The three motifs common to Animal Bride and Bridegroom stories are evident in “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”: marriage to (or cohabitation with) an animal or animal-like figure; the breaking of a prohibition and subsequent departure of the magical spouse (or suitor, or lover); and a pilgrimage to regain the loved one and achieve a more lasting union. Most fairy tales end on this happy note, but if we look at older tales in the folk tradition, we find that many end after the second part of this cycle. These are tragic tales (or horrific ones) in which the union of lovers from human and nonhuman worlds cannot be sustained. The selkie tales of the British Isles and Scandinavia generally fall in this category:
One night a fisherman spies a group of seals emerging from the sea, shedding their skins, and turning into beautiful maidens upon dry land. As the selkies dance under the moon, the fisherman steals one of the skins. Sunrise comes, the maidens turn back into seals and depart — except for one, who is unable to transform herself without the magic of her sealskin. She begs the man to return the skin — but he refuses, insisting she be his wife. Resigned, she follows him to his cottage and learns how to live as humans live. Eventually she comes to care for her husband, and bears him seven fine sons and a moon-eyed daughter. One day, however, she finds the skin — and she swiftly returns to her life in the sea. In some versions, she departs without another thought for the family left behind; in other versions, the children also turn into seals and vanish along with her. And in still other variants of this tale, she joins a large bull seal in the waves. “I love you,” she calls back to the fisherman, “but I love my first husband more.”
Similar tales are told of swan maidens in Sweden, of frog wives in China and Tibet, of bear women in North America, and of aspares (nymphs) in Hindu myth who appear in the shape of waterfowl. In the “Crane Wife” story of Japan, the Animal Bride is happy in her marriage and works hard to please her husband, a weaver, by making sumptuous cloth to sell — but in his greed for more and more of this cloth, he works his faithful wife to death. It’s a tragic story, for when he realizes that he loves his magical spouse, it is too late.
In some stories, Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are decidedly less benign figures. In the English tale “Reynardine,” for instance, a young woman pledges marriage to a handsome red-haired stranger who is actually a fox shape-shifter. He intends to murder and eat her in his ruined mansion in the woods. The cat-wives in English tales, by contrast, are merely mischievous. In one story, a young man’s bride alarms his mother by her merry, immodest ways, and the mother soon learns that her daughter-in-law used to be the cat sitting by the hearth. She tells her son he must chase his bride away, and the son reluctantly agrees — but he later regrets the deed, for he misses his charming animal wife. In a Native American story from the Pacific Northwest, a man who is lost in the woods meets a beautiful bear woman and marries her. She gives him two bear cubs for sons, and the family lives in harmony — until hunters from his tribe come upon the bear bride’s cave and kill her while she sleeps, believing that they are rescuing their kinsman from captivity.
In the fairy tales of the Middle East, an Animal Bride can prove to be quite valuable. In one old Arabic story, a sultan’s son makes a promise to a tortoise and must marry her. “But this you cannot do, my son!” the sultan tells him in alarm. “This tortoise is not of our village, our race, or our religion — how can such a marriage work?” His elder brothers will not attend the wedding, and their wives refuse to prepare the marriage bed. Nevertheless, the young man spends his wedding night with the tortoise, and every night thereafter. Each morning he appears looking well contented, causing tongues to wag throughout the village. The sultan falls ill and must decide which one of his sons shall inherit the throne. Deciding to choose the son with the best marriage, he devises a series of impossible tests — which the tortoise wife wins through cleverness, common sense. and a little magic. In the end, she discards her shell and becomes a young woman, and her husband wins the throne.
Similar tales can be found in other fairy-tale traditions — such as “The Frog Princess” from Russia and “The White Cat” from France — although they tend to avoid the frank sexual conjecture that gives the Arabic version its spice. In the French story, from the tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, the prince and his animal paramour do not marry until the end of the tale, after the cat turns into a woman. It’s also made clear that the Animal Bride is really human underneath the fur, the victim of a fairy’s curse. But in older stories, like the Arabic tale, the bride may really be an animal (or a magical shape-shifting creature), consenting in the end to give up her true form in order to live in the human world.
In his fascinating study The Serpent and the Swan[2], folklorist Boria Sax comments: “Just as marriage between two people unites their families, so marriage between a person and an animal in myth and fairy tale joins humanity with nature.” He points out that the changes in Animal Bride and Bridegroom tales as they’ve passed through the centuries have reflected the changing relationship between humankind and the natural world. The oldest known tales are generally those limited to the first part of the story cycle: the romance and/ or marriage of human beings and animals (or other nature-bound creatures). Tales of this sort include ancestral myths such as the Chinese stories of families descended from the marriage of humans and shape-shifting dragons, or the lore of Siberian shamans who trace their power and healing gifts to marriages between men and swans. Such tales evoke an ancient worldview in which humans were part of the natural world, cousin to the animals, rather than separate from nature and placed above all other creatures.
Animal Bride and Bridegroom stories that go on to the second part of the cycle — ending with the loss of the animal lover — arise from a worldview in which sharper distinctions are made between the human sphere (civilization) and nature (the wilderness). In such tales, humans and their animal lovers come from distinctly separate worlds, and any attempt to unite the two is ultimately doomed to failure. Crane Wives always die, and selkies always return to the sea.
Stories that move on to the third part of the cycle — like “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” or the Arabic tale of the tortoise wife — end with the lovers united, and the transformation of one or both partners. Such tales, notes Sax, express “an almost universal longing to reestablish a lost intimacy with the natural world.” Although the tortoise might consent to the loss of her shell in order to live in the sultan’s court, she brings the scent of the wild with her as she steps into civilization. She will never be an ordinary woman; she’ll always be the Fantastic Bride — joining the hero to the mysteries of nature.
In the older folktales, marriage between humans and animals broke certain taboos and could be dangerous, but such relationships weren’t generally portrayed as wicked or immoral. Even when the marriages were doomed to failure, often a gift was left behind: children, wealth, good fortune, or the acquisition of magical skills (such as the ability to find fish or game in plentiful supply). By the Middle Ages, however, animal-human relationships were viewed more warily, and creatures who could shift between human and animal shape were portrayed in more demonic terms.
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Boria Sax,