Lore 227: Bloodlines

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I sometimes wonder if we really truly understand what the word old means. For example, I grew up in a central Illinois town that had old buildings, but it turns out it was only founded in the 1860s.

Moving out to New England changed my perception on what old actually means. Here we have houses that are close to 400 years old.

Heck, there's a graveyard 100 yards from my office window that has tombstones older than 95% of this country. And if you go to the UK or Europe, that perception is challenged even more.

We always think the things around us are old until we discover stuff that's even older. Honestly, it never fails.
The oldest mummy ever discovered in Egypt was the body of a woman named Lady Rai.

Archaeologists believe that she was about 30 years old when she died over 3,500 years ago, and her remains have given scientists a great window into the past.

For the past century and a half, she has represented a watermark. Until now, that is.

At the beginning of 2023, Egyptian archaeologists announced that they had found the mummy of a man who was buried 800 years before Lady Rai, way back in 2300 BC.

And it's a discovery that proves, yet again, that there's always something older, just waiting to be discovered.

Some things feel old simply because we've known about them our entire lives, but for those who know where to look, even the oldest things, like the stories we tell, are hiding an even more ancient origin.

And as is so often the case, the further we dive into the past, the more darkness we uncover.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

It's the well from which so many stories have been pulled.

Young adult novels, television shows, movies, and comic books, all of them, on a pretty regular basis, have lowered their buckets into the depths to pull up a fresh take on an old story. Fairy tales.

Of course, Disney is probably the biggest example that comes to mind. Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Snow White.

These are all stories that existed long before their animators set pen to paper. But just how long before might surprise you.

That classic Beauty and the Beast story, according to some scholars, can be traced all the way back to a world before English, French, and Italian were even a thing. Researchers Dr.

Sarah Grasa de Silva and Jamshid J. Tarani published a paper a few years ago that followed the tale as far back as 6,000 years.
Think about that for a moment.

We consider Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for example, to be a classic, and yet it's only a century and a half old. I'm not sure my brain can even classify Beauty in the Beast.

A tale as old as time indeed. There are others, too.
The story of Rumpelstiltskin might be just as old.

And there's a 5,000-year-old fairy tale known as The Boy Who Stole the Ogre's Treasure, which we would recognize as Jack in the Beanstalk.

Now, I think all of us understand how the evolution of these tales worked, right? Over those centuries, for most of the time, the stories were being passed on by word of mouth.

The versions that we have today are mostly the work of curators like Frenchman Charles Perot and a century later, the Grimm Brothers. But they did more than write these tales down.
They changed them.

Perot was a master of this. He loved to add in a key iconic element to each story.
Remember Little Red Riding Hood?

Well, she didn't have a red hood until Charles Perot got a hold of her story in the 1690s. Before then, she was just a girl with no identity.
Perot's addition helped make her identifiable.

A century later, the Grimm brothers nicely added the bit where the huntsman saves her by cutting her out of the wolf, which means that for centuries, or perhaps even thousands of years, Little Red Riding Hood was simply a terrifying story of an unnamed girl who gets eaten by a wild animal, the end.

And how about Snow White? Well, in the oldest versions of that story, the woman who wants to kill her is her own mother, not her stepmother, which somehow feels darker, doesn't it?

When the Grimms got a hold of her tail, the evil queen becomes the stepmom, but is also a cannibal, requesting that the huntsmen bring her the liver and lungs of Snow White so she can eat them.

And if that wasn't dark enough for you, the Grimm version also features a very dead Snow White, not just sleeping.

And yet when the prince discovers her body, he tells his men that he wants to bring it home anyway, for

romantic purposes, shall we we say.

On the way home, they accidentally drop her coffin, and when her body hits the ground, a piece of the poisoned apple gets dislodged from her throat and she miraculously comes back to life.

I imagine that was a very awkward moment for the two of them. One last example, The Little Mermaid.

That one was written down by Hans Christian Andersen and has that well-known magical moment where she trades her voice for human legs. But most people forget that the deal came with two conditions.

First, every step she takes on those legs will be unbearably excruciating. And second, if the prince ever marries a different woman, the mermaid will turn into sea foam and die.

And then Anderson goes on to tell us how the mermaid dances for the prince to earn his attention, something that must have been absolute torture for her to do.

And in the end, he marries someone else, at which point the mermaid explodes in a cloud of foam. Happy ending, right?

And that's the thing about these tales. Few of them truly are happy stories.
Today we see fairy tales as little bite-sized children's stories that teach heartwarming moral lessons.

But centuries ago, they were something more, something darker. And yet, the darkest of them all is a fairy tale on a whole other level.

Not just because it's bloody and violent, but because of where it comes from as well. A story pulled from the pages of real life.

Many of you already know the basic story, but let's review it anyway, just in case.

It's another gem written down by our good friend Charles Perot, as part of a collection he published in 1697, and it's called Bluebeard.

The story introduces us to a young woman who marries a wealthy nobleman from the area. He's got a blue beard, too, which was a Charles Perrault edition.

After their wedding, the couple returns to Bluebeard's massive manor house and everything seems good and fine.

Well, except for the rumor that Bluebeard's previous wives had all mysteriously disappeared. Then one day he needs to make a trip and he hands the keys of the manor to his new wife.

Explore, he tells her. Go enjoy the luxury I've surrounded you with.
But he does have one small condition. The closet door at the end of the great hall is off-limits.

Open any door you want, he tells her, except that one. If she does, he'll be sure to punish her.
And you know how this is going to play out, right?

Bluebeard leaves, she goes exploring, and she's never satisfied until she sees what's behind that forbidden door. Perhaps it's treasure.

Maybe it's like Monica's closet on Friends, and that's where he puts all of his mess and chaos. She wants to know.

Upon opening the door, though, she discovers the bodies of all of his previous wives hanging from hooks in the ceiling, with pools of blood all over the floor.

In her fright, she drops the key to the room and when she picks it up she notices that there's blood on it. No problem, she can just clean it off, right?

Well she tries, but she's never able to get all of it off the key. And then Bluebeard returns home, inspects the key, and spots the blood, like some medieval CSI specialist.

Naturally, he gets very upset and is about to kill her when, surprise, surprise, her brothers bust the door in and rescue her, killing him instead.

Charles Perrault, of course, added a moral lesson at the end, as he was known to do. But true to the social values of the late 17th century, that lesson wasn't, hey people, don't kill your wives.

Instead, he wrote a long-winded version of the phrase, hey wives, don't be nosy.

Yeah.

Now, a lot of people think that the roots of this story can actually be found in the mid-6th century in a region of northwestern France called Brittany.

That's where a man named Connemore the Cursed ruled over the people, allegedly by killing the previous king and taking the throne for himself.

Time and folklore has sort of muddled our information about Connemore, but we know that he was a real actual person, and he had a reputation for cruelty. Remember that king that he killed?

It's said that Connemore forced the man's widow to marry him, and then treated her and her son so horribly that they were forced to escape and run away. So yeah, he was not a nice guy.

But the really famous bit is the story of how he ended up marrying Trephine, the daughter of the Count of Van. Initially, Connemore simply asked, but Trephine's father refused.

So the king invaded the Count's land, and the man caved. Connemore rode home with the new wife, and Trephine lost her freedom.

Soon enough, she was pregnant, but she was also starting to hear rumors about Connemor that frightened her, specifically that he had killed his four previous wives while they were pregnant.

In one version of the story, she even stumbled upon a room full of macabre trophies taken from those dead wives, and the ghost of one of them warns her to run for her life, which she does.

Only Connemore manages to catch her. Now in some versions of the story this happens after she gives birth to a son and in others she's still very pregnant.

Either way, Conamor kills both of them, just as he had done to all of his other wives. Trophine, for her part, would go on to become the patron saint of sickly children and overdue babies.

That's about as happy an ending as we can expect, given the circumstances. But Connemore, according to many historians, gains a darker reputation.

He too goes down in history as a symbol of a bigger concept, but for him, that concept is murder and abuse.

We might never know for sure if his story truly is the origin of the Bluebeard legend, but the glass slipper certainly seems to fit.

I'd even go as far as to consider the case solved and closed, if it wasn't for one more possibility. And as hard as it might be to believe, this one is even darker.

He was born rich. His father had been given the title of the Baron de Ray by the final member of the Ray bloodline, and along with it came a whole lot of money.

Throw-in and also rich mother, and little Gilles was set for life. But around 1415, when he was just nine years old, that wonderful world fell apart when both of his parents died.

Gilles was packed up and sent to live with his maternal grandfather, Jean de Cron, and that's where he grew up.

He was highly educated, wanted for nothing, and as a result, gained a reputation for being narcissistic and reckless. Life moved pretty fast for young Gilles de Ray.

He was betrothed at the age of 13, but that didn't end up working out. At 16, he went to war in a conflict between two noble families, serving for the winning side.

And at 17, he finally did get married, this time to a cousin, who he kidnapped with the support of his grandfather. Not the best family life, I know.
And his cousin, it turns out, was insanely rich.

In fact, through that marriage, Gilles became the wealthiest nobleman in the entire country. Money that he spent with abandon, on parties, art, more and more homes, and his own private army.

He even funded the production of a play that he wrote himself, paying the actors and the musicians to follow him everywhere he traveled.

At the young age of 18, he was invited to spend a year at the royal courts and quickly became a general and commander.

And it was during his time there that he earned a new reputation, that of cruelty. For example, he was fond of having prisoners executed even when their crimes did not warrant such a sentence.

He just did it for the fun.

In 1429, when he was about 25 years old, he met a military leader who won his loyalty. It was one of those hero-worshipping situations, and Gilles was enamored.

He found purpose serving under this leader, and whatever was modeled for him, he copied. Religious devotion, military might, you name it, Gilles copied his hero's every quality.

It was a relationship that took him into the fray of the Hundred Years' War and the Siege of Orléans.

The king made him Marshal of France and he was chosen to be one of only four lords assigned to bring the holy ampule to the consecration of King Charles VII.

Life was good for a while, but when his military hero was killed, he packed all that in and headed home. With nothing to do, he threw himself into his play again.

I won't go into all the detail, but it's worth looking up on your own. The production was huge and expensive, and it sucked up most of his vast wealth.
But his bigger hobby was something darker.

He had developed a taste for killing children.

Right there in the castle he had inherited from his grandfather, Gilles de Ray worked with a handful of accomplices to lure local children into his circle and then murder them in cold blood.

There are a lot of stories about what he did, how he did it, and the depths of his depravity, but that's not something I'm going to cover here.

I've got kids of my own, and these are things I would rather not dwell on.

Just know that during this phase of his life, Gilles was reported to have killed at least 100 boys and girls, although some reports put that number closer to 700.

And that's the sort of thing that can generate a storm of rumors, like a dark cloud that followed him wherever he went.

In 1439, he sold one of his properties and then immediately regretted it. So he did a very reasonable thing.
He raised his personal army and took it back by force.

But in the process, he imprisoned an important cleric, which brought the attention of the authorities. And when they investigated his properties, you can guess what they discovered.

Gilles De Ray was arrested on September 13th, 1440, for the crimes of child murder and occult violence. And rather than confess under torture, he freely admitted it all.

He was proud of his unspeakable deeds. It gave him pleasure, he told them.
The only thing he regretted, it seems, was that he had to stop. His sentence was sort of complex.

He was to be both hanged and burned, something usually done when they didn't want the criminal to suffer through the burning.

Although it's also easy to see it as a sort of statement, what you did was so evil, they seemed to say, that you deserve to be killed twice. Except, their plan failed.

Apparently, Gilles had enough supporters that after his hanging, they rushed the platform and took his body, giving him a chance at a normal burial.

All of this for a man who claimed to feel genuine pleasure, he told them, for the torture, blood, and tears of children.

Our favorite stories are often older than we think.

Maybe that's why they are our favorites, because they've stood the test of time, evolved to reflect the world we live in today, and have been refined and shaped by every retelling to become pure storytelling devices.

Maybe it's also important to point out that no single person can claim to own these tales.

Sure, some have put their own spin on them, like the candy-coated versions that Disney sells us, but at the root of all of them is an older, more brutal core, a word-of-mouth shadow that has cast darkness over the hearts of people for thousands of years.

In a way, the idea of a happy ending is a gaudy add-on that spits in the face of the originals.

But dark or light, the stories stories always have been and always will be a place where we might all learn a lesson or two. Just like the story of Gilles de Ray.

After his execution and rescue by his disillusioned fans, his name took on a life of its own. He became a sort of boogeyman used by parents to frighten children into good behavior.

In France, his name practically became synonymous with Satan and eventually even spawned new, darker stories. And as some might claim, one of those stories was even the fairy tale of Bluebeard.

Oh, and that military leader that Gilles de Ray worshipped and imitated for a short while, they went on to become the centerpiece of their own stories too, whispered by people everywhere.

And who could blame them? After all, it's not often that a military figure like that comes along and is also a woman.

That's right, the devil himself, Gilles De Ray, served as the personal bodyguard and champion in arms to the legendary French saint, Joan of Arc.

I hope you enjoyed today's deep dive into the ancient roots of our most beloved fairy tales.

It's fascinating just how old they really are and how much they've changed over the centuries to become the stories we hold so dearly today.

And to that end, I've got one more classic to unpack for you. Stick around through this brief sponsor break and I'll tell you all about it.

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Like a lot of these ancient fairy tales, there's a lot of guesswork built into the efforts of scholars today.

They compare stories across cultures and time and look at how certain details remain preserved or changed as the centuries pass by.

Sometimes that leads to one definitive source, but most of the time it just highlights an incredibly powerful truth that we as humans seem to be drawn to telling certain kinds of stories and that causes them to appear in multiple places in the world seemingly at the same time.

The one I want to share with you right now is well known throughout China, and it tells us about a young woman named Ya Xiang, who was the daughter of a local chieftain.

In the story though, the girl's father dies unexpectedly, leaving her in the care of his widow, her stepmother.

But between that woman's cruel behavior and her jealous stepsister Ching Li, poor young Yaxiang began to suffer horribly.

She had gone from a life of privilege to poverty in a heartbeat and as a result was forced to work for the others as a servant. She did have one little escape though.

A magic fish who could talk to her, giving her one true friend in a world of darkness and suffering.

We learn later on that this fish is a spirit guide sent to Earth by her dead mother to protect and teach her. And for a while that's exactly what happens.

But then her stepmother discovers the magic fish and, being a cruel woman, has it killed so that she and Ching Li can eat it, which as you might imagine was devastating to our hero, Yashiang.

But she gets a small glimmer of hope.

An ancestral spirit shows up and tells tells her that if she could gather up the fish's bones and place them in the four corners of her bedroom, the fish's magic would still work and allow her to have any wish that she might desire.

So, Yaxiang does exactly that. Although, to be fair, I have to wonder about the smell she had to put up with.

But fishy odors aside, the spell works, and she is once again able to talk to her friend, the magic fish.

And then, when the new year approached, Ya Xiang made a very specific wish to be able to attend the upcoming festival complete with a dazzling outfit and golden slippers.

The magic fish gives her exactly what she asks for and after dressing up in her new fancy clothes, Ya Xiang heads to the festival to party with everyone else.

Except while she's there she spots her stepmother and stepsister, freaks out that she might get caught and punished and runs away from the party.

But not before losing one of those nice slippers, of course.

Little does she know that the king has come into possession of that shoe and he is so intrigued by its tiny size and beautiful construction that he puts it on public display, hoping that the shoe's true owner might come forward.

Yaxiang eventually does and manages to convince the king that the slipper is hers. To prove it, she tries it on right there in front of him.

Immediately, he marries her and makes her his queen, and together, you guessed it, they live happily ever after.

And it's a story that I really don't need to dissect for you, do I? You probably recognize all of the major bones of the story.

The young woman who's lost her father, the step family that abuses her, and the magical assistance that leads her to a grand celebration and a lost shoe.

It's Cinderella, but it's not, all at the same time. Because this isn't just a Chinese interpretation of the story we've all grown up with.

In fact, this story came about long before Disney gave us the animated classic, and before Drew Barrymore helped us see the character in a new light. No, the tale of Yaxiang is far older.

It has its roots in ancient China during the years between the Qing and Han dynasties, which span the centuries from roughly 220 BC to 220 AD, which makes it over 2,000 years old, proving yet again that the stories we tell are often older and more diverse than we could ever imagine.

Folklore might often discuss tales of people set at odds with each other. But in the end, it also does something more magical.
It unites us around a common experience. That

of our shared humanity.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Jenna Rose Nethercott and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi.
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And as always,

thanks for listening.

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