The Mad Ogre's Beautiful Daughter

Plot Holes vs. History

One thing that reading history does is get you into the mindset of people who originally told the fairy tales. People who found it plausible that an ogre lived within walking distance, because they had never been that far away.

They may therefore take for granted things that appear as plot holes to us.

Take tales of the type The Girl Helps The Hero Flee or The Maiden in the Tower. Both usually (Rapunzel is an oddball) start with the hero who, for whatever reason, fares far from home.

In the first, he falls into the power of the villain, whether a witch, a wizard, an ogre, or whatever (possibly a married couple), and is set to perform impossible tasks on peril of his life. Fortunately, there is a young woman, whether the daughter of the house, or a servant, or a captive, or simply unexplained. She tells him how to perform them, and if he bungles it by not obeying her -- he often does -- she reminds him what she said.

In the second, he learns of a witch or possibly ogress keeping a similar young woman in a tower and tricks his way in.

Then the stories converge. The hero and the young woman run off together, and the villain chases after, or sends his lackeys after. The young woman protects them. She may generate obstacles by throwing objects (or having the hero throw them), which transform from, say, a comb into a thicket, and the third time, the villain can't get through, or perhaps even dies. She may transform herself and the hero, turning, say, the hero into a rose bush and herself into a rose on it, and twice this deludes the pursuers -- if they are the villain's servants, the villain berates them and reveals the transformation, and if it is the villain, his wife berates him the same way -- and the third time the villain takes over from his servants if necessary, and it ends fatally for him.

Then the hero goes to take her home, but before she reaches it, a curse falls on him (whether the villain's last act or dumb misfortune), and he forgets her, and she must disenchant him before they can marry.

You may wonder what the hero's plot purpose is, besides marrying her at the end. The brunt of the work falls on the young woman. To all appearances, if she did not like her home, she could have just run away at any time. At most, she needs the hero to keep watch for her pursuing father. Now, you can just shrug and attribute it to the tendency of fairy tales to endow heroes -- and heroines -- with undue rewards, achieved mainly by the labor of others, which is indeed commonplace. But a hint at another reason why can be found in Jean, the Soldier, and Eulalie, the Devil's Daughter, where Eulalie makes Jean promise, more than once, that he will take her home with him and marry her.

If you read about early modern France, you may hear of an account where a man married a woman from a nearby village. In his own village, she was referred to as an outsider until the day of her death.

Now imagine if she had tried to settle there without marrying a man of the village.

The mad ogre's beautiful daughter may have to abide at home until the hero arrives because she has nowhere else to go without him.

Indeed, the commonplace post-marriage mother-in-law troubles of fairy tales often fall to the lot of a mysterious bride found in the forest or the like. Perrault's Sleeping Beauty had the additional complication that her mother-in-law had ogre blood, but in the Brothers Grimm's The Girl Without Hands (in the first edition) and in The Six Swans, the mother-in-law just minds. In The One-Handed Girl, her villainous brother takes advantage of their ignorance to slander her to her parents-in-law in her husband's absence -- "She was a witch, and has wedded three husbands, and each husband she has put to death with her arts. Then the people of the town cut off her hand, and turned her into the forest. And what I say is true, for her town is my town also." -- because the heroine can not prove he is lying with the difficulties of returning to that town.

Fortunately, for the heroines who are the daughters of villains, that's a different kind of tale. If the hero forgets her, and she restores his memory, she will not have mother-in-law problems. And she's probably just as glad for that.