Sarah Brennan Funny & Fabulous Blog

The famous legend that inspired The Tale of Sybil Snake!

Some years before writing The Tale of Sybil Snake, I came across a famous Chinese folktale called The Legend of Lady White Snake, renowned as one of the four great folk tales of China. There are many versions of this tale, dating as far back as the Tang Dynasty.

My favourite tells of a beautiful, immortal, snow-white snake who frequented the shores of the West Lake in Hangzhou, a gorgeously scenic place where the Emperors used to take their holidays. One day the snake met a handsome young Chinese scholar, falling deeply in love with him. But he did not return her love, until she transformed herself into a beautiful woman. Then they married and happily settled down to run a Chinese medicine shop together. One day, a vengeful Buddhist monk, who was also immortal, and had been beaten in battle by the snake many years earlier, told the young man that his wife was really a snake. The poor husband refused to believe this, until the monk persuaded him to give his wife a magic potion at the time of the Dragon Boat Festival. After drinking the potion, the wife turned back into a snake, and the husband, in shock, fell into a deadly coma. The snake rushed to the mountains to find secret herbs to cure her husband, but the monk chased her there, and fought her, overcoming her this time because she was pregnant with the couple’s first child. She was locked up in a pagoda by the West Lake, but finally freed by her son, who, having escaped the pagoda when he grew up, came to his mother’s rescue. Lady White Snake and her husband (who fortunately seems to have recovered) lived happily ever after by the West Lake.

I wonder if you can pick the similarities between this wonderful folk tale and The Tale of Sybil Snake?

Even better, can you think of a famous Hans Christian Andersen story which also sounds quite a bit like The Legend of Lady White Snake?

If you can, why not let me know by posting a comment (see link above) – but remember to ask a parent for permission first!