An 1889 Meyerheim Illustration of 'The Frog King'

An 1889 Meyerheim Illustration of The Frog King (Godwin-Jones 1999)

Title Page

Introduction

The Tale

Evolution of the Tale

Other Versions of the Tale

Works Cited

The Quiz

Annotations

"afraid"
Bettelheim (1975) emphasizes the princess' anger, anxiety, and fear as the frog becomes increasingly intimate with her -- from asking to sit by her to asking to be in her bed. As the frog gets closer to her, she becomes more appalled and disgusted, especially at the thought of the frog touching her. Bettelheim, a psychologist and psychiatrist, sees this as symbolic of a coming-of-age, an "awakening to sex," which is "not free of disgust or of anxiety, even anger" (p. 288). Bettelheim writes that the princess becomes "more a person" (p. 288) the closer the frog comes to her (and the more hateful her feelings become), as opposed to her merely self-centered behavior at the beginning of the tale. She is on the way to asserting her independence.

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"bewitched"
Von Franz (1980) writes of her surprising discovery that even civilizations that are primitive (and do not harbor prejudices against the human body and against anima-like instincts such as the civilizations with primarily Buddhist or Judeo-Christian religions tend to do) also have stories in which "human beings {are} bewitched and transformed into frogs or snakes" (p. 57-8). She adds that in many stories people are bewitched and appear as frogs and that frogs are similar in many ways to humans.
 
"{I}t has little hands and feet and is, on the level of a little cold-blooded animal, like a caricature of the human being. We often call little children little frogs. If an unconscious content appears as a frog, I always conclude that it could become conscious, even that is wants to do so . . . {T}his relative similarity of structure of the frog to the human body affords a fitting symbolic expression for something which is partly buried in the somatic layers of the unconscious, but which has a definite stimulus towards conscious realization" (p. 70).
 

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"by her father's will"
The father in this tale is responsible for the marriage of the princess and her new husband, the animal-groom, according to Bettelheim (1975). It is parents, he writes, who instill a sense of responsibility in their children, and parental guidance brings about the development of the child's superego. In this story, the princess' father does as much by insisting she keep her promises, though her initial promise to the frog may have been questionable to begin with. It is not surprising to read that Bettelheim, as a psychologist and psychiatrist, believes it is this responsible conscience that brings about happiness in life, love, and marriage. In this case, we have the King to thank, he writes.

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"exclaimed the princess and ran away"
The sisters of the princess in The Frog Prince as well as many other folktales, including Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and King Thrushbeard "nearly all became models of bad breeding" (Tatar 1992, p. 11). These moral misgivings were added to the tales in the mid-19th century in an effort to show children the ramifications of bad behavior.

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"faithful Henry"
Iron Henry is not included in most versions of this fairy tale. It is almost as if this loyal, truly faithful character was an afterthought in an attempt to compensate for the princess' insubordinate and abominable behavior, and his story is generally unrelated to the story's meaning (Bettelheim 1975).

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"glave"
A sword (Ashliman 1999)

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"golden ball"
The ball in this story, according to Bettelheim (1975), is a symbol of perfection in two ways -- it is made out of the most precious metal, and it also represents an "as yet undeveloped narcissistic psyche" in the young girl. "{I}t contains all potentials, none yet realized" (p. 287).

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"Go wi' me to bed" and "we will both lie down"
According to Opie (1974), "the idea that a kiss, or the marriage bed, could release a person from the curse of monstrousness, was one that thrilled readers in the Middle Ages, the bewitched person most often, as in Icelandic saga, being a young girl who had been turned into a terrifying creature" (p. 184).

Bettelheim (1975) sees particular significance in this part of this story:
 
"On another level the story tells that we cannot expect our first erotic contacts to be pleasant, for they are much too difficult and fraught with anxiety. But if we continue, despite temporary repugnance, to permit the other to become ever more intimate, then at some moment we will experience a happy shock of recognition when complete closeness reveals sexuality's true beauty. In one version of The Frog King, 'after a night in bed, when awakening she saw by her side the handsomest gentleman.' Thus in this story the night spent together (and we may surmise what happened during the night) makes for the radically changed view of what has become the marital partner. The various other tales in which the timing of the events varies from the first night to three weeks all counsel patience: it takes time for closeness to turn into love . . . The story of the frog . . . confirms the appropriateness of disgust when one is not ready for sex, and prepares for its desirability when the time is ripe" (pp. 288-290).
 

Bettelheim goes so far as to say that the tale is a more effective way to teach modern sex education, as it shows that the child may be initially disgusted by sex (as represented by the frog), but that eventually the frog will reveal himself to be a handsome and enjoyable life's companion.

Wolfgang Mieder (1980), in an article showing the modern world's continual preoccupation with this famous first fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, writes "{o}bviously the bedroom scene of the fairy tale is of particular interest to writers and cartoonists of today, since the preoccupation with sexual implications is evident even in the Grimm tale" (p. 125).

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Grimms' Second Version of the Tale
This version of the tale from 1815 (Bettelheim 1975) was not included in future editions of the Grimms' collections of stories, because it was too similar to The Frog King (Ashliman 1999).

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"he had not the slightest intention"
It is noteworthy that in the Chinese version of the tale we have yet again the themes of commitment and honesty. Here the emperor refuses to keep a promise he has made, just as the princess does in the Grimms' version.

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"king's son"
In mythology, the frog provides the masculine element of many stories, as opposed to the feminine element in the toad (the toad more directly represents the uterus) (von Franz 1970).

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"losgann"
A frog or toad (Ashliman 1999)

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"promise me this"
Some versions of The Three Feathers, another of Grimms' tales, contain elements of The Frog King in that the toad of the tale begs for acceptance and asks to eat from the human's plate and sleep in his bed (von Franz 1970).

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"rolled straight into the water"
According to Bettelheim (1975), the princess in this tale matures at a very rapid rate. First, she is a carefree, playful, beautiful little girl playing with her beloved golden ball. Next, after the ball disappears, "naivete is lost and Pandora's box is opened" (p. 287). The princess grieves at the loss of not only her ball but also the loss of her innocence. Only this terribly ugly frog can "restore perfection -- the ball -- to her out of the darkness into which the symbol of her psyche has fallen" (p. 287). The darker and uglier facets of life -- in the form of a frog -- have been revealed to the young girl.

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"shone in her face"
Bettelheim (1975) writes,

  "The Brothers Grimm could not have begun their collection of fairy tales with a more telling sentence than the one which introduces their first story, The Frog King . . . This beginning locates the story in a unique fairy-tale time: the archaic period when we all believed that our wishes could, if not move mountains, change our fate; and when in our animistic view of the world, the sun took notice of us and reacted to events. The unearthly beauty of the child, the effectiveness of wishing, and the sun's astonishment signify the absolute uniqueness of this event. Those are the coordinates which place the story not in time or place of external reality, but in a state of mind - that of the young in spirit. Being placed there, the fairy tale can cultivate this spirit better than any other form of literature" (p. 62). 

Such story beginnings make it evident that the setting and events of the story are in no way similar to our common, prosaic realities.

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"sieve" and "Stop it with moss"
"The sieve-bucket task is widespread from the Danaids of the Greeks to the leverets of Uncle Remus, who, curiously enough, use the same rhyme: 'Fill it wid moss en dob it wid clay"
(Jacobs 1911, p. 276).

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"stretching forth its big, ugly head from the water"
According to
Bettelheim (1975), the frog emerges in this story just as the child emerges in birth -- from life in the water. Furthermore, he writes that children inherently understand our hero's "lowly animal form" at the beginning of the tale, since the child's life begins in a "lower state . . . The child knows his own situation is not due to some evil deed or a nefarious power; it is the natural order of the world . . . Historically, fairy tales anticipate by centuries our knowledge of embryology, which tells how the human fetus undergoes various stages of development before birth, as the frog undergoes a metamorphosis in its development" (p. 289).

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"terribly angry"
The Grimms Brothers repeatedly edited and changed this story over a span of forty-two years {"constant tinkering," Ellis (1983, p. 89) calls it}, and in the process they either presented or emphasized particular themes, which remain strong motifs in the story even today. One of these is the idea of the angry, spoiled, and resistant princess who is eventually rewarded (whether rightfully so or not can be debated) for throwing the frog against the wall. Another is the king's authority over her (Zipes 1988). Tatar (1992) notes that the Brothers Grimm rewrote the fairy tale with the goal of improving the lot of children everywhere in stressing the father's didactic message to his daughter - keeping one's promises. This, indeed, is the same theme in Well of the World's End, although - strangely enough - in that tale the commands the Princess promises to carry out are given by the character associated with evil. However, the Brothers Grimm failed in "camouflaging the way in which the tale rewards indignant rage" (p. 154), and their rewritten version shows that disobeying authority and breaking promises leads to "salvation" (p. 156).

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"That which you have promised must you perform" and "Girls must keep their promises"
Bruno Bettelheim (1975), a professor of psychology and psychiatry, emphasizes the young girl's heavy reliance in the beginning of the tale on the pleasure principle; clearly, he explains, she is operating on her id at all times, and only in the form of her father, the King, do we see the emergence of the superego. "What started playfully becomes most serious: the princess must grow up as she is forced to accept the commitments she has made" (p. 288).

Tatar (1992) writes of the transformation many fairy tales underwent in an effort to turn them into heavily didactic, cautionary stories for the nursery or classroom. Little Red Riding Hood and The Frog King are used as illustrations of this transformation. The former, she writes, began as a mischievous story of a provocative young heroine tempting a wolf, and the story then changed into a somber tale warning readers of the dangerous results of disobeying one's mother. The latter, our Frog King, "a story rich in opportunities for risqué humor, was similarly recast to produce a tale designed to issue stern lessons about the importance of keeping promises - even when it means sharing your bed with an amorous frog" (p. 4).

She also refers to the "moral clichés" (p. 62) of the tales that often do not relate to the crisis facing the protagonist. Here she refers to the father in The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich who scolds his daughter for breaking a promise. In the early versions of this tale, the King merely tells his daughter what to do, but by the time Nursery and Household Tales was released, the King suddenly became heavy-handed and didactic towards his daughter, reproaching her for her bad behavior. However, commenting upon the princess' hateful behavior towards the frog (by flinging him against the wall and being rewarded for such behavior), Ellis (1983) says, "The Grimms were perhaps more concerned with some kinds of moral questions than with others" (p. 202).

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"they would go together into his kingdom"
According to Zipes (1988), the story of The Frog King - along with Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella -- champions Protestant ethics and morals and a "patriarchal notion of sex roles" (p. 15). Zipes acknowledges that in this story we have one of only a few of Grimms' heroines (the princess, in this case); however, the story reinforces the notion of an obedient, subservient, self-sacrificing wife. The prince, as in many of these tales, is her reward, and it is clear that after his arrival and marriage to the heroine, he will take over and take control of her and her future {what Zipes (1997) calls the "traditional taming-of-the-shrew theme" (p. 106)}. In fact, in her book that examines and challenges the notion of femininity in fairy tales, Madonna Kolbenschlag entitles her last chapter "Exit the Frog Prince," in which she warns of the dangers of silencing the feminine voice in such tales and even writes an imaginary letter to the frog prince himself (Stone 1986).

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"threw him with all her might against the wall"
Bettelheim (1975) spins a positive slant on this unusual plot development in the tale. He explains that the princess' anxiety becomes anger and even hatred here as she flings the frog against her bedroom wall. "By thus asserting herself and taking risks in doing so -- as opposed to her previous trying to weasel out and then simply obeying her father's commands -- the princess transcends her anxiety, and hatred changes into love" (p. 288). In the end, he asserts, she has developed her own independence by going against her father's commands. She becomes "more a person" (p. 288) and develops her own identity, and as she does so, the frog does so as well by turning into a prince.

As for the frog, during this unfortunate turn of events, Bettelheim (1975) writes that this moment of violence is necessary for him to gain independence as well. Up to this moment, we see him develop a "loving, dependent relationship to a mother figure" (p. 289), which is necessary for emotional growth. "What child has not wished to sit on Mother's lap, eat from her dish, drink from her glass, and has not climbed into Mother's bed, trying to sleep there with her?" Bettelheim writes. However, there comes a time in which the child must sever that bond and cease that behavior in order to become an individual. "Much as the child wants to remain in bed with Mother, she has to 'throw' him out of it -- a painful experience but inescapable if he is to gain independence" (p. 289).

Tatar (1992) contrasts this hateful and destructive way of revealing the man inside the beast with the kinder method in Beauty and the Beast. "An act of passion (in its most rabidly violent form) rather than an act of compassion liberates the frog from his enchanted form" (p. 154).

Amongst the various versions of the tale, there are numerous means that bring about the frog's transformation back into a man -- throwing the frog against the wall (as in this version), sleeping in the girl's bed, being kissed, chopping off the frog's head, and even burning the frog's skin (Leach 1972).

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"tossed the Embroidered Ball"
It is interesting to note this similarity in the Chinese version of the tale -- the princess is once again tossing a precious ball as she does in the Grimms' version.

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Translation of frog's plea in The Queen Who Sought a Drink from a Certain Well
Gentle one, gentle one,
Rememberest thou
The little pledge
Thou gavest me
Beside the well?
My love, my love!
(Ashliman 1999)

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