Maid Maleen
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Maid Maleen is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, number 198.
It is Aarne-Thompson type 870, the entombed princess.
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[edit] Synopsis
Maid Maleen, a princess, and a prince fell in love, but her father refused his suit. When Maid Maleen said she would marry no other, her father had her locked up in tower for seven years, with a waiting-woman and food enough.
When the food ran out, they thought to be released, but no sound came, so they bored their way out and found that the kingdom had been overrun. They came in time to another country, which was that of Maleen's lover, and sought work in the royal kitchen.
The prince had been betrothed by his father to another princess, hideously ugly. On her wedding day, not wishing to be seen, the princess sends Maid Maleen in her place. The prince is astounded and thinks that if he did not know Maid Maleen to be dead, he would think this woman her. On the way, she spoke to a nettle, remembering when she ate it raw, and then to the bridge and church door, instructing them not to break, she was not the true bride. The prince put a precious chain about her neck, and they were married.
When they returned, Maid Maleen shed the finery but kept the chain. The princess was led to the wedding chamber, and the prince asked her what she had said to the nettle, the bridge, and the door, and the princess discovered them from Maid Maleen, but when she could not produce the chain, the prince looked at her face and discovered how she had put the scullery maid in her place. The prince finds Maid Maleen and because he went through the ceremony with her, they were married and lived together afterwards.
[edit] Commentary
The motif of the tower imprisonment, as in Rapunzel, is here only a prison, and while they work in a kitchen, as in Catskin or Katie Woodencloak, the contempt springs only from the false bride.
In other variations of type 870, the false heroine's motive to substitute the heroine for herself is not ugliness, but to conceal that she is pregnant, as in Little Annie the Goose-Girl or Gil Brenton.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ Steven Swann Jones, The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1995, ISBN 0-8057-0950-9, p72
