Transgendered Fairy Tales
by Kaleigh Way

If you're curious about where these stories come from, then this is the page for you. These notes are not about where the stories first appeared on earth, mind you. They just tell where I found the story.

The Fisherman And His Wife

I know two versions of this story. The one in Grimm's collection has the fisherman go again and again to the sea, each time with a more outrageous request from his wife. The fish makes her empress, then pope, but when she asks to be God, the fish takes it all away and leaves them in their original pig-sty. The other version is the story of the three wishes, which all get used by mistake: the man wishes for a sausage; the wife angrily wishes it were stuck on his nose; the man wishes the sausage were gone. In my version, I leave them better off at the end, although the wife is punished for her greed.

The Goose Girl

This is almost identical to the story in Grimm's collection, though in the original the travelers are both women from the start.

Little Parsley

The beginning might remind you of Rapunzel, but this one is a combination of two Italian fairy tales: Petrosinella and Prunella. The first was written by Giambattista Basile; the second is a folk tale. The name "Little Parsley" is a translation of Prezzemolina — which is another name for the story.

Kate Crackernuts

This one came from Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales. His story is about two girls, Kate and Anne, and Anne is the one who ends up wearing the sheep's head.

The Grey Horse

A Scottish Folktale. In the original story, there are three sisters. I kept the British spelling of grey because the American spelling just didn't look right. Also in the original the "poor dead ladies" stay poor and dead at the end, which struck me as a rather grisly loose end. The original also doesn't explain how the horse manages his several feats of dexterity, such as wielding an axe and drawing out the second sister's hand. I think it's because the story is meant to be told aloud, not to be read and puzzled over.

The Red Ettin

Another from Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales. For those who've never seen one, an "ettin" is a three-headed giant. In the original story, the first son is turned to stone, not a servant girl, and the ladies were all born ladies (and remain ladies). Of course, all the gender changes at the end were my addition.

La Belle Bisclavrette

This is based a long poem Bisclavret by Marie de France. In the original, he remains a wolf, and the king, who is hunting, corners him. He throws himself at the feet of the king, who is so astonished that he brings the wolf to court, where everyone admires his nobility. In the end, his humanity is restored — after he bites his wife's nose off. In spite of making it clear that the wife acts out of fear, the poem is very unsympathetic to the poor woman: even her (female) children are born noseless! I took out that bit of misogyny and put in a happy ending. No one in the poem has a name — I gave three of the people (Breton) names.

Yallery Brown

This comes from More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs. After Tom thanks Yallery Brown, the little man is never seen again, but he ruins everything Tom puts his hand to, perhaps even beyond the grave. I thought it more likely that he'd turn Tom into a girl, so that's what happens here.

The Groac'h Of The Isle of Lok

Taken from Andrew Lang's Lilac Fairy Book. In that story, there is no "Belado"; Bellah is born a girl. To rescue Houarn she has to disguise herself as a man, so that was easy to fix.

The Giant Who Had No Heart In His Body

From Asbjørnsen and Moe's Popular Tales from the Norse. In their story, a princess lives with the giant, for some unexplained reason. Boots hides while she questions the giant, and in the end Boots kills the giant (by squeezing his heart), and marries the princess. When the girl tricked the giant into thinking she liked him (by the business with the flowers) I felt sorry for the poor guy.

Riquet With The Tuft

From Old-Time Stories by Charles Perrault. The title in French is Riquet à la Houppe, and is usually translated "Ricky Of The Tuft" — which strikes me as silly, especially when you consider that "Ricky" is supposed to be his last name. In the original the twins are both born girls. I was a little miffed the first time I read the story because the ugly smart girl is completely forgotten at the end of the story. The beautiful twin makes Ricky beautiful, and the two live happily ever after. Yuck! Making the unattractive, smart twin a boy and turning Ricky into a girl set things right.

The Silent Princess

This story comes from "The Enchanted Cat" in the book Old Hungarian Fairy Tales by Baroness Orczy, but I've changed several things. I gave everyone an Irish name, and moved the country from the Persian border to a vague fairy-tale land. In the Hungarian story, the queen's son is evil — he's against the good prince from the very beginning. The good prince is changed into a cat, not a girl, and the cat remembers everything quite well. On the night of the new moon, the cat turns back into a prince, just as the bad prince is trying to drown him. In the end, the king exiles the queen and her son, and puts the magician to death. The story doesn't explain why the prince isn't still a cat — after all, he was supposed to be human for only six hours.

Zelinda And The Monster

This is a combination of the well-known Beauty And The Beast by Madame de Villeneuve and Zelinda And The Monster from Thomas Crane's Italian Popular Tales. The Italian version is over too quickly — it's only about 15 paragraphs long, but it does have a more sensible beginning: the father sneaks into an unknown person's garden and steals the rose. In the better-known French version, the father's "offense" is harder to understand — I could never see why, after being given a meal and a bed, it was so wrong of him to have taken a single rose.

Celia

There is a long fairy tale called Le Mouton by Marie d'Aulnoy. You can find it in Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book as "The Wonderful Sheep." The story of Celia comes from a tiny part of that story, although the fairy turns the king into a sheep, not a shepherdess.

Celia And The King

From the story "Prince Darling" in Charles-Joseph Mayer's Cabinet des fees. It follows the original up to the point when Celia (who is an ordinary shepherdess) is put in jail. What happens next is that the prince is transformed into one beast after another so he can learn a series of lessons. He is then reunited to Celia, turned back into a prince, and he and Celia live happily ever after. I've added all the names; in the original, only Prince Darling has a name, and it's a horrible name. The original story is also quite moralistic; I've toned it down, but I couldn't make it go entirely away.

The Potter-Princess

From Tales of the Punjab by Flora Annie Steel, where the title is "The Two Brothers," because the brothers remain brothers throughout. However, and interestingly enough, the young brother dresses as a girl in the end, so he can hide in the prime minister's palace. He remains in girl's clothes until he reveals himself to his brother. This disguise makes sense only up to a point: in the original, he tells the story of his life from the beginning. Here, it gets told backward; otherwise the king would know immediately who the storyteller is.

The Conch of Rama

From Tales of the Punjab by Flora Annie Steel, where it has the more generic name of "The Farmer And The Money-Lender." The original story ends very quickly after the wells appear: The farmer wishes he were blind in one eye. The money-lender is then blind in both eyes, falls down one of his wells, and dies. A moral of a sort is tacked on the end, which is that a farmer did once get the better of a money lender, but only at the cost of one of his eyes.

The Golden Mermaid

In Andrew Lang's Green Fairy Book, the prince captures the mermaid, who falls in love with him. In the end, the prince is killed by his brothers and revived by the wolf. One thing that is unexplained in the original (as well as here) is how the mermaid gets around once she leaves the water.

The Kinglet

This one is by Charles Deulin, and is one of my favorites. You can find it in Andrew Lang's Green Fairy Book under the name "The Little Soldier." I changed the title so it wouldn't sound like a Hans Christian Andersen story. In the original, the Seagull is a girl. The rest of the story is much like the original — up to the point when the Kinglet eats the plums. The gold plums give you horns; the green ones take them away. The soldier sells the gold ones to the princess, and poses as a doctor to "cure" her of her horns.

Ninetta And The Giant

This story was cobbled together from "Molly Whuppie," which you can find in Jacobs' English Fairy Tales and "Maol a Chliobain," which is in J.F Campbells' ''Popular Tales of the West Highlands." The three girls' names come from the Italian story "Grattula-Bedattula." In all three of the original stories, the youngest child was born a girl, and doesn't need to become one. Also, I gave magical properties to the items stolen from the giant.

How Prince Conall Found His Bride

This one is my own invention. I did borrow from I-forget-where the business about the wish not coming true unless the wisher wasn't thinking of the granter. Also, the princess and the coach all in black are found in a few fairy tales: She's always on her way to be sacrificed to some monster or another.

© 2007 by Kaleigh Way