The Frog Prince (Fairy tale)
The Frog Prince (Fairy tale)
Author: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Time Period: 1701 CE–1850 CE; 1851 CE–1900 CE
Country or Culture: Germany; Western Europe
Genre: Fairy Tale
Overview
Childhood memories of common fairy tales often set up expectations of a story that are not reflected in either the oral story or the first printed variations. “The Frog Prince” is one such story. When hearing of this story, many people conjure images of a happy, cheerful child losing a beloved toy and being rescued by a friendly frog or of a beautiful young princess kissing a crown-wearing frog. Neither of these pictures is particularly accurate to the early accounts of the tale. Not only is the princess an unpleasant child in these early versions of the story, but the motif of her kissing the frog does not even appear until a later date.
There are records of “The Frog Prince,” also known as “The Frog King” or “Iron Heinrich,” ranging from the thirteenth century to 1842. Variations on the tale emerged in Germany, Scotland, Russia, and Great Britain, with well-known writers such as Robert Chambers, Joseph Jacobs, and Edgar Taylor providing their own twists on the story. However, German fairy-tale collectors Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are credited with the most widespread version of the tale, possibly because of they usually placed it as the first story in their collections.
The basic premise of the love story is a familiar one: The princess must learn to appreciate the prince for his internal value rather than his external appearance. However, many versions of the story either completely delete the final scene or downplay it. In the final scene, the prince’s servant, who has waited for the curse to break, is so happy when the prince and princess ride off to the prince’s home kingdom that the bands of sorrow that had formed around his heart when his master was entrapped begin to break. However, this part of the tale is secondary to the romantic love story.
The frog said, “I do not want your pearls, your precious stones, and your clothes, but if you’ll accept me as a companion and let me sit next to you and eat from your plate and sleep in your bed, and if you’ll love and cherish me, then I’ll bring your ball back to you.”
“The Frog Prince,” 1812 ed.Beyond turning into a prince who can carry the heroine away to a happy-ever-after ending, the frog is important to the tale in several ways. First, he represents the animal groom that is found in tales such as “Beauty and the Beast” and “The King of Love.” Like the heroes in these stories, the frog is a man who has either been cursed into animal form or chosen to take on animal form during the courtship of his potential bride. Since the beast is frightening, the princess’s devotion is truly tested, and she wins the prize only if she is able to pass through some set of trials that reveal her as worthy of a real prince. Second, the frog is symbolic of many conventional ideas in fairy tales. The meanings behind the symbols range from positive to negative, with the frog being connected to fertility, witches, love charms, or sexuality. The life cycle of the frog is also frequently related to the maturation process of humans from childhood to adulthood (Leeming and Sader 184).
The interpretation of the frog’s symbolism is central to analyses of “The Frog Prince.” A feminist examination of the tale would, however, consider the princess as most integral to the meaning found in the tale. One of the most common feminist interpretations of this story is a psychological discussion of the symbolic actions of the tale in light of the princess’s maturation from childhood to adulthood, specifically as regards sexual activity.
Summary
“The Frog Prince” tells the story of an overindulged princess, a strong father, and a cursed prince. There are several well-known editions of this story from the Grimm brothers’ collections—the two best-known versions are from 1812 and 1857, but other variations (especially the 1823 translation by Edgar Taylor) are important specifically in how they modify the story’s ending.
The 1812 edition provides a simple version of the tale that is closer to the oral tradition than the later version. In this story, a beautiful princess goes out into the woods and sits next to a quiet spring where she plays with a golden ball, her favorite toy. She throws the ball in the air and catches it as it comes down. On one throw, she misses it, and it rolls away and falls into the deep spring. It sinks so far down that she cannot even see it, so she sits and wails over her loss. She even makes a rash promise to trade all that she owns for the ball’s return. Upon the utterance of this promise, a frog shows up and asks why she is crying. She ignores him as a potential savior until he tells her that he can retrieve her toy. Though he declines the riches she has offered, he does want a boon: “[I]f you’ll accept me as a companion and let me sit next to you and eat from your plate and sleep in your bed, and if you’ll love and cherish me, then I’ll bring your ball back to you” (Grimm 98). She quickly commits to his demand, but when he returns her ball, she runs away from him, just as quickly forgetting that she has made him a promise.
The next day, she is at her father’s table eating dinner when a noise catches her attention. It is the sound of the frog climbing the stairs to knock on the door, calling out for her to let him in. When she opens the door, she is frightened by the frog and slams the door in his face, returning to her seat. Her father asks her why she is so scared, and she tells him about her encounter with the frog in the forest. As she finishes telling her father what she has done, the frog knocks again, but this time he entreats her: “Youngest daughter of the king, / Open up the door for me, / Don’t you know what yesterday, / You said to me down by the well? / Youngest daughter of the king, / Open the door for me” (Grimm 100). The king demands that she fulfill her promise, so she retrieves her unwanted guest. The frog reminds her that she promised to let him sit next to her at the table, share her plate, and accompany her to her room to sleep. She follows through, though resentfully.
The ending of the story changes from version to version at this point. In both the 1812 and 1857 versions, the princess becomes violent and throws the frog against the wall when he threatens to tattle to her father about her unwillingness to take him to bed. Miraculously, when he hits the floor, a handsome prince has replaced the frog. The prince tells her of his woes, the two fall in love, and then they climb into bed together to sleep. The story ends with the prince’s servant Heinrich arriving in a splendid coach to return the prince to his home. On the way, the couple hears three sounds as if the carriage is falling apart, but when the prince asks Heinrich about the sounds, he is assured that it is his servant’s heart bursting: “No, my lord, the carriage it’s not, But one of the bands surrounding my heart, That suffered such great pain, When you were sitting in the well, When you were a frog” (Grimm 102). Both the couple and Heinrich are free to live happily ever after.
The first English translation by Edgar Taylor (1823) is much less violent than the versions accredited to the Grimms. In this variation, after the princess places the frog on her pillow where he slumbers peacefully on in her bed and then quietly slips out the following morning. The pattern repeats for two more days, and the princess hopes each morning that he will not return. However, on the third morning, she wakes to find a handsome prince standing at the foot of her bed. She is not unfavorably shocked at the intrusion, and she listens to his tale. He tells her that he was the frog, a creature cursed by an angry fairy until he could find a princess willing to share her bed with him for three nights. Since the princess has broken his curse, she is allowed to marry the prince. Just then, a coach drawn by eight magnificent horses arrives. It is driven by Heinrich, the prince’s servant whose “heart had well-nigh burst” (Taylor 210) at the prince’s trials and who has waited for the curse to be broken. The couple marries and leaves with Heinrich, to return to the prince’s homeland where they happily rule for many years.
In addition to the conclusion to the tale, both the 1823 version and the 1857 edition make a few changes to the body of the story. The 1857 edition starts with a description of the princess as “so beautiful that the sun itself, who, indeed, has seen so much, marveled every time it shone upon her face” (Grimm 97). The whole setting of the first scene is more descriptive as well. For example, in this account, the tree next to the pool is specifically identified as a linden tree (a lime-tree in the Grimms’ 1884 edition). A second change is enhanced dialogue in the later edition of the story. The first scene next to the pool, for example, is extended by a longer conversation between the princess and the frog and more interior dialogue from the princess. The princess’s explanation to her father is also lengthened: “Oh, father dear, yesterday when I was sitting near the well in the forest and playing, my golden ball fell into the water. And because I was crying so much, the frog brought it back, and because he insisted, I promised him that he could be my companion, but I didn’t think that he could leave his water. But now he is just outside the door and wants to come in” (Grimm 100). Further, the king is also given more dialogue than in the earlier versions, and readers can hear his anger about his daughter’s disobedience in his words. When the princess takes the frog to her room, she gently places him on her pillow in the earliest versions, but in the 1857 story, she puts him in a corner of the bedroom until he comes to her and says, “I am tired, and I want to sleep as well as you do. Pick me up or I’ll tell your father” (Grimm 101). Though these modifications are comparatively minor, they do make the later adaptation more literary.
Cross-Cultural Connection
The universality of “The Frog Prince” can be seen in the way this story has transcended time and genre. From classical mythology to fairy tale to more modern genres such as film and children’s books, the notion of a prince who has been cursed and must be rescued by a beautiful princess is a common thematic idea.
The motif of an animal groom is centuries old with variations beginning in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Bettelheim sees a connection between animal groom fairy tales and Roman writer Lucius Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche,” for example. In the Apuleius account, the youngest daughter of a king is so beautiful that she attracts attention from Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. Venus asks her son Cupid to curse the girl by making her fall in love with an unworthy mate. When Cupid goes to punish the girl, the curse goes awry, with the result that Psyche is still be praised as a beauty but never receives romantic attention. Her parents seek advice from an oracle and are told Psyche is fated to marry a monster. After a funeral-like procession to the mountaintop where she is to meet her groom, Psyche is gently carried to a castle populated by voices that serve her every need. She meets her groom only at night, under the cover of dark, at his request. The couple is happy and Psyche grows to love her husband. However, she is lonely, so her husband allows her sisters to come stay with her. Envious of Psyche’s material possessions and feelings for her husband, her sisters convince her to peek at his face. When she does, she discovers that he is Cupid and accidentally burns him with hot oil. In anger over her betrayal, he leaves, explaining that love cannot coexist with distrust. Realizing her error, Psyche sets off on a journey to recover her love. Along the way, Psyche entreats the gods for help, performs a number of tasks at their bidding, and suffers trials given her by Venus. Eventually, Cupid comes to her rescue and asks Jupiter to intervene with his mother. The lovers are finally reunited, receive Venus’s blessing, and bear a daughter together.
Though “Cupid and Psyche” may seem closer to “Beauty and the Beast,” Bettelheim finds the myth to be influential for “The Frog Prince” and other animal groom stories in Western culture as well. The main similarities between Apuleius’s story and “The Frog Prince” include the ideas that the king has at least one beautiful daughter, the beast in bed with the princess, and sexual awakening. In Apuleius’s story, Psyche’s beauty and comfortable marriage arouse her sisters’ envy. Their influence leads to Psyche’s period of trials. The Grimms do not add the detail of sisterly envy, but in revisions from the 1812 and 1857 versions of “The Frog Prince,” they did add the motif of the shining youngest sister.
Second, the beast in the princess’s bed is common to both stories. Psyche’s lover is invisible under the cover of darkness in his nightly visits, but the oracle’s prediction that she is to marry a monster and her sisters’ warnings of a serpent-like creature turn her understanding of him into a beast against whom she must violently defend herself. The Grimms’ princess, by contrast, knowingly carries a beast to her bed. Further, the injury to Cupid is accidental; Psyche is so shocked by Cupid’s beauty that she is careless with her lamp. She had planned to decapitate him, however. The princess from “The Frog Prince” also reacts violently to her beast, hurling him at the wall; in at least one later version, she even decapitates the frog.
A final connection illustrating the potential influence of the earlier myth is the symbolic suggestion of the stories being lessons on sexual awareness. Both stories illustrate that young women will mature from a child’s disgust or fear about sex to a woman’s acceptance and pleasure.
More than a century after the German story of “The Frog Prince” was recorded, its popularity continues. Several variations on the story have appeared in film. Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, a Showtime television series, debuted its pilot episode in September 1982 with “The Frog King,” in imitation of the Grimm brothers’ placement of the story at the beginning of each of their collections. Duvall’s tongue-in-cheek version of the story stars Teri Garr as the extremely spoiled and vain adult princess and Robin Williams as the charming frog. Though it detours at the beginning to offer background about the curse that changed the prince into a frog in infancy and offers a few other tangents for its contemporary audience, Duvall’s tale closely follows the Grimm version. The princess loses her ball in the well and tells the frog that she will take him home, share a meal with him, and let him sleep in her bed as a friend. She also abandons him at the well once she has her ball, sneering, “Thanks, Sucker!” as she hurries away. The frog follows her to the castle, where he is almost turned into a meal while the king chastises his daughter about her behavior. Duvall’s suggestion is that the princess must obey her father’s orders to fulfill her promise in an effort to uphold the social hierarchy. The king suggests that a broken promise by the princess could snowball into the collapse of the royal family and the loss of her head if those in the lower social classes realize that she cannot uphold the expectations of her role in the kingdom. The episode makes sure to touch on promises kept, on social and familial hierarchy, and on sexual innuendo for an adult audience, not unlike the original tale.
In contrast to the adult appeal in Duvall’s series, both Jackson Hunsicker’s 1986 film The Frog Prince and Disney’s 2009 animated The Princess and the Frog take Wilhelm Grimm’s advice to his brother that the tales could be more child-friendly. While The Frog Prince is a live-action movie and The Princess and the Frog is animated, both versions are musicals, a format that softens the content for a less mature audience.
Between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, an onslaught of after-school television specials appeared, addressing socially relevant themes for teenagers. These were followed in the early 1980s by sugarcoated stories that suggested simplistic solutions to children’s problems. Hunsicker’s musical production is from this second set of stories, but it pulls motifs from both “Cupid and Psyche” and the Grimm tale in its attempt to teach a moralistic after-school type lesson about manners and friendship. Sibling jealousy and the need for love to develop over time are drawn from Apuleius, while the basic story outline of a lost ball, a talking frog, and a broken curse are clearly from the Grimms’ account of “The Frog Prince.” Hunsicker’s story focuses on Zora, a precocious twelve-year-old who does not fit into the typical mold of a princess: She is not graceful, she is not patient, and she does not keep even the simplest of promises. Perhaps influenced by a social awakening to the dangers of eating disorders resulting from an overdeveloped concern over physical appearance, this film argues that the person inside is much more important than outward beauty, contrasting the gawky, freckle-faced preteen Zora and her older, poised, beautiful sister, Henrietta. Social concerns over teenage sexual activity also influenced the change from a romantic relationship to a focus on friendship between the girl and the frog. The obviously older prince tutors Zora in how to be a princess rather than inducting her into sexual activity.
Disney’s tale addresses cultural, social, and feminist themes in its development of the princess’s ability to do whatever she wants despite her race, socioeconomic status, or gender. The film, which credits E. D. Baker’s novel The Frog Princess as its inspiration, provides a major twist when the kiss turns the princess, Tiana, into a frog. The tests and trials Tiana must conquer reflect Psyche’s journey, but the thematic discovery of disgust turning to pleasure as love grows reflects later Grimm editions of “The Frog King.” The feminist argument that a girl can do anything she wants provides the background to Tiana’s dream of owning and running a successful restaurant, a dream that is realized only after she and Prince Naveen marry.
Baker’s novel changes the story by turning the princess into a frog when she kisses the prince rather than changing him back into a prince. The novel tells the story of Princess Emeralda, who flees to the swamp behind her parents’ castle to escape Prince Jorge, the young man her mother wants her to marry. Emeralda does not want to get married yet, and she especially does not want to wed the self-centered Prince Jorge, so she defies her mother’s orders to be present when Jorge arrives. While Emeralda is at a pool in the swamp, she meets a frog who claims to be a cursed prince named Eadric. He asks her to break his curse, but she tells him no and returns home.
The beginning of the novel is influenced by the Grimm version of the fairy tale in several ways. The princess is at a pool when she meets the frog prince. She is not surprised by the fact that the frog can speak, and like the princess in the Grimm tale, she is disgusted by the frog. Princess Emeralda never makes any promise to the frog, unlike her Grimm predecessor, and she later returns to the swamp out of concern for the frog’s dilemma instead of taking him in as a result of her father’s orders. Like the Grimms’ princess who finds romantic happiness when she rebels against her father’s orders and throws the frog at the wall, Emeralda’s journey toward true romance begins with the moment when she defies her mother’s wishes to stay at the castle and meet Prince Jorge.
Because of the fairy tale’s length limitations, the Grimm story ends with little clarification of the romance, but the nature of the novel allows for fuller development of the characters and the plot. Baker’s princess kisses her frog and turns into a frog herself when the spell flashes back to her. A friendship grows between the two as they travel through the swamp and into the woods to find the witch whose curse turned Eadric into a frog. The couple must learn to rely on each other and Emeralda must learn to trust herself through a variety of tests and trials before the curse can be lifted, returning the two to their true forms. They also fall in love along the way, saving Emeralda from having to marry Jorge. The love story becomes even more romantic when Emeralda’s aunt finds her own true love again, who had been turned into an otter years earlier, and when Emeralda realizes that her relationship with her mother is not as bad as she had thought. The lighter tone of the novel softens the Grimm tale, but Emeralda’s journey from childlike disgust at the idea of romance to an adult acceptance of sexual activity in marriage is still quietly suggested.
Another test of the universal appeal in the Grimm brothers’ “The Frog Prince” can be found in its ability to be parodied. Author Jon Scieszka is well known for his twisted versions of traditional tales. The Frog Prince Continued, written by Scieszka and illustrated by Steve Johnson, confronts the issue of what happily ever after really means. The story picks up after the wedding, but the prince and princess in this story are not happy. Marriage for this couple is problematic, so the prince decides to take action. He goes to find a witch to turn him back into a frog in the belief that this will make him happy again. Ultimately, he is forced to grow up and realize that escape does not change a person’s problems, so he returns home to his princess. They kiss and turn back into frogs. Scieszka does not leave the tale with just this one variant, however; he also penned “The Other Frog Prince,” which is found in his book The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. This frog prince convinces a princess to kiss him but he does not change; he just tells her he was joking and jumps back into the pond.
Whether the story’s plot or characters are exact replicas of those shared by the Grimm brothers or they are merely influenced by the tale, the influence of “The Frog Prince” has spanned centuries and may continue to do so for years to come.
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