The Younger Sister Marries the Snake (German: Die jüngere Schwester heiratet die Schlange) is a folktale from the Paiwan people, an indigenous people from Taiwan. In it, a father finds a flower from a snake spirit's garden and is forced to give his youngest daughter to the animal, who turns out to be a human, and their marriage is fortunate for the youngest daughter. Out of jealousy, the girl's sister conspires to take her place and kills her. The heroine, then, goes through a cycle of transformations, regains human form and takes revenge on her sister. The tale is related to the cycle of the animal bridegroom, but scholars consider it a narrative that developed in East Asia, since most of the tales are attested in China and Taiwan.
Source According to Hans Egli, the tale was collected from an informant named Karui, in Dashi.
Summary In this tale, a family of four live together: father, mother and two daughters. One day, the man goes to hunt wild boars in the mountains and, by nightfall, when he is returning home, he sights a tree yielding beautiful flowers and decides to pluck some for his two daughters. He climbs it, fetches some, but finds a large snake by the root of the tree. The snake begins to talk and says the flowers belong to him, which he should not have stolen, thus, as payment, the man is to forfeit one of the man's daughter as his wife, lest he devours the man. The man agrees to the snake's threat and goes home to ask his daughters about it. He brings them the flowers, but starts to cry. His daughters ask him the reason for his sadness and he explains the situation, asking them which will go with the snake: the elder daughter vehemently refuses to do so, but the youngest agrees in order to spare her father.
The snake has followed the man home and watches the whole exchange, and invites the girls' mother and father to their wedding, which is to take place at the snake's home. The elder daughter stays home, while her family goes to the wedding between their cadette and the snake. When they arrive, the snake tells the human family his body "tastes like Ananas", which they might not bear, and sends them ahead of him. As the human parents and the girl climb down the stairs, they hear the ringing of bells behind them, and see that the snake has turned into a handsome youth. They enter the snake youth's splendid house. After the marriage, the snake youth gives his human parents-in-law gold and objects they carry home with some difficulty, since the presents are many. When they reach home, their elder daughter notices the richness of the gifts and is told they are the snake son-in-law's, whose house is rich and luxurious. This instills a feeling of envy in the girl, who wishes she could have married the snake. Time passes, the elder daughter announces she will pay her sister a visit, harbouring an idea to kill her.
Back to the snake and his wife, he tells her she has not to worry with anything in their abode. One day, he leaves for the mountains, and the girl is visited by her elder sister. When the elder sister sees the luxurious house, she begins to feel even more jealous of her cadette and plans how to kill her. She asks her cadette about the nearest water source and invites her to take a bath with her. After taking a bath, the elder sister puts on the cadette's clothes and, lulling the younger into a false sense of security, shoves her in the water and drowns her, then returns to the snake youth's house, where she pretends to be ill so as not to draw suspicions. The snake youth returns and notices his 'wife' is in bed, but the false wife asks him not to lift the covers, since she is sick.
The snake youth decides to prepare some food for his wife, when he hears the crickets chirping outside his house in a strange manner. Then, a swarm of flies appear before his face, to his puzzlement. The following morning, a bird perches on a tree in his garden and begins to sing. The snake youth listens to the bird's song and suspects there is some meaning to it, then bids the bird sing again. The bird begins to talk and admits it is his wife, while the woman lying in bed in his room is her elder sister, who killed her to take her place. The snake youth bids the bird to sing a third time so he could understand its meaning, then the situation sinks in. He takes a sword, kills the false wife in his bed and tosses the body in the mountains. When he returns home, the bird is perching on bed and has turned back into his true wife. The girl reveals everything to the snake youth, and they begin to live in happiness.
Analysis Tale type The collector, Hans Egli, compared the tale to the Graeco-Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche, and classified it as type 425C, "Beauty and the Beast".
In the first catalogue of Chinese folktales, devised by folklorist Wolfram Eberhard in 1937, Eberhard abstracted a Chinese folktype he termed Der Schlangenmann ("The Serpent Husband"). In this type, indexed as number 31 in his catalogue, a man with many daughters marries his youngest daughter to a snake or snake spirit as a promise for a favour; the snake and the girl live happily, enticing the jealousy of the eldest sister; the eldest sister shoves the youngest sister into a well and takes her place; the youngest sister becomes a bird, then a tree (or bamboo), regains human form and unmasks her treacherous sister.Eberhard, Wolfram. Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1937. pp. 47-48.
Chinese folklorist and scholar established a second typological classification of Chinese folktales, and abstracted a similar narrative sequence. He named this tale type 433D, "The Snake Husband"Nai-tung TING. A Type Index of Chinese Folktales in the Oral Tradition and Major Works of Non-religious Classical Literature. FF Communications, no. 223. Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1978. pp. 73-74. (or "The Snake and Two Sisters").Zhang, Juwen. “Rediscovering the Brothers Grimm of China: Lin Lan”. In: The Journal of American Folklore 133, no. 529 (2020): 297. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.133.529.0285.
In a joint article in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, European scholars Bengt Holbek and John Lindow described it as a "Chinese oikotype".Holbek, Bengt; Lindow, John. "König Lindwurm (AaTh 433, 433 A–C)". In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Band 8: Klerus – Maggio. Edited by Rudolf Wilhelm Brednich; Hermann Bausinger; Wolfgang Brückner; Helge Gerndt; Lutz Röhrich. De Gruyter, 2016 . p. 162. . https://www.degruyter.com/database/EMO/entry/emo.8.037/html In that regard, researcher Juwen Zhang indicated that type 433D, "Snake boy/husband and two sisters", is an example of local Chinese tale types that are not listed in the international ATU index.Juwen Zhang. Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. p. 30. .
Relation to other tale types
Ting described tale type 433D as a combination of the initial part of type 425C, "Beauty and the Beast", and the second part of type 408.Nai-tung TING. A Type Index of Chinese Folktales in the Oral Tradition and Major Works of Non-religious Classical Literature. FF Communications, no. 223. Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1978. p. 73. Likewise, in the article about tale type King Lindworm in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Holbek and Lindow noted that Ting's new tale type combined motifs of ATU 425C, "Beauty and the Beast"; the heroine's transformation sequence that appears in tale type ATU 408, "The Love for Three Oranges", and the bird transformation from tale type ATU 720, "The Juniper Tree".Holbek, Bengt; Lindow, John. "König Lindwurm (AaTh 433, 433 A–C)". In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Band 8: Klerus – Maggio. Edited by Rudolf Wilhelm Brednich; Hermann Bausinger; Wolfgang Brückner; Helge Gerndt; Lutz Röhrich. De Gruyter, 2016 . p. 162. . https://www.degruyter.com/database/EMO/entry/emo.8.037/html
Taiwanese scholarship also recognizes some proximity between the Chinese tale type, the French story Beauty and the Beast (father plucks rose from the Beast and is forced to surrender him his daughter) and Italian The Three Oranges (heroine goes through cycle of transformations, including bird and tree), but emphasize that the European stories deal with love between heroine and hero, while the crux of the Chinese tale is the rivalry between a younger sister who married into good financial circumstances and her elder sister, wanting what the other has.
According to Christine Shojaei-Kawan's article, Walter Anderson, in his unpublished manuscript on The Three Oranges, identified a "Chinese mixed redaction" between the Snake Husband tale (which he listed as type AT 433A) and type 408, "The Three Oranges", in that the heroine is murdered and goes through a cycle of incarnations. However, Shojaei-Kawan considers that the motif of the transformation cycle already exists in South and East Asia unrelated to type 408, and suggests that the "mixed redaction" could be treated as an independent tale type.Shojaei-Kawan, Christine (2004). "Reflections on International Narrative Research on the Example of the Tale of the Three Oranges (AT 408)". In: Folklore (Electronic Journal of Folklore), XXVII, pp. 32-33.
Motifs
In his folktype system, Eberhard indicated that the number of sisters also varies between tales.Eberhard, Wolfram. Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1937. p. 49.
The heroine's father is ordered to surrender his daughter after he steals some of the snake's flowers from its garden, or asked to deliver her as the snake's reward for a favour (e.g., cutting all trees or retrieving his axe handle).
The snake husband Egli considered that the marriage between the youngest sister and the snake fits "almost perfectly" in Paiwan imaginary: the snakes are Tsemas, spirits from the other world that are superior to humans and can shapeshift between snake and human forms. However, he noted that the snake husband in the tale lived "in this world" instead of underwater, which would not be part of the Paiwan worldview.
In his folktype system, Eberhard indicated that in some of the variants, the supernatural husband is a snake, snake spirit or a dragon, and another type of animal in others.Eberhard, Wolfram. Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1937. p. 49. He also agreed that the motif of the snake husband seemed very old.Eberhard, Wolfram. Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1937. p. 51.
In Ting's catalogue, the snake husband assumes human form, but it can also be a "flower god", a wolf, or a normal man.Nai-tung TING. A Type Index of Chinese Folktales in the Oral Tradition and Major Works of Non-religious Classical Literature. FF Communications, no. 223. Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1978. p. 73.
The heroine's replacement The heroine is drowned by her sister when she is convinced to bathe or to take a look at their reflections in water. In her cycle of transformations, she may change into many objects: a cradle, a baby carriage, a spindle, or a type of food (bread, or, as in Taiwanese variants, a red tortoise cake).
Variants