Calumniated Wife
[3] The mother falsely accused of giving birth to strange children is in common between tale types 706 and 707, where the woman has married the king because she has said she would give birth to marvelous children, as in The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird, Princess Belle-Etoile, Ancilotto, King of Provino, The Wicked Sisters, and The Three Little Birds.
[4] A related theme appears in Aarne-Thompson type 710, where the heroine's children are stolen from her at birth, leading to the slander that she killed them, as in Mary's Child or The Lassie and Her Godmother.
[19][20] Scholar Anna Angelopoulos sees the storyline as a process of humanization for the heroine of the tale, albeit with participation of an evil female character (the king's stepmother).
[27][28] In addition, Anna Angelopoulou and Aigle Broskou, editors of the Greek Folktale Catalogue, list 55 variants found all over Greece.
[29] Scholars Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana remarked that the "complete type [with the episode of the ingestion of the fish] is more common" in Palestine.
[16] When analysing an Egyptian variant, The Falcon's Daughter, scholar Hasan M. El-Shamy saw that "basic parts" of the tale type found resonance with Ancient Egyptian religion: the falcon represented solar deity Horus, and the maiden on the tree Hathor, a deity with solar traits "believed to dwell in a holy sun tree" (the sycamore).
[38] On a similar note, scholar Jack Zipes stated that motifs of Helene de Constantinopla (including incest and bodily harm to the heroine) "stem from Byzantine and Greek tales and medieval legends".
[39] Professor Thomas Leek chronologically situates the birth of the story after the Fourth Crusade and the fragmentation of the then existent Byzantine Empire, and suggests an interaction between eastern and western sources to form the tale.
[47] Researcher Hélène Bernier, in her 1971 book about the tale type, listed 48 variants in France, 30 in Canada (18 in Québec and 12 in the Provinces Maritimes), and 5 in the United States.
[50] Japanese scholar Kunio Yanagita listed some variants of The Girl Without Hands (手なし娘; Tenashi musume) found in Japan.
[51][g] Scholar Seki Keigo reported 33 variants in Japan, and suggested a recent importation of the type into his country, since he found no ancient literary version.
[55] Professor Charles R. Bawden provided the summary of a Mongolian variant titled The Orphan Girl: a man remarries a rich woman, who gives birth to a son and becomes jealous of her step-daughter.
[58] A line of scholarship argues for the existence of the tale type among Arctic peoples (i.e., Inuit), related to a legend about the origin of marine animal life.
[60] As such, remark scholars Anne Duggan and D. L. Ashliman, in many variants of type ATU 706 the heroine is mutilated because she refuses her father's sexual advances.
[61] The female protagonist may lose her hands at the beginning of the story, but regains them due to the divine intervention of a holy character, such as the Virgin Mary,[62] God, or a saint the heroine prays to.
[63] After the handless maiden is found by the prince/king and marries him, she is pregnant with child or with twins, but her wicked mother-in-law writes her son his wife gave birth to a monster or to animals.
[64] According to scholar Denise Paulme, European versions of the tale type deal with the motif of the mother accused of giving birth to a monster; in African variants, the main theme involves the wrongdoings of a jealous co-wife.
[82] In addition, in his study, Swedish scholar Waldemar Liungman [sv] located it "from Italy to Scandinavia", and from Western Europe ("in Brittany, Ireland and Scotland"), to Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.
[40] A primary analysis by Celtic folklorist Alfred Nutt, in the 19th century, established the tale type, in Europe, was distributed "from the Balkan peninsula to Iceland, and from Russia to Catalonia", with the highest number of variants being found in Germany and Italy.
[90] In the second part of the tale, when the girl is found by the prince or king, she cannot utter a single word, either because she has made a vow of silence or because the shock of her experience with her caretaker has left her mute.
[96] The theme has also inspired tales and novellas about women's fidelity and chastity in the Middle Ages, in highly fictionalized accounts of historical personages, such as Bertrada, Charlemagne's mother.
[96] Scholarship locates three traditions for the tale type: (1) an Eastern one, represented by Persian-Muslim sources (e.g., the Tutinama, a 14th century book titled Ocean of the Soul and editions of the One Thousand and One Nights); (2) medieval legends about the Virgin Mary; and (3) a more secularized rendition in the Gesta Romanorum.
A closely related type to ATU 709, "Snow White",[102][103][104] in this tale type, the heroine, who has been living with her brothers, has to find a source of fire with a neighbour, since her fire has been put out, and finds a ghoul (or ogress) that gives her one; later, the ghoul or ogress comes after her, and, although it is killed, one of its nails (or tooth) pierces the heroine's skin and she falls in a death-like state; her body is preserved in a glass case by her companions (her brothers or storks), until she is eventually brought back to life by a prince, who marries her.
[106] French folklorist Paul Delarue drew attention to a series of tales he dubbed La mère qui ne m'a pas porté, mais m'a nourri ("The Mother who did not Bear me, but Nourished me") and classified as type ATU 713 in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index.
[107] Hispanists Julio Camarena and Maxime Chevalier (fr) identified another tale type which they termed type 714, "La Reina Porfiada y su Hijo en la Isla de los Monos": a queen is banished to a desert island; in this island, a monkey lives with the woman and she bears him a hybrid son; the queen is rescued by a ship and the monkey kills its hybrid child.
