Animal as Bridegroom
[10] Scholar Jack Zipes describes these tale types as a mate selection wherein the human maiden is forced to marry an animal bridegroom as per the insistence of her family or due to her fate.
[11] In another work, Zipes writes that, in these tales, the supernatural husband (in animal form) goes through a process of civilizing himself, whereas to the human spouse it represents an initiatory journey.
[13] Leavy, as well as scholar Wendy Doniger, also stated that the "Animal Bridegroom" is the male counterpart of the "Swan Maiden" - both types referring to a marriage between a human person and a mythical being.
[20] A line of scholarship (e.g., Charles Fillingham Coxwell [de], Boria Sax, James Frazer, Viera Gašparíková [uk]) associates human-animal marriages to ancient totem ancestry.
Folklorist D. L. Ashliman associated this general type with stories wherein the heroine crafts an artificial husband out of raw materials, who becomes a real man and a foreign queen falls in love with him.
[29] On her way to her husband, she asks for the help of the Sun, the Moon and the Wind,[30][31] a sequence that researcher Annamaria Zesi suggests is more typical of Northern European tales.
[37] Furthermore, according to Anna Angelopoulos [fr] and Aigle Broskou, editors of the Greek Folktale Catalogue, alternate gifts for the heroine may be related to weaving (such as a loom or a spindle), or beautiful dresses representing the Sun, the Moon and stars, or the sea, the land and the skies.
[40][b][c] In fact, when he developed his revision of Aarne-Thompson's system, Uther remarked that an "essential" trait of the tale type ATU 425A was the "wife's quest and gifts" and "nights bought".
[48] Richard MacGillivray Dawkins also noted that, in some tales, the mother-in-law, to further humiliate the heroine, betrothes her son to another bride and sends her on errands to get materials for the upcoming wedding.
[51] In some tales, the heroine is forced to carry torches to her husband's marriage cortège[52] - a practice that Zipes and Ernst Tegethoff [de] relate to an ancient Roman custom mentioned by Plautus in his work Casina.
[57] According to Christine Goldberg and Walter Puchner, some variants of this type show as a closing episode "The Magic Flight" sequence, a combination that appears "sporadically in Europe", but "traditionally in Turkey".
[73] In this tale type, the husband disappears and the human wife builds an inn (alternatively, a hostel, bath house, or hospital) to receive strangers.
[74][75][76][77] Greek scholars Anna Angelopoulou and Aigle Broskou remark that the breaking of the taboo by the wife in this tale type involves revealing the husband's identity during a party or a tournament.
[80][81][82] Croatian folklorist Maja Bošković-Stulli reported that, in one version of the Serbo-Croatian epic song titled The Falcon Groom, a princess is locked up in a tower by her father, intending to avoid a prophecy.
When the falcon groom appears at night to rock his child, he sings a lullaby on how to disenchant him: by having a patriarch and twelve monks say prayers until the morning.
[84] Academic Thomas Frederick Crane noted another set of tales which he called "The Animal Children": sometimes, the inhuman/animal suitor is born out of a hasty wish of their parents, or adopted by a human couple in their current beastly form.
[89] According to Jan-Öjvind Swahn [sv]'s monograph, the main tale type (Cupid and Psyche)[e][f][g] is "commonest in Scandinavia and eastern Mediterranean", but also appears in Europe, Asia Minor, Persia, India, Indonesia[h][i] and in Africa ("among the Berbers and Hausa"[j]).
[98] Swahn hypothesized that the original tale of Cupid and Psyche might have developed in the Eastern Mediterranean, an area that encapsulates Southern Italy, Sicily, Greece and Turkey.
[103] Later scholarship corroborates Swahn's assessment: "Animal as Bridegroom" tales with the "buying three nights" episode are very popular in Germanic-, Celtic-, Slavic- and Romance-speaking areas.
[109] Fellow scholars Anna Angelopoulou and Aigle Broskou remark that tale type 425D is popular in both Greece and Turkey, and from the latter spread to Egypt, Iran and Tunisia.
