The Dangers of Blue Beards (in Books)

Bluebeard Retellings and Reimaginings

As I’m sure you all know I’m not a folklorist or anything like that, but I LOVE folktales and stories, and I think in worldbuilding one of the best and most fun ways to get to grips with a culture is by imagining what stories people tell about themselves and their world. In The Crows I made up local legends and sayings, and put out a little eBook collection of hyperlocal folktales ‘collected’ from the area called Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea. which you can get for 99p from eBook stores, Amazon, or directly from me (preferred if possible!)

I’m making up whole myths and belief systems for my Yelen & Yelena fantasy world, and really enjoying that process. Each chapter is prefaced by some snippets of these, as I wanted to give that flavour without being too heavy-handed in the text, and you can always skip over them.

That disclaimer aside, I am continuing this series of posts on real world folktales and their retellings/reimaginings with Bluebeard, as this tale won the poll in the previous post – so here we are!

The first section of this post is a short look at different types of tale and some links to versions across the world, and then the second section is the retellings/reimaginings section!

Bluebeard Tales and Variations

Essentially, this tale is about a woman who marries a strange man, only to find he’s a serial killer. This discovery can take place in a few different ways, depending on the variation of the tale, but the ‘classic’ one is where she’s told not to open a specific door in his castle. She does, obviously, while he’s away, and discovers the grisly remains of his previous wives in the room. Fortunately, despite getting blood on herself or the key which gives her away, she manages to escape. In some versions, like the English ‘Mr Fox’, she hides somewhere and sees him dragging his victims into the castle, and manages to cut off the victim’s hand to present as proof the next day when she confronts him with her male relatives.

In terms of folk ballads, the Scottish “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight” is definitely one I’d class as a similar type to this. Lady Isabel is intrigued (or entranced) by an Elf knight blowing his horn, and rides off with him to the greenwood. There he tells her that he has slain seven of his brides already and she will be the eighth of them. Isabel lulls him to sleep in her lap and slays him with his own dagger, and rides off home. In some versions, her pet parrot sees her coming back and threatens to tell on her to her parents.

Steeleye Span in concert 1995

You can find a full list of the specific Aarne/Thompson/Uther index type here, which includes tales from around the world, including the USA (including an African-American version), and various parts of Europe. For “Mr Fox” and similar tales, classified as a different type, there’s a list here. Watch out for antiziganism in there, particularly the English/European ones.

For the purposes of this post, as Bluebeard and Mr Fox are really similar thematically, I’m going to merge these for this post, and do both types at once.

There are a number of printed versions of Bluebeard from Perrault’s 1697 version onwards, and in the 18thC, amid the trend for ‘Orientalism‘, a play version positioning the tale in Turkey and making Bluebeard a racial Other, playing into fears and prejudices of the audience, was a big hit. This trend for Bluebeard’s casting in various artistic interpretations of the tale persisted well into the 20thC.

I’m struggling to find a [free, open access] Turkish masal/fairytale equivalent in English, but here’s a collection of tales from Turkey by Ignácz Kúnos, trans. R. Nesbit Bain.

Some Turkish tales, like Altmış Akıllı Yetmiş Fikirli (Sixty Brains, Seventy Aims) might qualify, as here a selfish mother gives her daughter to a complete stranger (seeing a chance to improve her social position), who tests the young woman with locked doors she mustn’t open. However, the young woman is smart enough to not open the door, averting a tragic end, but in doing so remains subjugated to her mother and husband and subject to their wills and whims.

This tale and others is discussed in Dr. Gül Büyü’s PhD 2013 thesis, Evil in Fairy Tales Across Cultures: A Study of Turkish and British Fairy Tales from a Psychological Perspective. This is free to download, and in English. More publications by Dr Büyü are here.

Charles Perrault’s version of Bluebeard is here. The English version, Mr Fox, is here. There are a ton of ‘Strange Suitor’ tales like this across Africa too, and here is a podcast from Mythological Africans talking about tales from Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Chad and Namibia, although I’m not sure if these are in the same classification of the Aarne/Thompson/Uther folktales, but want to highlight them because I think they count, and because some Nollywood films based on them will work for the ‘Bluebeard in horror cinema’ post!! In the Caribbean, tales that do fit this type include The Chosen Suitor (Antigua) and Man-Snake as Bridegroom (Jamaica). In India, there are stories like The Brahmin Girl That Married a Tiger.

I think I might also say that if we’re going loose and you want to gender-flip it, then the tales of men marrying fox spirits and demon-wives in folktales from different parts of Asia would work too? Maybe tales like Lady Tamamo in ‘The Jewel Maiden’ (Japan) would fit, but in that case the secret isn’t that she kills all her husbands, but she is causing the sickness of the Emperor.

Your Retelling/Reimagining Recs!

There’s a GoodReads list for everything, and this tale is no exception: here’s one list and here’s another! The second list has a lot of pulp Gothic Romances on it, and some pulp noir, and you’ll be unsurprised to discover that this tale formed the basis for QUITE A LOT of those plots! Tor has a short list here too.

Dr Sam Hirst’s blog has a Bluebeard post for their October series, A Scare A Day (2023), on Day 28! The story set for Day 28 was Bluebeard’s Wife by T. Kingfisher (also mentioned and linked below). There is a list of 10 versions in this post, including poetry, that also have the Bluebeard theme! Where they are available to read online, they are linked.

You will also find some great queer Gothic reimaginings of various tales – as well as original fiction – in the anthologies Unspeakable and Unthinkable from Haunt Publishing, ed. Celine Frohn.

One of the Bluebeard tales is “The White Door” by Lindsay King-Miller, and is in Unspeakable. It’s sapphic and with vampires!

There is also a RPG from Magpie Games called Bluebeard’s Bride, and that deserves a mention as it was recommended as a game!

Will You Open The Final Door?

A young bride is wed to an ugly, but powerful man with a blue beard. He invites her to explore the house… but one room is forbidden. Eventually the young bride falls prey to her curiosity and opens it, discovering the gruesome display of former brides murdered…

Explore Bluebeard’s mansion and create your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale. Experience the nightmarish memories that haunt the rooms of this broken place and discover the truth of what happened here. But it is up to you and your friends to decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.

Bluebeard’s Bride, an investigatory horror tabletop roleplaying game for 3-5 people, based on the Bluebeard fairy tale.

Here are a mix of recommended versions from you, and some I’ve found/read/on my TBR. I’ve copied the blurbs/descriptions from GoodReads and Amazon where I can find them.

Blueblood by Malorie Blackman – A short story retelling.

Nia has met the man she wants to marry. Marcus is kind, clever and handsome, with a beard so dark it is nearly blue-black. Nia demands a single promise from him – that Marcus will never enter her study in the basement, her private space. But when Marcus’s curiosity begins to mount Nia feels more and more uneasy. Will he betray her? Can he accept that no means no? Can a woman ever have a room of her own?

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte appears again as it evokes Bluebeard in the text – and Rochester does indeed have a wife locked in the secret room! The secret is something that nearly costs Jane her life (metaphorically), and after discovery she flees Thornfield…

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter – we can’t escape Carter, so here she is again! This one is pretty much a classic Bluebeard retelling now, so it can’t be left off. She also wrote “Bluebeard” in the collection of short fairy tale retellings named after it.

“Bluebeard” by Soman Chainani in the collection Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales, where the protagonist is a young orphan boy, Pietro, going up against a powerful noble who has invited him in to be his guest and victim. (This is for younger readers).

Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta – a framed narrative where strangers in an airport, connected by a cancelled flight to Tokyo, tell each other stories to pass the time. One of these tales is a Bluebeard type story, in which a Turkish girl is left alone in the house of a German map-maker.

Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell one another stories. Thus begins Rana Dasgupta’s Canterbury Tales for our times.

In the spirit of Borges and Calvino, Dasgupta’s writing combines an energetically modern landscape with a timeless, beguiling fairy-tale ethos, while bringing to life a cast of extraordinary individuals-some lost, some confused, some happy-in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, and wonderful.

Captain Murderer by Charles Dickens – Dickens recalls the story of Captain Murderer, a story that his nurse would terrify him with as a child:

“The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember–as a sort of introductory overture–by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it.”

First published in Dickens’ weekly magazine All the Year Round on September 8, 1860.

Fitcher’s Brides by Gregory Frost – The tale of Bluebeard, reenvisioned as a dark fable of faith and truth

1843 is the “last year of the world,” according the Elias Fitcher, a charismatic preacher in the Finger Lakes district of New York State. He’s established a utopian community on an estate outside the town of Jeckyll’s Glen, where the faithful wait, work, and pray for the world to end.

Vernelia, Amy, and Catherine Charter are the three young townswomen whose father falls under the Reverend Fitcher’s hypnotic sway. In their old house, where ghostly voices whisper from the walls, the girls are ruled by their stepmother, who is ruled in turn by the fiery preacher. Determined to spend Eternity as a married man, Fitcher casts his eye on Vernelia, and before much longer the two are wed. But living on the man’s estate, separated from her family, Vern soon learns the extent of her husband’s dark side. It’s rumored that he’s been married before, though what became of those wives she does not know. Perhaps the secret lies in the locked room at the very top of the house—the sin-gle room that the Reverend Fitcher has forbidden to her.

Inspired by the classic fairy tales “Bluebeard” and “The Fitcher Bird,” this dark fantasy is set in New York State’s “Burned-Over District,” at its time of historic religious ferment. All three Charter sisters will play their part in the story of Fitcher’s Utopia: a story of faith gone wrong, and evil countered by one brave, true soul.

“The White Road” is a short story by Neil Gaiman published in Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of short stories. This one is a retelling of English folktale, ‘Mr Fox’.

“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue” by Jonathan Harper in Burly Tales: Finally, Fairy Tales for the Hirsute and Hefty Gay Man, ed. Steve Burman – a Bluebeard retelling for a gay anthology.

“This anthology of romances, adapted from fairy tales and fables, runs the gamut: from short stories to poetry, from contemporary settings to fantasy, from humorous to serious; all of them celebrate the beauty of large, hairy men.” – Library Journal, starred review.

“The Glass Bottle Trick” by Nalo Hopkinson, a short story from the collection Skin Folk. In it, a man hangs up glass bottles to prevent his dead wives returning to look for their bodies. CW: domestic abuse.

The award-winning author of Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber presents a powerful new collection of short fiction that draws on the folklore and legends of the Caribbean in sensual and disturbing tales that capture the dark worlds of the soucouyant (vampire) and lagahoo (werewolf).

A Good Marriage by Stephen King – a novella published in the collection Full Dark, No Stars, which contains 4 King novellas. It is a film of the same name (2014) dir. Peter Askin, and will be featured in the cinema post (next!)

Darcy Anderson learns more about her husband of over twenty years than she would have liked to know when she stumbles literally upon a box under a worktable in their garage.

The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher – Young Rhea is a miller’s daughter of low birth, so she is understandably surprised when a mysterious nobleman, Lord Crevan, shows up on her doorstep and proposes marriage. Since commoners don’t turn down lords—no matter how sinister they may seem—Rhea is forced to agree to the engagement.

Lord Crevan demands that Rhea visit his remote manor before their wedding. Upon arrival, she discovers that not only was her betrothed married six times before, but his previous wives are all imprisoned in his enchanted castle. Determined not to share their same fate, Rhea asserts her desire for freedom. In answer, Lord Crevan gives Rhea a series of magical tasks to complete, with the threat “Come back before dawn, or else I’ll marry you.”

With time running out and each task more dangerous and bizarre than the last, Rhea must use her resourcefulness, compassion, and bravery to rally the other wives and defeat the sorcerer before he binds her to him forever.

Kingfisher also wrote the short story Bluebeard’s Wife (free to read in Fireside Magazine, linked) in which his wife never finds the room until after his death, and they had a long and happy marriage due to her blissful ignorance.

The Wife in the Attic by Rose Lerner is more a Bluebeard tale than Beauty and the Beast, so it goes in here as well!

Goldengrove’s towers and twisted chimneys rose at the very edge of the peaceful Weald, a stone’s throw from the poisonous marshes and merciless waters of Rye Bay. Young Tabby Palethorp had been running wild there, ever since her mother grew too ill to leave her room.

I was the perfect choice to give Tabby a good English education: thoroughly respectable and far too plain to tempt her lonely father, Sir Kit, to indiscretion.

I knew better than to trust my new employer with the truth about my past. But knowing better couldn’t stop me from yearning for impossible things: to be Tabby’s mother, Sir Kit’s companion, Goldengrove’s new mistress.

All that belonged to poor Lady Palethorp. Most of all, I burned to finally catch a glimpse of her.

Surely she could tell me who had viciously defaced the exquisite guitar in the music room, why all the doors in the house were locked after dark, and whose footsteps I heard in the night…

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado has a sapphic Bluebeard story in her memoir, ‘Dream House as Bluebeard’.

For years Carmen Maria Machado has struggled to articulate her experiences in an abusive same-sex relationship. In this extraordinarily candid and radically inventive memoir, Machado tackles a dark and difficult subject with wit, inventiveness and an inquiring spirit, as she uses a series of narrative tropes—including classic horror themes—to create an entirely unique piece of work which is destined to become an instant classic.

Immolatus by Lyndsie Manusos, in Deadlands magazine. This one is told from the perspective of the brides and their ghosts! In this retelling there are 4 brides in total: the Iron Maiden, the Hungry Warrior and the Lover have their sections, and the last bride is a musician, faced with the prospect of joining the other three – but not if the ghosts can help it.

A good short read.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier – “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…”

Ancient, beautiful Manderley, between the rose garden and the sea, is the county’s showpiece. Rebecca made it so – even a year after her death, Rebecca’s influence still rules there. How can Maxim de Winter’s shy new bride ever fill her place or escape her vital shadow?

A shadow that grows longer and darker as the brief summer fades, until, in a moment of climatic revelations, it threatens to eclipse Manderley and its inhabitants completely…

From the Memoirs of Mme. B— by Elizabeth R. McClellan is a poem that tells the story of the surviving wife, posted on Corvid Queen. CONTENT NOTES: descriptions of violence, unwanted sexual encounters.

Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi – this one gets meta, and is based on the English folktale equivalent for Bluebeard, ‘Mr Fox‘.

It’s a bright afternoon in 1938 and Mary Foxe is in a confrontational mood. St John Fox, celebrated novelist, hasn’t seen her in six years. He’s unprepared for her afternoon visit, not least because she doesn’t exist. He’s infatuated with her. But he also made her up.
“You’re a villain,” she tells him. ‘A serial killer . . . can you grasp that?”
Will Mr Fox meet his muse’s challenge, to stop murdering his heroines and explore something of love? What will his wife Daphne think of this sudden change in her husband? Can there be a happy ending – this time?

Fallow Stone by dave ring is another queer retelling of Bluebeard, available from Pyre Magazine. This one features a Bluebeard figure (Cyan) who hunts young men to be his “wives”, and it’s told from the perspective of Cyan’s banished daughter/groundskeeper.

I enjoyed this one as well!

“Bluebeard’s Widow” by Iain Rowan is another tale posted on Corvid Queen and free to read there.

It’s flash fiction – very quick to read, where Bluebeard’s widow is on her second marriage and throwing a feast for her brothers and new husband, all of whom had heard rumours about Bluebeard but not warned her about him. It’s a short, punchy little story with a satisfying pay off.

Bluebeard’s Castle is a graphic novel adaptation by P. Craig Russell. It’s the graphic novelisation of the opera, Ariane et Barbe-bleue, by Paul Dukas (his only opera, I believe), which in turn is based upon the symbolist play of the same name by Maurice Maeterlinck. So an adaptation of an adaptation of a retelling!

“Bride-Heart” by Marie Rutkoski in the anthology Eternally Yours. This is a queer retelling of Bluebeard set on a flower farm in upstate New York – and there are so many other great authors in this anthology it’s definitely worth picking up, and not just for this story!

The Bloody Key by L. J. Thomas – an epistolary YA novel from the POV of a 15-year-old goat herder whose older sister marries a mystery nobleman.

Fifteen-year-old Anne tends goats while daydreaming of fairy tales—until the day she finds herself in one. When a wealthy nobleman marries her older sister, they’re both swept off to his castle deep in the woods. Upon entering this world of finery, lush gardens, and nightly balls with dashing suitors, Anne believes her own happily-ever-after is just around the corner. She has almost forgotten the rumors surrounding the estate—tales of the castle’s tragic history and whispers of ghosts—when her sister falls mysteriously ill.

To save her, Anne must uncover the shadowy pasts of those who share her new home. Her sister’s husband refuses to speak of the disappearance of his last wife (or possibly wives), the domineering housekeeper hides her own secrets in a forbidden garden, and the handsome, enigmatic gardener urges Anne to escape the castle and leave her sister behind. There are signs, too, that something dark and supernatural haunts the estate.

If Anne misplaces her trust or fails to discover where the real danger lies, she’ll forfeit her sister’s life—and her own.

Told through the diaries and letters of those who live within the castle, this reimagining of the Bluebeard fairy tale is perfect for fans of Crimson Peak, Erin A. Craig’s House of Salt and Sorrows, Lyndall Clipstone’s Lakesedge or classic Gothic horror.

Next Time:

Bluebeard in Film! The next post looks at films with Bluebeard (or Strange Suitor/Robber Bridegroom) type themes. I’ve got a pretty good list of these! You’ll be able to vote for the next tale on that post.

Missed a post? Check below.

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