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Reading Notes: Lang's European Fairy Tales II, Part A


"Blue Beard" tells the story of a rich man who has several houses, fine furniture, and silver and gold. However, he has a blue beard that makes his ugly. One of his neighbor's has two beautiful daughters and he wishes to marry one of them, but they are both disgusted by the thought. They also do not want to marry him because he has been married several times before and nobody knows what has happened to his past wives. He bring his neighbor, her daughters, and a few other girls to one of his country homes for the week. They party, hunt, fish, dance, eat, and stay up all night.

The younger daughter begins to think that the man may be a gentleman. They return home and get married; a month later, Blue Beard tells his wife that he has to go on a country journey for at least six weeks. He gives her keys to his apartments, wardrobes, and caskets that hold his valuable possessions. He also gives her a key to a closet, but tells her that she cannot enter it. Her friends come to see the house; the entire time, she is impatient to open the closet door. She goes down to the closet door, and pauses before she opens it. It is dark inside, but she eventually sees the floor is covered with blood and the bodies of women- Blue Beard's wives. The wife become frightened and drops the key.

She locks the room and returns upstairs, but notices the key is covered with blood. She tries to clean it off, but it stays. Blue Beard returns home that night, saying he received a letter that the trip he was on would not help him. He asks her for the keys back, and she returns them shaking. Blue Beard asks why the closet key is not with the rest, and she says she must have left it on the table. She brings him the key and he asks why there's blood on it. He guesses what happened and tells his wife she must die too.

She asks for some time to prayer before dying; Blue Beard gives her half a quarter of an hour. She calls to her sister, Anne, to check if her brothers are on their way over, and if they are, to tell them to hurry. Anne looks from a tower, but only sees the sun and grass. She keeps asking Anne is anyone is coming while Blue Beard keeps calling for his wife to come down. Eventually, Anne sees two horsemen coming. Blue Beard yells loudly and his wife and comes, sobbing. He tells her she still must die. He holds her up by her hair with one hand and holds his sword with the other. As he is about to cut off her head, she asks for a moment to collect herself. As he is about to strike, there is a knock at the gate and the two horsemen enter. He knows they are his wife's brothers and tries to escape, but they attack him and kill him. The wife became the mistress of the estate; she uses the fortune to marry her sister to a young man she loved and to marry herself to a man who made her forget about Blue Beard.
Bluebeard by Edmund Evans

This story is part of the Lang's European Fairy Tales II unit. Story source: The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, illustrated by H. J. Ford (1889).
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