She's defeated when her sins come home to roost, literally, and the bird drops a millstone on her head. In a way she set up her own demise, but I doubt she was thinking her stepson would come back as a magic bird after he'd been eaten.

On the other hand, we have the boy's mother. I know she died after the first few paragraphs, but she still plays a role in this story. She clearly loved the juniper tree quite a bit, even eating the berries, which might have been a terrible idea, since it's possible those berries were poisonous. That might explain why the mother died. Whatever her cause of death, it's very important that she was buried beneath the juniper tree. That's the reason the tree was able to change the little boy's bones into a magical bird. It's because, as much as this woman loved the juniper tree, she loved her son even more. This story can be seen as two women's wills battling because they are the ones who set these events in motion. In the end, the mother's love wins out over the stepmother's greed and insecurity.

However, let's not discount the boy entirely. It was through his mother's love that he came back, but his actions after that were his own. Once he is a bird, he learns the lesson that everyone who wants to make a living in the arts has learned: never sing for free if you can charge for it. He charges pretty high prices too, a gold chain, red shoes, and a millstone. He also plays his cards well, dispensing gifts to his father and stepsister, and death from above to his murderous stepmother. Once he is revenged, he turns back into a little boy and the family happily goes inside. I guess someone else had to clean up the mess under the millstone.

I suppose the moral of this story is not to murder anyone, because they might come back to kill you.

The Little Mermaid

Oh hey. Wanna fall in love?

This week, let's look at the Little Mermaid. I mean the story written by Hans Christian Anderson, found here. It's a bit longer than most fairy tales, but I'll wait while you read it.
Love is a funny thing. Anderson spent most of his life pining for someone and that shows through in his stories. In this one, the mermaid falls in love with a man who considers her like a sister and they are never together the way she wants them to be. Poor little princess.

In this story we learn that if you give up everything for someone, you might not end up with them. I'm not sure if the little mermaid considers a shot at having a soul better than getting to live with and love her prince. Or even if she considers spending 300 years to earn a soul better than turning to foam on the sea. I can see why Disney changed the story when they made it into a movie. It's not a happy ending, but it's not as sad as it could have been, I suppose.

We also learn that communication is incredibly important and that if you're going to pin your hopes on loving someone, you'd better be sure they aren't in love with someone else first.

Beauty and the Beast

Oh, my beloved boar-man.

Hello again, reader. This week, I'd like to talk about a story where it is the beauty on the inside that matters...as long as there's also beauty on the outside. I'm talking about Beauty and the Beast, and you can read the version I'm looking at here.

One of the morals we pick up is from the Beast himself. After Beauty has begun to get used to him, he proposes to her. If you don't ask for something, you never get it. She did refuse him, timidly, but that put the thought in her mind, and, at the end, she does agree to marry him. So, even if someone says they don't love you, just keep them prisoner in your castle for a little longer. Eventually, the Stockholm syndrome will set in and she'll even come back if you let her leave!

The next moral is, of course, about looking pretty. This is a common theme in fairy tales. I keep waiting for the villain to twirl a handlebar- mustache while chortling, but I think I'll have to keep waiting for that. In any case, as is standard, our protagonist is both beautiful and virtuous. Because the two things always go hand in hand. Once she loves the Beast for who he is, the Beast also becomes beautiful. You see, if he'd stayed ugly then he would not have been a good reward for Beauty.

So, to wrap this up, if you're going to steal a rose from a magical castle, you'd better be prepared to sacrifice your daughter, but only if she's beautiful and virtuous. If she's not, this might turn into Bluebeard's story instead.

Snow White

A dead girl? Can I keep her?

This story is a little different than the Disney version we're probably all familiar with. Go ahead and read this version here. It's a little bit more intense than the more common one, right? Snow White is seven when she's kicked out of her house for being too pretty. It is interesting to me that this is one of the few fairy tales where it's actually a bad thing to be pretty, at least at the beginning.

Also, can we talk about the seven dwarves? Not in a creepy way, lots of folks have covered that to death. In this particular story, the seven dwarves' house is incredibly clean. Just indescribably spotless. They also have dinner ready on the table for them when they get back. So, when they offer Snow White room and board for the cost of keeping house for them, how much does she actually do? The list looks pretty lengthy: "take care of our house, cook, make the beds, wash, sew and knit, and if you will keep everything neat and clean". I wonder how much of that list she actually ended up doing. Those miners are very generous.

They're also patient. I know Snow White is a child, but she opens the door for a stranger three separate times. And she nearly dies each time because of it. I do have to salute the queen's creativity, though. Lacing Snow White's corset too tightly is kind of a standard idea, at least for me, but a poison comb, and poisoning only half of an apple? That's pretty darn impressive. Through all of these various ways that Snow White almost dies, the dwarves never yell at her. They just warn her to be careful. I would have dragged her to the mine with me. Although that has its own set of dangers, so maybe not.

At the end, after all of this care that the dwarves give to her, they willingly give up her body to a prince who has seen her once and declares that he loves her. To add to this, she was seven when she was kicked out of her house. We're not told how much time passes before the prince shows up, but she's still probably a kid. Ew. I guess luckily for Snow White, when she wakes up, she decides that she loves the prince as well and is totally fine with marrying him.

In the end, everyone danced at Snow White's wedding, even the evil queen. It was the last dance she ever had. I told you it was brutal.

Jack and the Beanstalk

An ogre, just trying to life his life. With cattle on his belt.

Of course, not all fairy tales are princess tales. This week, I thought we'd take a look at Jack and the Beanstalk, found here. I managed to find a version of this story by Perrault, but he made Jack out to be much too nice of a character. Part of what I find interesting about this story is that the protagonist is rewarded for being a thief and a jerk.

Firstly, Jack is an idiot. He trades five beans for a cow. Of course the man who gives him the beans goes into detail about how the beans sprout up into the sky overnight, and then he adds that if Jack isn't completely satisfied with his product, he can have his cow back the next day. You know, if he can find this guy. It's like Jack has never been scammed before. Then, surprisingly, the beans actually grow into a beanstalk. I suppose if the beans are going to turn out to be magic, it can only be in a fairy tale.

Once Jack gets up the beanstalk, we see how rude is. After begging breakfast from the first person he sees, he hides in her oven and hears her husband talk about how he eats little boys, but the wife conceals Jack from her murderous husband. This woman feeds him and keeps him safe. How does Jack repay her? He steal a sack of gold from her. Yes, stealing it out from under her husband is just like stealing it from her. After he gets bored with the gold, Jack steals from her two more times, taking the gold-egg laying hen, and the magic harp, which are possibly the two most awesome things in their house.

We all know how it ends. Jack gets caught stealing the harp, but he manages to get away and kill the ogre, so he can live happily, and richly, ever after. And marry a princess as an add on.

I suppose the lesson to learn from this tale is that if you're going to be a thief and a jerk, then you'd better be fast. At least it's better than having to rely on being pretty.

Sleeping Beauty

The only woman with attractive bedhead.

Sleeping Beauty is another classic fairy tale with questionable morals. As with all of these tales, it was originally told for entertainment to a wide audience. There is a version where our main character gives birth to twins. Before she wakes up. We'll get to that version later. For now, we'll start with the one most people know, which you can find here.

Let's start with our main character, the Sleeping Beauty. We don't learn very much about her at all. We know she's beautiful, has the "temper of an angel" whatever that means (I'm assuming the avenging kind of angel), she's full of grace, sings like a bird, dances like a flower (which probably doesn't look like how people dance), and she plays music unlike any folks have ever heard. Other than those things that others put on her, we have no idea what she's like. She could be arrogant and have an over developed sense of vengeance. Did anyone else notice how her parents got old and died before she woke up? Maybe she decided to get revenge on the fairy who saved her. I would read that story. Either way, from what we know of her, Sleeping Beauty is not a real person. She's an idealized cut-out.

On that note, she's hardly a character in her own story. All she does is wander the castle at seventeen and find some deaf old woman so the princess can prick her finger on a spindle. Then she wakes up, talks to some stranger for hours, and marries him the night she meets him. I'm assuming he was the one who proposed. She is only a vehicle for this prince to find a bride and for the story to have a happy ending.

As far as morals go, this story doesn't have many that I've seen. If you're pretty, some guy you've never met will kiss you while you sleep and marry you that night. But only if he has to wander through a creepy castle to get to you. And only if you're not an actual person, but an idealized collection of attributes. Hopefully no one takes Sleeping Beauty as a role model.