Episode
Bushy Bride and Mother Holle
- Podcast
- The Three Ravens Podcast
- Published
- Jul 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2648
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.threeravenspodcast.com/
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Summary
For today's episode of the Lang Fairy Tales, we're proceeding on apace through the Red Fairy Book, and we've got another double bill of stories. First up is the excellently named Bushy Bride, a Norwegian story which exploits the fairy tale obsession with very, very long noses - and has some very curious features. There is a charming dog called Little Snow, though! We follow that on with Mother Holle, a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and included in their 1812 collection Kinder und Hausmarchen before the Langs got their hands on it. It includes legends about Mother Holda, or Frau Perchta, a winter spirit who lives in a well and has the power to make it snow - and teach powerful moral lessons too. They're a surprisingly good pairing to compare and contrast! As ever, we discuss and analyse the stories and apply our Raven Ratings to them. We hope you enjoy the episode, and we'll speak to you again on Saturday, when Martin is interviewing folk artist Frankie Archer all about her new album, The Dance of Death. If you are unfamiliar with the Lang Fairy Tales, these seminal collections were assembled between 1889 and 1913 by a married couple, folklorists and translators Nora and Andrew Lang, with most of the work done to compile them completed by Nora, also known as Leonora Blanche Alleyne. Assembled and published in 12 colour-coded "Fairy Books," the corpus the Langs put together included 798 fairy tales from across cultures, many of which had never before been translated into English. They were amongst the most influential books of their time, changing the course of children's literature - although they're hardly just for children, and often deal with quite challenging concepts. Today, purchasing a complete set of the Lang Fairy Books in good condition cos…