The Beastly Bride

INTRODUCTION: SHAPE-SHIFTERS, WERE-CREATURES, AND BEASTLY SUITORS Terri Windling

Who among us hasn’t wondered what it would be like to see the world through an animal’s eyes? To lope across the landscape as a wolf, fly above the trees on the wings of a crow, leap through the waves with a porpoise’s grace, snooze winter away in a bear cub’s den?

Many books for young readers explore the common childhood desire to run wild with the animals, from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are—but even better than dancing with the wolves would be to have the power to become an animal oneself. T. H. White tapped into this fantasy in his Arthurian classic, The Once and Future King. Here, Merlin educates the young Arthur by transforming him into a badger, a fish, an owl, an ant, et cetera; and Arthur must learn to live as they live, gaining knowledge, even wisdom, in the process. This isn’t a standard part of the Arthur myth, but White hasn’t made it up from whole cloth either. He’s drawn on a worldwide body of tales even older than Arthur mythos: tales of shape-shifting, therianthropy (animal-human metamorphosis)[1], and shamanic initiation.

Animal-human transformation stories can be found in sacred texts, myths, epic romances, and folktales all around the globe, divided into three (overlapping) types. First, there are stories of immortal and mortal beings who shape-shift voluntarily, altering their physical form at will for purposes both beneficent and malign. The second kind of story involves characters (usually human) who have their shape changed in voluntarily — generally as the result of a curse, an enchantment, or a punishment from the gods. The third type of story concerns supernatural beings who are a blend of human and animal; they have the physical and mental attributes of both species and belong fully to neither world. Animal bride and bridegroom stories (in which a human man or woman is married to an animal, or an animal-like monster) can fall under any of these three categories: the animal spouse might be a shape-shifter, or an ordinary mortal under a curse, or a creature of mixed blood from the animal, human, and/or divine realms. There are so many beastly brides and bridegrooms in the traditional stories of cultures worldwide that we’ll look at the archetype in more depth a little later on.

Right now let’s start, as a number of mythic traditions do, with the gods, goddesses, and supernatural creatures who have both animal and human characteristics. Ancient Egyptian myth, for example, features several important deities with human bodies and the heads of birds or beasts. Ra, god of the sun, has the head of a hawk; Horus, the sky god, the head of a falcon; Thoth, god of wisdom, the head of a baboon; and Anubis, lord of the afterlife, the head of a dog or jackal. The Great Mother Hathor is part woman and part cow; the pleasure-loving goddess Bastet has the visage of a cat; and, most striking of all, the river god Sobek has the head of a crocodile.

In Greek myth, the goddess Artemis has been pictured with the head of a bear in her aspect of Lady of the Beasts. Young girls in her cult pledged service to the goddess somewhere between the ages of five and ten, wearing bear-skins and living as wild as cubs before entering adulthood and marriage. Pan, the Greek god of the wilderness, has an upper body shaped like a man’s, and the horns and the lower body of a goat. He is the leader of the satyrs, goatlike spirits of the forest famed for their wild and lecherous behavior. Cernunnos, the woodland god of Celtic lore, has the body of a man and the head of a stag; he is an elusive figure of the wilderness, associated with both fertility and death. Aroui, a dog-headed god, is lord of the forest in Yoruban tales, which spread from Africa to Cuba and Brazil along the old slaving routes. The Jaguar God of the Mayans can appear as a man, as a jaguar, or as a cross between the two. He is associated with the dark magic of shamans across Central and South America. In Hindu myth, the trickster god Ganesh has the head of an elephant with a single tusk and a potbellied human body with four hands. Revered as the Remover of Obstacles, he is often pictured riding on a rat. Coyote and Hare, immortal tricksters in tales told across North America, are sometimes animals, sometimes animal-human hybrids, and sometimes disguised as handsome young men. In the latter form, they seduce pretty girls and cause all manner of trouble for human beings.

Among the hundreds of Indian nations spread throughout the United States and Canada there are numerous mythic traditions in which the Animal People were the first inhabitants of Mother Earth. In some of these stories, the Animal People are divine beings shaped much like ordinary animals but possessing magical attributes and the power of human speech. In others, they are shape-shifters who can take on either animal or human form; and in still others, the precise nature of what they are is left deliberately obscure. The Animal People are credited with primary acts of world creation (placing the sun and stars in the sky, creating the mountains and rivers), and have been charged by Creator with the task of teaching human beings how to live a proper life. Similar tales are told by the Ainu of Japan, for whom all animals contain a spark of the kamui, or divine beings, of the mountains and the sea. Kimun Kamui is one of these immortals — a bear god who sends the deer down from the mountains to be hunted and eaten by their human kin. If the slain deer are honored with prayers and songs, their spirits rise and return to the mountains to report that they’ve been hospitably treated. Only then are they willing to be reborn in flesh and to be hunted once again.

In addition to deities who appear primarily in animal-human form, there are also gods and goddesses worldwide whose regular appearance is human (more or less) but who change into animal shape at will. In Norse myth, Odin, chief god of the Æsir, can transform into any bird or beast; and Loki the trickster has shape-shifting powers that he boasts are the equal of Odin’s. Freya, the fiercely independent Norse goddess of love, beauty, and sensuality, shape-shifts into a bird with the aid of a magical cape made of robin feathers. Zeus, the sky god of the Greek pantheon, likes to shape-shift into animal form in his relentless pursuit of delectable young women. and to elude the wrath of his wife, the goddess Hera. Zeus impregnates Leda, a princess of Sparta, while shaped as a great white swan, for example, and abducts the Phoenician princess Europa in the guise of a sacred bull. The fertility goddess Demeter, by contrast, transforms herself into a mare in order to avoid the amorous attentions of Poseidon, the lusty god of the sea — who promptly changes into a stallion and has his way with her all the same. Tefnut, the Egyptian goddess of water and moisture, turns into a lioness when riled. In one famous myth, the goddess argues with Shu, god of the air and dryness, and leaves Egypt for Nubia. The other gods want to persuade her to return, but Tefnut, in animal form, destroys any god or man who approaches. Julunggul, from Australian Aboriginal lore, can appear as both a woman and as a colored snake. She’s the goddess of rebirth and oversees the initiation of boys into manhood. Inari, in the Shinto myths of Japan, is the god of rice, agriculture, and foxes. This god shifts from male to female form, and appears in both fox and human shape. The kitsune (fox spirits) of Japanese folklore are under Inari’s protection. In Ireland, Edain and Flidais are shape-shifting goddesses in some old Celtic tales, turning into a mare and a deer respectively, while in others they are members of the Tuatha Dé Danann (the fairy race of the Emerald Isle) and their shape-shifting is but an illusion (a “glamour”) cast over mortal eyes.

There are numerous stories like Demeter’s, in which physical transformation is prompted by the desire for protection or escape. In Roman myth, a beautiful princess, Cornix, is threatened with rape by Neptune, god of the sea. Her cries are heard by the goddess Minerva, who promptly turns Cornix into a crow — preserving the young woman’s honor, but at a price that is rather steep. In Greek myth, Proteus (son of Poseidon) is both a shape-shifter and a soothsayer — but he will not use the latter talent for mortals unless he is forced to do so. The king of Sparta is advised to grab hold of Proteus and to hang on tightly while the god shape-shifts in an effort to escape — for if he cannot, he’ll be compelled to answer the Spartan king’s questions. (It is from Proteus that we get the word protean, meaning “changeable in shape or form.”)

Proteus’s story is echoed in a classic tale from Welsh mythology: Gwion Bach, servant of the witch Ceridwen, steals three drops of wisdom from the cauldron of knowledge. As he flees the house with the witch in pursuit, he transforms into a hare. Ceridwen transforms into a hound. He turns into a fish, she turns into an otter, and on and on until he’s a grain of wheat, and as a hen she gobbles him up. Nine months later, the witch gives birth to Gwion Bach in infant form. The child grows up to become Taliesin, the greatest of all Welsh bards.

A similar tale is told in the Scottish border ballad “Twa Magicians.” One magician (female) is pursued by another (male) and tries a similar escape. The prize at stake is her virginity, which she is determined to keep. In another famous border ballad, “Tam Lin,” the eponymous hero (a prisoner of the fairies) undergoes a series of protean transformations in the song’s climactic scene: he becomes a lion, a bear, a poisonous snake, a flaming sword, a red-hot band of iron. His lover, Janet, bravely stands her ground and holds on tightly through each metamorphosis, by which means she wins Tam Lin’s mortal soul back from the Faerie realm.

The fairies themselves, in the lore of the British Isles, are often shape-shifters. Indeed, some fairies change shape so often, or so dramatically, that it can be hard to ascertain their true appearance. Monstrous fairy hags can appear as lovely maidens; wizened, lumpen, ragged old fairies can appear as sweet-talking, handsome young men; and sickly fairy changelings can look just like the human babies whose cradles they’ve usurped. When not attempting to pass as mortals, shape-shifting fairies most commonly borrow their appearance from elemental forms (earth, air, fire, water) or from the plant and mineral kingdoms (trees, flowers, mushrooms, standing stones) — but there are, nonetheless, some species of fairies who engage in therianthropic transformation. Kelpies, for example, are malicious river fairies who shift between human and equine form; the hyter sprites, by contrast, are a gentle breed of fairy who shape-shift into various birds. Piskies delight in disguising themselves as hedgehogs or hares of a strange green hue. Pookahs turn into big black horses or dogs to play nasty tricks on mortal men, and selkies are shaped as humans when on dry land and as seals within the sea.

In Japan, we find a number of animal shape-changers among the yōkai, supernatural spirits that range from deadly demons to mischievous tricksters. The tanuki is a kind of shape-shifting raccoon dog, jolly and comical, often pictured with testicles so big that they are slung over his back. The mujina is a nastier, devious fellow whose primary animal form is the badger, but who also takes the form of a faceless ghost to terrify mortals. The bakeneko is a cat shape-shifter; the inugami is a dog spirit; and the most famous of the yōkai are the kitsune, who are shape-shifting foxes. Kitsune are known for disguising themselves as attractive mortals (of either sex), in which form they seduce and even sometimes marry human men and women. In most stories the kitsune are dangerous, and relations with them lead to madness or death — and yet some kitsune, the zenko (good foxes), are said to be wise, intelligent creatures, often poetic and scholarly by nature, who make faithful spouses and are good parents to their half-human, half-animal children.

In Africa, we find shape-shifting lion- and hyena-people with many of the same traits as the kitsune. In a Mbundu tale, a young lioness is dressed and groomed by her lion kin until she resembles a stately, enticing young woman. She marries a wealthy man, intending to kill him as he sleeps and steal his cattle away, but a child witnesses her nightly transformations and blows the whistle. In Native American legends, Deer Woman is a sacred being but also dangerous. In one tale from the Lakota tribe, a young man walking far from camp meets a beautiful maiden in the woods. It is (he thinks) the very woman he’s been courting, who has previously rejected him — but now she’s smiling flirtatiously, looking enchanting in a deerskin robe. As they talk, he playfully loops the braided rope he carries around her waist. whereupon she panics and turns to flee, shifting into her true deer shape. The rope holds her fast. “Let me go!” she cries. “If you do, I’ll give you magical power!” The young man releases her warily, and Deer Woman disappears through the wood. Then he vomits profusely, for he’s sick with the knowledge that if he had carried on with making love, he would have gone mad — like the other young men who’d encountered Deer Woman before him. Afterward, he lives alone and is plagued by fits of wild, deerlike behavior. Deer Woman keeps her promise, however, and gives him a magical ability: his skill with horses and other four-footed creatures is unsurpassed.

The Elk Man is another dangerous, seductive shape-shifter in Native America myth, and “elk medicine” could be used as an aphrodisiac or as a charm to attract the opposite sex. In an Elk Man tale from the Pawnee tribe, a handsome young man has the ability to attract any woman he desires, and soon there are only a few women left with their reputations intact. The other men decide to be rid of him. They persuade his reluctant brother to help them, promising him riches in return. The handsome young man is duly killed, but his sister steals his head and an arm, hiding them in the forest nearby. The young man regenerates himself with these parts, and comes home to his brother’s tepee. He’s not angry with the brother but with the tribe, who have not yet fulfilled their side of the bargain, and he goes to the council tent to demand the wealth that his brother was promised. Fearful now, the council produces many horses, tepees, and fine blankets. The young man takes them home, and the siblings now live in luxury. After that, the narrative concludes, the young man “fascinated all the women so much there was not a single good woman left in that tribe. And then it was clear the young man was really an elk, and it was beyond their power to kill him, and neither could they put a stop to his attraction for women. They finally gave in and said no more. That is all.”

When human beings have the power to shape-shift at will, it is either a sign that they’re not as human as they appear (as in the stories of Deer Woman and Elk Man), or the shifter is a shaman, a healer, or a witch. The brujos and brujas of Mexico, for example, are believed to have the power to transform themselves into dogs or donkeys or turkeys, and the sorcerers of West Africa plague their enemies by assuming the shape of owls. The skin-walkers of the Navajo tribe can take on any animal shape, while the jaguar shamans of the Amazon draw magic from intense engagement with a single patron animal. Students of magic seeking to gain healing, prophetic, or shamanic powers sometimes undergo a ritual metamorphosis into one or more animal shapes in order to gain an understanding and mastery of the natural world. In Arthurian lore, Merlin goes mad after the Battle of Arderydd and flees into the forest, where he lives with the wild boars and the wolves for a long period of time. During this time of madness (a common part of shamanic initiation the world over), he learns to shape-shift into animal form, to understand animal languages, to control the elements, to foretell the future, and to perform other magical arts. The Irish tell a similar tale of Suibhne, a warrior cursed in battle and forced to flee into the wilderness. Shaped as a bird, he wanders for many years in a state of anguish and madness — but by the time he returns home again, transformed back into his own human shape, he has gained certain magical powers and a strong rapport with the beasts of the wood. Other stories in which metamorphosis comes about as the result of a curse have less positive outcomes than Suibhne’s, however, for humans forced into animal shape are often tragic or horrific figures. The werewolves of European folklore, or the were-tigers of India, or the were-jackals of the Middle East rarely regain their humanity; they are outcasts, shunned and feared by other men and cursed by God.

Human shape-shifting in fairy tales is usually involuntary and calamitous, resulting from a stepparent’s curse, a fairy’s punishment, or some other dark enchantment. In “Brother and Sister,” from the tales of the Brothers Grimm, two siblings flee their wicked stepmother through a dark and fearsome forest. The path of escape lies across three streams, and at each crossing the brother stops, intending to drink. Each time his sister warns him away, but the third time he cannot resist. He bends down to the water in the shape of a man and rises again in the shape of a stag. Thereafter, the sister and her brother-stag must live in a lonely hut in the woods. but eventually, with his sister’s help, the young man resumes his true shape. In “The White Deer,” from the French fairy tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, a princess is cursed in infancy by a fairy who had been insulted by the king and queen. Disaster will strike, says the fairy, if the princess sees the sun before her wedding day. Many years later, as she travels to her wedding, a ray of sun penetrates her carriage. The princess turns into a deer, jumps through the window, and disappears. She is then hunted and wounded by her own fiancé as she roams sadly through the forest.

There are many, many fairy tales where the hero or heroine marries an animal: a frog, a snake, a bear, a cat, a rat, or an animal-like monster. Often they’ve been obliged to do so by poverty, honor, or a parent’s fecklessness. Among the thousands of Animal Bride and Bridegroom stories to be found in cultures all around the world, “Beauty and the Beast” is probably the one that most of us know best today. “Beauty and the Beast” is not a folktale — it was written by Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in the eighteenth century — but it draws its plot from older stories in the Animal Bride/ Bridegroom tradition, including the Greek myth of “Cupid and Psyche,” the “loathly lady” stories of medieval literature, and “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” a popular Scandinavian folktale. In the Scandinavian story, the heroine must actually marry her beast (a big white bear) at the beginning of the story. Each night, by dark, he comes to their marriage bed in what seems to be a human form — but his wife may not light the lamp to see if she is married to a man or to a monster. She breaks this taboo, and the white bear disappears from sight. Having grown fond of him by now, she sets off on a journey that takes her “east of the sun, west of the moon,” where she breaks the spell that binds him and restores his humanity.

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.

One of the best-known Animal Bride tales of medieval Europe is the story of Melusine, written down by Gervasius of Tilbury in 1211. A count meets Melusine beside a pond and falls in love with her. She agrees to marry on one condition: he will never see her on a Saturday, which is when she takes her bath. They wed, and she bears the count nine sons — each one deformed in some fashion. Eventually the count breaks the taboo, spies on her bath, and discovers her secret. Every seventh day, his wife is a woman from the waist up and a serpent below. When the count’s trespass comes to light, Melusine transforms into serpent shape and vanishes — appearing thereafter only as a spectral presence to warn of danger. In medieval tellings, the monstrous sons are evidence of Melusine’s demonic nature — but in older versions of her story Melusine is simply a water fairy. The emphasis of the older tales is on the husband’s misdeed in breaking his promise, thereby losing his fairy wife, rather than on his discovery that he is married to a monster.

In the fifteenth century, a wandering alchemist by the name of Paracelsus wrote of magical spirits born from the elements of water, earth, air, and fire, living alongside humankind in a parallel dimension. These spirits were capable of transforming themselves into the shape of men and women, and lacked only immortal souls to make them fully human. A soul could be gained, Paracelsus wrote, through marriage to a human being, and the children of such unions were mortal (but lived unusually long lives). Several noble families, it was believed, descended from knights married to water spirits (called “un-dines” or “melusines”) who had taken on human shape in order to win immortal souls. Paracelsus’s ideas went on to inspire the German Romantics in the nineteenth century — in tales such as Goethe’s “The New Melusine,” E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Golden Pot,” and especially Friederich de la Motte Fouqué’s “Undine,” the tragic story of a water nymph in pursuit of love and a human soul. Fouqué’s famous tale, in turn, inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” along with other literary, dramatic, and musical works of the Victorian era. Many folklorists consider such tales to be part of the Animal Bride tradition, depicting as they do the union of mortal men and creatures of nature.

In the years between Paracelsus and Fouqué, fairy tales came into flower as a literary art of the educated classes, popularized by Italian and French publications that eventually spread across Europe. Animal Bride and Bridegroom tales were part of this enchanting literary movement. Giambattista Basile’s Il Pentamerone, published in Naples in the seventeenth century, included several stories of the type — such as “The Snake,” about a princess who marries a snake, loses him, and then must win him back. Later in the century, the term “fairy tale” (conte de fées) was coined by the writers of the Paris salons, who drew inspiration for their tales from folklore, myth, medieval romance, and prior works by Italian writers. A number of the contes were by women who used the metaphoric language of fairy tales to critique the social systems of their day while avoiding the notice of the court censors. In particular they railed against a marriage system in which women had few legal rights: no right to choose their own husband, no right to refuse the marriage bed, no right to control their own property, and no right of divorce. Often the brides were barely out of puberty and given to men who were decades older. Unsatisfactory wives could find themselves banished to a convent or locked up in a mental institution. The fairy-tale writers of the French salons were sharply critical of such practices, promoting the idea of love, fidelity, and civilité between the sexes. Their Animal Bridegroom stories reflected the fears common to women of their time and class, who did not know if they’d find a beast or a lover in their marriage bed. Madame d’Aulnoy, for instance, one of the leading writers of the contes, had been married off at age fifteen to an abusive baron thirty years her senior. (She rid herself of him after a series of adventures as wild as any fairy story.) By contrast, the lovers in d’Aulnoy’s tales are well matched in age and temperament; they enjoy books, music, intellectual pursuits, good conversation, and each other’s company. D’Aulnoy penned several Animal Bride and Bridegroom tales that are still widely read and loved today, including “The Green Snake,” “The White Cat,” “The White Deer,” and the tragic tale of “The Royal Ram.”

Madame de Villeneuve, author of “Beauty and the Beast,” was part of the “second wave” of French fairy tales in the following century, but arranged marriages were still the norm when she sat down to write her classic story. The original version is over one hundred pages long and is somewhat different from the story we know now. As the narrative begins, Beauty’s destiny lies entirely in the hands of others, and she can do naught but obey when her father hands her over to the Beast. The Beast is a truly fearsome figure, not a gentle soul disguised by fur; he is a creature lost to the human world that had once been his by birthright. The emphasis of the tale is on the Beast’s slow metamorphosis as he finds his way back to the human sphere. He is a genuine monster, eventually reclaimed by civilité and magic.

Sixteen years later, Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, a French woman working as a governess in England, shortened and revised Madame de Villeneuve’s story; she then published her version, under the same title, in an English magazine for young women. Tailoring the story for this audience, Le Prince de Beaumont toned down its sensual imagery and its implicit critique of forced marriages. She also pared away much unnecessary fat — the twisting subplots beloved by Madame de Villeneuve — ending up with a tale that was less adult and subversive, but also more direct and memorable. In Le Prince de Beaumont’s version (and subsequent retellings) the story becomes a didactic one. The emphasis shifts from the transformation of the Beast to the transformation of the heroine, who must learn to see beyond appearances. She must recognize the Beast as a good man before he regains his humanity. With this shift, we see the story alter from one of social critique and rebellion to one of moral edification. Subsequent retellings picked up this theme, aiming at younger and younger readers, as fairy tales slowly moved from adult salons to children’s nurseries. By the nineteenth century, the Beast’s monstrous shape is only a kind of costume that he wears — he poses no genuine danger or sexual threat to Beauty in the children’s version of the tale.

In 1946, however, Beauty and her beast started to make their way out of the nursery again in Jean Cocteau’s remarkable film version, La Belle et la Bête. Here, the Beast literally smolders with the force of his sexuality, and Beauty’s adventure can be read as a metaphor for her sexual awakening. It is a motif common to a number of Animal Bride and Bridegroom tales from the mid-twentieth century onward, as an adult fairy-tale revival brought classic stories back to mature readers. One of the leaders of this revival was Angela Carter, whose adult fairy-tale collection, The Bloody Chamber(1979), contained two powerful, sensual riffs on the Animal Bridegroom theme: “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride.” With the works of Carter and other writers of the revival (A. S. Byatt, Tanith Lee, Robert Coover, Carol Ann Duffy, etc.), we find that we have come back to a beginning. Contemporary writers are using animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation. just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many, many centuries past.

One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he’s exotic, almost appealing. Where once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it’s been tamed and cultivated (or set aside and preserved); the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives “the wild” a different kind of power; it’s something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods — they come from a place we’d almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, and limitless. Likewise, tales of Beastly Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within each of us — and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us — cat and mouse and coyote and owl — and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live. Those lines, however, are drawn in sand; they shift over time; and the stories are always changing. Once upon a time a white bear knocked at the door. Today Edward Scissorhands stands on the porch. Tomorrow? There will still be Beasts. And there will still be those who transform them with love.