something came crawling splish, splash, splish, splash, up the marble stairs...
‘In the old days, when wishing still helped’ is a wonderful first line but one which, according to Joyce Crick in the notes to my edition, was conventional and introduced by the Grimms to the story. Certainly there’s no indication in this story that wishing may be helpful: it doesn’t save the prince from enchantment as a frog or the princess from keeping her promise, much as she tries to wriggle out of it.
The first great surprise to me was that nobody kisses any frogs. This variation was introduced by early English translations of variants of the tale, in which the princess has (reluctantly) to share her bed for three nights with the frog and then he turns into the handsome prince. I suppose the kiss is a more decorous echo of that sexual implication. In the version given by the Grimms, the princess shouts ‘Now take your rest, you nasty frog’ and hurls him against the wall ‘with all her strength’. For this display of temper, she is rewarded with ‘a king’s son with beautiful, kind eyes’.
The second great surprise is Faithful Henry, the prince’s loyal servant, who appears at the end standing at the rear of a carriage drawn by eight white horses with ostrich plumes which will carry the king’s son back to his kingdom with his new bride. As the carriage travels along, the king’s son hears three times a snapping sound, which he mistakes for the carriage breaking; Faithful Henry explains that it’s the cracking of the bands around his heart now that it is once more filling with joy because his master has been delivered. This put me in mind of the story of Odysseus’s faithful dog Argus, although admittedly Argus did actually die when he once more laid eyes on his master. There was a poem about him I had to learn as a child, I can’t remember anything except (roughly) the last line: ‘Wagged his tail, laid down and died.’ Cheerful stuff.
(Charles Folkard, illustration for Grimm's Fairy Tales, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911; found here; all the illustrations I have found of this tale make the frog look rather sweet and cuddly and this one is no exception, but I think it does give a flavour of the princess’s wilfulness)
Anyway. This tale is one of those which tend to be grouped as ‘Animal Bridegroom Tales’, another being Beauty and the Beast. I seem to remember that Marina Warner writes interestingly about it, but alas I had to give my mother back her copy of From the Beast to the Blonde some time ago so cannot check. Bettelheim, with his insistence that all fairy tales were for children, reads this as a tale which teaches acceptance of sexual relations and encourages young girls to overcome their natural distaste for them. Naturally he discards the Iron Henry part of the story since it does not fit with his theory. To be fair, a lot of editors of fairy tale collections do the same. This strikes me as a pity as Iron Henry’s loyalty, joy and devotion provide a counterweight to the princess’s unreliability and hostility; his reaction is the reaction the story wants us to have to its outcome.
Interpretations of the tale as embodying some sort of psychological and moral journey, such as Bettelheim’s, only work if one reads the king, who insists on the princess’s keeping her word, as the super ego. The princess herself undergoes no obvious transformation into a ‘better’ person; she is rude to the courteous frog from the outset (‘old paddle-puddle’) and agrees to his conditions for retrieving the ball with no intention of fulfilling her side of the bargain. Still, her thought, ‘he can’t be a companion for any human’, is not unreasonable even bearing in mind he’s a talking frog, and the frog demands a high price for a simple act of retrieval:
if you will love me and have you for your companion and playfellow, if you will let me sit next to you at your little table, and eat from your little golden plate, and drink from your little goblet, and sleep in your little bed, if you promise me this, I will go down and fetch your golden ball back up for you again.
While I don’t actually care for Bettelheim’s reading of the story, I do think that ‘The Frog King’ concerns anxiety over sex and specifically from the female’s point of view. The physical repulsiveness of the ‘clammy’ frog who is ‘now supposed to sleep in her beautiful clean little bed’ inclines to this. The princess, surrounded by her beautiful ‘little’ things, seems very young and when she hears the frog splish-splashing up the steps to the palace dining-room she feels not guilt or anger but fear. I found that part of the tale very powerful. Without the Iron Henry episode to emphasise it, I find the ‘happy ending’ too weak to balance the panic and revulsion the princess experiences here – and what makes it uncomfortable after the discomfort of the frog’s imposition of himself on the princess’s lap, dinner, bed, is that it’s a happy ending which is external to the princess, who never speaks again.
The story’s oral origins must always remain unclear, but it is likely that it retained its appeal because it reflected a fact of life for many girls who heard it – that they might not have a choice, or much of a choice, in whom they married (the higher-born they were, the more likely that they would be married off for dynastic or economic reasons) and that once married their husbands would have sexual authority over them. For me, ‘The Frog King’ dramatises this fact. The king and Iron Henry tell the princess what she should be doing, feeling, but she seems to have very different ideas. When the princess has agency, she is rebelling. It is not a neat tale with a pleasing resolution. (You know, this might well be Warner’s interpretation of the tale now I think about it.)
What do you think?
(Next tale: ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’, not a story which I think is going to end well for both parties...)