Most of the favorite folktales involving lovers and married couples are laid in a world of unreality and are filled with the supernatural. But at least two large groups of stories treat this subject without entering into the never-never land of swan maidens and bear lovers. On the one hand there are the humorous or scurrilous anecdotes of married life so popular in the fabliaux and the novella. These move in an unreal world, it is true, the world—in Charles Lamb's words —"of cuckoldry, the Utopia of gallantry," but the events are conceivably true and within the range of possibility. The same may be said of the romantic tales in which, after astonishing but not impossible adventures, the lovers are united and live on in a timeless happiness as if they had come direct from the heart of. fairyland. These romantic tales, having sloughed off the supernatural, are the direct ancestors of the romantic novella and of the modern love story.

In a considerable number of these romantic tales we find a faithful wife who goes on a long search for her husband—a thoroughly realistic search filled with high adventure instead of magic and mystery. [112] There are also stories in which a princess is won by cleverness, but the interest there is in the keenness of wit rather than in the romantic conclusion. Two realistic [p. 104] tales, however, have their main interest in bringing about a happy marriage, even though the means adopted may seem to the modern sophisticated reader unnecessarily violent. In both of them a shrewish wife is reformed.

The first of these stories is King Thrushbeard (Type 900). In its main lines it seems to have developed in the Middle Ages, probably in Italy. It has been popular with literary taletellers since its appearance in a German poem of about 1260. [113] It is in the Icelandic Clarussaga of about 1330. In Italy, in addition to its appearance in earlier novelle, it is told as one of the numbers of Basile's Pentamerone. Within a definitely limited area the tale has been rather popular in oral tradition. It is known from Iceland to the western borders of Russia but apparently has not been carried to any other continent. Philippson, in his definitive monograph on the tale, comes to the conclusion that it was probably invented in Germany. On the other hand, Kaarle Krohn, after reviewing all of the evidence, feels sure that the homeland must have been Italy. [114]

A king sends out invitations for suitors to woo his daughter. Either as a reply to this invitation or because he has seen a picture of the princess (sometimes in a forbidden chamber), a prince falls in love with her and appears as her suitor. The princess has no mind to get married and treats her suitors shamefully. Among other things she calls them by ugly names. She repulses the prince and calls him King Thrushbeard. In spite of her unwillingness, the princess is forced to marry. Sometimes her father in anger compels her to marry the first man who comes along, and this turns out to be a beggar. Sometimes the seeming beggar is really the disguised prince, who wins the princess by solving riddles or by gaining admission to her room, or, in some cases, really winning her love. After the princess and the beggar are married, her father banishes them. She is then compelled to endure great hardship—poverty, menial work, begging, peddling, and eventually service as a maid in the king's kitchen. As a climax to her shame, she attends the wedding of the prince. But he reveals himself in good time as the man who has masked as her beggar husband, and they celebrate their wedding together.

This story inevitably calls to mind Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. And, indeed, that tale has had some popularity as an oral story (Type 901). [115] The dramatist has kept very close to the main outlines of the folktale. It will be recalled that the husbands of three sisters wager as to whose wife is the most obedient. The youngest of the sisters is a shrew. The husband proceeds to bring her to submissiveness by his own outrageous conduct: [p. 105] shooting his horse and his dog and treating her to all kinds of indignities. The tale goes back to the Exemplum literature of the Middle Ages, where it appears in Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor. It was also retold by Straparola in the sixteenth century. Whether from these literary forms or otherwise, it is popular in the folklore of the Baltic states and Scandinavia. It has also been reported from Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Russia, and has been heard from a Zuñi Indian in New Mexico. It would seem most reason able to suppose that we have here a literary tale which has become a real part of the folklore of northern Europe.