The false hero is a stock character in fairy tales, and sometimes also in ballads. The character appears near the end of a story in order to claim to be the hero or heroine and is usually of the same sex as the hero or heroine. The false hero presents some claim to the position. By testing, it is revealed that the claims are false, and the hero's true. The false hero is usually punished, and the true hero takes their place. [1]
Vladimir Propp identified it as one of the seven roles he found in an analysis of Russian folktales, but the figure is widely found in many nations' tales. [2]
In some tales, the false hero appears early, and constitutes the main obstacle to the hero. These include "The Goose Girl" where a serving maid takes the princess's place, and makes her a goose girl, "The White and the Black Bride" where the stepmother pushes the bride into the river and puts her own daughter in her place, and "The Lord of Lorn and the False Steward", where the steward robs the young lord of Lorn and passes himself off as him, with the true lord serving a shepherd.
In most of the tales that use this figure, the false hero is the final obstacle to the hero's happiness. Such false heroes include Cinderella's stepsisters, who chop off parts of their feet to fit the shoe, but are given away by the blood; [3] the washerwoman's daughter in "Black Bull of Norroway", whose mother lies about who washed the blood out of the hero's shirt, but whose lies are given away when the heroine bribes her way to the hero; the king's marshall in "The Two Brothers", who chops off the dragon's seven heads, but only after the huntsman hero has cut out the dragon's tongues, so that when the heads are displayed, the huntsman can observe that their tongues are missing (a common motif when a false hero claims to have killed a monster); [4] and the older brothers in "The Golden Bird", who try to kill their younger brother and do steal his prizes, but when the youngest survives, those prizes recognize him as the true hero.
Other tales have characters take the hero or heroine's place without claiming to be the original. This may stem from an enchantment whose conditions the hero or heroine has broken, as in "East of the Sun and West of the Moon", or because the lover has been enchanted into forgetting the hero or heroine, as in "The Master Maid", or merely from the belief that the true hero or heroine is dead or lost, as in "Maid Maleen".
In many such tales with "true brides" and "false brides", such as "East of the Sun and West of the Moon", the true bride must bribe her way to the hero for three nights, where the false bride is holding him captive; the first two nights, the false bride drugs the hero, but her pleas are heard by someone else, who warns him. [5] The false bride fails the test when the heroine, not plagued with greed, refuses to trade the bride for gold or treasure; the false bride's greed draws her to agree, and so loses the bridegroom. [6] Another test is to determine which bride can carry out a domestic task to perfection; this, also, is found in "East of the Sun and West of the Moon", where the heroine can wash the shirt that neither the false bride nor her mother can. [7]
The false bride is sometimes a usurping servant, as in "The Goose Girl", "The Sleeping Prince" or "The Love for Three Oranges", but overwhelmingly the substituted bride is the sister or stepsister of the true bride. [8] The substitution is an integral part of Aarne-Thompson type 403A, The Black and the White Bride, including such fairy tales as "The White and the Black Bride" and "Bushy Bride"; this often opens with an episode of "The Kind and the Unkind Girls" (Aarne-Thompson type 480) where the girls' character is revealed. [8] Other tales including this are "Brother and Sister" and "The Wonderful Birch".
Hans Christian Andersen's literary tale "The Little Mermaid" makes a variation not usually found in more traditional fairytales. The Temple Girl fits the above prototype, since she gets the credit (which actually belongs to the Mermaid) for saving the Prince's life and wins his love. But unlike in the above-mentioned examples, nobody knows of the Mermaid's role in the rescue (not even the Temple Girl herself, who genuinely thinks that she saved him), and there is no last-moment reprieve: she does get to marry the Prince, and additionally, as the Princess of a neighboring kingdom, she had been chosen as the Prince's bride by their parents. The Mermaid is given the chance to kill the Prince to recover her Mermaid body, but she refuses to do so and, after dying of a tragic noble sacrifice, she gets a different reward: the chance to gain a soul, and therefore immortality.
False heroes in film are common. An example includes the 1980 South African blockbuster film The Gods Must Be Crazy where the protagonist Andrew Steyn saves a group of schoolchildren from some rebels. Steyn's rival Jack Hind acts as if he did the deed in front of both men's love interest Kate Thompson.
A fairy tale is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful beings. In most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale; all these together form the literature of preliterate societies. Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends and explicit moral tales, including beast fables. Prevalent elements include dragons, dwarfs, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, griffins, merfolk, monsters, pixies, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches, wizards, magic, and enchantments.
"Cinderella", or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world. The protagonist is a young girl living in forsaken circumstances that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage. The story of Rhodopis, recounted by the Greek geographer Strabo sometime between 7 BC and 23 AD, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, is usually considered to be the earliest known variant of the Cinderella story.
Princess and dragon is an archetypical premise common to many legends, fairy tales, and chivalric romances. Northrop Frye identified it as a central form of the quest romance.
The Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index is a catalogue of folktale types used in folklore studies. The ATU Index is the product of a series of revisions and expansions by an international group of scholars: originally composed in German by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne (1910), the index was translated into English, revised, and expanded by American folklorist Stith Thompson, and later further revised and expanded by German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther (2004). The ATU Index, along with Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1932)—with which it is used in tandem—is an essential tool for folklorists.
"The Goose Girl" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and first published in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1815. It is of Aarne-Thompson type 533.
"The Master Maid" is a Norwegian fairy tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in their Norske Folkeeventyr. "Master" indicates "superior, skilled." Jørgen Moe wrote the tale down from the storyteller Anne Godlid in Seljord on a short visit in the autumn of 1842. Andrew Lang translated the tale to English and included it in his The Blue Fairy Book (1889). A later translation was made by George Dasent, in his Popular Tales from the North.
"Kate Crackernuts" is a Scottish fairy tale collected by Andrew Lang in the Orkney Islands and published in Longman's Magazine in 1889. Joseph Jacobs edited and republished the tale in his English Fairy Tales (1890). The tale is about a princess who rescues her beautiful sister from an evil enchantment and a prince from a wasting sickness caused by dancing nightly with the fairies. The tale has been adapted to a children's novel and a stage play.
Vasilisa the Beautiful or Vasilisa the Fair is a Russian fairy tale collected by Alexander Afanasyev in Narodnye russkie skazki.
"Maid Maleen" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, number 198.
The youngest son is a stock character in fairy tales, where he features as the hero. He is usually the third son, but sometimes there are more brothers, and sometimes he has only one; usually, they have no sisters.
Vesle Åse Gåsepike is a Norwegian fairy tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in Norske Folkeeventyr. It has also been translated as Little Lucy Goosey Girl, and classified as Aarne-Thompson tale type 870A, "The Goose-Girl as Suitor".
"The Girl Without Hands" or "The helpless Maiden" or "The Armless Maiden" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It is tale number 31 and was first published in the 1812 edition of Children's and Household Tales. The story was revised by the Grimm brothers over the years, and the final version was published in the 7th edition of Children's and Household Tales in 1857. It is Aarne-Thompson type 706.
The Bear is a fairy tale collected by Andrew Lang in The Grey Fairy Book. It is Aarne-Thompson classification system type 510B, unnatural love. Others of this type include Cap O' Rushes, Catskin, Little Cat Skin, Allerleirauh, The King who Wished to Marry His Daughter, The She-Bear, Tattercoats, Mossycoat, The Princess That Wore A Rabbit-Skin Dress, and Donkeyskin, or the legend of Saint Dymphna.
The Sleeping Prince is a Greek fairy tale collected by Georgios A. Megas in Folktales of Greece.
The Enchanted Maiden is a Portuguese fairy tale collected by Zófimo Consiglieri Pedroso in Portuguese Folk-Tales.
The Young Slave is an Italian literary fairy tale written by Giambattista Basile in his 1634 work, the Pentamerone.
In fairy tales, a donor is a character who tests the hero and provides magical assistance to the hero upon their success.
Maria Magdalene Tatar is an American academic whose expertise lies in children's literature, German literature, and folklore. She is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University.
In folkloristics, "The Animal as Bridegroom" refers to a group of folk and fairy tales about a human woman marrying or being betrothed to an animal. The animal is revealed to be a human prince in disguise or under a curse. Most of these tales are grouped in the international system of Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index under type ATU 425, "The Search for the Lost Husband". Some subtypes exist in the international classification as independent stories, but they sometimes don't adhere to a fixed typing.
"The Forgotten Bride" or "The Forgotten Fiancée" is a motif of folktales recognized in several folktale motif indices.