As the first fairy tale in the Brothers Grimm, Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), it has gained an incredible popularity as a didactic lesson for children as well as an erotic tale for adults. This tale of a king's daughter who promises a frog to let it eat and sleep with her if it retrieves a golden ball that she has dropped into a well becomes an exemplum for the fact that promises must be kept. In the German version the princess throws the frog against the wall, and this breaks the spell of a witch who had changed the prince into the frog. In most other versions the frog is kissed by the princess, and the prince appears. The relationship of this tale to the larger cycle of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is much more prevalent here. But Wilhelm Grimm de‐emphasized the sexual allusions in his various editions of the Children's and Household Tales, thus making the German variant above all an educational children's story.
The idea of a prince turned into a frog by a spell has been traced back to the Middle Ages, but the fairy tale itself was collected by Wilhelm Grimm, probably from Dortchen Wild. While its major purpose appears to be instructional, it has been pointed out that the princess also goes through a maturation process. She does not merely learn that promises must be kept, but she also comprehends that she must grow up and take matters into her own hands. It is the liberating and individualizing process that has been emphasized in the interpretation of this fairy tale by such psychologists as Bruno Bettelheim. When Anglo‐American variants with the kiss scene are added to this view, then the tale also becomes an indirect expression of sexual development.
It is doubtless for the latter reason that ‘The Frog King’ has been reinterpreted to such a vast degree by literary authors in the form of serious poems and short stories or intriguing satires and parodies. Anne Sexton's lengthy poem ‘The Frog Prince’ (1971) presents a sexual interpretation of the tale, but there are also poems by such authors as Sara Henderson Hay, Robert Graves, Hyacinthe Hill, Phyllis Thompson, Elizabeth Brewster, Robert Pack, and Galway Kinnell. These poetic reactions to the traditional fairy tale abound with modern questions about love, marriage, identity, happiness, and interpersonal communication. In German poems by Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Franz Fühmann, for example, questions of love and maturation are raised as well but with a lesser sexual implication owing to the fact that the ‘kiss’ variant has only become known in more recent years.
Nevertheless, the fairy tale has been usurped by the mass media and commercialism. In fact, the tale has been reduced to the internationally disseminated proverb ‘You have to kiss a lot of toads (frogs), before you meet your handsome prince.’ This slogan regarding the anxieties of modern relationships can be found on greetings cards, bathroom walls, T‐shirts, bumper stickers, and posters. The scene of the frog being thrown against the wall or being kissed has also been used repeatedly in cartoons, comic strips, caricatures, and advertisements, where the topics range from economics to love or from politics to sex. Wishful thinking and realism are placed in striking confrontation by innovative manipulations of the traditional fairy tale. Most of these reinterpretations of the traditional ‘Frog King’ fairy tale are frustrated statements regarding the social and psychological problems of people whose dreams clash with reality. But by questioning the happy end of this extremely popular fairy tale, these people are barely hiding their hope for that redeeming kiss.
Bibliography
- Bettelheim, Bruno, The Use of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976).
- Blair, Walter, ‘The Funny Fondled Fairytale Frog’,
Studies in American Humor , 1 (1982). - Ellis, John M., One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and their Tales (1983).
- Mieder, Wolfgang, ‘Modern Anglo‐American Variants of The Frog Prince’,
New York Folklore , 6 (1980). - ——Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry (1985).
- Röhrich, Lutz, Wage es, den Frosch zu küssen! Das Grimmsche Märchen Nummer Eins in seinen Wandlungen (1987).
— Wolfgang Mieder
