The Robber Bridegroom [Paperback]

Eudora WELTY (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pennyroyal Press (1987)
• ASIN: B001E9F7L8
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A very enjoyable read...., November 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Robber Bridegroom (Paperback)

A beautifully written blend of fairy tale imagery, evocative prose, and Southern folklore. Welty's mastery of colloquial speech and her rich descriptions of the Natchez wilderness are the high points in my mind. A short novel with a somewhat lively plot, diligent readers shouldn't have a problem finishing this one off in one or two sittings. Overall, I found it to be a very promising first novel by the Pulitzer Prize winning author.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A warped fairy tale, April 13, 2004

By 

Jeronimo (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Robber Bridegroom (Paperback)

Eudora Welty borrowed from the old Brothers Grimm fairy tale 'The Robber Bridegroom' to create this story that is part fairy tale, part historical fantasy, and very strange. Instead of old Europe, the action takes place in the southern United States. The old characters are all there: the innocent daughter, the merchant father, the irascible thief who becomes the 'bridegroom', and some new people have been added. A wicked stepmother, a boy named Goat, and an Indian tribe are just a few of the extras.

Apparently some of the characters, like Mike Fink and the Harp brothers, were real people, or at least were part of American folklore. Welty combines old world and new world fairy tales to create something completely unique. If you know the story of the Robber Bridgroom, you'll see how Welty has slyly snuck in very subtle similarities (the bird in the cage), and you'll be astonished at how much the ending was changed from the original story.

The book moves with rapid speed through larger than life situations. The Indians cooked and ate the merchant's family and he and his daughter escaped, THEN he married the evil Salome, THEN some guy tried to kill him while he slept with his bag of gold, THEN Lockhart carried his daughter away naked, THEN... It becomes almost too frantic, and you might need to go back a few pages now and again to make sure you didn't miss something. It's probably not the best introduction to Welty, but it's one of her most colorful works. For an elegantly written, surrealist fairy tale, you can't do much better than this.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Troll Lovers and Talking Ravens, October 1, 2009

By 

Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Robber Bridegroom (Paperback)

He has long blond hair, carries a talking raven on his shoulder, and both outwits and outfights stupid but wily giants. Who is he? If you guessed "Odin", you've been reading the same sagas and folk tales I have -- and specifically the Twice-Told Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- but the answer this time is Jamie Lockhart the Robber Bridegroom, the abductor of Rosamond, beautiful princess-like daughter of the rich planter Clement Musgrove, hated by her wicked-witch step-mother Salome. Others have recognized the folk-tale roots of Eudora Welty's first published novel, most recently the voracious reader and reviewer Herr Schneider; whether those roots are German or Norse makes little difference, though I'd argue that the secondary characters in this narrative - Little Harp, Goat, and Mike Fink - are trolls pure and simple. Younger readers, if there are any, might put the cart before the horse and compare this 1942 fantasy with the Coen Brothers Southern Gothic film "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" In fact, there are plenty of homegrown 19th C American antecedents for The Robber Bridegroom, especially the almost-forgotten "Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi" by Baldwin.

This is a rollickingly funny book, no matter what else one might claim to find in it. It's a comic antidote to all the dead-serious mythification of William Faulkner, an intentional (I think) counterweight to the exaggerated self-reverence of Southern culture. And it's short! About the length of a good viking romance.

Clement Musgrove, the planter father, is a curiously honorable man in a world where the only dishonor is getting thwarted in your rascality. Near the end of the tale, when everything has gone from worse to worst, Clement sets himself in the middle of a circle of stones and delivers a three-page monologue of runic wisdom. Here's an excerpt:

""What exactly is this now?... What is the place and time? Here are all possible trees in a forest, and they grow as tall and as great and as close to one another as they could ever grow in the world. Upon each limb is a singing bird, and across this floor, slowly and softly and forever moving in profile, is always a beast, one of a procession, weighted low with his burning coat, looking from the yellow eye set in his head.... But the time of cunning has come, and my time is over for cunning is of a world I will have no part in. ... Men are following men down the Misssissippi, hoarse and arrogant by day, wakeful and dreamless by night at the unknown landings. A trail leads like a tunnel under the roof of this wilderness. Everywhere the traps are set. Why? And what kind of time is this, when all ids first given, then stolen away?"" Snorri Sturlison couldn't have said it better. And no sooner is Clement's monologue spoken than he is snatched by Indians, vengeful spirits as silent as the trees such planters as Clement have been despoiling for cotton lands.

Like all good folk tales, The Robber Bridegroom comes with a stinger, a grim Grimm moral.