The Lake Beetle as Groom (; English: "The Bettle-Husband from the Lake") is a Russian fairy tale (skazka) collected by Russian philologist . It deals with the marriage between a human maiden and a lake beetle that changes into a human named Osip. The heroine's mother murders her husband and the maiden curses her children to become birds at the end of the tale.
The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 425M, "The Snake as Bridegroom", a subtype related to the international cycle of the Animal as Bridegroom, in that a human maiden marries a man that can assume animal shape due to a curse or his enchanted nature. The tale is also connected to the Lithuanian and Baltic story of Eglė, the Queen of Serpents, with variants collected in other Slavic languages, like Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (East Slavic), and Polish.
Source
The tale was originally collected by Russian philologist from informant Elisaveta Ivanovna Sidorova, from Tersky region, in the White Sea, with the title "Озерный жук — жених" ("Lake Bettle - Groom"). Scholar Isidor Levin later translated the tale as Der Seekäfer als Bräutigam.
Summary An old woman has an only daughter. One day, the girl goes with other girls to bathe in the lake, and leave their clothes on the shore. When they return to fetch their clothes, a beetle appears on the maiden's dress and proposes to her. Her friends put on her clothes, save for her, who is convinced to accept the beetle's proposal. The girl accepts the animal's proposal and retrieves her dress, while the beetle jumps back into the lake. The girl returns home and keeps quiet about the incident.
However, on the same night, the girl and her mother hear some knocking on their house, the voices mentioning something about marriage, and the girl tells her mother about everything. The next night, the same voices knock on the woman's door and demand the bride. The third night, the woman decides to give into their demands, puts her daughter in a funeral dress and sings a funeral lament, as she delivers the girl to the voices, considering her dead since she is now living in the lake.
The story tells that the human maiden marries another "kidnapped" person that was living with the "lake people", named Osip Tsarevich. The girl and Osip have two children, a boy and a girl. One day, she mutters aloud she wishes she could visit her mother back on land. The lake people allow for her visit, and Osip teaches her a command: "Osip, Osip, take me", for her to use when she returns from her visit. The girl takes her children with her and goes to her mother's house. The woman rejoices in finding her daughter is alive and asks her how she lives down there. The girl herself tells her mother about the secret command that allows for her return, then goes to sleep.
While her daughter is asleep, the woman takes an axe and goes to the lake, then calls for Osip. Osip's head emerges from the lake and the woman chops off his head, then returns home to sleep. The next morning, the girl says goodbye to her mother and returns to the lake with her children. She repeats the secret command, but a storm rages on the lake, the water foams blood, and a head, Osip's, floats up to the surface, then floats back down. The maiden turns her son into a dove and her daughter into a hedge swallow (a goldcrest, in another translation), and bids then fly away, while she transforms herself into a cuckoo. The story states that the girl's mother thought that by killing Osip, she would stay on land, but the cuckoo is forever a widow.Haney, Jack. The Complete Russian Folktale. Volume 3: Russian Wondertales 1 - Tales of Heroes and Villains. M. E Sharpe. 1999. pp. 306-307 (text for tale nr. 237), 427 (source and classification). .
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified, in the East Slavic Folktale Classification (), as tale type SUS 425M, "Жена ужа (змея, гада)"Barag, Lev. "Сравнительный указатель сюжетов. Восточнославянская сказка". Leningrad: НАУКА, 1979. p. 132. ("The Snake's Wife"Леонид Геннадьевич Каяниди. "СКАЗКИ ТИПА 425M «ЖЕНА УЖА» ИЗ СМОЛЕНСКОЙ И БРЕСТСКОЙ ОБЛАСТЕЙ". In: ЖИВАЯ СТАРИНА 2 (102) 2019. pp. 34-37. .ВАРВАРА ЕВГЕНЬЕВНА ДОБРОВОЛЬСКАЯ [VARVARA DOBROVOL’SKAYA]. "ИСТОРИЯ ФИКСАЦИИ СКАЗКИ «ЖЕНА УЖА» (425 М) У РУССКИХ" [HISTORY OF RECORDING OF FOLKTALE “GRASS-SNAKE AS A HUSBAND (BATHING GIRL’S GARMENT KEPT UNTIL PROMISE OF MARRIAGE)” (425 M) AMONG RUSSIANS]. In: Традиционная культура. 2015. № 4. pp. 133-142. or "The Grass Snake's Wife").Kostiukhin, E. A. 1998. “Magic Tales That End Badly”. FOLKLORICA - Journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association 3 (2): 12. https://doi.org/10.17161/folklorica.v3i2.3670. According to Russian scholarship, tale type 425M sometimes merges with ATU 703, "The Snow-Maiden" in many Russian variants.Добровольская В.Е. (2016). "Воронежские варианты сказки «Жена ужа» (СУС 425М) в контексте русской сказочной традиции". In: Народная культура и проблемы ее изучения: Сб. ст. Матер. рег. науч. конф. Воронеж: Издательско-полиграфический центр «Научная книга». 2016. pp. 3–14.
The East Slavic type corresponds, in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, as tale type ATU 425M, "The Snake as Bridegroom" (previously, "Bathing Girl's Garments Kept"): the heroine goes for a swim in the lake, but when she goes to get her clothes a snake (or other animal) sits on her clothes in exchange for her agreeing to marry it; the heroine accepts, and later her animal husband goes to fetch her; the heroine and the animal husband, who becomes human, have children; she takes them to visit her human family and learns a secret song or command that allows for their return; the heroine's children eventually leak the secret to her human family and they kill her animal husband; the heroine and her children try to return to the animal husband, but discover he is dead; lastly, the heroine curses her children to become trees or birds.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. p. 144.
Motifs The heroine's secret code Other variations lie in the secret code the wife learns from her snake husband, and in the fate of the heroine and their children (sometimes all girls; sometimes all boys): they are either transformed into trees or into birds and disappear forever.Sauka, Leonardas. "Kūrybiškumo proveržiai pasakoje "Eglė žalčių karalienė"" [Outbreaks of creativity in the tale "Eglė - the queen of serpents"]. In: Tautosakos darbai [Folklore Studies]. 2010, 39. pp. 66-79. Žmuida, Eugenijus. ""Eglė žalčių karalienė": gyvybės ir mirties domenas" ["Eglė the queen of serpents": domain of life and death]. In: Tautosakos darbai [Folklore Studies]. 2011, 42. pp. 160-161. Lūvena, Ivonne. "Egle — zalkša līgava. Pasaka par zalkti — baltu identitāti veidojošs stāsts" [Spruce – the Bride of the Grass Snake. The Folk Tale about Grass Snake as a Story of Baltic Identity]. In: LATVIJAS UNIVERSITĀTES raksti. n. 732: Literatūrzinātne, folkloristika, māksla. Rīga: LU Akadēmiskais apgāds, 2008. p. 15.
The children's transformation According to researcher Galina Kabakova, the fate of the children at the end of the tale is important to determine the origin of that particular variant (based on a geographical method): in the main Lithuanian versions, mother and children are transformed into trees, a motif that occurs in versions collected from the Belarus's border between Poland and Lithuania, and in Russian versions collected in Lithuania. On the other hand, if the tale ends with the transformation of the family into birds or reptiles, it is a tale from East Slavic origin.Kabakova, Galina. «Le projet du Dictionnaire de motifs et de contes-types étiologiques chez les slaves orientaux». Revue des études slaves [Онлайн], LXXXIX 1-2 | 2018 (§30). Выложить онлайн 09 juillet 2019, Наводить справки в 04 février 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/res/1526; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/res.1526 In 's monograph, he considered the bird transformation in other texts to be a "variation" on the motif of the tree transformation.
Galina Kabakova notes that, among the East Slavic populations, the tale type ATU 425M assumes the features of an etiological tale:Kabakova, Galina. "Le mari-serpent ou Pourquoi le coucou coucoule". In: EURASIE, 2007. vol. 17: "Oiseaux: Héros et devins". pp. 127-142."Восточнославянские этиологические сказки и легенды: Энциклопедический словарь" [East Slavic Etiological Fairy Tales and Legends: Encyclopedic Dictionary]. под общ. ред. Г.И. Кабаковой; сост. О.В. Белова, А.В. Гура, Г.И. Кабакова, С.М. Толстая. Moskva: Неолит, 2019. p. 139. . as remarked by professor Natalie Kononenko, it shows the origins of the cuckoo, the lark and the nightingale.Kononenko, Natalie (2007). Slavic Folklore: A Handbook. Greenwood Press. pp. 28-29. . In this regard, the heroine "nearly always" becomes a cuckoo, while her son "almost always" becomes a nightingale,"Восточнославянские этиологические сказки и легенды: Энциклопедический словарь" [East Slavic Etiological Fairy Tales and Legends: Encyclopedic Dictionary]. под общ. ред. Г.И. Кабаковой; сост. О.В. Белова, А.В. Гура, Г.И. Кабакова, С.М. Толстая. Moskva: Неолит, 2019. p. 392. . although the children may turn into different birds in other versions. Furthermore, in the Slavic variants, the mother-in-law is the one that kills the snake husband.Kayanidi, L.G. (2020). “Structural and semantic typology of the metamorphic ornithological plot of an East Slavic tale (SUS 425М)”. In: Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics, vol. 3, no. 1, p. 58.
Variants Although it can be considered a tale type developed in the Baltic area, since most of the variants have been recorded there,"Ji pagrįstai gali būti laikoma baltų – lietuvių ir latvių – pasaka, nes daugiausia jos variantų užrašyta Lietuvoje ir Latvijoje." Bagočiūnas, Saulis. ""Eglė žalčių karalienė": pasakos topografijos paieškos" ["Eglė - the Queen of Serpents": in search of the tale's topography]. In: Tautosakos darbai [Folklore Studies]. 2008, 36, p. 64. variants are reported by scholar Leonardas Sauka to have been collected in nearby countries: 23 variants in Estonia (near Lake Peipus);Bagočiūnas, Saulis. ""Eglė žalčių karalienė": pasakos topografijos paieškos" ["Eglė - the Queen of Serpents": in search of the tale's topography]. In: Tautosakos darbai [Folklore Studies]. 2008, 36, p. 68. 150 Lithuanian versions; 89 Latvian versions; 28 from Russia; 22 from Belarus; 6 in Ukraine; 3 from Poland; 2 from Bulgaria. Variants have also been found from Tatar (4 tales) and Kazakh (1 version) sources.Sauka, Leonardas. "Veikėjų ir vietų vardai, jų kaita Eglės pasakoje" [Names of characters and places and their change in the fairy tale "The snake as bridegroom"]. In: Tautosakos darbai [Folklore Studies]. 2008, 35. pp. 184-193. Altogether, the variants collected outside Lithuania and Latvia, from 11 countries, amount to 106 versions.Sauka, Leonardas. "Pastangos švelninti kūrinį: pasakos "Eglė žalčių karalienė" periferiniai variantai" [Attempts at mitigating the narrative : peripheral variants of the tale "Eglė - the queen of serpents"]. In: Tautosakos darbai [Folklore Studies]. 2007, 33. pp. 45-55. The tale is also said to be known in Germany, Finland and among the "Cheremis" (Mari people).Repšienė, Rita. "Eglės pasaka: populiarumo transkripcijos" [Eglė's tale: transcriptions of popularity]. In: Gimtasis žodis Nr. 1 (2001). p. 20. . Similarly, according to Russian folklorist , despite Stith Thompson's opinion that the tale type existed in Lithuania, it was also reported among East Slavs (in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus), in Poland, Bulgaria, and in Latvia and Estonia.
Eastern Europe Professor Jack V. Haney stated that variants of type 425M appear "frequently recorded among the Russians", but "less frequently by Belarusians and Ukrainians".