Folklore and Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauty
This is, most likely, not the story you know.
Transformations can be both exciting and scary, yet we all have to go through them, we all have to, eventually, grow up. This story, called “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” is from Norway. It raises questions like: How brave would you have to be if this happened to you and how far would you go to rescue a friend?
In Spain and Greece people tell a similar story called “The Sleeping Prince.” It is a very old story and in Ancient Greece it was known as “Cupid and Psyche.”
It goes something like this:
One evening, a big white bear approaches a poor woodcutter and his wife and their three beautiful daughters. The bear offers to make the woodcutter as rich as he is now poor, in exchange for his youngest daughter. However, the woodcutter has his doubts. He is apprehensive, so the bear leaves them for a week to give them time to decide.
After she initially refused, after a week of debate, after praying about it, the daughter consents. The bear returns, she climbs on its back, digs her hands into his thick fur and holds on for dear life as he takes her away. He tells her to not be afraid. They travel until they reach a secret, warm, bright, comfortable cave, full of golden items. There is also delicious food, the best she could want. The girl eats her fill. Then the bear gives her a silver bell, and says:
“You ring that whenever you want anything. And now I must go.”
Then the bear leaves. She is tired, so she yawns and rings the bell and suddenly she finds herself in a beautifully decorated bedroom with a bed covered in sheets as white as snow. She blows out the candles and just before she falls asleep, she hears something come in the room, it lays down, and it begins to snore. She soon falls asleep, and when she wakes up the next day, the snoring thing is gone.
At breakfast, she asks the bear:
“What was the creature who came into my room last night?”
The bear says:
“Do not ask about the creature. Do not ask about me either. You can have anything you want, but you ask no questions.”
They carry on like this for many days. She has plenty of food to eat, at night some mysterious creature sleeps in her room, and she does not ask the bear about it again. Eventually, she becomes very sad, and the bear asks why. She says she misses her family and wants to see them once more and the bear agrees to take her.
When they got back to her home, she is surprised to find that her parents and siblings are living in a huge mansion that replaced the tiny cottage where she grew up in. Her sisters play outside and are happy to see her. Her parents are happy to see her, too, and all is well.
She talks to her family, but her mother, being a mother, can tell that something is bothering the girl, so during the evening, her mother gets her alone and she asks what is going on with the daughter, and the daughter tells her about the snoring creature that comes into her room at night. The mother warns her, saying that it might be a troll or some other godforsaken evil creature, so she gives her daughter a candle and a dagger to protect herself with and tells her to light the candle once the creature has gone to sleep and find out what it is.
The next day the bear fetches her, so presumably he did not visit the family along with her. They might have been scared, making small-talk with such a dangerous creature. After all, it is not every day that you have a bear visiting a family of humans. The bear asks about her visit, and the girl tells him that her mother has given her some advice. The bear tells her not to listen to it. Now what kind of daughter does not listen to the advice her mother gives her? They go back to the bear’s beautiful home. That night, just as she is about to fall asleep, she hears the creature enter the room and fall asleep again.
She takes out her candle, lights it, clutches the dagger firmly, and brings the light to where she hears snoring. She is amazed to see the face of a young man, the most beautiful young man she has ever seen. She leans in to get a better look at him, but three drops of tallow from the candle drip onto his shirt, waking him up. When he speaks, she hears that it is the voice of the bear. The man admits that he is the bear, the bear is he, they are one and the same, and that he has been cursed.
He has been cursed by a troll queen. Trolls are giant, monstrous beings in Scandinavian folklore, who are hostile to humans and they sometimes have magical powers. If the girl had been patient, able to wait a year without asking who it was that slept in her room every night, he would have been free of the curse, but now he had to return to the land that is “east of the sun and west of the moon” and marry the troll queen’s daughter, a hideous creature with a nose that is three yards long. Sad to his very core, he leaves. The girl cries, sad and ashamed, she cries and cries and cries herself out. She sits for a while, drying her tears, not sure what to do, and then she makes up her mind, and she sets out to find him.
She walks until she sees a high cliff face. At the bottom, there is an old woman carrying a golden apple. The girl asks her if she knows the way to the land “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” but she does not. The old women does, however, say that perhaps the girl is meant to be with the prince and perhaps her neighbor might know the way, so the woman gives the girl the apple and a horse to ride and sends her on her way.
The girl rides until she comes to a second cliff face, where there is a second old woman. This old woman also does not know the way to the land that is “east of the sun and west of the moon,” but she gives the girl two golden carding combs, which are used to comb out sheep’s wool before the wool is spun into yarn, and tells her to go ask her other neighbor who was still further on.
The girl rides off once more until she comes to a third cliff where she meets a third old woman who is spinning on a golden spinning wheel. The old lady gives her the heavy golden spinning wheel and a horse that knows how to get to the land that is “east of the sun and west of the moon.”
Boy, these old ladies sure are generous. There seems to be no jealousy or malice in them. Sometimes more mature women can be jealous of the youth and beauty of a younger lady, but this does not seem to be the case in this story. These older ladies are more like the fairy godmother than the wicked witch. The girl sure is lucky, but then, sometimes we all need a bit of luck.
Next, the girl meets the east wind, who doesn’t know how to get to the land that is “east of the sun and west of the moon,” but takes her to the west wind, the west wind takes her to the south wind, who finally takes her to the north wind, the north wind that knows how to take her to the land that is “east of the sun and west of the moon.”The north wind blows her into the land that is “east of the sun and west of the moon” and lets her down gently. Finally she has arrived at her destination.
When she lands, she sees a big castle with an open window, and sure enough, out of this window, a schnozzle sticks out, three yards long, the very nose of the troll princess that her charming prince is about to marry.
The girl walks up and down underneath the window, takes out her golden apple, and starts playing with it, throwing it up and down, up and down. There is nothing better than gold to entice a troll, and before long, the troll princess asks her what she can give the girl for the apple.
The girl says she does not want jewels, she does not want a nice dress, no, she wants one night, just one night, with the prince. The troll agrees, but that night, when the girl visits the prince, she tries to speak to him, but he does not wake up.
The next day, the girl trades her golden carding combs for another night with the prince. Now, I don’t know if it was customary in that part of the world to prostitute out princes for one night at a time or not. It reminds me of historical accounts that I read about rich Roman ladies who paid exorbitant fees to spend one night in the arms of a gladiator. Again, the prince does not wake up. Desperate now, she grabs him and shakes him, all to no avail.
Finally, the girl trades her golden spinning wheel for one more night with the prince. She tries to think of ways to wake him up. However, inside the castle, there were some good Christian people who were also held captive by the trolls in the room next to that of the prince. They had heard the girl in the prince’s room. Before nightfall, they sneak into his room and say:
“You must know that someone comes during the night. She tries to wake you up, but you remain asleep.”
The prince thinks about it and he suspects that the troll princess drugs him, so that night, when she offers him a drink he waits for her to turn her head and throws it out. Finally, he gets into bed and pretends to sleep. The troll princess comes back, checks that he is asleep and then throws the girl into the room and shuts the door. The girl comes over to the bed and prepares to shake the prince awake. But, as she moves closer, he opens his eyes and says:
“Hello!”
This startles the girl, but she soon recovers and laughs and tells him of her travels and travails. The prince says he has a plan to get out of this predicament and marry her. The next morning, he takes out his shirt that was stained by the three drops of tallow. He takes the shirt to the troll queen, his would-be mother-in-law, and says:
“I want to see what kind of girl I am about to marry. I want to see if she can wash the tallow off of this shirt and make it clean.”
The troll queen laughs and says:
“Well, anyone can do that — give it to her!”
She takes the shirt and gives it to her daughter. The princess tries to wash it, but as she rubs the shirt, she only makes the spot larger, until in the end, the shirt is a sooty, black mess. Finally the prince says:
“There’s someone over there, let’s see if she can do anything with it.”
The girl comes over, takes the shirt, and as soon as she dips it into the water, it turns white as snow. The stains are all gone. The prince says:
“That is the girl I will marry. And none of you can do anything about it.”
(Because everyone knows a man loves a woman who can wash out his dirty stains).
At that, the troll princess with her long nose, starts to hop up and down with anger. She hops and hops until she bursts into pieces. Her stepmother does the same, hopping until she pops into pieces, and all the other trolls do the same, covering the ground, the prince and the girl in their ghastly, sticky goo.
The two young lovebirds clean themselves and then ride back home on the back of the north wind. At last, they have each other, and they are not afraid. Like in most fairy tales, they live happily ever after.
So what can we learn from this tale?
In life, we have to be cautious whom we trust. The girl only trusts the bear when she sees him in his true form. However, by then it is too late. He has to go to the land “east of the sun and west of the moon” to marry a troll. Thankfully, in fairy tales, and often also in life, it is not too late to turn the story around. But, it takes a lot of bravery, persistence, and determination for her to save her prince and pull off the happy ending that they both want.
In this story, it is the girl who saves the prince and not the prince who saves the damsel in distress. I, for one, am impressed by her bravery, determination and resilience. Take note Disney, or any other film company (Bentkey perhaps?) that is looking for a terrific tale that promotes female empowerment to tell children.
In the story the girl decides to leave her home so that her family would be provided for.
Would you have made the same choice?
I am not nearly pretty enough, nor am I a girl, so nobody is going to offer my family any money to take me away from them, so I would never be in such a situation. However, many men leave the house and go to work at some place they hate to provide for their families and, in a way that is a similar sacrifice. It is, of course, much better if a young girl can marry someone she loves and if her family does not rely on her decision for their survival.
The trolls, of course, would see the whole situation differently. Here comes this horrible girl out of nowhere and ruins the marriage of their princess to the handsome prince. They are in the wrong by cursing the young man, but how else are they to get an eligible bachelor like him to marry their princess since she has a three yard long nose? What’s more, the prince tricks her by demanding that she wash his shirt. Her, a princess, wash a shirt? How humiliating. And then the prince has the gall to declare that he will marry the human girl and nobody else has any say over it. Of course the queen and princess and all the other trolls lost their minds with anger. How dare he? How dare the prince reject their princess? And the prince rejected their princess for this puny human girl? Unthinkable! Unacceptable! No wonder they got so angry.
I still don’t get why the stain got larger when the troll princess washed the shirt and why the girl got it just right, but I suppose that is some kind of magic for you. It is a fairy tale, written for children whose brains have not fully developed, after all, so perhaps it does not have to make perfect logical sense.
Nonetheless, for me, it is a beautiful story. Stay tuned for the next one. The story “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” contain elements of two other tales: Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast. It is at the original French tale, Beauty and the Beast, that I will look at next.
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Bibliography
Harvey, H.B. (2017). A Children’s Guide to Folklore and Wonder Tales. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.