The Frog Princess
The Frog Princess is a fairy tale that has multiple versions with various origins. It is classified as type 402, the animal bride, in the Aarne–Thompson index. Another tale of this type is the Norwegian Doll i' the Grass. Eastern European variants include the Frog Princess or Tsarevna Frog and also Vasilisa the Wise ; Alexander Afanasyev collected variants in his Narodnye russkie skazki, a collection which included folk tales from Ukraine and Belarus alongside Russian tales.
"The Frog Princess" can be compared to the similar western European fairy tale "The Frog Prince".
Synopsis
The king wants his three sons to marry. To accomplish this, he creates a test to help them find brides. The king tells each prince to shoot an arrow. According to the King's rules, each prince will find his bride where the arrow lands. The youngest son's arrow is picked up by a frog. The king assigns his three prospective daughters-in-law various tasks, such as spinning cloth and baking bread. In every task, the frog far outperforms the two other lazy brides-to-be. In some versions, the frog uses magic to accomplish the tasks, and though the other brides attempt to emulate the frog, they cannot perform the magic. Still, the young prince is ashamed of his frog bride until she is magically transformed into a human princess.In Calvino's version, the princes use slings rather than bows and arrows. In the Greek version, the princes set out to find their brides one by one; the older two are already married by the time the youngest prince starts his quest. Another variation involves the sons chopping down trees and heading in the direction pointed by them in order to find their brides.
In the Russian versions of the story, Prince Ivan and his two older brothers shoot arrows in different directions to find brides. The other brothers' arrows land in the houses of the daughters of an aristocrat and a wealthy merchant, respectively. Ivan's arrow lands in the mouth of a frog in a swamp, who turns into a princess at night. The Frog Princess, named Vasilisa the Wise, is a beautiful, intelligent, friendly, skilled young woman, who was forced to spend three years in a frog's skin for disobeying Koschei. Her final test may be to dance at the king's banquet. The Frog Princess sheds her skin, and the prince then burns it, to her dismay. Had the prince been patient, the Frog Princess would have been freed but instead he loses her. He then sets out to find her again and meets with Baba Yaga, whom he impresses with his spirit, asking why she has not offered him hospitality. She tells him that Koschei is holding his bride captive and explains how to find the magic needle needed to rescue his bride. In another version, the prince's bride flies into Baba Yaga's hut as a bird. The prince catches her, she turns into a lizard, and he cannot hold on. Baba Yaga rebukes him and sends him to her sister, where he fails again. However, when he is sent to the third sister, he catches her and no transformations can break her free again.
In some versions of the story, the Frog Princess' transformation is a reward for her good nature. In one version, she is transformed by witches for their amusement. In yet another version, she is revealed to have been an enchanted princess all along.
Analysis
Tale type
The Eastern Europe tale is classified - and gives its name - to tale type SUS 402, "", of the East Slavic Folktale Catalogue. According to, the East Slavic type 402 "frequently continues" as type 400: the hero burns the princess's animal skin and she disappears.Russian researcher Varvara Dobrovolskaya stated that type SUS 402, "Frog Tsarevna", figures among some of the popular tales of enchanted spouses in the Russian tale corpus. In some Russian variants, as soon as the hero burns the skin of his wife, the Frog Tsarevna, she says she must depart to Koschei's realm, prompting a quest for her. Jack Haney stated that the combination of types 402, "Animal Bride", and 400, "Quest for the Lost Wife", is a common combination in Russian tales.
Species of animal bride
Dutch scholar Theo Meder supposed that the tale type originated in Europe, and the frog was the original form of the animal bride, although she can be a cat in Western Europe and a mouse in Northern Europe. According to researcher Carole G. Silver and, apart from bird and fish maidens, local forms of the animal bride include a frog in Burma, Russia, Austria and Italy; a dog in India and in North America; a mouse in Sri Lanka; the frog, the toad and the monkey in Iberian Peninsula, and in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking areas in the Americas.Professor Anna Angelopoulos noted that the animal wife in the Eastern Mediterranean is a turtle, which is the same animal of Greek variants. In the same vein, Greek scholar noted that similar aquatic beings and water-related entities appear in the Greek oikotype of type 402.
Role of the animal bride
The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 402, "The Animal Bride". According to Andreas John, this tale type is considered to be a "male-centered" narrative. However, in East Slavic variants, the Frog Maiden assumes more of a protagonistic role along with her intended. Likewise, scholar Maria Tatar describes the frog heroine as "resourceful, enterprising, and accomplished", whose amphibian skin is burned by her husband, and she has to depart to regions unknown. The story, then, delves into the husband's efforts to find his wife, ending with a happy reunion for the couple.On the other hand, Barbara Fass Leavy draws attention to the role of the frog wife in female tasks, like cooking and weaving. It is her exceptional domestic skills that impress her father-in-law and ensure her husband inherits the kingdom.
Maxim Fomin sees "intricate meanings" in the objects the frog wife produces at her husband's request, which Fomin associated with "regal semantics".
A totemic figure?
Analysing Armenian variants of the tale type where the frog appears as the bride, Armenian scholarship suggests that the frog bride is a totemic figure, and represents a magical disguise of mermaids and magical beings connected to rain and humidity.Likewise, Russian scholarship has argued for the totemic character of the frog princess. Propp, for instance, described her dance at the court as some sort of "ritual dance": she waves her arms and forests and lakes appear, and flocks of birds fly about. also associated these human-animal marriages to totem ancestry, and cited the Russian tale as one example of such.
In his work about animal symbolism in Slavic culture, Russian philologist stated that the frog and the toad are linked to female attributes, like magic and wisdom. In addition, according to ethnologist, the frog and the toad represent liminal creatures that live between land and water realms, and are considered to be imbued with magical properties in Slavic folklore. In some variants, the Frog Princess is the daughter of Koschei, the Deathless, and Baba Yaga - sorcerous characters with immense magical power who appear in Slavic folklore in adversarial position. This familial connection, then, seems to reinforce the magical, supernatural origin of the Frog Princess.
Other motifs
Georgios A. Megas noted two distinctive introductory episodes: the shooting of arrows appears in Greek, Slavic, Turkish, Finnish, Arabic and Indian variants, while following the feathers is a Western European occurrence. Likewise, Swedish scholar located the motif of the arrow shooting in Slavic and Oriental variants, while the feather as the method of choice appears in Western European. However, in Sweden, the hero follows a ball or a ball of yarn.Variants
included an Italian variant of the tale, titled The Frog in The Violet Fairy Book. Italo Calvino included another Italian variant from Piedmont, The Prince Who Married a Frog, in Italian Folktales, where he noted that the tale was common throughout Europe. Georgios A. Megas included a Greek variant, The Enchanted Lake, in Folktales of Greece.In a variant from northern Moldavia collected and published by Romanian author Elena Niculiță-Voronca, the bride selection contest replaces the feather and arrow with the shooting of bullets, and the frog bride commands the elements to fulfill the three bridal tasks.