Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Bird

So the other day in College Literature our teacher brought up an allusion that most of the class, including myself, did not catch in Jane Eyre. This allusion was to the story of Bluebeard (pp. 112), a French folk tale written by Charles Perrault, since none of us knew it we looked it up.

Here is a short summary – Bluebeard was an ugly aristocrat who had been married several times, each time his wife disappeared. He went to one of his neighbors looking for another girl to marry him and persuades the youngest daughter to marry him. After they are married she goes to live with him but he says he must leave awhile and he gives her the keys to all the rooms in the castle but stresses that she must not go through one door. Eventually her curiosity gets the better of her and she opens the door and finds the murdered former wives hanging from the walls. Their blood will not wash off the key so she runs to her sister. Bluebeard seeing the key and realizing what she had seen from the key is furious but her brothers arrive and in the end Bluebeard dies and the last wife inherits his fortune and goes to live a good life. Read it in full HERE or a fuller summary HERE.

This reminded me of one of the Grimm Brother’s Fairy Tales that I had read so I looked it up. The story is called “Fitcher’s Bird” and it follows very similar lines. Trade Bluebeard for a wizard who took the form of a begging poor man, the youngest daughter for the oldest, three daughters for two, set it instead just before the wedding (rather than after), and add and egg and you pretty much have the same story.  Read it in full HERE or a summary HERE. (Side note both are really short stories, only a couple of pages long so I’d recommend reading the full stories they are interesting.)

The story of Bluebeard; however, is dated much earlier than “Fitcher’s Bird” so I wonder if what if the differences we see are the warping of time (about 115 years) and French to German culture or If the two stories never came in contact with each other at all. The first is probably more likely but I think it would be all the more fascinating if the two cultures came up with the same story separately.