The Princess Who Never Smiled
Encyclopedia
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
collected by Alexander Afanasyev
Alexander Afanasyev
Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev was a Russian folklorist who recorded and published over 600 Russian folktales and fairytales, by far the largest folktale collection by any one man in the world...
in Narodnye russkie skazki
Narodnye russkie skazki
Russian Fairy Tales , is a collection of Russian fairy tales, collected by Alexander Afanasyev and published by him between 1855 and 1863. His work was explicitly modeled after the Brothers Grimm's work, Grimm's Fairy Tales....
.
Synopsis
There was once a princessPrincess
Princess is the feminine form of prince . Most often, the term has been used for the consort of a prince, or his daughters....
who never smile
Smile
A smile is a facial expression formed by flexing the muscles near both ends of the mouth. The smile can also be found around the eyes . Among humans, it is an expression denoting pleasure, joy, happiness, or amusement, but can also be an involuntary expression of anxiety, in which case it is known...
d or laughed. Her father promised that whoever made her smile could marry her, and many tried, but none succeeded.
Across the town, an honest worker worked hard for his master
Master
Master or Masters are terms denoting some kind of rank or status, and may refer to:-Ranks and titles:* Master craftsman in the Medieval guilds* Master , a title...
. At the end of the year, the master put a sack of money before him and told him to take as much as he wanted. To avoid sinning by taking too much, he took only one coin
Coin
A coin is a piece of hard material that is standardized in weight, is produced in large quantities in order to facilitate trade, and primarily can be used as a legal tender token for commerce in the designated country, region, or territory....
, and when he went to drink from a well
Water well
A water well is an excavation or structure created in the ground by digging, driving, boring or drilling to access groundwater in underground aquifers. The well water is drawn by an electric submersible pump, a trash pump, a vertical turbine pump, a handpump or a mechanical pump...
, he dropped the coin and lost it. The next year, the same thing happened to him. The third year, the worker took the same amount of coin as before, but when he drank from the well, he did not lose his coin, and the other two coins floated up to him. He decided to see the world. A mouse
Mouse
A mouse is a small mammal belonging to the order of rodents. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse . It is also a popular pet. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are also common. This rodent is eaten by large birds such as hawks and eagles...
asked him for alm
Alm
Alm may refer to:* An alpine pasture* Alm , Austria* The protagonist of Fire Emblem Gaiden* A stadium in Bielefeld, Germany, see "Bielefelder Alm"* An historical liquid measure, see aamALM may refer to:* Abundant Life Ministries...
s; he gave him a coin. Then he did the same for a beetle
Beetle
Coleoptera is an order of insects commonly called beetles. The word "coleoptera" is from the Greek , koleos, "sheath"; and , pteron, "wing", thus "sheathed wing". Coleoptera contains more species than any other order, constituting almost 25% of all known life-forms...
and a catfish
Catfish
Catfishes are a diverse group of ray-finned fish. Named for their prominent barbels, which resemble a cat's whiskers, catfish range in size and behavior from the heaviest and longest, the Mekong giant catfish from Southeast Asia and the second longest, the wels catfish of Eurasia, to detritivores...
.
He came to the castle
Castle
A castle is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble...
and saw the princess looking at him. This astounded him, and he fell in the mud
Mud
Mud is a mixture of water and some combination of soil, silt, and clay. Ancient mud deposits harden over geological time to form sedimentary rock such as shale or mudstone . When geological deposits of mud are formed in estuaries the resultant layers are termed bay muds...
. The mouse, the beetle, and the catfish came to his aid, and at their antics, the princess laughed. She pointed him out as the man, and when he was brought into the castle, he had been turned into a handsome man. The honest worker, now a handsome man, married the princess.
Motifs
Making the princess laugh, or smile, is a common fairy tale motif of various uses. The culmination of Golden GooseGolden Goose
The Golden Goose is a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm .-Story:The hero is the youngest of three brothers, given the nickname Dummling. His eldest brother is sent into the forest to chop wood, fortified with a rich cake and a bottle of wine. He meets a little gray man who begs a morsel...
and The Magic Swan
The Magic Swan
The Magic Swan is a European fairy tale collected by Hermann Kletke. Andrew Lang included it in The Green Fairy Book..-Synopsis:Two older brothers abused the youngest son. An old woman advised him to run away...
, where the goose or swan causes other characters to stick to each other, is that the sight causes a princess to laugh for the first time, resulting, as in this story, in her marriage. Peruonto
Peruonto
Peruonto is an Italian literary fairy tale written by Giambattista Basile in his 1634 work, the Pentamerone.It is Aarne-Thompson type 675. Other literary tales of this type are Straparola's "Peter The Fool" and Madame d'Aulnoy's The Dolphin...
and the frame story of Giambattista Basile
Giambattista Basile
Giambattista Basile was an Italian poet, courtier, and fairy tale collector.- Biography :Born to a Neapolitan middle-class family, Basile was, during his career, a courtier and soldier to various Italian princes, including the doge of Venice. According to Benedetto Croce he was born in 1575, while...
, however, combine it with a curse, caused by the angry person laughed at, to force the princess to marry someone.