Like the classic fairy tale “The Beauty and the Beast” (type 425C in the Aarne-Thompson index of folktales), the central theme of the Appalachian tale “A Bunch of Laurel Blooms” is the transformation of an animal-like groom into a human being. The tale is sometimes also known as “A Gift of Laurel Blossoms for a Present.”
It is believed that the Appalachian version of this classic tale has its roots in the Irish tale “The Three Daughters of King O’Hara.” Other European versions of the story can be found in Aarne-Thompson’s type 440, “Frog Kings.” The earliest published version of the Appalachian tale was in Marie Campbell’s Tales from Cloud Walking Country in 1958. The story was actually collected by Campbell in the early 1930s. In her version, a father goes out to pick flowers for his daughter, only to discover that he has taken them from a witch’s property. The witch tells him to come back later to receive his punishment. The daughter goes to the witch’s house to be punished in his place, and the witch puts the girl in the house with a huge “toad-frog.” He is kind to her and cares for her, even cooking for her. While she’s asleep he sheds his skin and turns into a handsome young man. One night she burns his skin in the fire, the spell is broken, and they live happily ever after.
There are other, more complicated renditions of this tale, including the version published by Betsy Hearne in Beauties and Beasts (1993), but the theme is basically the same. In Hearne’s retelling, the father is going away on business, and he asks his three daughters what gifts they would like him to bring back for them. One asks for a silk dress, another for a gold necklace. The youngest, however, wants a bunch of laurel blooms. He waited until he was almost home to pick the laurel so that it wouldn’t wilt. Unfortunately, the only place he could find it was at the edge of the woods, where a witch appeared, saying she didn’t want anyone to pick her flowers. When he said they were for his youngest daughter, the witch said she would spare his life if he gave her his daughter. When he returned home, reluctant to sacrifice his younger daughter, he told the girls that he would be going to live with the witch. His youngest daughter, however, slipped away in the night and ran to the witch’s home. From that point on, the story is virtually the same as Campbell’s.
There are other Appalachian tales of the same transformational genre, including “The Louse Skin” (noted by Isobel Gordon Carter in 1925), “The Enchanted Tree” (where a crow turns into a prince), and “Whitebear Whittington” (in which a girl marries a man who turns into a bear at night). There are also tales where the sexes are reversed. In “The Snake Princess” and “The Bewitched Princess,” men marry snakes who are actually princesses, and in “Cat ‘n Mouse,” Jack marries a woman who has been turned into a cat by a witch.
Tom Davenport made a short film based on “A Bunch of Laurel Blooms” entitled “The Frog King” in 1981. John Scieszka and Steven Johnson published a fractured version of the tale called The Frog Prince in 1991.
Nancy Snell Griffith
See also Babes in the Woods; Beauty and the Beast Folklore; Campbell, Joseph; Folklore and Folktales; Frog King; Storytelling
Further Reading
Botkin, B. A. 1949. A Treasury of Southern Folklore. New York: Crown.
Campbell, Marie. 1958. Tales from the Cloud Walking Country. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Haase, Donald, ed. 2007. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Hearne, Betsy. 1989. Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jones, Loyal. 2010. Appalachian Folk Tales. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation.