Animal as Bridegroom stories are among the most popular and compelling of all folk tales. In the modern world, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast has been named the greatest animated film of all time by reviewers. In the ancient world, our ancestors told stories about women and men who married frogs, tigers, hyenas, monkeys, dogs, bears and a host of other animals, from Japan to Ghana to Scotland.

Animal bridegroom stories are a fascinating both for their psychological depth and the drama they offer. Just as compelling is the unique shapes the archetypal story-shapes take in disparate cultures and climates, from predatory hyena husbands to melancholic seal brides.

In this post, we’ll explore the reasons for the ubiquity of animal as bridegroom stories and look at the most common types of story, along with some examples of each.

The Lure of the Beast

Why are people fascinated by the idea of marrying animals?

Our reasons for telling these tales are sure to have varied across the world and throughout the ages.

In one sense, we tell stories about marrying animals because animals are the perfect vehicle for exploring what it is to be human. As Claude Levi Strauss put it,

‘Animals are good to think with’

People have always found it easier, safer, entertaining and psychologically stimulating to portray the joys and struggles of life through a language of animals, monsters and magic. Stories for young children are invariably about animals, while the highest-grossing adult movies and TV shows today are nearly all fantasies: Avatar, The Avengers, Game of Thrones.

We tell stories about animal companions who befriend us. We tell stories about animals raised by people and about people who live among wild animals. Stories allow us to explore all of life’s trials and joys, and they often do so through the prism of animals. It therefore makes perfect sense that we should explore romantic relationships through tales of marriage to animals.

A boy lives as an animal in The Jungle Book (2016)

There are also specific cultural reasons for the telling of these tales. Stories of the beauty and the beast type were likely told to help young women prepare for an arranged marriage to a man whom they did not know and to whose temper they would be subject.

‘Quest for a missing husband’ stories (hereafter referred to as quest stories) may have helped comfort abandoned spouses with the idea that their partner had been put under a spell and lured away from them.

Stories in which the protagonist marries a fairy bride or groom, then comes home to find that a hundred years have passed and everyone they know is dead, may reflect the difficulty of reintegrating to one’s own community after a failed marriage in a new community.

Underneath all this, at the root of the animal groom archetype, is the marriage of human and animal in each of us.

Every human – male and female, adult and child – has to wrestle each day with the conflict between their animal instincts and their cultural conditioning. This is as true of a Tokyo board room as it was of a hunter-gatherer camp. We repress our desires for food, for comfort, for pleasure and for sex.

Meanwhile, we are irresistibly drawn to voices that speak what we are afraid to speak, and to characters who do what we are afraid to do; from Disney’s Beast to Borat to Walter White. The animal as bridegroom story, particularly in its beauty and the beast form, is the quintessential expression of this. We experience the naked fear of the civilised human before the rage of the beast, while revelling in the beast’s hypnotic pull.

We fantasise about letting go of our cultural conditioning and submitting fully to the animal within us.

Lycaeon is turned into a wolf after sacrificing a child on the altar of Zeus

Locked Up Together: Beauty & The Beast Stories

Though beauty and the beast-type stories are just one variant of the animal groom story, they have eclipsed the other variants in the popular imagination, thanks to literary retellings that were taken up by Disney.

The literary tale that gave us the story we have today was written in France by Madame Beaumont and published in 1756 in Magasin Des Enfants.

Beaumont’s version was inspired by a baroque literary version written by the novelist Gabrielle Suzanne De-Villeneuve.

Beaumont simplified Villeneuve’s story, paring it down to a form that could be enjoyed by children, and Andrew Lang rewrote the story again for The Blue Fairy Book in 1889.

An illustration by Walter Crane of Beaumont’s story

Beaumont’s ‘classic’ version of the beauty and the beast story pairs a gentle, kind girl, Beauty, with a beast who lives in a magnificent castle, after the beast extracts a promise from Beauty’s father to give his daughter to the beast. Beauty gets to know the beast and sees that he is perhaps not so beastly after all, while at night she dreams of a handsome prince locked away somewhere in the castle. Beauty becomes convinced that the beast has imprisoned the prince and seeks to find him and free him.

When Beauty goes home to visit her family, they are envious of her finery and persuade her to stay away from the beast. She eventually returns to the castle and finds him sick and dying. They profess their love to one another, the curse is lifted and we learn that the beats is the prince He was cursed by a witch to live in beast form until he found true love.

The story reflected the values of the time: that girls should be virtuous, kind, gentle and willing to sacrifice their own happiness for the good of others. It also reflected the belief that fairy tales were no more than useful vehicles for the transmission of morals; a horribly reductive idea that still abounds today.

This story and its cousins draw their power from tensions between opposites; between gentle Beauty and her ferocious husband; between the pull and repulsion we feel towards the beast; between the magnificence of the castle and the castle as a prison. There is also, of course, the timeless appeal of the cruel, bad-tempered man with the dashing prince hidden inside him.

Right down at the core of the story is the dichotomy of aggression and tenderness which we experience in sex and in relationships.

It is no accident that we say someone searching for a mate is ‘on the prowl’.

Stories that play with dynamic are perennially popular, and include Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey.

A really interesting contemporary take on the beauty/beast dynamic is Ex Machina, in which a young man is put together with a beautiful female android. He falls in love with her and begins to hope that love can somehow break the spell of her artificial nature and make her a real person.

This spin on the tale-as-old-as-time fits our era, in which artificial intelligence has taken the place of wild animals in our imagination, representing danger and the unknown.

Alicia Vikender is the ‘beast’ in Alex Garland’s *Ex Machina*

Cruel Beauty

The other best-known traditional story within this category is The Frog Prince, the first story in the Grimms’ collection.

A princess agrees to marry a frog after he retrieves her ball which she drops down his well. The frog pesters the princess, who never had any intention of honouring her promise, until she throws him against a wall after he asks to share her bed. The frog reveals himself to be a prince who was cursed by a witch.

It’s a powerful and magnetic story, yet an unpalatable one to modern tastes.

We have been too well-trained to expect an easily digestibly moral to our stories, and are plagued by the insipid idea that stories are merely manuals of how to behave.

Thus we have the modern retellings in which a kiss from the princess restores the frog to prince-hood. It doesn’t make sense to us that the princess’ cruel act should be ‘rewarded’ with the prize of the prince.

Folk tales aren’t as simple as that. The key to the frog’s transformation and the breaking of the curse was an act of passion; even a violent one.

Christian Grey, the billionaire businessman beast from *50 Shades of Grey*

Passion’s Power

That a spell can be broken by an act of passion, be it violence or love, is an old idea and a psychologically astute one.

We see from initiation ceremonies worldwide that extremities of emotion are necessary to break apart a person’s mental state and forge a new one. Hence initiates into adulthood hunt lions, undergo mutilation, ingest visionary plants or fast in isolation.

The important thing is the extremity of the initiate’s emotional state, not the moral quality of the feeling aroused in them.

Through extremity of emotion, the mind is broken open. We see this reflected in the breaking of the spell through an act of passion.

Other classic folk tales of this type include:

Gawain & Lady Ragnell (English/Cornish)
The Daughter of King Under Wave (Irish/Scottish)
The Frog Princess (Russian)
The Pig King (Italian)
The Bear Husband (Native American)
The Well At World’s End (Scottish)

Dame Ragnell, the beast-turns-belle of Arthurian lore

Stolen Skins & Robber Grooms

Another popular variant of the animal groom story is the stolen skin story. In these stories, a man comes across a woman in nature who has shed her animal skin temporarily. He falls in love with her, steals her skin and abducts her, making her his wife.

Interestingly, this violent abduction seems to be forgiven in most instances (making the story unpopular with many modern readers). The woman becomes a wife and mother, often growing to love the man deeply, who is usually portrayed as being a decent person despite the abduction. However, the woman inevitable finds her skin and returns to her home environment, abandoning her husband and children.

As with beauty and the beast stories, this story exerts a strong pull on the modern imagination as well the ancient. It has been retold by modern mythologists including Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Sharon Blackie, been made into a wonderful film, Song of The Sea, and inspired novels such as Sealskin by Su Bristow. Traditional stories of this type are found worldwide, with the best-known examples being selkie or seal-woman stories from Scotland, Ireland and the Arctic regions.

Read my article on selkie lore here.

As with beauty and the beast stories, stolen skin stories illustrate a battle – or perhaps a dance – between our human and animal natures. The human and animal, or husband and seal-woman, to use that example, are put together in a house and manage to find an accord for a time. Eventually, though, the seal-woman is presented with a chance to reclaim her skin and break free. She takes it.

Estes sees this as a dialogue between the ego and the soul. The ego is drawn towards the beauty and mystery of the soul, yet the only way it can relate to it is to grab it and force it into a container which is too small for such a wild and unruly being.

Each of us has been the seal wife. We have all woken up one day to find ourselves living a life which does not suit us, with a partner who does not suit us, in a job which horrifies our wild animal self. As Estes puts it,

‘Very few women reach the age of majority with more than a few tufts of the original pelt intact’
C. P. Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves

The story can remind us of the need to return to the sea periodically, to the place or the practice that invigorates our soul, before returning to whatever duties bind us.

Fairy Brides

Another comparable tale type is the fairy bride story.

In these stories, the hero (usually a man) leaves his homeland after meeting an animal or otherworldly being who invites him to live as her husband in her faraway home.

After a period of time spent under the sea or on a magical island, the husband decides that he would like to visit his home. Against his wife’s wishes, he returns home, only to find that tens or hundreds of years have passed. His home is gone, everyone he knows is long dead and he instantly becomes a withered old man. He longs to return to his bride, but the way is shut.

It’s interesting to compare the fairy bride story with the stolen skin story. Rather than the animal coming to live in the human environment, the human goes to live in the animal environment. In Celtic folklore, the warrior poet Ossian goes to live on Tir Na Nog, Land Of The Ever Young. In Japanese folklore, Urushima Taro rescues a turtle and ends up living as her husband beneath the sea. In Japanese folklore, a man meets an amorous kitsune (fox spirit) and becomes a fox himself.

The kitsune is a nine-tailed fox spirit from Japanese folklore

How does the human fare in the animal realm? The ego in the soul realm? The stories vary, but for one reason or another, he tires of it and longs for home.

In the Irish story, Ossian grows bored of a life in which every hunt is successful, every day is bright and sunny, no feasts ever turn into fights.

I’m reminded of a man I met who’d recently gone on a ten day silent meditation retreat. He loved it. The very night it ended, he went out to a bar, got blind drunk and picked a fight. The ego can only handle so much soul before craving the reassurance of familiar ground.

Yet soon after heading home, it begins longing for the soul again.

Immersion in the soul changes the ego for good.

Rambo tells the tale of a man who cannot return from the otherworld he experienced in combat, leading him to recreate that world in this one, with disastrous results.

The Quest for the Missing Husband

Lurking in the shadow of beauty and the beast is another animal groom tale type; the quest for the missing husband. Sadly, this story hasn’t found its way into the contemporary imagination, despite or maybe because of its richness. It is stranger than beauty and the beast, more oblique and more resistant to easy interpretation.

In these stories, the (usually female) protagonist marries a mysterious man who turns out be a man only half of the time; the rest of the time, he is an animal. The wife betrays her husband’s trust in order to discover the truth about his animal nature, and he flees from her. She goes on a quest to find him and bring him home.

There is a Greek version of this story, Eros & Psyche, which has inspired artists and poets throughout the ages and in particular during the Renaissance; Van Dyck’s painting hangs in Buckingham Palace, Legros’ in the Tate Gallery. In this story, Venus becomes jealous of the beauty of a mortal girl called Psyche, and instructs her son Eros (Cupid) to make her fall in love with a monster. Eros falls in love with Psyche himself and he takes her to a fabulous palace, where he visits her only at night. After she attempts to see him, she loses him and has to undergo tasks set by Venus in order to win her back.

More popular among storytellers today is the story known as East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon. In this Scandinavian tale, a girl marries a bear, loses him and sets out to find him, eventually discovering that he is to marry a troll queen. The story has been made into a number of picture books and was almost made into a film before the production lost funding. The story may have inspired the image of the girl riding a bear which is now familiar to us from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

My favourite story of this kind is The Crow’s Wife from Scottish folklore (retold in my book Scottish Myths & Legends). In this story, a girl flies away on the back a crow to his castle among the mountains. After their three children are abducted, he flees and she sets off to find him. Let’s look at this tale more closely.

The Crow’s Wife

The story opens with three sisters washing clothes by the river. A hoodie crow comes along and asks each of them if she will be his wife. The older two sisters are revolted, but the youngest asks him how he will treat her and if he will always be a hoodie. Satisfied with his answers, she leaves on his back.

We can see here that she has the kind of spirit that won’t be satisfied with the ordinary, and eyes which see beyond what is in front of her. This is the call to adventure; the beginning of a hero quest (I’m using the word ‘hero’ without referring to a specific gender here).

The Crow’s Wife, or The Tale of the Hoodie, from Scottish folklore

The girl arrives at her husband’s feathered fortress and lives a life of splendour there. Each night, he become a hoodie crow and flies out into the darkness; by day he is a man. The girl becomes pregnant, yet on the first night after her son is born, she hears music that puts her to sleep. She wakes to find her son gone.

This happens three times. After the third time, her husband insists that they leave their home. When his wife tells her she has forgotten her comb, their carriage becomes a pile of sticks, and he becomes a crow before flying away.

‘I have forgotten my comb,’ she said. ‘Can we go back, or—’
Her husband cried out as if in pain. The carriage became a withered stick of wood; the horses disappeared. She fell to the ground, landing hard, as her husband became a hoodie crow again. He flew around her three times, cawing furiously, and flew away.
‘Come back!’ she called as her husband became a dot in the sky. He didn’t come back. He grew smaller and smaller until he vanished into the distance.
‘He’ll come back to me,’ she told herself. ‘He’ll come back.’
But she knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t coming back.
Daniel Allison, Scottish Myths & Legends

The Red, The Black, The White

Hero quests are sometimes described as having three stages; red, black and white. These colours often crop up together in stories to signify the presence of powerful mythic forces, such as in Deirdre of the Sorrows, where the heroine sees a crow on white snow with blood dripping from its beak.

The Red

Here, the girl is in the red. She has gone out into the world on the back of a crow. She has a handsome, elegant and animalistic husband, with whom she lives a life of splendour. This is red energy: pumping blood, passion, energy, boldness.

A character living in a red time is likely having a good time, and may well feel they’ve made it. Yet they are incomplete. In this case, there is a lack of attention and wakefulness in the girl. The comb is a powerful symbol of feminine energy; to forget it is to lose her power, just as she has lost her children. Perhaps her life has been too luxurious; her farming hands have grown soft while her husband pampers her.

This loss of her own power and her own creations leads to the loss of her husband (a mirror of her animal nature), and a descent into the black.

Sarah enters the underworld in *Labyrinth*

The Black

The black is the underworld; the soul- realm; the place we go to when everything we loved has been taken from us. Within the darkness of the underworld, we begin to discover who we really are.

Our heroine shows who she is. She finds a walking stick and sets off into the wild lands, on the trail of her husband. He lures her on, always in the distance ahead of her. The going is tough, especially for one who has just given birth, but she keeps on going. Every night, for three nights, she stays in a different little house, each of which is occupied by a woman and a small boy. On the final night, she awakens and senses her husband beside her, grabs at him and finds herself holding a black feather. He has slipped a ring onto her finger.

Why this chase? Is he under an enchantment or does he have this all planned out? Either. Both. It’s irrelevant.

We’re in the deep psyche now; logic struggles to gain solid footing.

We can see that the crow is putting his wife through a process which tests her resolve while making her stronger and tougher. She is learning to give everything she has in the pursuit of her desire. She is become a whooshing arrow of intent.

She is learning to navigate the underworld.

The woman of the third house tells the girl that her husband has crossed the hill of poison. To cross it, she must forge four horseshoes. The girl goes away and spends the winter learning blacksmithing in order to forge her shoes. The smith’s forge is another powerful mythic symbol, where the elemental magic of transforming one thing into another takes place. As she works in the forge, so she is reforged.

She crosses the hill, becoming animalistic herself as she runs on four feet. She finds her husband, who is all set to marry the daughter of the lord of that land. She uses trickery to find her her way into the wedding and to her husband’s side.

The White

The two kiss and go home together. They gather their sons on the way home, for they were the three boys in the three houses.

Reunited with her husband, the girl enters the white. She has her children again, and has attained wholeness in herself by navigating and emerging from the underworld. That wholeness, the unity of ego and soul, of the human and animal within her, is expressed in her marriage to her hoodie husband.

Marrying the Animal

What can we take from these stories?

There’s no one-size-fits-all lesson here. But there is an invitation to examine our own, individual relationship to our animal nature. Are we too domesticated? Not domesticated enough? Do we need some time beneath the sea with a fairy lover, or is it time to go home before it’s too late?

One way to examine your place in the story is to say, ‘When was I?”

when was my animal skin stolen from me?
when did I quest after a missing part of myself?

Journal on this.

Another way is to write a letter or poem from one character to another, at any point in one of the above stories. The story becomes a landscape in which we can speak the language of our own soul.

Explore More Folklore

Explore my blog to read more articles on folklore, with a focus on Celtic Mythology.

Listen to my podcast, House of Legends, to hear myths and legends told by myself and other professional oral storytellers.

Do you have a favourite animal as bridegroom story? Let me know.

Daniel Allison is a Scottish oral storyteller and the author of the USA Today bestseller Scottish Myths & Legends. He writes retellings of Celtic myths and legends that are true to the tradition and as exciting as the best contemporary fiction.

Animal As Bridegroom: The Folklore of Beauties and Beasts

The Lure of the Beast

Locked Up Together: Beauty & The Beast Stories

Cruel Beauty

Passion’s Power

That a spell can be broken by an act of passion, be it violence or love, is an old idea and a psychologically astute one.

Gawain & Lady Ragnell (English/Cornish)

The Daughter of King Under Wave (Irish/Scottish)

The Frog Princess (Russian)

The Pig King (Italian)

The Bear Husband (Native American)

The Well At World’s End (Scottish)