One of the reasons there are so many royal characters in a fairy tales is that they symbolize themes like ultimate power and goodness. We expect the king to be a wise ruler, honest and fair in his dealings. Likewise, the queen should embody the best of the feminine traits—whether she is ruling the kingdom or managing the household.
So when the royals behave, well, unroyal, we know something has gone very wrong in the kingdom. For example, the Snow White story might be the height of a queen-gone-bad story when she goes to such great lengths to try to kill her stepdaughter.
And in a lot of these stories that we’ve read so far in our #GRIMMread2019 challenge, we find kings promising their daughter’s hands in marriage, only to keep changing the impossible requirements for the suitors when the young men complete each task. One story this week had a twist on this trope.
In How Six Men Got on in the World, we get a hint in the beginning that the ruler in this kingdom might be unscrupulous. A skillful man who has “conducted himself correctly and courageously” in a war (for the king) is discharged and given only three pennies for traveling expenses.
He gets angry and sets out to force the king to turn over all his treasures. Along the way, he collects five other men with unusual abilities and they band together to get their fortune.
Meanwhile, the king has declared that whoever runs a race against his daughter and wins, can marry her. Of course, if they lose, they also lose their heads.
Through various shenanigans on both sides, the soldier wins. Angry at the outcome, the king immediately starts plotting against him and his friends. But we were told right at the beginning that our soldier is skillful, and his friends do have unique talents. In the end, the king is tricked into handing over his fortune, minus the princess, who was never the sought-after prize in the first place.
I didn’t like the king. Given our expectations of what a king should be, he falls far short.
I also didn’t like how the soldier turned out. My mom always told me two wrongs don’t make a right. This soldier went overboard in teaching the king a lesson, taking all the riches from the kingdom and dividing them with his men. Makes me wonder about the other people in the kingdom and what happened to them.
And what about the princess? Turns out, from the perspective of a fairy-tale writer, I was most interested in her.
One way you could read her story is that she is in cahoots with the king and is herself quite devious. (She does consult with the king on how to get rid of the men, though the plans are the king’s ideas and she is rarely mentioned again.) This was how I read the story the first time. And by the end, I didn’t like any of the characters, and I didn’t like the story all that much.
Or, more interestingly, you could read the story as if the princess is a pawn in this power struggle and fortunate that she escapes marriage to the bitter and vengeful soldier who doesn’t want her anyway.
What I liked about the princess was that she was not only physically capable, but clever as well.
The race portion of the story is similar to the tortoise and the hare, with the additional challenge that they had to bring back a jug filled with water from the spring.
When the princess (tortoise) comes across the sleeping runner (hare), she thinks the enemy has been delivered into her hands and she pours out the water in his jug. Haha. That was unexpected and made me root for her.
She bought herself some time, even though she still lost the race. That one act made me find her the most interesting of all the characters. After all, what else could she be capable of?
