Call for Help: Beauty and the Beast Submissions

Beauty and the Beast Tales From Around the World will be released later this year, and I am finalizing the content. While the book is dominated by ATU 425: The Search for the Lost Husband and its subtypes, including Beauty and the Beast, Cupid and Psyche, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, there will be other Animal Bridegroom tales within it. With little or no exception there will not be Animal Brides. There just isn't book space or time for those. (But they are tempting. Fascinating stuff, these animal spouses. Perhaps someday... And a Swan Maiden collection is in my future whether or not it expands to all Animal Brides.)

However, I wanted to ask for your favorite or even relatively unknown Beauty and the Beast tales, folkloric tales, not modern retellings, but tales that fit in a collection like this, such as the ones found on the Tales Similar to Beauty and the Beast page and the Tales Similar to East of the Sun and West of the Moon page on SurLaLune.

If you offer a tale that I haven't discovered yet and that I use in the collection, I will send you a copy of the book when it is released. Those of you well-read in the folklore of other countries will have a greater chance at suggesting something that has eluded me so far. The more obscure the collection, the better. Grimms and such need not apply! And, no, the tale need not be in English.

If you submit a tale and I already have it, I will add your name to a list for a drawing of a copy of the book when it is released. And, yes, you are guessing at this point because my list is much more extensive than any list on the web, including my own. I have found some unusual and rare ones! This is going to be a fun collection for all of us. I have been working on it for years. I tell my family and friends that while Cinderella is the most popular fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast is perhaps the most beloved. It always wins the "What is your favorite fairy tale?" question. It is mine, too, so despite myself there is extra love going into this one. All of my collections receive my devotion, but this one is special to me, too.

Please submit the tale, the source, and even an online link if one is available, through a comment to this post or a private email to me.

The book will be another 828 page tome like my Cinderella, Mermaid and Bluebeard collections. These tales are inherently longer--those questing searches have high word counts--but there will be well over 150 tales, way more than any other collection to date, although there aren't very many collections of this tale beyond the wonderful work of Betsy Hearne in Beauties and Beasts: (The Oryx Multicultural Folktale Series) and Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale as well as Jerry Griswold's The Meanings of "Beauty & The Beast" A Handbook.