The Course of True Love

Reading a legendary love story is a bit like flipping a coin. Heads, they survive; tails, they die miserably. For all that people like hearing about a young couple in love, they sure do have a lot of stories that end in tears and heartbreak. And for that certain subsection of these tales - the star-crossed lovers - everything they do to fix their situation just ends up drawing the noose even tighter around their necks.

Deirdre and Naisi, Breogan

Take Deirdre and Naisi, the great tragic lovers of Irish mythology. The cards were stacked against them from the start; poor Deirdre wasn't even a day old before druids prophesied the bloodshed that would result from her incredible beauty. Locked up away from the world, promised to a king with a yen for a trophy wife, Deirdre decides that she deserves a say in her own fate and promptly falls in love with the equally-gorgeous Naisi. Like any knight in shining armor worth his salt, he throws caution to the winds and elopes with her. So far, so good, right?

Well, there's that king. He's not happy about this interloper. And he's also not above using treachery, magic, and plain old pettiness to avenge his wounded pride. By the time the story's done, Naisi and his brothers have been murdered, and Deirdre - who tried belatedly to warn them of the dangers of hanging out with her - has died of a broken heart, but only after having been married for a year to King Backstabber. And the worst part is that they go into danger knowing that they could die. Deirdre's ominous dreams, the warnings of Naisi's brothers, even the prophecy that started the whole shebang are all openly discussed and perfectly interpreted. They know exactly what faces them, and they still can't change their fates.

Lancelot and Guinevere, Herbert James Draper

For that very reason, Lancelot and Guinevere fight tooth and nail against their forbidden passion. They too can see with perfect clarity the chaos that it could bring: the destruction of the Round Table, the death of Arthur's dream, the confusion and anarchy of civil war. Lancelot, sworn to be Guinevere's knight from the moment they meet, goes out questing again and again to remove himself from temptation. (Of course, lesser temptations present themselves all the time, but the strength of his love for Guinevere - unacknowledged, unconsummated, and for all he knows unreciprocated - lets him steer clear.) Guinevere wrestles her demons in silence, molding herself into a perfect queen and Arthur's mainstay. But when they finally give in and become lovers, all their good work goes for naught. Just as their secret passion tormented them earlier, now their betrayal of Arthur cuts them both. Tons of versions (Tennyson most notably) turn Guinevere into a jealous shrew, quarreling with Lancelot over the strength of his love at any opportunity. And it's their affair that provides the crack through which Camelot is broken open - again, the very outcome the lovers foresaw and dreaded, come about directly through their own actions.

In comparison, the Weaving Princess and the Cowherd seem positively peaceful. They don't cause any wars; there's no blood shed on their behalf; they don't even die. But it's still tricky to get more star-crossed than them. They're total workaholics - her cloth and his cows are the best in the world - until she gets wistful about the fact that her crazy work schedule means she'll never have time to fall in love. Her father, the Sky King, brings the two of them together, and it's love at first sight, which means they both take an indefinite vacation from weaving and tending the herd. From being exemplars, they become a cautionary tale, and the Sky King goes to the opposite extreme: he puts a river between them and forbids them ever to cross it. Only when his daughter begs him to let her see her beloved again does he allow them to meet for one day out of every year, and then only if there are enough magpies to make a bridge for her to cross the river. No magpies, no reunion. And it's really hard to blame either lover for this bittersweet end to their story. Yes, if the Weaving Princess had just been satisfied with a life chained to her loom, or if the lovers had only acted in moderation, none of this would have been necessary. But you can't fault them for wanting to fall in love, or for being carried away by a grand passion. Unlike Deirdre and Naisi, who walk with open eyes toward their fate, the Weaving Princess and the Cowherd get blindsided by every twist in their path. Their actions still create their lousy situation, but much less deliberately.

Romeo and Juliet, Frank Dicksee

We probably don't even need to discuss Romeo and Juliet. But you can't mention impulsive star-crossed lovers and not talk about them. They get married the day after they meet, and separated the following morning. They concoct wild schemes of escape and reunion. And their own unwillingness to move "wisely and slow," as Friar Laurence urges, leads to their horribly early deaths. Juliet prefers a faked death to coming clean to her (admittedly terrifying) parents; Romeo can't even wait a day after hearing of it before making rash plans to kill himself. Given how early and often these two threaten suicide, it's a miracle they make it through Act Four still alive.

But here's the catch. Even though pretty much everyone can agree that each pair of lovers creates their own problems, no story ever takes them to task for the impulsiveness and recklessness that leads them to separation and/or death. Deirdre and Naisi are fulfilling a prophesied fate; Lancelot and Guinevere are used as pawns by Mordred; the Weaving Princess and the Cowherd are perhaps most sympathetic because they're most human, stumbling through life with no foreshadowing and reacting to things as they happen. And Romeo and Juliet get romanticized to a ludicrous extent. They were incredibly lucky that the greatest poet of the English language made their story famous. Without Shakespeare's exquisite words, they'd be a couple of innocently moronic teenagers who made their bed and now have to lie in it. As it is, they're the English byword for true love, with countless silly songs using their names as shorthand. (No, Taylor Swift wasn't the first one to misread the play. She's just the most obvious.)

So even when the lovers themselves contribute materially to their own destruction, they're not really blamed. Storytellers may be trying to hammer home a moral about rash impulse, but even they fall under the spell of an all-consuming love. It's an easy thing to do. Two people who sacrifice everything, including themselves, for each other, is an incredibly attractive story. In fact, the lovers who make that sacrifice get immortalized far more readily than those who don't. Prince Charming and his princess of choice have a zillion iterations; Romeo and Juliet are unique, and instantly recognizable. It's as if the making of that sacrifice elevates a particular love above all the other couples who, for all we know, would have given their lives for each other just as readily. But it wasn't asked of them, and so they're not the celebrated ones.

Romeo and Juliet, Joseph Wright

It's much easier to swoon than to question. Rationality has no place in a tale of grand passion and high stakes. But there's probably a reason that those lovers die young and wildly. They don't just make their fates; they make their world. The rules they live by are not the rules that the rest of us cleave to. Theirs is an all-or-nothing world (with the exception of the Weaving Princess and the Cowherd, who get dragged out of that world and forced into a compromise that tortures them eternally). We swoon because we admire their absolute conviction, their refusal to have only some when they want all. But while theirs may be a world that two people can live in, it's not one that fits well with the rest of us. In their refusal to surrender to outside demands, these lovers lay down an ultimatum to themselves. And if they are to hold true to each other and their wild and reckless love - which is what their world is built around - they must follow through.

Dragonslaying for Fame and Profit

When you get right down to it, there's one surefire way to become a hero. It's better than saving a king. It's more impressive than marrying a princess (although that often comes with the territory). It's basically guaranteed to cement you in our imagination forever.

Because only a true hero can slay a dragon.

Shadow over Mystara, Capcom

We could all recite this story in our sleep. Dragon terrorizes kingdom, king promises his daughter to whoever kills dragon, only the hero succeeds. It's a winning scenario for everyone: the king's subjects get to live without fear of being devoured, the king has his kingdom back plus a worthy successor, the princess gets to marry a hero, and said hero gets his courage and skill handsomely rewarded. But the weird thing is, that's only part of the story.

Heroes, like all the rest of us, have to work up to glory. Very few charge off the homestead and slay a dragon on their first try. Despite its position as the best way to become a hero, dragonslaying more often actually comes later in a hero's career, cementing his heroism rather than being the first proof of it.

Perseus and Andromeda, Drakenza Kimpel

Take Perseus, my personal favorite of all the Greek heroes for his combination of asskicking and being a decent human. By the time he meets his dragon, he's already accomplished the heroic feat for which he's famous: he's killed Medusa, and has her head in a bag at his side when he meets cute with Andromeda. Undaunted by the battle he literally just won (and probably psyched at the thought of rescuing a gorgeous naked princess), Perseus promptly dispatches the sea serpent sent to eat Andromeda. Some versions have him slice the monster up with his sword; others have him cleverly use the killer trophy from his last fight in a very dramatic display of his already-established heroism. And while Andromeda chained to the rock is the iconic image of a damsel in distress, Perseus' killing of the sea serpent is very much secondary, even in the story, to his killing of Medusa. It's the head of Medusa, not of the serpent, that he brandishes when he returns home.

There's also Rama, an unquestioned hero long before he runs into his dragon. Like Perseus, he doesn't even need one. He's endured baseless exile and a life of hardship with incredible grace and goodwill. He's also clearly a great person, because both his wife and his younger brother accompany him into exile of their own will, despite Rama's pleading with them to protect themselves and stay in their cushy palace. Not enough yet? Well, there's also the matter of his entire kingdom mourning his loss because they know he'd be a fantastic king, or his other younger brother Bharata (whose jealous mother orchestrated the whole wrongful-exile thing) refusing to claim the rights due to a crown prince. Bharata actually tracks Rama down in exile just to apologize in person for his mother, and to assure Rama that he himself is just keeping Rama's place open for when he returns. The Ramayana is chock-full of awesome people being awesome. And even in this land of paragons, they all respect Rama most. Dude is a hero. No question.

So although the capture and rescue of his wife Sita forms one of the great set-pieces of the whole epic, it's never necessary for proving Rama's heroism. It's certainly moving that he follows Sita's trail all the way to a demon kingdom, and it's very impressive that he fights a demon king (whose ten heads push the same dragon-alert buttons as, say, the Hydra, or the Yamata no Orochi) to reclaim the woman who's been faithful to him all this time. But it's not by any means the first hint we get that Rama is a hero. At this point - near the end of the Ramayana, just before Rama gets called back home to become king - it's icing on the cake. It's actually made even better by the fact that we know very well that Rama rocks. We're not wondering in the slightest who will win this fight; we're munching popcorn and cheering Rama on.

Susano-o Fighting the Yamata no Orochi, superspacemonkey

Whether in legend or in Spenser, Saint George's dragon-slaying follows a slew of other heroic acts (and isn't even the final capper in The Faerie Queene, which has him still questing after he defeats the dragon and marries Una). Susano-o beats the Yamata no Orochi, a monstrous eight-headed dragon, by a combination of trickery and swordplay, but Susano-o is a storm god who previously made his sister's necklace give birth to five men; he has no desperate need to prove his power. And for Siegfried, killing a dragon is just one of many stepping-stones (although not the first) to his most famous deed: the wooing of Brunnhild, a formidable warrior regardless of whether she's a Valkyrie or just an incredibly strong mortal. We remember them because they killed dragons, but that's hardly all they did.

The Fall of Beowulf, Devin Maupin

And then there's Beowulf. His fight with a dragon, far from making his name, is the fight that kills him. When he meets his dragon, he's old but still powerful. He killed Grendel and his mother long ago. He's ruled his people for years, largely because of the fame and prestige he won in those two battles. But he takes on the dragon anyway, partly because he's the king and knows how these things work, but also partly because he knows very well that he's a hero. And heroes fight dragons. It's inevitable that he will die in this fight - you didn't really think an asskicker like Beowulf would go in his sleep, did you? - but it's also his final act of heroism to face the dragon himself, taking very literally the king's task to defend his people. When he and the dragon kill each other (with Beowulf getting a much-needed assist from his one loyal warrior, Wiglaf), it's a truly fitting death: the monster and the monster-slayer destroying each other. The fight with the dragon provides the final affirmation of Beowulf's heroism in risking (and losing) his life to protect his subjects.

Saint George and the Dragon, Trina Schart Hyman

So nowhere, really, is the slaying of a dragon the ultimate proof of heroism. But in each case, it is a watershed moment in each hero's career. Perseus wins a wife; Rama claims his crown; Beowulf goes out in a blaze of glory. Maybe the reason it's become so obvious a path to heroism is because slaying a dragon marks a change in a hero's life. Nothing is the same after a fight with a dragon. There's always an upgrade of some kind.

Killing a dragon isn't usually the first time the hero proves his heroism. But it is usually the first moment he gets the trappings and rewards of a hero. And that speaks very eloquently to a culture searching for a deed that defines heroism.

Fighting With Gods

Thor vs. the Fire Trolls, Howard David Johnson

War. What is it good for?

Well, it produces some rather entertaining gods. Ares very kindly volunteered to be the butt monkey for the entire Greek pantheon. Thor's tempers are quite literally the stuff of legend. Durga, created to defend the world from a rampaging demon, trounces Mahishasura in what had to be the best show ever seen on the face of the earth. Nothing draws the eye quite like a war god out to make a point.

The really militant cultures understandably put the most thought into their war gods. Ares might get trapped in a jug and run screaming from the plain of Troy, but he does also have Terror and Fear pulling his chariot. And his affair with Aphrodite points up the seductive appeal of war in a culture based on fighting. Eighteen-armed Durga also represents the force of compassion; joined with fierce fighting energy, her very existence makes a fascinating argument for humanity in warfare. The Mithras cult, a favorite of Roman soldiers, provided a forum for sworn brotherhood; the god's very name might come from the Sanskrit word mitra, meaning friendship. Hachiman isn't just an ancient Japanese war god, he's the patron and teacher of warriors, as well as the particular god of an entire clan. These aren't just creatures of bloodlust - they're complicated deities with lots of responsibilities, both in their stories and symbolically.

Inanna, Luis Royo

And that's not even getting into the war goddesses. The Mesopotamians, one of the most bloodthirsty ancient cultures out there, had Inanna, goddess of sex and war. (She saw no reason not to mix the two; mythical humans rejected her as a lover at risk of their lives.) Freya has been bastardized down to the goddess of beauty, but in her day she got first pick of the battlefield dead, to take to her own halls. Athena combines wisdom and warfare, much like Durga; Bastet's most familiar manifestation, as a cat, means that she's also one of the patron goddesses of the pharaohs. Even Aphrodite enters the fray when she's needed, and is quite capable of rescuing a son here and there.

In short, we're ambivalent about war. Even in cultures that glorify strife and battle, war gods come with a mitigating circumstance built into their worship. You can pray to Thor as a thunder god, not just as a death-dealer, and if it's glory you're after, you might be better off talking to Tyr or Odin anyway. Nobody is quite easy with letting a god represent only the savagery of the field.

Ares, j-art

And that savagery is there in spades. Ares never goes anywhere without the goddess of discord; all three aspects of the Morrigan are intimately identified with death and killing; Hathor, who represents beauty and music, gets so angry at one point that she turns into Sekhmet, the lion-headed war goddess, and goes so out of control that Ra has to trick her into thinking beer is blood. Thor, the main Norse war god, is not in charge of honor or victory, only of the act of war itself.

So what creates this very real concern with war? We're not afraid of glorifying it; if we were, we wouldn't be the kind of life form that creates war gods. It could just be a storyteller's reluctance to let a perfectly good god be one-use-only. It's easy to make the leap from thunder god to war god, from sexually voracious to aggressively combative. If Inanna stories are popular, why not expand her mythos?

It could also be the up-close nature of these cultures' relation to war.

The Battle on the Ice, Boris Olshansky

If we're still talking about an ancient culture, you can bet anything they had lots of personal encounters with war. (Their enemies - the ones we've forgotten about - might not have had so many war gods.) A Norse berserker, coming off the high of a battle frenzy while surrounded by corpses, might well draw a distinct line between war and honor. The path from doer to teacher is a perfectly logical one; since Hachiman started out as the patron of fishermen, it's not hard to see how he might have become a patient instructor rather than a battlefield threat. Wisdom and compassion are very desirable things to have tempering bloodlust, especially for people who saw little of either. (Let's not forget the Iliad's massive death lists, or the straight-up anti-war sentiments of Lysistrata and The Trojan Women.) And while you'd definitely want your war gods aggressive, you'd probably prefer that the protector of your king be rational Bastet, consort of levelheaded Anubis, rather than kill-crazy Sekhmet.

Humans know it's easy to lose control when emotions are running high. But we want our gods to be better than us. We want there to be a reason to need their help. It makes sense, for whatever reason, that we'd create war gods with other things on their minds. If they can maintain control, maybe they can show us how. If they could devote themselves to other aspects of life, maybe ancient worshippers who didn't like the people that they became in war could hold out hope that there was still a better side to themselves. Either way, it shows us that even in highly war-based cultures, people still wanted their gods to have something to fight for.

Part of Your World: Limited Engagement Only

Adrift at Sea, Nilah Magruder

So much fuss gets made over the little mermaid who failed to nab a prince that we tend to forget the scores of supernatural women who succeeded. Human men, it seems, are a hot commodity on mythical women's mash notes. And with the exception of Andersen's strangely blind prince, they tend to be rather eager for a supernatural wife. Which is no surprise - these are, after all, magical women whose goodwill can ensure success and wealth.

Some men actively set out to catch an otherworldly wife. There are endless tales of men who steal a mermaid's red cap or a selkie's sealskin to trap her on land. Others go about their wooing more delicately, like the Shepherd of Myddfai offering his chosen mermaid a bite of bread to entice her to a life on shore. Still others are forcefully wooed. The Fairy Queen is notorious for abducting handsome men with nice voices, regardless of their opinions. But the benefits of having a supernatural lover are immense. Without exception, the women's influence - from magical blessings to excellent housekeeping - win the men comfort and renown for their good luck.

So everyone's happy, right?

Not so fast. This is the fairy world. There's always a catch.

Loss, Cheryl Kirk Noll

Supernatural brides hold to the letter of their bargains. Make one wrong move (three at most), and they pop out of your life as suddenly as they entered it, taking all their magical support with them. The classic setup goes thusly: upon engagement, the bride names a single condition with which the groom must comply. Melusine forbids her husband to look at her while she bathes; the mermaid of Myddfai (in a nice move for women's rights) vows to leave her husband if he strikes her three times; the Crane Wife won't let her husband watch her weave the cloth that brings them wealth. Sounds easy, up until curiosity kills the cat and the husbands have to look, or lose their temper, or forget to lock up the sealskin. There's no fooling a supernatural bride, either. They know when the deal is broken. (Melusine's husband tries to lie to her, which only makes him look worse.)

What's more, when they go, they never come back. Volund's marriage to Hervor the Valkyrie, a perfectly happy one, ends for good when she decides she misses her old life. The husbands of local selkies get no warning when their wives discover their sealskins and return to the sea; some stories have the bereft husband walking the shore for the rest of his life, searching for his lost bride. Melusine's husband has an extra worry: in addition to the loss of his wife, he frets that she's cursed him and his lands in vengeance.

Wayland, Max Koch

Once the contract is broken, supernatural brides aren't known for their generosity. Mermaids tend to abandon their families before their children are grown and able to take over their mother's duties. The Crane Wife leaves her husband's only source of income unfinished. Volund gets bit worst: as soon as Hervor's gone, the local king orders Volund hamstrung and trapped on an island so no one else can have access to his superior smithing skills. (To be fair, Volund bites back, making the king some drinking goblets out of the skulls of the king's sons, and also raping and impregnating his only daughter, before escaping on wings he'd made in secret. All par for the course in a Norse legend.) The mermaid of Myddfai is extraordinarily generous in that, while she takes back her dowry of cattle, she also blesses her descendants with phenomenal healing powers and watches over the town. No other supernatural bride ever looks back.

Mephistophilis Appears to Doctor Faustus

The trappings of these stories are eerily similar to the tales of men who sell their souls to the devil. In exchange for instant benefits, the man makes a letter-of-the-law deal with a creature not of this world, which will hit hard when the contract inevitably runs out. True, a mermaid bride isn't quite on the same level as Mephistophilis, but the women of Melusine's line were rumored to be witches up through the Wars of the Roses. The supernatural creature retains all rights; only the human stands to lose. In some cases, the bride manipulates the terms of the contract. The mermaid of Myddfai counts an impatient "hurry up" tap on the shoulder as one of the three blows that will entitle her to return to the lake; the Fairy Queen sends True Thomas back to our world when she gets bored of him, neglecting to tell him that seven years have passed while he partied for a night in Fairyland. This is straight-up Doctor Faustus material: the seduction of a human by mystical forces that disguise the truth without ever outright lying.

Mermaid, Laurent Miny

Granted, the brides don't intend anything as sinister as dragging their husbands into Hell. But the one-sided arrangements, and the clear evidence that the power rests with the females, indicate a serious reversal of the normal run of things. It's uncomfortably easy to make the jump of reasoning that a powerful woman is on par with the devil, or at the very least in possession of abilities that are too dangerous for humans to be around for long. The Melusine story in particular throws gas on the fire: between the snake-woman and the monstrous children she bears, her identification with the devil couldn't be clearer.

So maybe there's a reason we forget those stories. They overturn the status quo. They remind us that there are forces we don't and will never understand. Like their heroines, they seduce with the promise of happiness and dash our hopes without warning. They're not comfortable bedtime stories; they're tales of man against nature, often without a clear villain or victor. Stories like that don't make for sweet dreams.