Do you ever have that thing where you can remember a snippet of a lyric but you have no idea what the rest of the words are, or what the song was? I do too, but with me it’s folktales.
If you can identify the folktales these two incidents come from, I would be profoundly grateful if you could let me know. I’m guessing it’s 25 years since I read either of them, my google-fu is weak, I have frankly too many books of this stuff to go looking, and AskMetafilter is too cool to be asked this kind of nonsense.
1. Female devil or imp is sent to tempt man (or possibly gets stranded in the world and meets a man). They fall in love and she agrees to marry him. On entering the church for the first time her tail falls off and she has to kick it out of sight. Northern European, I think. It may not be an actual folktale but a piece of fiction written in a folkloric style. Can’t remember any more than that, though I continue to reference it whenever I mention non-religious people going into a church, to the general confusion of anyone who hears me.
2. Man and woman stuff. One of them (I think it’s him, and he may be a king) has had a candle made with a wedding-ring hidden in the wax. As the candle burns, the ring falls out at an important moment. Again, I can’t remember any more than that, but I think this tale is better known than the one before.
Any common theme you detect between these two stories is entirely coincidental.
I don’t know either of them, although I dreamed the first one, or something very like it, when I was about 14 years old, although it was mingled with a dream about Lankhmar-style undead Kings of the City. I’ve intended to turn it into a story ever since, but the angle hasn’t been perfect yet. So if you can turn up some folklore along the same lines, that’d be grand — please keep me informed.
The lady with the impermanent tail is the Huldra, of Norse folklore. You probably read about her in Briggs.
The ring-and-candle thing stumps me, however.
Five points for Ken; I am now pretty sure I know what book I read the tale in. Sadly it was in the library of the school I left when I was 13, but that’s what ABEBooks is for.
Five points still available.
Aaahhh… Ken beat me to it.
Yes, the huldrer would sometimes marry human men. One story tells of a man who would abuse his hulder wife; she’d take the beating silently, but at one point, she picked a horseshoe off the wall and bent it straight. He never beat her after that.
(My RPG “Draug” is all about stuff like this – Norwegian folklore).