Episode 39C – Queens and Fairies – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 39C Show Notes

Source: French Folklore

This week on MYTH, we’re going to travel deep into fairy country. This is the third episode in our telling of the classic French tale, Beauty and the Beast. You’ll learn that you should never trust ugly people, that badass warrior queens can have tender sides, and that you can learn everything you need to know from a library and a fairy. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll meet a deadly water-breathing dragon that also made a splash in the world of architecture. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 39C, “Queens and Fairies”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
When we last left our story, we met a rich merchant in a city in France whose wife had probably died, but not before having six sons and six daughters with him. Things had gone pretty well until an unlucky fire had burned everything the merchant had owned, and a series of accidents on the high seas had destroyed his business dealings. Broke and bereft, he was forced to move his family out to a tiny cottage several hundred miles away from the city that he had managed to hang on to by his fingernails. The dozen children had settled into their new routine of being poor and abandoned by everyone who had previously wanted to either flirt, befriend, or fuck them, although all but the youngest had done so with bad grace. That young woman, nicknamed Belle (or Beauty) because of her incredible looks and even better personality, had been the only one to try and make the best of the situation. Two years into this Purgatory, a message had come that one ship full of goods had arrived at port unexpectedly. The merchant had rushed off to the city to try and get some of his previously vast wealth back, but he was cheated out of everything by his former partners and found himself having to head back in defeat six months later only to get lost in a blizzard. He wandered into a magical seeming castle full of weird shit but no people and, for reasons unknown, decided that fate wanted him to have it. He had plucked a rose for his beloved Belle, the only thing she had asked for while he was gone, only to be confronted by a horrible, hideous beast enraged at the merchant for ripping him off. The Beast demanded the merchant’s life, but offered to take one of his daughters in his stead, but only if she came to the castle willingly and in full knowledge of what awaited her. He warned the merchant that if he tried to flee or break the bargain, the Beast would hunt down everyone he ever loved. Then, he sent the man home for a month to say his goodbyes. When his children learn what happened, the sons offer to fight the Beast, and the daughters offer up Belle as a sacrifice. The merchant doesn’t want to accept this bargain, but Belle is insistent. At the end of the allotted month, the Beast’s horse arrived as promised to take them back to the castle and their certain doom.
Now, I’m sure you’re all curious to see what happens when Belle and her father arrive at the Beast’s castle, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait a little while longer. Instead of that story, we’re going to be hopping over to a different kingdom to meet a new set of characters who, I promise, will be important before this whole thing is done. None of this is in the Disney version, so buckle your seatbelts, cause shit’s about to get cray cray.
Once upon a time, there was a kingdom ruled by a king and a queen. The two loved each other very much, and so she was devastated when he was killed in a border skirmish while leading his army. She would have been inconsolable, in fact, except for one thing: in the time between her husband riding off to fight and news of his death coming back, she discovered that she was pregnant with their first (and now only) child. The Queen poured all of her love for her dearly departed husband into the unborn child, who ended up being a son. She was overjoyed at this. Her husband’s legacy would not die with him, for now he had an heir.
The Queen became the original helicopter parent. She was driven both by a fierce desire to see her son be given the best education money could buy (and it could buy an awful lot for royalty), and by a bone-deep terror that her son would be taken from her as well. If she lost both of the men she loved, she would never be okay again.
One of the things that her power and position afforded her was the aid of a Fairy that the Queen knew from somewhere nonspecific. The Fairy was more than happy to help raise the young Prince and was quite diligent at protecting the smiling infant from all harm. The Queen was thrilled about her son’s new protector, but it wasn’t long before the Fairy gave the Queen som bad news. “Your Highness, this boy is quite the dashing rapscallion, and it’s going to take a lot of time and energy to keep him safe and teach him everything he knows as he starts to grow. The only way that this can work is if you let me take him entirely into my care.”
The Queen was not happy about this. It didn’t help matters that the Fairy had something of a dark reputation. When you think of fairies, you’re probably thinking of something like Tinkerbell, but that’s not really who this fairy was. She was powerful, with access to deadly sorceries and a capricious nature. Fairies in general could range from being helpful to being a pain in the ass to being straight up deadly. This fairy was known to severely punish anyone that she thought had insulted her, and the Queen was sure that this would include a mortal monarch, so she knew she had to walk a careful line. She didn’t exactly want to give her son up entirely, but she also was too prudent to refuse entirely. “My dear fairy, that is an incredibly generous offer! I would love to accept, but as a single mother, you understand that I don’t think I could bear to not be able to see his beautiful face every single day. I’ll need to think on it, if you don’t mind.” The Fairy understood a mother’s love and was willing to give her some time to mull it over.
That might have been the end of this side story, except that, at this time, the king of a neighboring kingdom decided to be an asshole. He figured that a kingdom ruled by a woman, and one with a newborn baby to boot, would be easy to invade and, as a bonus, he figured he could have some fun with the Queen before having her executed. With his dick firmly in control of his actions, he gathered a massive army and invaded the kingdom.
The Queen, however, was a warrior. She knew that her people were still reeling from the loss of their king, and she knew that her army was smaller than the invading force, so they would need every advantage they could get. It wasn’t hard for her to come to the conclusion that she was going to have to ride out at the head of the army to rally the troops and lead the fight. The author says that she had courage far beyond her gender, but fuck that shit. She was a badass, full stop.
Given that she was about to march into battle, leaving her fate uncertain and no one to care for the child, the Queen did the hardest thing she had ever done and agreed to entrust her son to the Fairy. She was nobody’s fool, however, and fairies are well-known for stealing children, so before she left, she extracted a solemn vow from the Fairy to bring her son back to the castle and hand him back over to his mother as soon as the war was over. Having consulted extensively with her generals, she expected that she would be gone for just over a year before the invading army would take enough casualties and be short enough on supplies to give up and go home.
That’s not exactly how things worked out though, as you probably guessed. The Queen proved to be a formidable tactician and led the army to several powerful victories, but she soon realized that the damage to her lands had been substantial and that the only way to recoup the losses and keep the kingdom from being weakened by their victory was to follow the retreating army into enemy territory and seize their lands for her own. She took town after town until, finally, she laid siege to the capital, forcing the bastard of a king to fly the white flag and sue for peace under very, very harsh terms.
Victory finally won, the Queen and her army set out for home. The Queen in particular was keen to return to the castle and see her beloved son again, who by now was probably walking and talking (at least a little). About the time she reached her own border, however, a runner found the army. He had come from the direction of the conquered kingdom, and his clothes were dirty and bloodstained. “My Queen, it is treachery! That bastard has violated every last line of the treaty he signed with you. In a cowardly attack in the middle of the night, his soldiers slaughtered the garrisons you left behind and the streets run red with their blood. You flag has been torn down and trampled underfoot, and his own flies again from the battlements!”
The Queen sighed, her heart heavy. This kind of insult could not be allowed to stand or that asshole would gather another army and march on her kingdom again. She had tried to be merciful and allow him to live as her vassal, but now she would have to utterly annihilate him and his army or there would never be a lasting peace. Though her heart longed to hold her son in her arms again, she knew that she had a duty to her people. The army turned and retraced its steps back into the enemy kingdom to wage war again, and she vowed that her sword would not be sheathed again until the bastard keeping her away from home could never again disturb her kingdom. She was gonna kill that motherfucker for this.
It had taken almost two years to beat him the first time, and she hoped it would take less this time since she didn’t have to drive him out of her homeland first, but that wasn’t how things played out. The treacherous king may have been a sexist dickhead, but he wasn’t stupid. He had learned a lot from his first encounter with the Queen and he adjusted his tactics accordingly. He knew that she would not be content with a simple victory, but would need his head on a platter, and that meant that time was his ally. She was a long way from home with long supply lines, whereas he was on his home turf. He could afford to fight her guerrilla style and wait for her army to either wither away from attrition or rebel against her for taking so long.
Now that he could pretend to be the victim in the conflict, since she was waging war in his homeland (even though he had totally started it), he was able to foment rebellion in some of the border territories of her kingdom, convincing them that she was evil and manipulative and had only been kept in check by the benevolence of the dead king (who maybe she poisoned? He wasn’t saying she definitely had, but it made you think, right?). Several battalions turned on her and declared themselves independent. The chaos forced her to split her forces along several fronts, which prevented her from bringing the overwhelming numbers she needed to win a decisive victory in any one place.
By this point, the war had dragged on for over fifteen years, and the Queen had been forced to stay in the field with the army both because of her vow and, more practically, because she needed to be there to keep the army from deciding it was better to defect to the other side since she clearly didn’t care enough to fight alongside them. More than once, she thought fleetingly of sending for her beloved son, long separated from her, but she always hesitated. Each time, some victory would be achieved and she would think that surely the end of the war was just another month or two away and besides, a battlefield was no place for a young boy. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she got her son killed because she couldn’t stand to be away from him just a little longer.
Flash back almost 20 years to the Queen’s departure. The Fairy was delighted to finally have free reign in raising the young Prince. To keep him safe while the Queen was away, she had spirited the young boy away to her own castle on the edge of the Fairy lands. There, she focused on raising and teaching the boy everything that he needed to know, which, for a prince, constituted quite a lot. The boy grew up with the Fairy, the only mother he had ever known, and he treated her with all the love and affection of a young child for their mommy.
This lasted for several years, with the Fairy quite happy with the boy’s progress in the mental and physical disciplines he was already beginning to try and master until one day, with no explanation, the Fairy vanished from the castle and was gone for several years. She did not tell the boy where she was going or when she would be back, but left him to his studies with the servants loyal to her in her fairy castle. When she finally returned, the boy had grown considerably into a young man. Both of his parents had been attractive in the way that actual royals usually aren’t but that fairy tale royals always are (because they’re just that much better than you, damn it), and he showed every sign of growing up into a truly stunning man one day soon.
The Fairy, who had previously loved, cherished, and raised the boy as her own son, now found herself feeling something…different. Something creepy. Something very, very sexual. This was bad enough given that this was basically her stepson (weird porn trope aside), but it was made much worse by the fact that the Prince was still quite young and definitely prepubescent. The Fairy was a creeper, but then, fairies have never felt a need to obey the laws and morals of mortal folk. The old fey are often a terrible, cruel, disturbing lot, and this Fairy was no different.
Before she had left, the Fairy had let the young Prince call her by her given name, but after she returned from her years long errand, she insisted instead that he call her Mommy. The boy had long since learned that The Fairy wasn’t someone to cross, so he did as he was told without asking any questions about why. He was young and isolated, so he had no idea that his foster mother’s affections had turned to an unhealthy lust. He was confused, therefore, when she suddenly seemed to always be dissatisfied with his behavior and performance. She criticized him constantly and complained about how ungrateful he was to her. The boy had no idea why he was being treated like this, and was even more confused that these tongue lashings were always either followed or preceded by tender caresses.
One day, when the boy was a tween or maybe a very young teenager, he complained aloud about how long it had been since he had seen his mother, the Queen. That was exactly the wrong thing to say to the Fairy. She raged at him for his impudence and selfishness, and lamented at how poorly he treated her. She sobbed that he was so besotted with his mother that he couldn’t spare an ounce of love for the woman actually doing all of the goddamned work! He hastened to assure her that the love he had for his mother in no way diminished the love and gratitude he felt for the Fairy.
She hiccoughed. “That’s good to hear, my sweet. I’m sorry I yelled. I’m not jealous, you know, even though I’ve done so much more for you than that absent bitch ever thought about doing, and I have such big plans for you! I can make you into an incredible man, but my plans are a little…involved. The only way that I can make it work, I think, is for you to marry me. I think it’s for the best, anyhow. We’re not related, so it’s totally fine for you to want my body and to love me sexually. I love you that way. I know you’ve been secretly longing for this for years now, and have just been afraid of upsetting me, but fear no more, my sweet! Think of all you can do when you have such a powerful fairy on your arm (and in your bed)! No one will ever be able to harm you, and nothing will be able to stop you. Anything you want, you just stretch out your hand and take.”
The Prince was uncomfortable. This was wrong, and he knew it. He was pretty isolated, but he had seen the servants around the castle, many of whom were married, and he and read endless stories, poems, and plays about romance, so he wasn’t entirely ignorant. He knew that, for a marriage to work, there usually had to be some kind of similarity in age and disposition (and species, for that matter). The Fairy was old, mean-spirited, and very, very ugly (because, as I’ve said before, everyone in a fairy tale knows that all ugly people are evil and deserve to be ugly). He was pretty sure that marrying her would leave him with a life of endless torment and misery rather than the joy and glory she painted with her words.
Beyond all of that, he felt icky trying to think sexy thoughts about the woman that had raised him from an infant. He had absolutely no interest in being with her romantically or sexually and he felt that he was too young to make a commitment to be married. Honestly, the only thing he really wanted was to go back home and see his mother, the Queen, again. He wanted to join her on the battlefield and help lead their people to victory. Unfortunately, that was just about the only thing that the Fairy refused to grant him. He had begged her many, many times to let him go and visit the front and share the danger that his mother faced in his place every day, but he was always shot down immediately.
The Fairy was still staring at him, and he realized she wanted an answer right the fuck now. Shit. “Well, Mommy, you yourself told me that I couldn’t court any girls my age because I didn’t have the right to commit to anything like that without my mother’s blessing and permission. With her gone, I can’t answer, right?” The Fairy waved the concern away. “Of course, my sweet, of course. I’m not asking you to go against the Queen, just to refer the matter to her.”
The Prince’s ears perked up at this. He had never been able to get her to agree to let him see the Queen, but it seemed that she finally wanted something badly enough to maybe give in. “Alright then, mommy, I’ll go and see her.” “We’ll go and see her, my sweet. It’s far too dangerous out there to let you go without my supervision and protection.” That hadn’t been what the Prince was hoping for, but half a loaf was better than nothing. He tried several tactics to try and talk her out of coming along, but she was insistent, so finally, he agreed to her condition and they set out for the war with a huge escort.
They arrived on the eve of a massive battle. The Queen had been maneuvering her opponent into this position for months and, after much planning, had finally arranged things such that, if all went well in the morning, she would finally crush the errant king and end this godforsaken war once and for all. If she took this position from him, he would be cut off from any supplies and, even if he somehow escaped, wouldn’t be able to keep his army in the field for more than a few more days. The Prince’s arrival on the eve of battle seemed like a goddamned sign from the heavens, and the army found itself with renewed hope and vigor.
The Queen was initially overjoyed to see her beloved son for the first time in a decade and a half, but it didn’t last long. The war had been bloody, and the coming battle promised to be the bloodiest yet. Her son was strong and brave, everything she could hope he would grow up to be, but that also meant he would be tempted to try and prove himself tomorrow. She had no idea how well he had been trained, but he was definitely untested. Tomorrow would be incredibly dangerous and could well kill him. That thought terrified her. By the same token, she knew that her son was a Prince and would have to be baptised in blood sooner or later, and at least this way, she could keep an eye on him. Rather than trying to keep him out of the fighting, she simply asked him to be as careful as his honor would allow.
The Queen believed that a young royal needed to maintain his image and his honor, but she was also going to hedge her bets. She went to the Fairy and asked her to stay with her son in the coming battle and use her considerable power to help keep him safe. She needn’t have bothered, however, because the Fairy was still just as besotted as ever with her young ward. She was also terrified that the young man would get himself killed before she could manage to jump on that dick. Even worse, although she had incredible power, she knew of no enchantment or spell that could keep him safe from every danger in battle. All it would take would be one stray arrow from one lucky asshole and it would be curtains. She couldn’t stop everything. She did know how to inspire competence in a military commander, complete with the caution and prudence of a battle-seasoned general, and that would just have to do.
When the sun rose in the morning, the battle was joined. The Prince rode out at the head of the army, head held high, and he whooped some ass. He rattled off orders almost without thought, stemming any attempts by the enemy to change the tide of the battle. On one occasion, he personally rode to the defense of his mother, the Queen, and prevented her from being killed or taken hostage. By the end of the day, his command of the battle had been so skillful that what was left of the enemy threw down their weapons and fled, abandoning all of their supplies. Once the dust had settled, three quarters of the enemy army was either dead, prisoner, or surrendered. It was an overwhelming victory.
The Prince had done incredibly well, suffering only a minor cut to his arm in the fighting, but it was enough to put an icy terror in the heart of his mother. Now that her son had finally come back to her as a grown, if very young, man, she would not be able to keep him away from any further fighting. If she prosecuted this war longer, as her generals all advised her to do with the momentum so clearly on their side, she could gain the world but lose him. It was an easy call for her to make. Her son was worth more than everything else to her. Against the wishes of the rest of the army, she made peace with the vanquished king on better terms than he could have possibly dreamed of, considering the rout he had just suffered, including getting to keep his head attached to his shoulders. It was done. After a decade and a half of fighting, the war was over. They could go home.
This should have been the end of things, since the carefully worded bargain the Queen had struck with the Fairy called for getting her son back once the war was over, but things are never simple, and if things worked out neatly here, there wouldn’t be much point to this little aside to the main story. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to wait until next time to find out what happened after the war, because now it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s monster is the gargouille, more often known as the gargoyle.
The word gargoyle comes from the French word gargouille, meaning throat or gullet, and is also related to the verb gargariser, meaning to gargle or gurgle. However, it also refers to the fearsome French dragon known as La Gargouille who terrorized the countryside in the time of St. Romanus, around 630 AD.
In the town of Rouen, near the English Channel, things were going well until a massive dragon erupted without warning from the sea. It was huge, with a long neck, great bat wings, reptilian scales, and fearsome jaws that scythed like a guillotine when they closed (not that anyone at the time knew what a guillotine was). He made his way to a spacious cave on the River Seine and made himself at home. Like many dragons, he could of course breathe fire, but what made him unique was that he also breathed water. Sometimes, it would wade out into the ocean and rip holes in passing ships so it could devour all of the sailors leaping into the water to try and swim to safety. Other times, it would invade the town itself, alternately burning people alive or spewing enough water to flood the streets, eating whatever was unable to escape.
The villagers were understandably terrified of this scourge and as none of them happened to be great dragon-slaying warriors (medieval knights not having come into vogue yet), they did the only thing they could think of to try and survive: they tried to buy the monster off. It was well-known that dragons loved to devour innocent young maidens, especially virgins, and the town delivered on that horrible price once a year for a few years before switching over to using a condemned criminal for the annual sacrifice. The town could live with sacrificing a criminal, although it wasn’t long before even fairly petty crimes could put you in line for the dragon’s belly, so it wasn’t a perfect solution.
This had been going on for many years when St. Romanus wandered into town. At this time, parts of rural France were still heathen, having not been converted to the Catholic church that had been slowly gaining dominance over the area for the last few centuries. The saint, who wasn’t yet a saint but just a local aristocrat, had been raised to bishop of the area. He listened to the town’s story, nodding sagely, and agreed to banish the dragon for them provided that everyone in town agreed to be baptized and join the church, which they would need to build in the town and name after him. He wasn’t super humble for a saint, but he was also a rich noble, so I guess it comes with the territory.
“Alright, guys, cool cool cool. I’ll get rid of the dragon for you. You know, this is a lot for just one guy. I could probably use some help. Anyone want to come with? I mean, I know that wasn’t part of the deal, but you guys are cool, right?” They were not. In fact, out of everyone in the town, only one person volunteered to go with Romanus: the convict who was sentenced to death by dragon, who honestly had nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting rid of the dragon. Armed only with a cross that the future saint had brought with him, the two men set out towards the dragon’s cave.
It wasn’t hard to find the place, what with all of the corpses and general devastation. The dragon watched curiously as the two men walked boldly into its home. It had never had food come to it willingly before. They looked fairly weak and were obviously unarmed, so the dragon wasn’t worried, which turned out to be a mistake. Romanus approached the deadly creature and made the sign of the cross over it, invoking his connection with God on it, and the creature immediately laid its head down at his feet, completely tame. The bishop made a leash out of his stole and led the dragon back to town for what had to be one of the shortest trials ever.
The dragon was, of course, condemned to death (although I think they really missed out on the opportunity to have a tame attack dragon as a town mascot). A pyre was built in the town square and La Gargouille was burned at the stake. But wait, you may be asking; didn’t the dragon breathe fire? How could fire burn it? As it turns out, most of the dragon was completely susceptible to fire, since it was never actually in contact with flames, but the dragon’s head had been tempered by years of searing heat and could not, in fact, burn.
Being an enterprising sort of clergyman, Romanus took the disembodied head and kept it until the new church had been built in his name, then nailed it to the wall as a warning to any other dragons that might want to terrorize the neighborhood. Not one to waste things, the bishop also used the severed head as a waterspout for the church and thus was the concept of the gargoyle created.
Interestingly, this story also gave pretext for a very real bishop’s privilege. Based on the tale of Saint Romanus, the bishop of the parish could pardon one prisoner who was condemned to death by handing the man or woman the reliquary holding the saint’s relics in a grand procession. He was allowed to do this once a year up until 1790.
It’s a cool story, although it’s definitely bullshit (and not just because of the whole thing with dragons and church magic). Gargoyles, or at least, waterspouts on buildings carved to look like animals or mystical creatures, had been around for millenia by the time of Romanus. The oldest known gargoyle is a 13,000 year old stone crocodile discovered in Turkey, and the Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks all had a habit of making gargoyles, often in the shape of a lion.
The most famous gargoyles are probably those on the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, but surprisingly, the gargoyles are actually much, much newer than the building itself. Although the church dates from the 1250s, the gargoyles were actually added as part of a restoration project in the 1800s. They had been very much in vogue in the Middle ages, added to ward away evil spirits and to demonstrate to an illiterate public that all of the evil was outside the church, so the architect decided to add them to make the church feel like he thought the middle ages felt. So the next time you see an angry looking gargoyle glaring down at you from a building, say hello because it might just be the disembodied head of a magical creature forced to serve as decor for the rest of eternity.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you like what you’ve heard, I’d appreciate a review on iTunes. These reviews really help increase the show’s standing and let more people know it exists. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, we’ll see what happens when a Fairy and a Queen go toe to toe and we’ll also catch up with Belle as she journeys to meet her fate. You’ll see that fairies can dish it out but not take it, that creepers gonna creep, and that magic horses are damned useful. Then, in Gods and Monsters, we’ll meet two French monsters that prove the medieval period was pretty fucking sexist. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.