The Robber Bridegroom (fairy tale)
"The Robber Bridegroom" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 40. Joseph Jacobs included a variant, Mr Fox, in English Fairy Tales, but the original provenance is much older; Shakespeare alludes to the Mr. Fox variant in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1:Like the old tale, my lord: "it is not so, nor `t was not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so."
Illustration of "The Robber Bridegroom" from Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane, illustrated by Walter Crane, first published by Macmillan and Company in 1886.
"Bluebeard" is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of the present one to avoid the fate of her predecessors. "The White Dove", "The Robber Bridegroom", and "Fitcher's Bird" are tales similar to "Bluebeard". The notoriety of the tale is such that Merriam-Webster gives the word Bluebeard the definition of "a man who marries and kills one wife after another". The verb bluebearding has even appeared as a way to describe the crime of either killing a series of women, or seducing and abandoning a series of women.
Bluebeard, his wife, and the key in a 1921 illustration by W. Heath Robinson
The Wife is given the keys of the house. Illustration by Walter Crane
Bluebeard is slain in a woodcut by Walter Crane
Edmund Dulac illustration, 1910