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=AT 425A—The Search For The Lost Husband=

The Search For The Lost Husband is a tale type in the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index that describes assorted fairy tales about women who go on quests to remove an enchantment from their husbands. The tale type is sometimes referenced via the most well-known variant of the tale, a Scandinavian variant called East of the Sun and West of the Moon. European tale variants include those of German, English, Scottish, Romanian, Scandinavian, Italian, and other origins. Each of these variants takes on details of the local culture and when the husband is an animal, he is sometimes one of a regionally-specific significance (eg, Scandinavia's polar bear or Appalachia's hound dog).

Classification
The Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index classifies fairy tales about supernatural or enchanted relatives with the numbers 400-459 and includes enchanted husbands as a subheading, labelled with the numbers 425-449. Tale types that are classified with the number 425 are further distinguished by letters A-N, with A designating the subtype The Monster/Animal as Bridegroom or Cupid and Psyche. It differs from the more well-known Beauty and the Beast tale by adding a quest wherein, after the couple are separated by the breaking of a prohibition, the wife goes on a long and arduous journey and completes several tasks in order to reunite them, and by doing so legitimizes the marriage (usually by lifting a curse on the husband) in order to bring about a happy ending.

The Aarne-Thompson index mostly limits it's catalog to tales of European origins, and most occurances of AT 425A are European. However, the tale, like other fairy tales, was exported to cultures that came into contact with or were colonized by Europeans, and there are several American variants, such as "White Bear Whittington" and "The Girl That Married a Flop-Eared Hound Dog", both found in the Appalachian region.

Tatar opines that the name of the tale type is objectionable in that the wife's quest is diminished by the use of the word "search" instead of "quest", which is normally used in the same cases where a male character is the undertaker of the adventure:

Origins
Tales of this tale type are derived from the ancient Greek story Cupid and Psyche as told by Apuleius in Metamorphoses in the 2nd century CE. According to Bottigheimer and several others, it would have been disseminated through Europe via the popularity of classical texts and then been altered and further disseminated via oral re-tellings. Once European cultures began to colonize other parts of the world, they brought their folktales in both written and oral forms, and they were then further adapted to the cultures they were told in.

Synopsis
In stories of this this tale type, typically speaking, a young woman of marriageable age is unwillingly married to a bridegroom who appears to be an animal of some kind. After the wedding, the new husband reveals his true identity as a human man who has either been trapped in the body of an animal or who is required to be an animal half the time and a man the other half. Sometimes, at this point, the new wife is given a choice of preference in whether the husband will henceforth be a man by day and an animal by night or vice versa. Thus the conditions of their marriage are set, usually including the stipulation that the husband's transformations should never be interfered with (he has to be allowed to change into an animal half the time and cannot be a man all of the time); a different, specific, and unexplained rule is laid forth (eg., she cannot look upon him with candlelight); or the wife is required to obey all of the husband's directives, even if they fail to make sense to her or seem wrong (cf The Black Bull of Noroway, where the wife is told not to mourn her missing children).

In some variations, the couple now live happily for some time, or else resentment begins to build in the wife due to the prohibition. At this point, the prohibition is broken, deliberately or accidentally (as in The Singing, Springing Lark, where, despite efforts to prevent candlelight from falling upon the husband, it does so anyway), or the wife is tricked by a saboteur into breaking it (for example, The Pig King, where a witch tells the wife to tie a string around the husband's pig foot to break the curse, when in reality, she is forcing the couple to be separated).The husband is driven away by the terms of the curse or else flees of his own power,feeling betrayed,and the wife begins a long journey or series of tasks(sometimes both)to find him and break the curse.The terms of her quest are sometimes dictated by a benchmark of time or effort(eg.,she has to have three pairs of iron shoes made and has to travel the world by foot until each pair,one by one,is worn through),or a set time period(eg.,seven years,a hundred years,ect.).

Significance and Interpretations
The tale has historically served two opposing purposes, depending upon the teller: some versions teach obedience as a prized value in wives, while others seem to have been outlets for women to discuss and assuage their fears regarding arranged marriage. Tatar summarizes the tale's potential use for this purpose in "Beauties and Beasts: From Blind Obedience to Love at First Sight":

"In cultures where marriages were routinely arranged by parents, the wedding/death depicted in Cupid and Psyche had to have been charged with special relevance. What girl could escape the sense of being abandoned by her parents and turned over to a monstrous creature with repulsive desires when she was about to be wedded to a total stranger?...By making a show of Psyche's courage in meeting the unknown...and by revealing the senselessness of her fears...the tale might have subdued, if not banished, the fears of girls on the threshold of marriage."

In some versions of this tale type, disobedience or curiosity by the wife are explicitly treated as negative traits, whereas in fairy tales with male protagonists, the breaking of prohibitions or attempts to satisfy curiosity are rewarded, as is typical of European folktales. In Asbjornsen and Moe's telling of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon", for example, the husband excoriates the wife for failing to follow his unexplained instructions not to look upon him with a candlelight while he is in his human form. It can be argued, however, that the quest and subsequent legitimization of the marriage is a result of the wife's disobedience, so the tale can sometimes be read as sympathetic to the wife, even as implicitly rewarding her for disobedience, in opposition to the explicit lesson of the tale.