Joseph Jacobs’ European Folk and Fairy Tales (1916) aimed to reconstruct “the original form of the fairy tales common to all Europe”. He compares his method to restoring “Ur-texts” from manuscripts. One of his most successful reconstructions was ‘The Swan Maidens’. A hunter encountered seven maidens all clad in feathered robes which they removed when bathing in a lake. Stealing the youngest maiden’s plumage he manages to keep her captive, marrying her and hiding her feathers so she cannot escape. After several years of marriage the swan maiden’s daughter is playing and finds the plumage, thus her mother escapes. The hunter goes on a quest to find the “Land East o’ the Sun and West o’ Moon”, eventually retrieving his errant wife. At the beginning of John Rhys’ Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx (1901) a similar tale of the Lady of ILyny Fan Fach in Carmarthenshire, taken from William Rees of Tonn in 1841, acts as a departure point for Rhys’ discussions. In the tale a young lad encounters the lake maiden sitting on the water whilst grazing his widowed mother’s cattle. On subsequent visits he offers her bread, until eventually she agrees to marry him, providing a large dowry of farm animals, on the condition he must not strike her three times without a cause. Eventually after having children the husband strikes the wife for the third and final time. She immediately leaves home with her dowry of animals following her back into the lake. However, the lady gifts her sons with the knowledge to become ‘most skilful physicians in the country.’ Similar tales of fairy-brides leaving their families, or subverting Victorian marital norms, run as a thematic arc through late nineteenth and early twentieth century folkloristics, fascinating male scholars. This article discusses some examples of this expansive and under considered topic.