The Classic Fairy Tales_Norton Critical Edition

by Edited by Maria Tatar

  And King Galeotto, when he saw that he had so fine a son and a grandchild as well, put aside his diadem and his royal robes and passed the crown on to his son, who was made king with great pomp. Ever afterwards he was known as King Pig. To the great joy of the people in the land, the young king began his reign, and he lived long and happily with Meldina, his beloved wife.

  * * *

  †  Giovan Francesco Straparola, “The Pig King,” in The Facetious Nights of Straparola, trans. W. G. Waters (London: Society of Bibliophiles, 1891).

    1. The tales in Straparola’s collection are told by a circle of ladies living in exile in Murano to pass the time during the nights of the Venetian carnival.

    2. In this version of the story, Meldina’s betrayal of the pig’s confidence has no consequences, but in other variants, the heroine must undertake a perilous journey or carry out “impossible” tasks to redeem herself and be reunited with her husband. The phrase thus lifting the curse has been added by the editor.

  BROTHERS GRIMM

  The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich†

  In the olden days, when wishing could help you, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful. But the youngest was so beautiful that even the sun, which had seen so much, was filled with wonder when it shone upon her face. There was a dark, vast forest near the king’s castle, and in that forest, beneath an old linden tree, was a well. When the weather was really hot, the king’s daughter would go out into the woods and sit down at the edge of the cool well. And when she got bored, she would take out her golden ball, throw it up in the air, and catch it again. That was her favorite toy.

  One day it happened that the golden ball didn’t land in the princess’s hands when she reached up to catch it, but fell down on the ground and rolled right into the water. The princess followed it with her eyes, but the ball had disappeared, and the well was so very deep that you couldn’t see the bottom. She began to weep and wept louder and louder, unable to stop herself. While she was wailing, a voice called out to her: “What’s going on, princess? Stones would be moved to pity if they could hear you.”

  She turned around to see where the voice was coming from and saw a frog, which had stuck its big ugly head out of the water.

  “Oh, it’s you, you old splasher,” she said. “I’m crying because my golden ball has fallen into the well.”

  “Be quiet and stop crying,” said the frog. “I can help you, but what will you give me if I fetch your toy?”

  “Whatever you want, dear frog,” she said. “My dresses, my pearls and jewels, even the golden crown I’m wearing.”

  The frog said: “I don’t want your dresses, your pearls and jewels, or your golden crown. But if you promise to cherish me and let me be your companion and playmate, and let me sit beside you at the table and eat from your little golden plate, drink from your little cup, and sleep in your little bed, if you promise me that, I will crawl down into the well and bring back your golden ball.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ll give you anything you want as long as you get my ball back.” But to herself she thought: “What nonsense that stupid frog is talking! He’s down there in the water croaking away with all the other frogs. How could anyone want him for a companion?”

  Once the frog had her word, he dove down into the water head first. After a while he came paddling back up with the ball in his mouth and tossed it onto the grass. When the princess caught sight of her beautiful toy, she was overjoyed. She picked it up and ran off with it.

  “Wait for me,” the frog cried out. “Take me with you. I can’t run the way you do.”

  He croaked as loudly as he could after her, but it was no use. She paid no attention, sped home, and quickly forgot about the poor frog, who crawled back down into the well.

  The next day, after she had sat down for dinner with the king and all the other courtiers and was eating from her little golden plate, something came crawling up the marble staircase, splish, splash, splish, splash. When it reached the top of the stairs, it knocked at the door and called out: “Princess, youngest princess, let me in!”

  She ran to the door to see who it was, and when she opened the door, the frog was waiting right there. Terrified, she slammed the door as fast as she could and went back to the table. The king could see that her heart was pounding and said: “My child, why are you afraid? Was there a giant at the door coming to get you?”

  “Oh, no,” she replied. “It wasn’t a giant, but it was a disgusting frog.”

  “What does a frog want from you?”

  “Oh, father dear, yesterday when I was playing at the well, my golden ball fell into the water. And because I was crying so hard, the frog fetched it for me, and because he insisted, I promised that he could be my companion. I never thought that he would be able to leave the water. Now he’s outside and wants to come in to see me.” Just then there was a second knock at the door, and a voice called out:

  Princess, youngest princess,

  Let me in.

  Did you forget

  Yesterday’s promise

  Down by the chilly waters?

  Princess, youngest princess,

  Let me in.

  Then the king said: “When you make a promise, you must keep it. Just go and let him in.”

  She went and opened the door. The frog hopped into the room and followed close on her heels until she reached her chair. Then he sat down and called out: “Lift me up beside you.”

  She hesitated, but the king ordered her to obey. Once the frog was up on the chair, he wanted to get on the table, and once he was there he said: “Push your little golden plate closer to me so that we can eat together.”

  She did as he said, but it was obvious that she was not happy about it. The frog enjoyed his meal, but for her almost every little morsel stuck in her throat. Finally he said: “I’ve had enough to eat and am tired. Carry me up to your little room and prepare your little bed with the silken covers.”

  The princess began to cry, and was afraid of the clammy frog. She didn’t dare touch him, and now he was going to sleep in her beautiful, clean bed. The king grew angry and said: “You shouldn’t scorn someone who helped you when you were in trouble.”

  The princess picked up the frog with two fingers, carried him up to her room, and put him in a corner. While she was lying in bed, he came crawling over and said: “I’m tired and want to sleep as much as you do. Lift me up or I’ll tell your father.”

  Then she became really cross, picked him up, and threw him with all her might against the wall. “Now you’ll get your rest, you disgusting frog!”

  When he fell to the ground, he was no longer a frog but a prince with beautiful, beaming eyes. At her father’s bidding, he became her dear companion and husband. He told her that a wicked witch had cast a spell on him and that she alone could release him from the well. The next day they would set out together for his kingdom. They fell asleep, and, in the morning, after the sun had woken them, a coach drove up drawn by eight white horses in golden harnesses, with white ostrich plumes on their heads. At the back of the coach stood Faithful Heinrich, the servant of the young king. Faithful Heinrich had been so saddened by the transformation of his master into a frog that he had to have three hoops placed around his heart to keep it from bursting with pain and sorrow. Now the coach was there to take the young king back to his kingdom, and Faithful Heinrich lifted the two of them in and took his place in the back again. He was overjoyed by the transformation. When they had covered some distance, the prince heard a cracking noise behind him, as if something had broken. He turned around and called out:

  “Heinrich, the coach is falling apart!”

  “No, my lord, ’tis not the coach,

  But a hoop from round my heart,

  Which was in such pain,

  While you were down in the well,

  Living there as a frog.”

  Two more times the prince heard the cracking noise, and he was sure that the coach was falling a
part. But it was only the sounds of the hoops breaking off from Faithful Heinrich’s heart, for his master had been set free and was happy.

  * * *

  †  Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, “Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich,” in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 7th ed. (Berlin: Dieterich, 1857; first published: Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812). Translated for the first edition of this Norton Critical Edition by Maria Tatar. Copyright © 1999 by Maria Tatar.

  ANGELA CARTER

  The Tiger’s Bride†

  My father lost me to The Beast at cards.

  There’s a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon trees grow.1 We come from countries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think you’ve come to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South infects the starved brain; it gasps: “Luxury! more luxury!” But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flocking against the windowpanes to mock my father’s expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devil’s picture books.

  The candles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more and yet more draughts of the firewater they call “grappa,” rids himself of the last scraps of my inheritance. When we left Russia, we owned black earth, blue forest with bear and wild boar, serfs, cornfields, farmyards, my beloved horses, white nights of cool summer, the fireworks of the northern lights. What a burden all those possessions must have been to him, because he laughs as if with glee as he beggars himself; he is in such a passion to donate all to The Beast.

  Everyone who comes to this city must play a hand with the grand seigneur;2 few come. They did not warn us at Milan, or, if they did, we did not understand them—my limping Italian, the bewildering dialect of the region. Indeed, I myself spoke up in favour of this remote, provincial place, out of fashion two hundred years, because, oh irony, it boasted no casino. I did not know that the price of a stay in its Decembral solitude was a game with Milord.

  The hour was late. The chill damp of this place creeps into the stones, into your bones, into the spongy pith of the lungs; it insinuated itself with a shiver into our parlour, where Milord came to play in the privacy essential to him. Who could refuse the invitation his valet brought to our lodging? Not my profligate father, certainly; the mirror above the table gave me back his frenzy, my impassivity, the withering candles, the emptying bottles, the coloured tide of the cards as they rose and fell, the still mask that concealed all the features of The Beast but for the yellow eyes that strayed, now and then, from his unfurled hand towards myself.

  “La Bestia!” said our landlady, gingerly fingering an envelope with his huge crest of a tiger rampant on it, something of fear, something of wonder in her face. And I could not ask her why they called the master of the place “La Bestia”—was it to do with that heraldic signature?—because her tongue was so thickened by the phlegmy, bronchitic speech of the region I scarcely managed to make out a thing she said except, when she saw me: “Che bella!”3

  Since I could toddle, always the pretty one, with my glossy, nut-brown curls, my rosy cheeks. And born on Christmas Day—her “Christmas rose,” my English nurse called me. The peasants said: “The living image of her mother,” crossing themselves out of respect for the dead. My mother did not blossom long; bartered for her dowry to such a feckless sprig of the Russian nobility that she soon died of his gaming, his whoring, his agonizing repentances. And The Beast gave me the rose from his own impeccable if outmoded buttonhole when he arrived, the valet brushing the snow off his black cloak. This white rose, unnatural, out of season, that now my nervous fingers ripped, petal by petal, apart as my father magnificently concluded the career he had made of catastrophe.

  This is a melancholy, introspective region; a sunless, featureless landscape, the sullen river sweating fog, the shorn, hunkering willows. And a cruel city; the sombre piazza, a place uniquely suited to public executions, under the beetling shadow of that malign barn of a church. They used to hang condemned men in cages from the city walls; unkindness comes naturally to them, their eyes are set too close together, they have thin lips. Poor food, pasta soaked in oil, boiled beef with sauce of bitter herbs. A funereal hush about the place, the inhabitants huddled up against the cold so you can hardly see their faces. And they lie to you and cheat you, innkeepers, coachmen, everybody. God, how they fleeced us!

  The treacherous South, where you think there is no winter but forget you take it with you.

  My senses were increasingly troubled by the fuddling perfume of Milord, far too potent a reek of purplish civet at such close quarters in so small a room. He must bathe himself in scent, soak his shirts and underlinen in it; what can he smell of, that needs so much camouflage?

  I never saw a man so big look so two-dimensional, in spite of the quaint elegance of The Beast, in the old-fashioned tailcoat that might, from its looks, have been bought in those distant years before he imposed seclusion on himself; he does not feel he need keep up with the times. There is a crude clumsiness about his outlines, that are on the ungainly, giant side; and he has an odd air of self-imposed restraint, as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright when he would far rather drop down on all fours. He throws our human aspirations to the godlike sadly awry, poor fellow; only from a distance would you think The Beast not much different from any other man, although he wears a mask with a man’s face painted most beautifully on it. Oh, yes, a beautiful face; but one with too much formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human: one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uncanny. He wears a wig, too, false hair tied at the nape with a bow, a wig of the kind you see in old-fashioned portraits. A chaste silk stock stuck with a pearl hides his throat. And gloves of blond kid that are yet so huge and clumsy they do not seem to cover hands.

  He is a carnival figure made of papier mâché and crêpe hair; and yet he has the Devil’s knack at cards.

  His masked voice echoes as from a great distance as he stoops over his hand and he has such a growling impediment in his speech that only his valet, who understands him, can interpret for him, as if his master were the clumsy doll and he the ventriloquist.

  The wick slumped in the eroded wax, the candles guttered. By the time my rose had lost all its petals, my father, too, was left with nothing.

  “Except the girl.”

  Gambling is a sickness. My father said he loved me yet he staked his daughter on a hand of cards. He fanned them out; in the mirror, I saw wild hope light up his eyes. His collar was unfastened, his rumpled hair stood up on end, he had the anguish of a man in the last stages of debauchery. The draughts came out of the old walls and bit me, I was colder than I’d ever been in Russia, when nights are coldest there.

  A queen, a king, an ace. I saw them in the mirror. Oh, I know he thought he could not lose me; besides, back with me would come all he had lost, the unravelled fortunes of our family at one blow restored. And would he not win, as well, The Beast’s hereditary palazzo outside the city; his immense revenues; his lands around the river; his rents, his treasure chest, his Mantegnas, his Giulio Romanos, his Cellini4 salt-cellars, his titles … the very city itself.

  You must not think my father valued me at less than a king’s ransom; but, at no more than a king’s ransom.

  It was cold as hell in the parlour. And it seemed to me, child of the severe North, that it was not my flesh but, truly, my father’s soul that was in peril.

  My father, of course, believed in miracles; what gambler does not? In pursuit of just such a miracle
as this, had we not travelled from the land of bears and shooting stars?

  So we teetered on the brink.

  The Beast bayed; laid down all three remaining aces.

  The indifferent servants now glided smoothly forward as on wheels to douse the candles one by one. To look at them you would think that nothing of any moment had occurred. They yawned a little resentfully; it was almost morning, we had kept them out of bed. The Beast’s man brought his cloak. My father sat amongst these preparations for departure, staring on at the betrayal of his cards upon the table.

  The Beast’s man informed me crisply that he, the valet, would call for me and my bags tomorrow, at ten, and conduct me forthwith to The Beast’s palazzo. Capisco?5 So shocked was I that I scarcely did “capisco”; he repeated my orders patiently, he was a strange, thin, quick little man who walked with an irregular, jolting rhythm upon splayed feet in curious, wedge-shaped shoes.

  Where my father had been red as fire, now he was white as the snow that caked the windowpane. His eyes swam; soon he would cry.

  “ ‘Like the base Indian,’ ”6 he said; he loved rhetoric. “ ‘One whose hand, / Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe …’ I have lost my pearl, my pearl beyond price.”7

  At that, The Beast made a sudden, dreadful noise, halfway between a growl and a roar; the candles flared. The quick valet, the prim hypocrite, interpreted unblinking: “My master says: If you are so careless of your treasures, you should expect them to be taken from you.”

  He gave us the bow and smile his master could not offer us and they departed.

  I watched the snow until, just before dawn, it stopped falling; a hard frost settled, next morning there was a light like iron.