Most people know the Frog Prince as a story about a kiss. The Brothers Grimm, who put it at the head of their collection, did not tell it that way.
The Horror
In 1812 the Grimms published the first volume of their Kinder- und Hausmarchen. It held 86 tales, and tale number one was Der Froschkonig oder der eiserne Heinrich, The Frog King, or Iron Henry. The brothers were then working as librarians in Kassel. By their own account the tale seems to have come from the oral tradition of Dortchen Wild’s family in the town, and an older version survives in a manuscript of 1810.
A princess is playing with a golden ball beside a well in a dark forest, under an old linden tree. The ball falls into the well. A frog offers to fetch it, and she promises him whatever he wants. She takes the ball and runs home, forgetting the bargain. The next day the frog comes to the palace and claims what she promised.
At the bedroom the story turns. In the 1812 text the princess carries the frog to her room and throws him against the wall. In the 1857 text she sets him down in a corner, and when he asks to be taken up to bed she throws him against the wall with all her might. There is no kiss in either text. The frog falls as a prince. In the later text the enchanter is a wicked witch.
One reading of the tale, in a modern commentary, is that the Grimms were teaching obedience to parents and the keeping of promises, which is why it opened the book. That is an interpretation of the tale, not a statement by the brothers.
The tale does not end with the wedding. The prince’s servant, Henry, had put three iron bands around his own heart when his master was enchanted, so that it would not break with grief. As the carriage drives away, the bands burst one by one with joy. That is the image the Grimms chose to end on, and it gave the tale its second title.
The Legend
The kiss is later. It does not appear in Edgar Taylor’s English translation of 1823 or in many nineteenth-century English retellings, and by the twentieth century it had become the point of the story. Who added it, and when, is unconfirmed. One commentator suspects it came from confusion with tales such as Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty, where a kiss breaks a spell. That is a guess.
The popular claim that the kiss is a Victorian and Hollywood invention is only partly checked: the kiss appears in English translations, and the exact dates and hands are not established.
The tale’s age is also open. A Scottish version appears in the sixteenth-century Complaynt of Scotland. Some scholars have pointed to a line in Petronius’s Satyricon, and others argue that the line is a joke about Nero. A thirteenth-century Latin tale has also been proposed as the source of the German tradition. None of these claims is settled.
The Grimms changed their texts. Wilhelm edited and rewrote the tales from 1815, lengthening them and adding dialogue, and the seventh and last edition of 1857 held 211 tales. A different frog tale, Der Froschprinz, was printed in 1815 and dropped later. The wall-throw stayed through the revisions.
The Modern Relic
GRIMMWELT Kassel, at Weinbergstrasse 21, is devoted to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and their work, with a permanent exhibition introducing the brothers. Kassel is where the brothers worked as librarians while the first volume came out, and where the tale seems to have been told to them.
The relic that matters is the book. In the 1812 first edition the Frog King sits at the front, with no kiss, a princess in a rage, and a heart bound in iron.
