The Big Black Bull of Hollow Tree

Told by Alice Lannon to Martin Lovelace and Barbara Rieti, June 26, 1999, in Southeast Placentia. (MUNFLA 2019-029)

ATU 425A The Animal as Bridegroom

AT 425A The Monster (Animal) as Bridegroom (Cupid and Psyche)

AT 425B The Disenchanted Husband: The Witch’s Tasks

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Alice’s tale is a version of The Animal as Bridegroom (ATU 425A), a subtype of The Search for the Lost Husband (ATU 425). This cluster of themes about unlikely romances, and marriages opposed by the husband’s mother, has been recorded in oral tradition globally since at least 100 CE when Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche” appeared in his Metamorphoses. He appropriated and adapted it from contemporary oral stories in Greece and beyond (Scobie 1983, 39; Anderson 2014, 61–71). In Apuleius, Psyche falls in love with and becomes pregnant by Cupid, but his mother, Venus, refuses to accept her as daughter-in-law. Thus appear the fundamental oppositions Bengt Holbek discerns in the magic tale: the “Low Young Female” (the mortal, Psyche) finds her “High Young Male” (the god, Cupid), but to secure her right to him must overcome opposition from the “High Old Female” (the goddess, Venus) (1987, 47–49). “Cupid and Psyche” addresses the disruption marriage could bring to a family in patriarchal and patrilocal societies, wherein a new husband’s mother feared being replaced, in his affection and as household ruler, by the young bride.

Alan Dundes argued that female-centered magic tales are very much about the conflict between mothers and the young women their sons bring home as brides. In patrilocal cultures, when the new bride moves to her husband’s parents’ residence “she becomes the virtual slave of her mother-in-law” (2006, 71). Gail Kligman memorably described Romanian peasant weddings and the patriarchal authority laid bare in them as brides are ritually transferred, like plump hens in the symbolism of traditional verses, from their mothers to their mothers-in-law. Women rule the household, but “while assuring the continuation of the family, the presence of a bride simultaneously threatens the solidarity of the corporate household, and the authority of the mother-in-law” (1988, 108). This vexed relationship also underlies “Cupid and Psyche.” As Susan L. Haskins observes, Venus “feels her feminine power as child-bearer within the family will be threatened by having to acknowledge a grown son and accept a younger, fecund female into the family as a rival for her place” (2014, 259–60).

Jan-Öjvind Swahn surveyed approximately 1,100 nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions of The Search for the Lost Husband recorded from oral tradition. The husband as a bull, as in Alice’s version, marks Irish or British provenance; elsewhere he may be a bear, dog, snake, pig, or wolf, or just a “beast” or a “monster” (1955, 26, 230). Swahn states that the tale “apparently developed almost exclusively in a female milieu” and was “cherished by female story-tellers;” few men told it (437–38); “the female partner is usually the main character” (20), and narration follows her quest and its trials more than the plight of the enchanted husband.

Linda Dégh’s “How Do Storytellers Interpret the Snakeprince Tale?” (1995a), based on forty oral versions from non- or semi-literate Hungarian villagers recorded between 1822 and the 1980s, sees the Hungarian ecotype reflecting mothers’ traditional roles in arranging marriages for their sons. Unusually, given Swahn’s assertion about the gender distribution of tellers, only seven of the forty tales in Dégh’s sample were told by women. Dégh sees these versions as being about the traditional Hungarian peasant worldview. Men are promiscuous, and male narrators take vicarious pleasure in the high life enjoyed by the husband with his wealthy second wife; women are submissive, and female tellers stress the wife’s degradation in status and guilt for having burned the snakeskin and precipitating his abandoning her.

Dégh’s title’s promise to reveal how narrators themselves have thought about the tale does not deliver direct testimonies—unsurprisingly, since narrators tell stories rather than dispassionately evaluating their meaning. Alice, when quizzed by Martin, said “we just took ’em as stories . . . I don’t think we ever tried to find, you know, what was behind it” (1999). The English folklorist Mabel Peacock (b. 1856) heard the story as a child from a “rough, illiterate, farmhouse servant,” a “girl,” born at Brigg, Lincolnshire. Peacock recalled the guarded storytelling style: “She told the tale with an air of great mystery, as something particularly extraordinary and uncanny, cautioning me never to ‘let on’ that I was acquainted with it, which she would scarcely have thought of doing had one of our commonplace traditions of boggard, ghost, or wizard been in question” (1893, 322).

Why such caution? Peacock guessed that the servant had heard it from one of “the colony of Irish labouring people at Brigg,” where her family lived at Bottesford Manor until 1892 (1893, 322). Was the teller ashamed that she had told her master’s daughter a tale that had come to her from “low company”? Peacock’s father, Edward, a member of the Society of Antiquaries, would probably have been very interested in it. Or did the “rough” teller fear she would be blamed for speaking to young Mabel of sexual relations and marital problems through this tale of a bull/man who forbade his bride to speak of his secret to her mother and sisters? “We shall have the blackest of trouble if you ever tell what you know of me,” he says (324).

Alice’s character Kitty is free-spirited and heedless of patriarchal authority. As Swahn puts it, “The heroine herself . . . brings about her relationship with the enchanted husband” (1955, 25). Swahn finds the wishing chair a markedly Celtic, Irish, and British motif (221). Alice treats the ideas of magical furniture, and magical husbands, with amusement. Kitty leads her elder sisters into mischief by finding the way to the wishing chair. And what, in this tale world, would any girl wish for but a husband? It’s worth remembering that like many storytellers, Alice saw aspects of herself and her teenage experience in her heroine: “The two older girls, Maria and Dinah, were very sedate and ladylike but Kitty was a tomboy.” Martin asked her if she was “a little bit like Kitty.” She replied: “I was a tomboy! [all laugh] I used to ride horses and ride bicycles and climb fences and do what the boys were . . . and up in the hills cutting the bows and I could make the arrows as good as anyone with Dad’s plane . . . I was into that! That’s why I’m not much good in like needlework . . . I didn’t enjoy that. I enjoyed whatever the boys were doing, out in the boats and going trouting and whatever they were at that’s what I wanted to be” (2001).

When Alice has Kitty flippantly wish for the Big Black Bull as a husband, her character mocks her elder sisters’ conventional marriage choices. She had real-life models in mind:

I didn’t have much time for those that were always doing themselves up and, you know, were squeamish–afraid of things? I was afraid of nothing! [laughs]. . . . My sister Loretta had a couple of friends and . . . they were older than me I know by about ten years. But well, they were like afraid of the mice and, and we used to tease ’em. One time my friend and I made mud cakes. And we put worms in ’em. Cut up the worms for color to make it look like fruit. And they were along by the road and we pretended we were eating it . . . That kind of stuff, we liked to tease them because they were so finicky! (2001)

So, like Alice, tomboy Kitty “didn’t care what people thought of her;” but her elder sisters were “prim and ladylike, they didn’t want anyone to see ’em with a snake in the day, so they took the snake in the night! [chuckles].” The metaphor of a husband who is a “fine man” in company but a snake in private is a common enough experience. Unlike her sisters, Kitty loves her husband in human and animal form.

When the grandmother takes action to solve what she thinks is her granddaughter’s problem, the hooves thump on the stairs as she takes his skin down to the fireplace. The husband wakes in a “dilemma.” When he strikes his nose on the bedstead, blood spills on his white shirt. The motif of the bloodstain that only the rightful wife can remove condenses jealousy and rivalry. False claims by another woman of having washed out the stain, thereby claiming the man, occur in many of these tales (Jacobs 1894, 24; MacManus 1913, 208).

The blood need not be the husband’s. “Whiteberry Whittington,” told by Jane Gentry in Hot Springs, North Carolina, in 1923, begins prosaically enough with Whittington, the hired boy, “killing beef” and getting blood on his shirt. He offers to marry the woman who washes it clean. The hired girl does so; they marry and have three children. But one day the King’s daughter claims that she had cleaned the shirt and Whittington goes away with her. Not magically transformed from a powerful beast but mocked as a seduced husband, “he jest minded the king’s daughter like he was a little brown puppy” (Carter 1925, 359). The hired girl gets him back by the usual trade of magic objects for nights with her husband. Three times the hired girl says, as she grudgingly parts with the fan, the comb, and the beads: “You got my man and that’s enought for you” (358). Similarly, “White-Bear Whittington,” told by Rose Spaulding of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in 1950, dismisses the husband’s magic transformation, and any bloodstain, in favor of blunt presentation of the seduction of a “very handsome” but weak-willed and forgetful husband: “A young witch come down the road, and she sung a wicked song and cast a strong spell on White-Bear. So pretty soon he run off to follow the witch” (Randolph 1952, 174).

The tales deepen an everyday woman’s task into an emblem of fidelity and monogamy to be fought for. None but the true wife has the power or right to remove that blood. Inspired by the idea of folktale symbolization of “the three bloods of woman” (menstruation, defloration, and childbirth) (Cardigos 1996), Martin quizzed Alice. She agreed that the blood shed by the husband in her tale is, as he put it, “very deeply identified with the fact of their marriage and so it’s almost a kind of sacred kind of blood” (2001). But for Alice, the episode brought to mind not jealous rivalry between women but her grandmother’s practical skill: “She’d take it and she’d rub the material together like that—it was almost like magic! And she’d get the stain to come out—you could scrub it even on the scrub board and it wouldn’t come” (2001). So Alice’s servant is not Kitty’s rival but a helpful intermediary who leads the wife to finding her husband. The episode seems not to have been critical to her. Here Kitty cuts out the blood spot with the magic scissors and the shirt is “good as new”; in the published text Kitty rubs it with soap, “and the stain at once disappeared” (Lannon and McCarthy 1991, 15).

Anita told a version of this story, which she learned from Canadian storyteller Katherine Grier as “White Bear Whittington,” at a festival in St. John’s where Pius was in attendance. Afterward, he mentioned that his mother knew this story and she gave it to a relative, Lizzie Brewer, whose version of “Peg Bearskin” appears in Halpert and Widdowson’s collection (1996). Pius didn’t tell the tale himself because he thought of it as a woman’s story. He noted that the bear in Anita’s version was a black bull in his mother’s story, and that the witch who enchanted him was his new wife. He had forgotten all about the original woman, who had to spend three nights singing to him outside his bedroom window before he remembered her again. When he does recollect, he is the one who banishes the wife to another kingdom rather than killing her, as happens in many versions.

Herbert Halpert always advocated asking naive questions, thinking the answer might give a glimpse of a narrator’s understanding of a tale, which was not necessarily the way the folklorist saw it. So Martin asked Alice why the enchanted husband could not have killed the witch himself. She replied as if it was obvious: “Well, I suppose the curse was on him, and he couldn’t do it. I don’t know if that was the idea . . .’Cause he knew, he knew where to hit her” (2001). But in Irish, British, and American versions, it is more frequently the husband who kills the witch, once his wife has reawakened his memory. His action can be indirect: “He caused the old washerwife and her daughter to be burnt” (Jacobs 1894, 25) or brutally personal. In Jane Buell’s version, told to Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner in 1913, “the husband fell upon her and killed her” (1977, 114). Alice’s version has the husband and wife act together against the witch.

The young couple’s liberation from the witch’s curse exemplifies Holbek’s argument that magic tales reflect generational conflict. In rural societies with limited land and resources, the old must eventually cease to obstruct the young’s natural desires to form their own families and to take over the family farm. Nineteenth-century Danish storytellers knew that “a young man could not court a girl unless he was well on his way to independence, and he could not marry until he had won her acceptance, her parents’ consent, and some sort of ‘kingdom,’ be it ever so small” (1989, 49). Alice’s tale, like many other versions, ends with the recovery of the couple’s children and the resumption of their family life together. Even the sisters’ husbands are liberated from their snake forms and become fully human. Life goes on and a new generation rises.