The Forbidden Room (Fairy Tales Behaving Badly Book 1)

I read my mail. Also, I listen to the questions people ask me, both in interviews and after public readings. The kinds of questions I'm talking about have to do with how the characters in novels ought to behave. Unfortunately, there is a widespread tendency to judge such characters as if they were job applicants, or public servants, or prospective roommates, or somebody you're considering marrying.

For instance, I sometimes get a question -- almost always, these days, from women -- that goes something like, "Why don't you make the men stronger? It was not, after all, I who created Adam so subject to temptation that he sacrificed eternal life for an apple; which leads me to believe that God -- who is, among other things, an author -- is just as enamoured of character flaws and dire plots as we human writers are.

The characters in the average novel are not usually folks you would want to get involved with at a personal or business level. How then should we go about responding to such creations? Or, from my side of the page, which is blank when I begin -- how should I go about creating them? What is a novel, anyway? Only a very foolish person would attempt to give a definitive answer to that, beyond stating the more or less obvious facts that it is a literary narrative of some length which purports, on the reverse of the title page, not to be true, but seeks nevertheless to convince its readers that it is.

It's typical of the cynicism of our age that, if you write a novel, everyone assumes it's about real people, thinly disguised; but if you write an autobiography everyone assumes you're lying your head off. Part of this is right, because every artist is, among other things, a con-artist. We con-artists do tell the truth, in a way; but, as Emily Dickenson said, we tell it slant. By indirection we find direction out -- so here, for easy reference, is an elimination-dance list of what novels are not. But if the author's main design on us is to convert us to something -- - whether that something be Christianity, capitalism, a belief in marriage as the only answer to a maiden's prayer, or feminism, we are likely to sniff it out, and to rebel.

As Andre Gide once remarked, "It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written. Is Pride and Prejudice about how a sensible middle-class nineteenth-century woman can snare an appropriate man with a good income, which is the best she can hope for out of life, given the limitations of her situation? Their characters are not all models of good behaviour -- or, if they are, we probably won't read them. But they are linked with notions of morality, because they are about human beings and human beings divide behaviour into good and bad. The characters judge each other, and the reader judges the characters.

However, the success of a novel does not depend on a Not Guilty verdict from the reader. As Keats said, Shakespeare took as much delight in creating Iago -- that arch-villain -- as he did in creating the virtuous Imogen. I would say probably more, and the proof of it is that I'd bet you're more likely to know which play Iago is in. It cannot do without a conception of form and a structure, true, but its roots are in the mud; its flowers, if any, come out of the rawness of its raw materials. Now, let's get back to the notion that in a novel, something else has to happen -- other than breakfast, that is.

What will that "something else" be, and how does the novelist go about choosing it? Usually it's backwards to what you were taught in school, where you probably got the idea that the novelist had an overall scheme or idea and then went about colouring it in with characters and words, sort of like paint-by-numbers. But in reality the process is much more like wrestling a greased pig in the dark.

Literary critics start with a nice, clean, already-written text. They then address questions to this text, which they attempt to answer; "what does it mean" being both the most basic and the most difficult. Novelists, on the other hand, start with the blank page, to which they similarly address questions. But the questions are different. Instead of asking, first of all, "what does it mean," they work at the widget level; they ask, "Is this the right word? Novelists have to get some actual words down before they can fiddle with the theology. Or, to put it another way: God started with chaos -- dark, without form and void -- and so does the novelist.

Then God made one detail at a time. So does the novelist. On the seventh day, God took a break to consider what he'd done. But the critic starts on Day 7. The critic, looking at plot, asks, "What's happening here? Whereas the critic is liable to exclaim, in the mode of the policeman making the arrest, "Aha! You can't get away with that! In short, the novelist's concerns are more practical than those of the critic; more concerned with "how to," less concerned with metaphysics. Any novelist -- whatever his or her theoretical interests -- has to contend with the following how-to questions: Is it, for instance, comic or tragic or melodramatic, or all?

How shall I tell it? Who will be at the centre of it, and will this person be a admirable or b not? And -- more important than it may sound -- will it have a happy ending, or not? No matter what you are writing -- what genre and in what style, whether cheap formula or high-minded experiment -- you will still have to answer -- in the course of your writing -- these essential questions.

Any story you tell must have a conflict of some sort, and it must have suspense.

Let's put a woman at the centre of the something-other-than-breakfast, and see what happens. Now there is a whole new set of questions. Will the conflict be supplied by the natural world? Is our female protagonist lost in the jungle, caught in a hurricane, pursued by sharks? If so, the story will be an adventure story and her job is to run away, or else to combat the sharks, displaying courage and fortitude, or else cowardice and stupidity.

Gifts of Speech - Margaret Atwood

If there is a man in the story as well, the plot will alter in other directions: Once upon a time, the first would have been more probable, that is, more believable to the reader; but times have changed and art is what you can get away with, and the other possibilities have now entered the picture. Stories about space invasions are similar, in that the threat comes from outside and the goal for the character, whether achieved or not, is survival. War stories per se -- ditto, in that the main threat is external. Vampire and werewolf stories are more complicated, as are ghost stories; in these, the threat is from outside, true, but the threatening thing may also conceal a split-off part of the character's own psyche.

Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and Bram Stoker's Dracula are in large part animated by such hidden agendas; and both revolve around notions of female sexuality. Once all werewolves were male, and female vampires were usually mere sidekicks; but there are now female werewolves, and women are moving in on the star bloodsucking roles as well. Whether this is good or bad news I hesitate to say.

Detective and espionage stories may combine many elements, but would not be what they are without a crime, a criminal, a tracking-down, and a revelation at the end; again, all sleuths were once male, but sleuthesses are now prominent, for which I hope they lay a votive ball of wool from time to time upon the tomb of the sainted Miss Marple. We live in an age not only of gender cross-over but of genre crossover, so you can throw all of the above into the cauldron and stir.

Then there are stories classed as "serious" literature, which centre not on external threats -- although some of these may exist -- but on relationships among the characters. To avoid the eternal breakfast, some of the characters must cause problems for some of the others.

This is where the questions really get difficult. As I've said, the novel has its roots in the mud, and part of the mud is history; and part of the history we've had recently is the history of the women's movement, and the women's movement has influenced how people read, and therefore what you can get away with, in art. Some of this influence has been beneficial. Whole areas of human life that were once considered non-literary or sub-literary -- such as the problematical nature of homemaking, the hidden depths of motherhood, and of daughterhood as well, the once-forbidden realms of incest and child abuse -- have been brought inside the circle that demarcates the writeable from the non-writeable.

Other things, such as the Cinderella happy ending -- the Prince Charming one -- have been called into question. As one lesbian writer remarked to me, the only happy ending she found believable any more was the one in which girl meets girl and ends up with girl; but that was fifteen years ago, and the bloom is off even that romantic rose.

To keep you from being too depressed, let me emphasize that none of this means that you, personally, cannot find happiness with a good man, a good woman or a good pet canary; just as the creation of a bad female character doesn't mean that women should lose the vote. If bad male characters meant that, for men, all men would be disenfranchised immediately. We are talking about what you can get away with in art; that is, what you can make believable. When Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to his dark-haired mistress, he wasn't saying that blondes were ugly, he was merely pushing against the notion that only blondes were beautiful.

The tendency of innovative literature is to include the hitherto excluded, which often has the effect of rendering ludicrous the conventions that have just preceded the innovation. So the form of the ending, whether happy or not, does not have to do with how people live their lives -- there is a great deal of variety in that department and, after all, in life every story ends with death, which is not true of novels. Instead it's connected with what literary conventions the writer is following or pulling apart at the moment.

Happy endings of the Cinderella kind do exist in stories, of course, but they have been relegated largely to genre fiction, such as Harlequin romances. To summarize some of the benefits to literature of the Womens' Movement -- the expansion of the territory available to writers, both in character and in language; a sharp-eyed examination of the way power works in gender relations, and the exposure of much of this as socially constructed; a vigorous exploration of many hitherto-concealed areas of experience. But as with any political movement which comes out of real oppression -- and I do emphasize the real -- there was also, in the first decade at least of the present movement, a tendency to cookie-cut: Some writers tended to polarize morality by gender -- that is, women were intrinsically good and men bad; to divide along allegiance lines -- that is, women who slept with men were sleeping with the enemy; to judge by tribal markings -- that is, women who wore high heels and makeup were instantly suspect, those in overalls were acceptable; and to make hopeful excuses: Such oversimplifications may be necessary to some phases of political movements.

But they are usually problematical for novelists, unless the novelist has a secret desire to be in billboard advertising. If a novelist writing at that time was also a feminist, she felt her choices restricted. Were all heroines to be essentially spotless of soul -- struggling against, fleeing from or done in by male oppression? Was the only plot to be The Perils of Pauline, with a lot of moustache-twirling villains but minus the rescuing hero?

Did suffering prove you were good? If so -- think hard about this -- wasn't it all for the best that women did so much of it? Did we face a situation in which women could do no wrong, but could only have wrong done to them? Were women being confined yet again to that alabaster pedestal so beloved of the Victorian age, when Woman as better-than-man gave men a license to be gleefully and enjoyably worse than women, while all the while proclaiming that they couldn't help it because it was their nature?

Were women to be condemned to virtue for life, slaves in the salt-mines of goodness? Of course, the feminist analysis made some kinds of behaviour available to female characters which, under the old dispensation -- the pre-feminist one -- would have been considered bad, but under the new one were praiseworthy. A female character could rebel against social strictures without then having to throw herself in front of a train like Anna Karenina; she could think the unthinkable and say the unsayable; she could flout authority. She could do new bad-good things, such as leaving her husband and even deserting her children.

Such activities and emotions, however, were -- according to the new moral thermometer of the times -- not really bad at all; they were good, and the women who did them were praiseworthy. I'm not against such plots. I just don't think they are the only ones. And there were certain new no-no's. Could one depict the scurvy behaviour often practised by women against one another, or by little girls against other little girls? Or was a mere mention of such things tantamount to aiding and abetting the enemy, namely the male power-structure? Were we to have a warning hand clapped over our mouths, yet once again, to prevent us from saying the unsayable -- though the unsayable had changed?

Hadn't men been giving women a bad reputation for centuries? Shouldn't we form a wall of silence around the badness of women, or at best explain it away by saying it was the fault of Big Daddy, or -- permissible too, it seems -- of Big Mom? Big Mom, that agent of the patriarchy, that pronatalist, got it in the neck from certain seventies feminists; though mothers were admitted into the fold again once some of these women turned into them. Or, in another word -- were men to get all the juicy parts?

Literature cannot do without bad behaviour, but was all the bad behaviour to be reserved for men? Take back the night! It's a great part, and due for revision. I have always known that there were spellbinding evil parts for women. Never mind the Protestant work ethic of the dwarfs. The prince's aunt sends back the chest, and it is replaced. The prince, however, on his return finds it open, and falls into great distress. One day, as he sits at his window mourning his loss, a rushing of wings and a strange light fill the room; the heroine, in the form of a bird, flies in, and to his joy resumes her proper form.

He marries her, and declares war upon his aunt, whom he conquers and beheads. Turning away for the present from Bluebeard and his ghastly mortuary, let us look at another story of the Forbidden Chamber. We shall find its type in Grimm's tale of " Mary's Child. The offer is accepted, and the child is taken to heaven, where she grows up under the care of her august benefactress.

One day the Virgin hands her her keys, thirteen in number, and, saying she is going away on a journey, gives the heroine leave to open all the doors but one. The luckless girl opens the forbidden door, and sees within "the Trinity sitting in fire and sheen. The Virgin Mary returning takes the keys and inquires whether the heroine has disobeyed her. Denying it, she is expelled from heaven and stricken dumb. In the midst of a wilderness from which she cannot escape, she is found by a king while hunting. He takes her home, weds her, and in due course she gives birth to a child.

Her benefactress now reappears in the silence of the night, and offers to restore the heroine's speech if she will at length confess. On her refusal, the Virgin disappears, taking the child with her. The people murmur that the heroine is an ogress and has eaten her child. On the birth of a second child the Virgin repeats her offer, with the like sequel. When a third child is born the heroine is taken up to heaven, where she is shown her two former children growing up as she herself had done with the angels, and she is told they will be restored to her if she will now admit her guilt.

Again she refuses, and the third child is taken away. The people clamour so loudly that the king gives the heroine up to justice, and she is condemned to be burnt. The fire is lighted, but at the stake she cries out to the Virgin, confessing her guilt. Rain at once falls, putting the fire out; and her forgiving patroness reappears to vindicate her, bringing back her children. In this pretty story the deceitful and remorseless monster, whose wiles have entrapped and whose cunning all but destroys the heroine, is replaced by a goddess of a character entirely beneficent.

The punishment she inflicts, not so much for the abuse of her confidence as for the sin of denial, though severe, is not unmerited; and the heroine is forgiven the moment her obstinacy is overcome, her guilt admitted. An analogous Lithuanian tale [56] follows Grimm's very closely.

The Virgin, however, there in the form of an old woman, rescues the heroine from her father, who, in despair at his wife's bringing forth nothing but daughters, is about to fling the latest-born into a lake. The awful sight in the Forbidden Chamber is the Lord Jesus hanging on the cross; and the heroine betrays herself by touching with her finger the blood flowing from his wounds and smearing it on her lips.

A variant of Mary's Child given by Grimm in his notes [57] is not quite so close to the type. A poor man, who can scarcely feed his children, meets in the forest a beautiful maiden, clad in black, driving a black carriage drawn by black horses. This weird personage offers him a sack of money in exchange for that which is hidden in his house—namely, his unborn daughter. He accepts the offer, and at the age of twelve his daughter is fetched away by the maiden to a black castle. All is splendid within, but the heroine is forbidden to enter one chamber.

After resisting the temptation for four years her curiosity prevails. Within the chamber there is no more terrible sight than four swarthy maidens engaged in reading. Her foster-mother comes out and gives her the choice of losing, by way of punishment, whatever she prefers. The heroine chooses to lose her speech, and the Black Maiden striking her on the mouth expels her from the castle.

The rest follows the principal story, except that the heroine's mother-in-law, and not the Black Maiden herself, makes away with the children, which she does by flinging them into the water and sprinkling her daughter-in-law with blood, so as to throw upon her the imputation which brought Mary's Child, as we have seen, and ultimately the heroine of the variant we are now considering, to the stake. She also, however, is saved from death by the appearance of her foster-mother in the black carriage to restore her speech and enable her to explain the circumstantial evidence which looks so bad.

The three other maidens bring back her children, whom they have rescued from the water; and the wicked mother-in-law is punished by a cruel death. The heroine is preserved from disgrace in the one, and both disgrace and death in the other, not by confession but by persistence in denial in spite of all temptations to admit her guilt. Her protectress in one of these stories a Bohemian tale , [58] is her godmother, who has appeared in the shape of an old woman to her poverty-stricken father, and accepted the office of sponsor when all else had refused.

In the Forbidden Chamber she finds a bier and a skeleton nodding its head at her in grim mockery, while all around the room is hung with deadly black.

• The Folk-Lore Journal/Volume 3/The Forbidden Chamber - Wikisource, the free online library.
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In this version too, the heroine, denying her disobedience, is stricken with dumbness and turned out into a dark wood. A prince, who has thrice dreamt that he has shot a beautiful hind, going to hunt, finds in the abandoned maiden a fairer prey than he had dreamt of. Her marriage and the births and disappearance of her three children follow; and she is at last rescued from the stake to which she had been condemned as the punishment of witchcraft by her godmother's advent in a golden chariot.

This mysterious lady brings back the children and declares that the heroine's constancy has delivered her from an enchantment. The other story comes from Pisa. The heroine sees in the Forbidden Chamber only her mistress bathing, with two maidens near her reading a book. Her two sisters, whom her mistress had previously bought from her father, had been rash enough when taxed with their disobedience, at once to admit, and to repeat what they had been privileged to behold; and they had consequently suffered summary death at the hands of their outraged lady.

Not so the heroine. Questioned as to what she has seen, she says "Nothing! When driven out again from the lady's palace into the wood, she is found by a prince and married. After her second child has disappeared the prince resolves to put her away as insane and marry another. The clearer Italian sky has got rid of the shadows of witchcraft and ogrehood that overhang the German and Sclavonic tales.

But the heroine is saved even from the milder suffering involved in repudiation and the imputation of madness, by the appearance of her former mistress. After having at this trying moment attempted and failed to extract an admission, she declares the heroine's innocence, restores her children, and adds that her persistence has redeemed her from a spell. In all the foregoing tales the heroine, though guilty of curiosity and often deceit, is not treacherous, or if she is we readily pardon it, seeing the evil that has been practised upon her.

In another group prevalent in the East she and the ogre have changed places. She is the faithless sister or mother whose curiosity leads to the discovery and release of the hero's mortal enemy, with whom she forms an intrigue and plots the hero's death. In the typical story, published in Roumanian Fairy Tales and Legends , [60] two children, a boy and girl, are by the contrivance of their stepmother abandoned in a wood.

The boy receives a cub each from a fox, a wolf, and a bear, in return for sparing their lives; and with his sister he takes possession of a certain palace. Opening a door in the palace he finds within a giant bound with three chains, who cries out for water. He bangs-to the door, which he afterwards forbids his sister to open. In his absence, however, she disobeys and satisfies the giant's thirst. The effect of the water is to release the monster from his bonds.

The treacherous heroine plots with him to persuade her brother to leave his three animals at home the next time he goes hunting; and on his leaving them the giant locks them up in the Forbidden Chamber and pursues the hero. He has almost fordone him when his beasts, hearing his voice singing a magic song that summons them to his aid, dash out of the chamber, rescue their master, and devour his persecutor.

Other versions of the story amplify it much, some bringing the heroine's treachery into even higher relief. In one [61] a brother is warned against his sister, and counselled to put her to death.

Rather than do this he takes her to live with him in the desert, where ho overcomes and puts to death a band of brigands, takes possession of their treasure, and brings his sister to dwell in their cave. She hears a voice, and opening a room in the cavern finds one of the brigands, a negro, not dead. The faithless girl heals his wounds, becomes his paramour, and by his advice sends her brother for the grapes of Paradise, and afterwards for the Water of Life to cure her feigned illness.

When he returns successful the negro cuts off his head and hews him in pieces, which he puts in a sack, loads an ass with it, and drives the animal away. Two faithful lion cubs, however, bring the ass to the hero's wife, a princess whom he has in the meantime healed and married; and she with the Water of Life restores him.

This is an Arab story. Some Sclavonic tales present nearly the same scries of incidents, without the Forbidden Chamber. The faithless sister's paramour is a revived brigand who presents himself in some other way; and the faithful animals are enchanted men. It elaborates the incidents at greater length; but its chief point of interest is its approximation of the central scene to that of the type we shall next consider.

The palace of which the hero and his mother take possession has been a habitation of dragons, all of which the hero at first supposes himself to have killed. There is, however, one left, bound in a certain room by three iron rings to the wall. This room the hero warns his mother not to open. She disobeys, and the dragon asks for wine from a certain vat in the cellar. She brings it to him thrice, and his bonds fall off. We have now done for the present with female curiosity and disobedience. The remaining types disclose the same faults in the other sex. The first group may be called by the name of the typical story of Marya Morevna, the daughter of the Sea.

This is given by Ralston [64] from Afanasief ; and its outline is as follows. In accordance with his dying parents' commands. Prince Ivan gives his three sisters in marriage to the first comers,—the eldest to a Falcon, who comes in thunder and changes into a brave youth, the second to an Eagle, and the youngest to a Raven, both of whom conduct their wooing on the same principles as the Falcon.

After a year the prince sets out in search of his sisters. He finds a whole army lying dead on the plain, and learns that it has been destroyed by a certain Princess Marya Morevna. He meets with this redoubtable Amazon, and finds favour in her eyes. She marries him, but cannot settle down to domestic life. On the contrary, she sets out to war again, leaving him at home, and with instructions not to enter a certain closet. He promptly disobeys her, as was to be expected.

Within hangs Koshchei the Deathless, bound by twelve chains. Koshchei asks for water, and the hero gives him successively three bucketfuls; whereupon he bursts his chains and flies away, carrying off the Princess Marya Morevna. The hero starts in pursuit, and comes to one after another of the palaces of his three sisters and their husbands, who vainly try to dissuade him.

Though he will not listen to them, he leaves them magical tokens, his silver spoon, fork, and snuff-box. At length he finds his wife and runs off with her. But Koshchei overtakes the fugitives, and takes back the Princess, sparing Prince Ivan, however, for his kindness in giving him water. This occurs a second and a third time.

The fourth time Koshchei kills him, chops him up, and puts the pieces into a barrel, which he flings into the sea. The hero's brothers-in-law, discovering by the aspect of his tokens that he is dead, fly to his aid, and, having procured the Water of Death and the Water of Life, revive him. He returns to his wife, whom he persuades to inquire of Koshchei whence he had got so good a steed.

He tells her he got it from the Baba Yaga in return for watching her mares for three days without losing one. The heroine repeats this to Prince Ivan, and steals for him Koshchei's handkerchief, whose waving causes a bridge to spring up over the fiery river that has to be crossed. The prince sets out and crosses in safety the fiery river. Being hungry by the way, he threatens to eat, first, a chicken of a strange bird, then a bit of honeycomb, and lastly a lion-cub, but spares them,—the bird, the bees, and the lioness promising to reward him. With their assistance he watches the Baba Yaga's mares, and by a bee's directions steals a certain sorry-looking colt and rides off on it.

The Baba Yaga, pursuing, is deceived by the hero, and precipitated into the fiery river. Prince Ivan steals the heroine. Koshchei pursues, but the hero with the help of a kick from his steed puts an end to him. In this type the simple story of Bluebeard has assumed epic proportions; but so far as I know it is a type entirely peculiar to the Sclavonic race, and the variations are consequently not very great. Koshchei the Deathless is the Sclavonic Punchkin; nor do I quite understand how in the tale just cited he comes to so ordinary an end.

Steelpasha, [65] who is Koshchei's analogue among the Southern Slaves, is unconquerable until the heroine has wormed out the secret of his life from him. Some remnant of the Delilah episode is, however, left in the typical story and in some others of the group, since it is necessary to ascertain from Koshchei himself where he got his swift steed. In others the hero learns this secret from a fox he has forborne to shoot, [66] from one of his brothers-in-law, [67] or even from his own steed, [68] who, and the witch's sorry colt, are in this case both the enchanted brothers of the heroine.

In the tale of Steelpasha the hero is the youngest of three sons, and the only one of the three who is willing to perform his dead father's commands as to the marriage of his sisters. After their marriages the brothers set out to seek them, and the youngest surpasses his brothers in the feats he performs, ultimately saving a king's daughter from death while she sleeps by killing a snake which is about to devour her. For this, when he chooses to confess, he is rewarded with her hand. The elder brothers then drop out of the story. The brothers-in-law will of course be recognized as the Animal Brothers-in-law of Von Hahn 's classification, where their functions appear to be confounded with those of the Grateful Beasts.

It is true that this is frequently the case; but these Sclavonic Forbidden Chamber stories seem to present a further evolution. The office of the hero's mysterious kinsmen here is to restore him to life, to give him good counsel, and even to fight the ravisher; but the Grateful Beasts themselves are brought in to perform the tasks which are the condition of his success.

It may be noted, however, that, while their functions are thus differentiated, the Brothers-in-law and the Grateful Beasts do not usually both appear in the same story. The latter are absent from Steelpasha and the parallel Bohemian story of Sunking, Moonking and Windking, [69] as the former are from another sub-genus of this group.

The stories of this sub-genus substitute the Swan Maiden myth for that of the Animal Brothers-in-law as the motive of the hero's original wandering. A vila in the shape of a large bird robs a pear-tree by night. His mother cuts off the hair and the maiden disappears, cursing him not to rest ere he find her again. He sets out to seek her, and is directed to a fountain where she comes to bathe on Thursdays and Fridays. The old man who gives this information puts the hero into a magical sleep; but the vila awakens him, carries him off, and marries him. A variant narrated by Wenzig is somewhat more Oriental in some of its features.

As a reward for fidelity the magician gives him gold and a dove, who is in fact an enchanted maiden capable of being restored to human form by plucking forth three golden feathers wherewith she is adorned. The magician directs him to hide these feathers where none shall know.

The hero takes the dove-maiden home, weds her, and, like Aladdin, builds a palace, hiding in its walls, in a place only known to his mother, the three precious feathers. In his absence his mother decks the heroine with these feathers, with the effect of renewing her enchantment, and she flies away. Her husband has recourse to the magician, who takes pity on him and transports him to the heroine's palace, warning him not to set free her enemy.

He finds her there and renews his union with her. It is, however, imperfect; for she has to pass some hours of every day as a dove. One day, while she is undergoing this necessity, the hero opens the Forbidden Chamber, and finds within a dragon with three heads each hung on a hook. Three glasses of the Water of Life give the dragon power to burst forth and carry off the heroine in her dove-form.

The steed on which the hero pursues is his wife's brother, who also is enchanted. He is enabled to steal her still as a dove twice from the dragon; but the latter twice recovers her. By his horse's advice he then procures, through the help of a raven, the Water of Growth and the Water of Life. But a better steed must be obtained to achieve the adventure; and this is no less than another brother of the heroine held captive by a monster named Yezibaba on the other side, not of a fiery river, but of the Red Sea.

Here the heroine's brothers take the place of the Animal Brothers-in-law, and the Grateful Beasts appear to assist the hero in obtaining the second enchanted horse. But that which gives the greatest interest to the foregoing tale is that it forms a link between the Marya Morevna type and another we may call The Teacher and his Scholar type. This relates to the adventures of a youth who falls under the power of a magician whom he learns to excel in cunning and ultimately to outwit, or whom he robs of a magical steed.

Two stories, not falling categorically under either of these alternatives, but apparently in process of development each to one of them, are given in Arnason's collection of Icelandic legends. In the one [72] a king's son, a prodigal, who has sold his kingdom for a horse laden with gold and silver, rides forth in search of adventures.

With his treasure he pays the debt of a dead man—by that sacrifice gaining him rest—and then comes to the dwelling of seven giants during their absence. Setting their house in order, he wins their protection, and is allowed to remain as their servant. The big giant gives him all the keys except one. By a trick he gets possession of this key, takes a mould of it in dough, and forges a duplicate, with which he opens the Forbidden Chamber.

He there finds a princess hung up by the hair for refusing to marry the big giant, who had stolen her from her home. In the end he gets as his wages the contents of the Forbidden Chamber, namely, the maiden, and with her leaves the giants, when they pursue the hero and heroine, overcome, and kill them. At the seaside the hero finds a ship sent by the heroine's father. They go aboard; but the captain, that he may obtain the heroine's hand as her deliverer, puts the hero into an oarless, rudderless boat, and cuts him adrift.

The dead man whose debt the hero has paid conducts the boat to shore, and instructs him to take service as groom with the princess's father. The heroine of course recognises and marries him, and the sea-captain is put to death. The other story [73] is also of a king's son who falls into a giant's power. The giant shews him all his stores, except what are in the kitchen. In the giant's absence he opens the kitchen and finds therein an enormous dog, who says to him, "Choose me, Hringr, king's son!

By the dog's counsel he makes his way to a king's court, and asks for permission to spend the winter there. The jealousy of the king's minister sends him to perform a number of feats, including thefts like those of Jack, the Beanstalk hero; and the guerdon of these is the king's daughter.

The dog, by whose aid he achieves these adventures, saves his life from the envious minister, and recovers his own pristine form as a prince who had been bewitched. In both these tales the marvellous animal, or the princess, is given by the giants to the hero as the reward of service, just as in Wenzig's Sclavonic story the monster-magician pays the hero with the dove-maiden.

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More usually however he steals them, an incident of which we see either a germ or a recollection in the pursuit by the seven giants in the former of the two Icelandic tales. I find the type of one of the groups of stories we are now discussing in a Greek tradition given by Von Hahn, entitled The Teacher and his Scholar. The demon gives him an apple, of which the king eats one half and the queen the other.

The latter bears three sons. The king tries to foil the demon by building a tower of glass in which he keeps his children; but one day they escape, and the hero is pounced upon by the demon and carried down to his underground palace. This palace contains forty rooms, of which the ogre hands the hero the keys of thirty-nine.

He also gives him a book to learn from. The hero gets possession of the fortieth key and opens the Forbidden Chamber. There he finds a fair maiden hanging by her hair, and takes her down. She instructs him to feign inability to learn his lesson when his master next gives him the book; and, lest the demon should find them out, she directs the hero to restore her to her uncomfortable situation and replace the key. He follows her advice; and the demon, like any other master not under wholesome awe of a schoolboard, beats him for his stupidity.

The heroine next counsels him to learn the whole book as fast as he can, always however feigning inability, and bids him when he has finished his task to come and fetch her. He complies, and in accordance with the directions in the book he takes certain magical articles, aikd, ungallantly changing the heroine into a mare, rides off on her. The ogre pursues, but is impeded by the stolen goods, which are thrown behind, one by one, by the hero, and the fugitives escape. The hero brings the heroine back to human shape; and, having plighted troth, they part.

He goes to lodge with an old woman, and makes money by transforming himself successively into various objects, which she sells, always retaining something pertaining to these objects, otherwise he will be unable to resume his proper form. Finally he changes into a pomegranate, which his father plucks, but the demon by a trick nearly succeeds in getting possession of it; it falls in pieces, and the seeds are scattered. The demon as rapidly changes into a hen and chickens; whereupon the hero becomes a fox which kills the hen and chickens, but loses his eyes, for the hen has eaten two of the seeds.

He returns to his own shape, and sets out to find the heroine, who is a king's daughter. Her father has built a hospital in gratitude for her deliverance. There the hero meets her, and she recognises him by a ring she had put on his finger when they plighted their troth. She leads him to bathe in a certain brook and his sight is restored. This story calls to mind that of the Second Royal Mendicant in the Arabian Nights [75] in which a similar combat takes place between an 'Efreet and a king's daughter learned in magic for the restoration of the Mendicant to human form from that of an ape.

The beginning of the tale as it stands is of course totally different from that of the foregoing, but there are not wanting indications that it has obtained its present literary shape by the grafting of the story of the Ape-man on some variant of The Teacher and his Scholar. The 'Efreet and the King's Daughter are no strangers to one another; their greeting refers to some incident or chain of incidents outside the history of the Mendicant, and certainly not incompatible with the type we are now considering, though not included in any variant I am acquainted with.

It is not impossible that further research among eastern folk-tales may recover the version which has been thus wrought up, or one near akin to it. Meantime, the variant bearing the strongest likeness to the typical story is that of Mohammed the Prudent given by Spitta Bey in his Contes Arabes Modernes. In due time the Moghrebbin fetches the boy to his underground palace, and gives him a book to read, of which he cannot decipher a single word.

The magician accords him thirty days to learn it by heart, threatening that in default he will cut off the hero's head. Failing to decipher the mystic volume the latter wanders on the last day but one of the allotted period into the garden, where he finds a maiden hung up by the hair. She tells him that she has been thus punished by the Moghrebbin for succeeding in learning the book. She reveals the secrets to him, warning him to feign ignorance.

Ultimately the hero and heroine flee on two horses, which they have obtained by reading the last three leaves of the volume. The hero's mother performs the part of the old woman in the former story; and his final transformation is into a poniard which stabs to death the magician while seeking in the form of a cock to devour all the seeds of a pomegranate—the hero's last previous shape.

Here the Forbidden Chamber appears as a garden, and the prohibition to enter it is only to be inferred from the secrecy of the hero's visits and the fact that the contents enable him to outwit his master. In other versions, however, a nearer approach is made to the Bluebeard type. A variant recorded by Von Hahn [77] makes the hero the youngest of three disobedient sons of a poor woman, who, gathering sticks in a wood, meets an ogre and complains of her undutiful children. The ogre offering to take one, she gives them up to him successively, to be brought up to a handicraft.

The ogre's den contains a Forbidden Chamber full of murdered men; and the test of disobedience is an apple which is dropped and covered with blood. The hero alone obeys the prohibition; but one day, performing the service so common in stories from the Mediterranean countries of ridding his master of vermin, he discovers a little keybound on the top of the ogre's head. It gives him access to the chamber where the princess is. She warns him to behave as if he were stupid; and he carries out her instructions until the ogre at last, losing patience, turns him out-of-doors. Returning home he persuades his mother to sell him in the form of a horse.

Pursued by the demon he changes into all sorts of animals and at last into a flower in a princess' hand. The ogre tries in every way to obtain the flower; but the princess tells him, "Though your heart burst in pieces, you shall not get the flower from me. The bursting in pieces of the ogre reminds us of the Troll in the northern tale; [78] and there may indeed be some connection of thought between that and the bursting and scattering of one of the combatants, which seems a necessary feature of the conflict between the master and his too clever scholar in the present type.

Though, if so, it is not easy to trace, and I must leave the task to more accomplished mythologists. An Italian variant, similar in its general course to the three stories given above, differs in its commencement. He is bold enough to make her an offer of marriage; but the only answer he can get from her is—"If thou do a miracle fairer than this I will marry thee. The wizard trusts him with the keys of twenty-four chambers, forbidding him to open two of them. In these chambers he finds a young prince and another daughter of the king.

The latter of course gives him the usual instructions how to behave towards the magician, from whom he at length escapes. The transformation and sale tricks follow, until the hero is captured by the wizard, from whom he can only escape by touching water. He accomplishes this by turning into a fish, and afterwards performs the required miracle by becoming a ring on the princess's finger. His further changes are those into a grain of millet and into a fox that devours the magician while in the form of a hen seeking for the millet. There is a closely related group of variants differing chiefly in their conclusion from the tales of this type just analysed.

In this group the ogre is finally defeated by the hero's flight, and the remainder of the story is occupied by a totally different series of adventures which hang to what I may term the trunk of the story by the transformation in the hero's personal appearance consequent on his disobedience. A stranger is taken as the boy's godfather, who returns at the end of a year and a day to fetch his precocious godson to his castle. There the hero's business is to feed two horses and to starve and beat a certain mule.

He is entrusted with a hundred keys opening as many rooms in the castle; but he is forbidden to enter the hundredth chamber. For a while he obeys; but after his godfather's second departure he is overcome with curiosity and ventures to use the hundredth key. In the room he finds dead bodies and magical books.

Going afterwards to attend to the animals the mule speaks to him, accusing him of disobedience, and advising him, now that he has gone so far, to bind up a certain bell, to plunge into a certain fountain, and to mount the mule herself and flee, taking with him some magical articles which she enumerates. The fountain turns his hair to gold.

His godfather pursues the fugitives, but is impeded in the usual manner by the stolen talismans flung behind by the hero, who at length reaches the Holy Land, where his godfather who turns out to be the Devil cannot enter. Following the mule's directions he covers his shining hair and engages himself as under-gardener to the king, the mule in the meantime disappearing. The gardener becomes jealous of him and falsely accuses him twice to the king. The hero calls in the aid of the mule by means of a magical wand she has given him, and with her help he foils the gardener, who is at length dismissed and the hero installed in his place.

Secretly by night the hero wears at different times three glorious dresses given him by his faithful mule; but the youngest of the kings three daughters discovers him. On the princesses' choosing husbands she chooses the gardener, much to her father's displeasure; and the lovers are wedded and banished from the palace.

The Folk-Lore Journal/Volume 3/The Forbidden Chamber

The hero, however, finds his opportunity when his father-in-law goes to war. Given contemptuously an old hack and a rusty sword, he mounts his mule, hurries after the army, and, thrice defeating the enemy, he single-handed compels peace. Upon certain terms which will enable him afterwards to prove his case he temporarily yields the spoils and glory to his brothers-in-law, the husbands of his wife's sisters, who insult him and wound him in the leg.

On his recovery he holds a feast, where he discloses himself in all his proper splendour, claims and proves to be the real victor, and puts his brothers-in-law to open shame. A Greek variant narrated by Von Hahn [81] approaches more closely in its opening to the true Teacher and his Scholar type. The hero and a colt are born in consequence of his father and mother having eaten an apple given them by an ogre and fed a mare with the rind.

The monster has previously bargained for the issue, and he fetches the hero accordingly to his fastness. In this castle the rooms are forty-one in number; and the hero finds the key of the forty-first room and enters it while his master sleeps. Inside are two puddles: The ogre in his rage dips the boy entirely into the puddle, and he emerges all gilded. The hero afterwards flies on his horse; and his former master, unable to overtake him, counsels him to shake the bones out of an old man whom he will meet, and dress himself in his skin.

He follows this advice, and takes service with a king who is the father of three daughters. The youngest, of course, catches a glimpse of his real nature, and chooses him as her husband. He procures a remedy for the king, who is smitten with blindness; and afterwards in war defeats the enemy, with a conclusion similar in general terms to that of the previous story.

The mongrel inhabitants of Zanzibar [82] tell a story of a boy whose birth was the result of a bargain similar to that in the foregoing variant. The demon, whose medicine proves so powerful, takes one of the offspring; and on reaching home hands him all his keys, bidding him open whatever he liked. The hero enters the room containing the molten gold, and conceals his discoloured finger beneath a rag. He afterwards opens a series of six rooms and finds the bones of various animals, and, lastly, skulls of men. In the seventh chamber is a living horse, by whose advice he precipitates the demon into a cauldron of hot ghee.

The horse swallows the contents of the treasure-chamber, and the hero flees upon his back, while the demon is eaten by his own companions out of the cauldron. The remainder of the narrative is tame; though, of course, it ends with the hero's marriage to a sultan's daughter. The commencement of the last two variants is completely parallel with that of The Teacher and his Scholar, and recalls that of The King of the Fishes, [83] a Breton tale belonging to the Perseus group.

In tales of this type a large fish caught by a fisherman and given to his childless wife, or to a childless queen, results in the birth of three boys, three colts, and three puppies. The eldest boy growing up, sallies forth into the world, kills a dragon, and marries a princess.

The next day he goes, in direct defiance of his bride's prohibition, to a magician's house, or to hunt in a certain wood, where he is captured and spellbound. The second son sets out to seek his brother, and is received by the princess as her husband,—so like is he to the first. He shares his brother's fate, from which they are both at last rescued by the greater cunning of the youngest.

Some of these stories hold out a hand of such apparent kinship to the Forbidden Chamber myth that it requires some care to avoid linking them together. But closer analysis shows their affinities to belong rather to a different class; and the mention of them here will serve to illustrate further the ease with which one folktale seems to glide off into another, just as in the physical world every genus of animals or plants fades through its several species and they, in their turn, through their individual members into the genera that on every side surround it.

The hero's miraculous birth is not, however, an inseparable feature of the type we are considering. In the Roumanian story of The Hermit's Foundling with the Golden Hair [84] the boy appears as a king's daughter's bastard brought up by a hermit; and in a Norse variant [85] he is simply a widow's son seeking employment. In the latter story there are four forbidden rooms, wherein the ogre foolishly stores up the magical articles which are to impede his pursuit of his disobedient servant and end in his death. Beside these the hero finds a large black horse with a trough of burning embers at his head and a basket of hay at his tail, and compassionately reverses them.

The horse then speaks, telling him to wash in one of the rooms in a kettle which boils without any fire under it, and to fetch from another room a suit of armour, sword, and saddle. The boy had already tried the virtue of the kettle by dipping in it his finger, which he had drawn out gilded, thereby causing the detection of his curiosity and its punishment by his master. Bathing in it now he finds himself not only endowed with splendour, but also with strength to bear the armour. The Roumanian tale transforms the ogre into three fairies, whose service the hero enters after his foster-father the hermit's death.

These fairies go away, leaving him the customary prohibition, which he of course disobeys, and discovers in the room an empty bath and a chest containing three bundles of clothes. On a second absence the fairies charge him to sound a horn three times if he hear any noise in the Forbidden Chamber. But his magical horse, the hermit's posthumous gift, directs him instead to enter the room and plunge into the bath. This bath fills only once in a century; and the noise of its filling is the signal for which the hero was to wait.

The bath turns his hair to gold; he steals the clothes from the chest and rides off, with his masters in full pursuit, I need not follow his adventures farther, as they scarcely differ from the later incidents of the two stories already analysed. There is another story in which the fatal curiosity of Bluebeard's wife plays an important part.

I mean that of The Third Royal Mendicant in The Arabian Nights [86] It is too well known to require any recapitulation of incidents; and the variants with which I am acquainted follow it so closely that they will not detain us long. The story as a whole, in its motive and details, is of a very different character from that of most of the types we have previously considered: The horse discovered within the forbidden chamber may remind us of The Teacher and his Scholar, and Scabby John. But there, except for the Forbidden Chamber itself, the resemblance ceases.

The hero is ruled by fate from end to end of his story; and it is not simply curiosity which overcomes him and severs him from the life he had found so agreeable. This may be due to the Mohammedan colouring in which the tale appears in The Thousand and One Nights. The same predestination reappears, however, in a version given by Signor Nerucci, [87] as told at Montale, in Tuscany.

I confess that all Signor Nerucci's tales display a fulness of detail, and an artistic polish which convey a certain suspicion to my mind. But they are received as genuine in Italy, and the story referred to is, in particular, stamped with the acceptance of Signor Comparetti by his admission of it into his collection.

Its identity I cannot call it similarity with the Arabian story is most striking; for, with the omission of the lodestone-rock, and a few unimportant variations, it follows the exact course of The Third Royal Mendicant. We may make what allowance we will for literary adornment by the collector; nothing short of absolute disbelief in the genuineness of his stories as folk-tales will get rid of this remarkable unity; and this short and easy method seems closed to us.

In any case its form, as well as its spirit, is so thoroughly oriental that it is impossible to believe it has been domesticated in Europe for a very long period. The fatalism of The Third Koyal Mendicant, though not so prominent in the Italian version, is still present; but in the nearest analogue to these two tales which I know it is emphatically repudiated and put down to the tempting of Satan,—and this though the story as it reaches us is in a distinctly Islamic guise.

He is engaged as servant to ten old men who live together, and who correspond to the old sheykh and ten young men of the better-known version. They die one by one; and, as the last one is dying, the hero's curiosity overcomes him and he conjures him to disclose the reason of their lamentations. The -dying man replies, forbidding him to open a certain locked door—a prohibition he, of course, disregards. A black eagle takes him up and conveys him to the Land of Women, where he weds the queen, who again charges him not to open a particular door.

After seven months he disobeys, and is borne back by the same black eagle to the spot where it had first seized him, whence he finds his way once more to the palace of his former masters. Here, it will be observed, the Forbidden Chamber is duplicated. The hero both reaches and quits the Houri Paradise by disobedience to the prohibition.

There can be little doubt that in the earlier form of this story there is but one forbidden door—namely, the one whereby the hero quits the Paradise, and that the other is a reflection of this. On the other hand, the absence of the harem is, probably, a note of antiquity. The story in this form approaches a very wide-spread tale, which is found even beyond the limits of the Aryan and Semitic races. In the Hitopadesa [89] - a king's son goes to seek a maiden, who lies on a couch in the sea, under a tree.

She catches sight of him and disappears; but he leaps into the sea, arrives at the golden city in which she dwells, and weds her. He disobeys, and the pictured figure resents his insolence with a kick so violent as to fling him back to his own country. Another version is in still closer contact with the tales previously cited. The hero is conveyed by a gigantic bird to the Golden City, and there wedded by the queen, who gives him strict charge not to ascend to the middle terrace of the palace. Disregarding this charge, he is kicked by a steed with a jewelled saddle, which he essays to mount, into a lake, and, rising to the surface, he finds himself standing in the midst of a garden-pond in his native city.

Another group of variants goes somewhat further, and introduces that mysterious lapse of time which visitors to Fairyland experience. A loutish youth in an Esthonian tale [91] is beloved by a mermaid and taken to the subaqueous dwelling where she reigns as queen. He is forbidden to call her Mermaid. Every Thursday she disappears, passing the day in a locked chamber until the third cock-crow in the evening. After living happily with her for some time, he is overcome with curiosity and jealousy, and peeps in through the window-curtains.

The room has no floor; but where the floor should be is water, in which the mermaid is swimming—woman to the waist, and fish below. The following day she appears to him in mourning, and, reproaching him, bids him farewell. With a thunder-clap he becomes unconscious, to find himself next lying on the beach where he had first met his love. Rising, he goes into the village to find that his parents have been dead for thirty years, and evenhi s brothers are no more. He has become an old man, and is dependent on charity. One day he ventures to tell his story.

That night he disappears; and, after some time, the waves cast up his dead body on the shore. The mermaid of this story is, like the dove-maiden in the Sclavonic tale cited before, one of a well-known class, possessed of a double nature, and condemned to spend a portion of their time in the lower form, secluded from those whom they most love.

The godmother, also, in the Mary's Child type, betrays in the same characteristic a trace of her mythological descent. Of a different character is the heroine of a legend of the County Clare. But a broad flat stone in one part of the palace garden is pointed out to him on which he may not stand under penalty of the heaviest misfortune. One day he disobeys and finds himself in full view of his native land, which he had forgotten since he had been in the Country of Perpetual Youth.

He sees it oppressed, and begs permission to return. The queen, finding all dissuasion vain, permits him to return for a single day, and gives him a jet-black steed. From this steed he is not to dismount, nor is he on any account to let the bridle go. Forgetting so simple a direction he quits his seat to assist a peasant.

The spell is thus broken: He becomes an old man, feeble and helpless, and the horse that should have borne him back to happiness disappears. This is the weird story of Olger the Dane, which in one form or another is so popular all over the west of Europe; but to follow it would lead me too far from my present subject. Keeping within the limits I have prescribed for myself, I will just mention one other version of the tale last cited. It is an Algonquin legend, bearing a strange, I had almost said a suspicious, likeness to our Aryan myths.

They pursued him, and on one of them coming up he caught and wedded her. Subsequently he procured in a similar way one of his wife's sisters, and wedded her also. The two wives desert him. Lying down together at night, they wish for stars for husbands, and when they awake they find themselves in another world, each wedded to the star she had chosen, who appears in the form of a man. Their new husbands forbid them to lift a certain large flat stone; true to their instincts, they disobey, and find beneath a hole, through which they look down to the earth, and are seized with a desire to return to it.

On their husbands' return they deny their disobedience; but, being found out, they obtain leave to return, and are wafted thither during the night. These two women, who are described as water fairies, are doubtless equivalents of the Swan-Maidens of the eastern hemisphere. Except in the mode of capture, however, the true Swan-Maiden story has little in connection with this tale, which may yet serve to remind us that some of the Swan-Maiden variants belong to the Forbidden Chamber class.

The best known of these is perhaps that of Hasan of El Basrah. They at length leave him for two months, giving him the keys of their rooms, but begging him not to open a certain door. He disregards their injunction, and finds within among other things a pool of water, to which ten birds come, and, pulling off their feather dresses, descend to bathe in the pool as women.

He falls in love with one of them, and on the return of the maidens who dwell there he confesses to one of them what he has done. She informs him who the supernatural women are, and instructs him to watch when they come again and seize the feather dress of the one whom he desires to wed, and he will then obtain power over her.

He thus gains her; but his marriage with her ends in her recovery of the feather dress and flight, an incident that starts him on a new series of adventures for the purpose of regaining her. We found a version of this new series in a story of the Marya Morevna type. In the present case, however, there is no further reference to the Forbidden Chamber, and we therefore need not pursue the tale further.

This is not the only Arabian tale in which the Swan-Maiden is discovered by opening a forbidden door [95] ; but without stopping to examine others I will content myself with mentioning one of Von Hahn's Greek stories, where a similar event occurs. The hero, wandering on a mountain, finds a trapdoor, which by his great strength he succeeds in pulling up, and he descends into the cavern beneath for a whole day.

Arrived at the bottom, he sees and enters a palace, and finds within an old man bound with chains.

Having released him, the old man gives him the keys of thirty-nine out of the forty rooms in the palace. After a while the hero asks for the key of the fortieth room, and in spite of the elder's warning he insists on having it. In accordance with the old man's instructions he enters the room and finds a lake, wherein three maidens come to bathe. He hides and waits until the two elder have bathed and the youngest strips herself and plunges. He then seizes her clothes, in which her strength lies, and forces her to follow him back into the palace. The old man gives him a flying steed and a golden wand, and with these he sets out for home with the maiden, who of coarse ultimately obtains her clothes again.