The Lost Fairy Tales
When a story starts with “Once upon a time,” we know we’re about to hear a fairy tale, and pesos to pollos, the tale will involve a beautiful heroine and a villain, especially an ugly one. It will also have a moral and a happy ending.
In 1697, Frenchman Charles Perrault published a collection of eight stories in a thin book
He called it Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals: Mother Goose’s Tales. The name Mother Goose was derived from Contes de Ma Mére L’oye, a French folk expression that loosely translates as “old wives’ tales.”
The stories had never been published before
Perrault’s book was significant because it was the first time anyone had collected and printed stories that for centuries had been passed down from generation to generation solely by word of mouth. When stories are transmitted this way, it is inevitable that some parts are removed in the retelling and others are added. Over time, this results in the evolution of different versions. For example,
- Are you familiar with the Sleeping Beauty version with the chariot of fire, drawn by dragons?
- Did you know that a wandering king impregnated Sleeping Beauty and she gave birth to twins while unconscious?
- Has anyone told you how one of the earliest versions of Little Red Riding Hood has Red taking off her clothes and getting in bed with the wolf?
- Did you know that Cinderella went to two balls, not just one, and lost her slipper at the second?
- How about Puss, of Puss in Boots, who was not a real cat, but a fairy disguised as a cat?
Those four stories are all in the first book of fairy tales
Most of us know Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a collection that was compiled by the Brothers Grimm 100 years after Perrault’s book was first published. Puss in Boots is nowhere near as well known as those big three.
Most fairy tales go back much farther than the 17th Century European versions we know from childhood
- What is considered by some to be the earliest “Cinderella” story has an eagle snatching one of a young girl’s sandals while she was bathing. The eagle flew over a king and dropped the sandal into his lap. Taken by the shape of the shoe, the king sent his men to find the woman who wore the sandal and bring her to him.
- In another version, “Cinderella” has an ugly disfiguring growth on her face until a fairy makes her beautiful by treating the growth with Aphrodite’s roses.
- An Italian version has a governess instruct “Cinderella” to kill her wicked stepmother, which she does by slamming a heavy trunk lid down on her stepmother’s head.
Four more Old Wives’ Tales
Half of the eight stories Perrault included in his Mother Goose went on to still be well-known centuries later. The other four survive mostly in chat rooms and among scholarly nitpickers. They’re too long to print in their entirely, so I’ve tried to capture their gists and hit a few high spots, too. Here they are, the long-lost Lost Fairy Tales.
Blue Beard
A man of enormous wealth had a blue beard. All the women ran away from him because the blue beard was so ugly and because he had been married to six women, each of whom had suddenly disappeared. To try and win favor with women, he invited many of them to spend a week at his country estate where he dazzled them with his wealth in every way possible. Everything was so perfect that one of the young women decided she liked the life of the very rich enough that she could live with the ugly blue beard and the vanished wives, so she married him.
When Blue Beard had to go away on business, he left a handful of keys with his wife for safekeeping. One key opened all his apartments, other keys opened his strongbox, his wine cellar, a vault full of silver and gold, and another filled with jewels. He told his wife to use all the keys but one to enjoy herself and have parties for her friends. The one key he forbade her to use was to a locked closet. She looked anyway and was so astonished to find the closet filled with the six bodies of his earlier wives that she dropped the key in a pool of blood.
When she returned the keys to Blue Beard, he saw the blood and knew immediately that his wife had disobeyed, so he told her she must go back to the closet and join his other six wives. Just as he was about to behead her, her brothers burst in and killed him with their swords.
Little Thumb
A woodcutter and his wife had seven sons. The youngest was so tiny that they named him Little Thumb. The parents were so poor that they abandoned the seven boys in the woods rather than see them starve.
The boys came upon a house in the forest with a candle in the window. A good woman, in spite of being married to an ogre, took them in. In the night, the ogre killed all seven of the boys. In the morning, the ogre’s wife discovered he had mistakenly slit the throats of their seven daughters and the seven boys had escaped.
Little Thumb scooped up the ogre’s money and took it home to his father and mother, who received him with great joy.
The Fairies
A widow had two daughters The gentle and sweet one helped an old lady get a drink at the town’s well. Back home, she told her mother that the old lady turned out to be a fairy who granted that with every word I speak, a precious stone will fall from my mouth. As the gentle and sweet daughter spoke those words, hundreds of diamonds cascaded from her lips.
Her cruel and mean sister ran to the spring to cash in on this deal. She saw a young girl, not the old lady she was expecting to see, and treated her impolitely. The young girl was really the old lady her sister had been kind to. The fairy decreed that for her lack of courtesy, every time the cruel and mean daughter spoke, snakes and toads would fall out of her mouth.
Soon after, the gentle and sweet daughter met a prince who fell in love with her — and the dowry that fell from her mouth every time she spoke. Knowing she would be a good wife, the prince married her.
Ricky of the Tuft
A queen had an astonishingly ugly baby with a little tuft of hair on his head. The young prince was more hideous-looking than you can imagine, but with brains given to him by a fairy at his birth. Along with those brains, the fairy gave him the power to see that the woman he loved would get the same level of intelligence.
Some years later in a nearby kingdom were two sisters. The first was more beautiful than the dawn, but as ignorant as she was beautiful. The second daughter was extremely ugly but very intelligent and blessed with the power to make beautiful anyone who pleased her. One day the beautiful but dumb girl met the repulsive-looking but brilliant Ricky the Tuft. She made him handsome, he made her wise, and they lived happily ever after.
This article is also an exercise in imagination
Most of us have very clear pictures in our heads about how Beauty, Red, Cindy, and Puss look because of the images we’ve seen in storybooks, Disney films, on TV, and online. But when it comes to Blue Beard, Little Thumb, The Fairies, and Ricky of the Tuft, we are on our own. How did you envision the characters in each of these Lost Fairy Tales? What did they look like, what were they wearing, how were they speaking? How did you envision the keys to the closet and what was inside? Did you see what the ogre did to his seven daughters? How about the diamonds, snakes, and toads pouring from the sister’s mouths? How ugly was your astonishingly ugly baby?
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The author is a researcher, writer, teacher, and storyteller who looks at old things in new ways, sees the commonplace in greater detail, and explains complex subject matter in simple, conversational language. More than 400 of his articles are posted on this site.
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