Ry Herman Uncovers Queer Fairy Tales Older Than the Princess Canon

Novelist Ry Herman went looking for LGBTQ+ subtext in fairy tales in the summer of 2024 and found something stronger: a documented tradition of explicitly queer tales, catalogued in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (ATU) as tale type 514, "The Shift of Sex". The discovery now shapes the protagonist of Herman's novel This Knight Topples Empires, published by Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, in 2026.

Herman's account appears in an author's essay excerpted alongside the book. "In a time of renewed attack on queer identities, there's something I find reassuring in the evidence that we've always been around, even in the oldest of texts," Herman writes.

What is tale type 514?

The ATU system catalogs thousands of folktales in groups based on shared plot elements. Type 514 covers dozens of stories that follow one broad pattern:

• The heroine disguises herself as a man.
• She falls in love with, becomes engaged to, or marries another woman.
• In the end, she is magically transformed into a man.

Some of these stories are extremely old. The Greek myth "Iphis and Ianthe" and "Alimbeg's Daughter", from the Nart sagas of the North Caucasus region, both date back thousands of years, according to Herman.

Many tales share recurring elements — a talking animal, usually a horse, or a series of tests to prove the disguised heroine's masculinity. Herman suggests they may descend from a single tale adapted as it spread across regions. The framework is loose: in one story the heroine collects back taxes from poisonous snakes; in another she frees a woman imprisoned in a hazelnut. "Fairy tales can be very weird," Herman writes.

How queer-positive are the tales really?

Herman's first reaction was delight — "Trans-positive fairy tales!" — and some stories fit that description. In the Serbian tale "A Woman Became a Man", the title character actively wants the transformation and performs a complicated ritual involving a duck stolen off the head of a sleeping outlaw. Herman admits: "What does the duck have to do with it? I have no idea." In the Finnish story "Satu", the protagonist simply hands a wad of cash to a witch to get it done.

Two or three tales are, in Herman's words, quite lesbian-friendly. In the Chilean fairy tale "Florinda" and the Spanish "The Story of the Unicorn", both romantically involved women are pleased when the disguise comes off. In "The Story of the Unicorn", the two women live as a married couple for years before the protagonist's final metamorphosis.

Closer study complicated the picture. Fairy tales change depending on who tells them, and many of these stories passed through places and periods hostile to queerness. The queerness could not be erased without destroying the plot, Herman argues, so it was downplayed instead. Usually the heroine does not seek the transformation; it is imposed by an outside force such as a curse, locking everyone into a traditional role by the ending.

What does this change for the novel?

Herman's response to gender assumptions in inherited stories was to question them directly. "I found myself wondering what would happen to a nonbinary protagonist, someone outside the traditional roles entirely," Herman writes.

The result is Jules, the protagonist of This Knight Topples Empires. Herman states plainly that much of Jules's experience of gender draws on personal experience and is not meant as a universal depiction of nonbinary people. Both author and character took a long, confusing road to their gender identities, growing up where the word "nonbinary" never reached them — Jules in a medieval fantasy land, Herman in 1980s America.

Herman's closing claim is the essay's quiet thesis: nonbinary people were there in both cases. "After all, we've always been around." The novel stands as the corrective — a tale where the ending is not imposed by a curse, but chosen.