The Yellow Dwarf's ending(s)
So, thanks to @princesssarisa I discovered this old radio program, Let's pretend, from the 1940's. It adapts various classic fairy tales, and among them there was an episode on Madame d'Aulnoy's Yellow Dwarf. And I got curious to check it out, since this story has kind of a downer ending, with the pair of lovers getting defeated by the dwarf and dying together, only to be turned into palm trees by their mermaid friend who couldn't save them. It is quite melodramatic, kind of makes fun of the précieuses of the time and offers a morality about not making promises you can't keep. And while the radioplay kept the death and transformation of the protagonists, the tone changed drastically: now the mermaid summons the "Queen of Enchantments" to save her friends, and the arboreal metamorphosis is to protect the pair for as long as the Yellow Dwarf lives. In the meantime, the two can still be heard professing their undying love to each other. So from a tragic ending we switched to a bittersweet but hopeful one. This isn't too out of the ordinary for a U.S. children's production from the '40s, but it got me thinking: the Yellow Dwarf is one of d'Aulnoy's most famous productions, to this day it gets often cited when talking about her tales. But over the course of the late 18th and 19th century fairy tales experienced a gradual shift to being more and more geared towards children. So I wondered how else the ending of this one may have been altered to be more child-friendly. I figured that it would either soften the sullen finale like in Let's pretend, or dwell on the faults of the protagonists to create a moral teaching.
So I went to look and I actually found a bunch of instances like this!
First of all, the Let's pretend episode is tracing the ending of Minnie Wright's translation for the Blue Fairy Book, from 1889. Here too, the palms intertwine and caress each other as they whisper of their love, though we're given no hope for them to return to human shape. Otherwise the tale is kept much the same as in french, only without the inclusion of the final morality. Such an approach was also used by the anonymous translator of the 1840 Glasgow edition as well as Sabine Baring-Gould in 1894, only translating the text but not keeping the morality. James Planché on the other hand kept the final moral, when he translated the story in 1854, around the same time he produced his fairy tale extravaganza on the very subject.
Now a true difference can be found in Walter Crane's Toy Book, from 1875, explicitly written for children. Here the King is warned in time by Toutebelle of the dwarf and kills his foe, taking his betrothed back home. The story ends with the comment that the princes was "cured of her vanity, and lived happily with the King of the Golden Mines".
Both Baring-Gould and James Planché agree that during the early 19th century The Yellow Dwarf was among d'Aulnoy's lesser known fairy tales in England, however this started to change when its plot was incorporated in christmas pantomimes, like Planché's Fairy Extravaganza, the Yellow Dwarf and the King of the Gold Mines. This show has probably the most outrageous alteration for a happy ending. The lovers die and get turned into palms by their respective supernatural suitors, only for Syren the mermaid to pop out of the fountain that sprouted between the trees. She invokes creative liberty and theatre logic to allow for a departure from d'Aulnoy. Wow.
In 1825 there already was one english retelling of the french fairy tale: Walter Sholto Douglas' Tales of the Wild and Wonderful used the story as a jumping point to create its own gothic folkloric plot, mixing in elements from Germany. One such thing is the Yellow Dwarf's weakness, his beard. Just like Snow White and Rose Red, princess Brunhilde must cut it off to finally defeat him and escape with her lover Ludolph.
Speaking of german fairy tales, there have been reworks of d'Aulnoy there as well! In Johann Andreas Christian Löhr's 1820 fairy tale anthology, which mixes Grimms' tales and those of France and 1001 nights, the Yellow Dwarf is able to kill the lover of princess Wunderschön. However, in a sudden burst of rage, the princess wrings the diamond sword from his hands and chops his head off. She then returns to her mother's court, where she marries the first of her suitors that doesn't faint at the sight of her (so much for her undyig love for the King of the Gold Mines). "Thus ends this murder-, sorrow-, tear- and wonder-tale". From 1846 we have Johanne Satori's take on the Yellow Dwarf. Here instead the King defeats the imp and takes princess Flora with him home. Meanwhile, the Desert Fairy Fufu, embarassed for having been tricked, decides to never leave her kingdom again, and thus leaves the two in peace.
The only adaptation of this story I could find from Italy is in the notes of Gozzi's Greenbird, where he first intended the Ogre and the fairy Serpentina to kidnap the protagonists Renzo and Barbarina like the Desert Fairy and Dwarf do in d'Aulnoy. But this was never included in the final product.
I find it interesting how much the different adaptations have changed their interpretation of the tale and the tone in the retelling. This story has more elasticity than I first thought it might.
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