From heads to eggs

Content advisement: Some discussion of death by suicide.

I’ve been continuing to listen to fairytales and started a new book, the second story in this book was called “Three Heads in the Well” and some of the similarities to this story I wrote about, really captured my attention and imagination. 

This is the written version I’ll use for reference, but the audio version was also really wonderful.

There is so much in these stories that feel so similar, to the point I wonder if the heads are the ancestors of the eggs. Or maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe the themes are more global or universal, maybe the experience is just rooted in being human.

But then a universal human experience is being guided by a KnownUnknown (Known in the sense of recognized kinship/connection and Unknown in the otherworldly/unpredictable nature of it) to a place where some sort of animate ovoid gives you directions that lead you to riches. 

Being slightly less literal, the experience might be encountering the KnownUnknown and radically trusting it to guide you somewhere new; but it’s going to be a weird ride. 

In this story we begin with a motherless princess at some aged time in England (some versions place it in 13th-14th centuries, others suggest it could be even older). The princess is unnamed here but named Eleanor in another version, I’ll call her Eleanor for clarity. 

Unlike Blanche, Eleanor’s physical needs are met but they’re both unloved/unvalued. Eleanor’s father has married a wicked step-mother with an equally flawed daughter. 

One would assume a king is already rich, but the story says he marries for money. It’s made very clear the step-mother is unattractive in multiple ways, to the point she’s called “deformed”. It’s also never stated how the step-mother has such riches, she doesn’t seem to be a royal but we learn nothing of her source. The step-sister is also described as ugly, internally and externally, “much the same mould as her mother”, similar to Blanche’s sister Rose.  

In contrast, Eleanor is physically appealing and kind. But her father turns on her believing the step-mother’s lies about her. We aren’t told what the lies were, we just know that the princess quickly loses “her father’s love”. 

She gets tired of the abuse and tearfully leaves, and her father supports her. He instructs her to get items from her step-mother for support on her journey and what she gives her isn’t enough. 

It’s not enough to live on in the outerworld. 

But the princess accepts it and is still thankful - not that one should be grateful for not having enough, but that she stays true to her kind nature.

After some time, she encounters the Otherworld, an elder man sitting at the mouth of a cave. She immediately acknowledges and values him, she calls him “aged father”, Blanche calls her KnownUnknown,  “aunty”.

He asks her what she has in her bag, she tells him and freely offers to share. She doesn’t have enough, but her kind nature leads her to being unconditionally generous. She has no anticipation or expectation of a reward for being herself and sharing of herself. 

What’s not enough in the outerworld can be more than enough for the inner world to make use of it, and multiply it. 

Eleanor is able to feel this. 

The elder man then gives her a “wand” (in other tellings, it’s just a stick) and tells her to do something outwardly silly: strike it three times and ask the hedge to allow her to pass through. 

With support from the KnownUnknown, things that don’t normally move or seem impassable, shift. 

He also tells Eleanor she’ll encounter a well and gives her instructions for what to do, including conversing with three disembodied heads that will pop up from the water. And to do what they say. 

He doesn’t tell or promise her that something positive will come from doing this; she just respects him and does as he requests, much like Blanche. 

But can we talk about these heads? Yes, they’re described as golden, implying value, but boy wouldn’t that still be horrifying? 

It’s giving Samara. 

Or maybe “golden” just means yellow-haired, after all, the heads just want their hair combed and to air-dry they each sing:  

'Wash me and comb me,
And lay me down softly.
And lay me on a bank to dry,
That I may look pretty,
When somebody passes by.'

Not to be a broken record: the aunty in the first story also needs to disembody her head to do her hair. 

Eleanor complies and combs their hair with her own comb, she fully embraces and interacts with the macabre and the otherworldly, using something of herself.  

But the song isn’t exactly a promise or a prophecy either; the heads need to be returned to the well before someone actually “passes by”. But I guess they did say “may”. 

They don’t need to change or be changed by her presence, but the princess can be changed by her relationship with them.

 Once the heads are back in the well, they say “what shall we weird” for the princess. 

Given the assumed age of the story, “weird” here would have meant someone having the power to control  “fate” or “destiny”. 

Initially, it seems like they give her more of what she already has (beauty) but maybe it’s actually the ability for it to be seen by others? 

They also “weird” some things she doesn’t have; a sweet voice and the fortune to marry a powerful man who does value her. 

She leaves the well, enters a clearing and meets a prince, he woos her, and they get married. Eleanor has a similar triumphant return to the family of origin as Blanche, including on a chariot and with many riches in tow.

Unlike Blanche, who tells her mother what happened out of trust, the prince speaks for the princess and tells her story. 

Other than her physical presence at the visit, the princess seems done with her old life and also done with this story.

Blanche tried to share and bring her family with her, but they rejected her a second time.

It seems that, if someone doesn’t see your value and doesn’t want to, it’s not up to you to change their minds. 

This is where we leave Eleanor to live out her “weird”. 

We return to the envious step-mother; she sends her daughter out to try and achieve the same outcome as the princess. But of course, the step-sister is given more worldly resources for her journey.

She encounters the same KnownUknown elder, but she can’t see him for who he is and she doesn’t respect him. 

In fact, she says she’d only share her resources with him if it would cause him harm. 

He wishes her bad luck and she continues her journey. 

Unlike the Aunty, he doesn’t tell her what to expect beyond the hedge, so she has no advice about the disembodied horror she’s about to witness. She still finds the hedge and forces her way through (sustaining similar injuries to the mother and elder sister in the first story when they’re being chased by the contents of the bejeweled eggs). 

She’s bloodied and scratched and comes to the well to wash herself. The heads appear and sing their song, and the step-sister has the (reasonable, imo) worldly response of bonking them on the head with her wine bottle. I mean, it’s giving Samara. 

After she has harmed each of them, they discuss what they will “weird for her”. Naturally, she receives the opposite of Eleanor; she’s made more ugly, she’s given bad breath/a grating voice, and she’s fated to marry a cobbler. 

It’s portrayed as lowly, something literally (and figuratively) beneath her. 

But when I think about the maker of shoes, the role of someone who makes an item that lets us go to new places, protects us, makes us more comfortable as we engage with the earth. 

Is it actually a curse? Or maybe what she needs? 

Things unfold in a similar fashion, she meets her cobbler who has his own streak of pragmatic kindness; he helped an elder (perhaps the same ‘aged father’?) and was given cures for her ailments without knowing they were for her. 

He offers to heal her in exchange for marriage, she agrees and he keeps his promise. When the step-sister returns her mother hangs herself in “rage”. 

We don’t know much about how she was feeling, but there’s something about how she’d rather self-annihilate than watch her daughter live a different life than she planned for her. 

We also don’t know how the step-daughter felt about her mother’s death. We end our story learning that the step-daughter and her cobbler live out their humbler lives. The step-daughter is a weaver, someone who makes something beautiful from something common. 

I wonder if she knew how to do that already, or did she learn it?