Blog Post #9

The Robber’s Bridegroom, Fitcher’s Bird, and Bluebeard all have the motifs of a Bluebeard tale. This means they all contain an old man who takes girls as his bride and gives them a test to know their loyalty. The test usually involves a locked room with a key and inside the room there is a horde of dead bodies whom are all the old man’s previous wives. Although these tales are all similar and have similar themes, they all have their differences. The only Bluebeard tale where the man has a blue beard is in the Charles Perrault version called Bluebeard. In the robber’s bridegroom the bridegroom is a cannibal and murders his brides along with his companion in order to eat them. He doesn’t test them and then kill them if they fail the test and store them in a locked room. Perrault’s tale of Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Bird are the most similar in my opinion. Both contain the locked room and the test. But the brides in both have different ways of escaping Bluebeard. In Perrault’s version the bride is caught snooping in the locked room but avoids being killed by waiting upstairs until it is confirmed that her brothers are coming to go downstairs. Her brothers then kill Bluebeard for her. In Fitcher’s Bird the bride uses her wit to trick her husband into taking her sisters home with gold in jewels and then she disguised herself as a bird to so that he would not recognize her.