The Frog King
Told by The Brothers GrimmGermanyTale type ATU 440
- Age
- 4 to 9
- Reading time
- 9 minutes
- Scariness
- 2 of 5A villain, never frightening on the page
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The story
In the old days, when wishing still worked, there was a king whose youngest daughter was so beautiful that the sun, which has looked at everything, was surprised every time it looked at her.
Near the castle there was a dark forest, and in the forest, under an old lime tree, there was a well. On hot afternoons the princess went out and sat beside it and played with a golden ball. She threw it up and caught it. That was the whole of the game. She had played it a thousand times and had never once dropped it.
One afternoon she dropped it.
The ball went past her hands, struck the rim of the well and went in. She leaned over and looked down. The well was deep. She could not see the bottom, only her own face a long way off, looking back up at her, and she began to cry.
"What is the matter?"
She looked round. There was a frog on the wet stones with his head out of the water.
She told him. She said she would give anything to have it back. Her dresses. Her pearls. The golden crown off her own head.
The frog said he did not want any of those. He said he wanted to be her companion. He wanted to sit at her table, eat from her little golden plate, drink from her little golden cup, and sleep in her bed.
She said yes at once.
She said yes because she was looking at a frog. He sat in the water with his own kind and croaked. He could not climb stairs. He could not open doors. She thought the entire arrangement was nonsense, and she agreed to every single word of it.
He went down. He came up with the ball in his mouth and put it on the grass. She snatched it and ran. He called after her to wait. She was already through the trees, and she did not turn round.
The next evening she was at supper with her father when something came up the marble stair. It came slowly. It stopped outside the door. It knocked.
"Youngest daughter of the king, open to me."
She opened the door. She saw what was sitting on the step. She shut the door, walked back to the table, sat down, and her father looked at her face.
He asked her what was outside. She had to tell him. She told him all of it, the ball and the well and the promise, and while she was speaking the knocking started again.
Her father put down his knife.
"What you have promised, you must keep," he said. "Go and let him in."
He was not angry. That was the worst of it. He said it the way he would have said that the fire needed another log.
So the frog came in, and crossed the floor, and asked to be lifted onto the table, and she lifted him onto the table. He asked for her plate to be pushed closer, and she pushed it closer. He ate. He was in no hurry about it. She sat beside him with her hands in her lap and did not eat anything at all, and her father went on with his supper and said nothing further, because he had already said it once.
When the frog had finished he said that he was tired and would like to be carried up to her room.
She cried then.
"He helped you when you needed helping," her father said. "You will not look down on him now."
She picked the frog up with two fingers, carried him upstairs, put him in the far corner of the room and got into bed.
He crossed the floor towards her. It took him some time.
"I am tired too," he said. "Lift me up, or I shall tell your father."
And that was the thing that finished it.
She had promised what she did not mean, and had been made to keep every word of it, and had swallowed the whole of it in front of her father for an entire evening without once being allowed to say what she thought. She had done everything she said she would do. Now she was being reminded of it in her own room, in the dark, by a frog.
She got up. She took him off the floor. She told him, in a voice she had not used at all that evening, that he could sleep somewhere else.
Then she threw him at the wall.
What came away from the wall was not a frog.
He was a young man with the kindest eyes she had ever seen, and he was looking at her as though she had just done him an enormous favour, which she had. A witch had put him down that well. Only she could have got him out of it. He had been waiting a very long time and he had gone about it extremely badly, and he said so.
They were married. Her father, who had spent the entire evening on the frog's side, was pleased.
In the morning a carriage came for them, with gold on the doors and eight white horses in front of it, and standing at the back of it was a servant nobody had introduced.
His name was Heinrich.
When his master had been turned into a frog, Heinrich had gone to a smith and had three iron bands put round his heart, so that it would not break from grief. Nobody had asked him to do it. Nobody had thanked him for it. He had worn them under his coat every day since, and he had never once mentioned them.
The carriage started. It had not gone far along the forest road when there was a loud crack behind it.
"Heinrich," said the prince, "the carriage is breaking."
"No, my lord," said Heinrich. "It is a band from my heart."
It happened three times before they were clear of the trees. Three cracks, three answers, and each time Heinrich said it in exactly the same voice, as though he were reporting the weather.
The princess had promised something she did not mean and had been made to keep it.
The man standing behind her had promised nothing at all, and had kept it for years.
What is the moral of The Frog King?
A promise you did not mean is still a promise, and somebody is always keeping count.
Most retellings turn this into a story about looking past appearances, which requires a kiss and a princess who is sweet. The Grimm version is sharper. She is not sweet. She lies to get what she wants, and the only reason she keeps her word is that her father will not let her out of it. The spell breaks when she stops being polite. Kindness is not what saves the prince here. Someone simply making her finish what she started is what saves him.
Talk about it
- The princess promised something she did not mean. Is that the same as telling a lie?
- Her father never shouts at her once. Do you think that made it easier or harder for her?
- The frog keeps asking for more and more. At what point would you have said no?
- Heinrich never tells anyone about the bands round his heart. Why do you think he kept it to himself?
- The frog turns back into a prince when the princess loses her temper, not when she is kind to him. Does that seem fair to you?
Who is in the story
The Princess
protagonist · human
The king's youngest daughter, who makes a promise she has no intention of keeping and then spends an entire evening being made to keep it.
- Kind
- 4 out of 10
- Brave
- 6 out of 10
- Clever
- 8 out of 10
- Honest
- 3 out of 10
- Curious
- 7 out of 10
- Patient
- 2 out of 10
The Witch
antagonist · human
The person who put a prince at the bottom of a well and then leaves the story entirely. She gets one sentence, offstage, after the fact.
- Kind
- 1 out of 10
- Brave
- 5 out of 10
- Clever
- 9 out of 10
- Honest
- 2 out of 10
- Curious
- 4 out of 10
- Patient
- 8 out of 10
Iron Heinrich
helper · human
The prince's servant, who had three iron bands put round his heart when his master was cursed so that it would not break from grief, and then said nothing about it for years.
- Kind
- 9 out of 10
- Brave
- 7 out of 10
- Clever
- 5 out of 10
- Honest
- 10 out of 10
- Curious
- 2 out of 10
- Patient
- 10 out of 10
The Frog
deuteragonist · frog
A cursed prince living at the bottom of a well, who negotiates his own rescue in one conversation and then executes the contract line by line.
- Kind
- 5 out of 10
- Brave
- 8 out of 10
- Clever
- 9 out of 10
- Honest
- 9 out of 10
- Curious
- 6 out of 10
- Patient
- 10 out of 10
The King
mentor · human
Her father, who hears the entire story, puts down his knife, and rules against his own daughter twice in one evening without raising his voice.
- Kind
- 5 out of 10
- Brave
- 6 out of 10
- Clever
- 7 out of 10
- Honest
- 10 out of 10
- Curious
- 3 out of 10
- Patient
- 9 out of 10
In a nutshell
A princess drops her golden ball into a well and promises a frog anything to get it back. She does not mean a word of it. Her father makes her keep every word of it, and the frog is turned back into a prince not by a kiss but by the moment she finally loses her temper.
Scene by scene
18 moments from the tale.
- Scene 1The Well in the Foreststill, gold, faintly bored
The Sun Was Surprised
An old lime tree over a deep well. The princess alone with a golden ball. Nothing has gone wrong yet, and she has no reason to think anything will.
She had never once dropped it. Hold on to that.
- Scene 2The Well in the Forestsudden, cold, small
One Afternoon She Dropped It
The ball passes her hands, clips the rim and is gone. She leans over the edge and finds the water too far down to see, and her own face waiting on it.
A thousand catches. Then one that was not.
- Scene 3The Well in the Forestwet, quiet, interrupted
What Is The Matter
She is crying when the question arrives, and it arrives from below. There is a frog on the wet stones with his head out of the water, and he waits for an answer.
Somebody had been listening from the water.
- Scene 4The Well in the Forestbrisk, transactional, false
Every Single Word Of It
He does not want her pearls or her crown. He wants her table, her plate, her cup and her bed. She looks at a frog in a well and says yes to every clause of it.
She agreed to all of it, because she had decided it could not happen.
- Scene 5The Well in the Forestabrupt, cool, receding
She Did Not Turn Round
He goes down and comes up with the ball in his mouth and puts it on the grass. She takes it and runs, and he calls after her, and she is through the trees before he finishes.
He surfaced with the ball. She was already gone.
- Scene 6The Great Hallinterrupted, formal, cold
Something On The Marble Stair
The next evening she is at supper with her father when something comes up the marble stair. It takes its time. It stops outside the door and it knocks and it uses her title.
It came up slowly. Then it knocked.
- Scene 7The Great Hallclipped, guilty, watched
She Shut The Door
She opens the door and sees what is on the step. She shuts it, walks back to the table and sits down, and her father reads the whole matter off her face before she says a word.
She looked, she closed it, she sat down. Her father looked at her face.
- Scene 8The Great Halllevel, immovable, domestic
What You Have Promised
She tells him all of it, the ball and the well and the promise, while the knocking starts again. Her father puts down his knife and tells her to go and let him in, in the voice he would use about a fire needing another log.
He was not angry. That was the worst of it.
- Scene 9The Great Hallslow, awful, polite
He Was In No Hurry
He is lifted onto the table and asks for the plate to be pushed closer, and it is pushed closer. He eats. She eats nothing, and her father goes on with his supper and says nothing further, having already said it once.
He ate. She sat beside him with her hands in her lap.
- Scene 10The Great Hallraw, refused, quiet
She Cried Then
The frog announces he is tired and would like to be taken upstairs. She cries. Her father says the one thing she cannot answer, which is that the frog helped her when she needed helping.
He asked to be carried up. That was when she cried.
- Scene 11The Princess's Chambercold, exact, sleepless
Two Fingers
She picks him up with two fingers, carries him up the stairs, puts him down in the far corner of the room and gets into bed. Every clause has been honoured and nothing has been given.
She kept her word to the letter and not one inch further.
- Scene 12The Princess's Chambertight, final, airless
Or I Shall Tell Your Father
He comes across the boards towards the bed. It takes him some time. When he arrives he asks to be lifted up, and adds what will happen if he is not.
That was the thing that finished it.
- Scene 13The Princess's Chamberfurious, sudden, released
Then She Threw Him At The Wall
She gets up, takes him off the floor and tells him, in a voice she has not used all evening, that he can sleep somewhere else. The camera stays on her. Her arm reaches the top of its movement and her hand is empty.
She had done everything she said she would do. This was the first thing she chose.
- Scene 14The Princess's Chambergold, astonished, quiet
What Came Away From The Wall
A young man is standing in her bedroom with the kindest eyes she has ever seen, looking at her as though she has just done him an enormous favour. She has. He has been waiting a very long time and has gone about it extremely badly, and he says so.
What came away from the wall was not a frog.
- Scene 15The Well in the Forestold, violet, patient
Only She Could Have Got Him Out
The thing that was done to him at the well, years before, and the single condition that would undo it. He had waited a very long time in cold water for one particular person to lose her temper.
A witch had put him down that well. There was exactly one way back up.
- Scene 16The Forest Roadbright, ceremonial, overlooked
A Servant Nobody Had Introduced
They were married, and her father, who had spent the entire evening on the frog's side, was pleased. In the morning a carriage came with gold on the doors and eight white horses in front of it, and a servant standing at the back of it that nobody had introduced.
Eight white horses at the front. One man at the back.
- Scene 17The Well in the Forestdark, deliberate, unspoken
Three Iron Bands
When his master was turned into a frog, Heinrich went to a smith and had three iron bands put round his heart so that it would not break from grief. Nobody asked him to do it and nobody thanked him for it, and he wore them under his coat every day since.
He had them made. He never mentioned it.
- Scene 18The Forest Roaddry, breaking, understated
It Is A Band From My Heart
The carriage has not gone far when there is a loud crack behind it. The prince says the carriage is breaking. It is not the carriage. It happens three times before they are clear of the trees, and each time Heinrich reports it as though he were reporting the weather.
Three cracks on the forest road. Three answers in exactly the same voice.
Where it happens
The Forest Road
road
The road out of the kingdom on the morning after, where the carriage goes and where three iron bands come off a servant's heart, one at a time.
The Great Hall
castle
The hall where the king and his daughter eat, with a marble stair outside the door and a table long enough that two people at one end look extremely alone.
The Princess's Chamber
room
Her own room, upstairs, at the end of the worst evening of her life, with a frog in the far corner and a long piece of floor between them.
The Well in the Forest
forest
An old stone well under a lime tree, deep enough that you cannot see the bottom of it, in the dark wood beyond the castle.
How they are connected
The PrincessThe Frogrescuer
A contract, agreed in about eight seconds by someone who did not believe it counted, and then enforced clause by clause by someone who did.
The PrincessThe Kingparent
A daughter who assumed her father would take her side, and a father who spends the entire evening not taking it.
The FrogIron Heinrichservant
A man who was turned into a frog, and the servant who had his own heart bound in iron so it would hold until the man came back.
A king who takes the side of a frog he met four minutes ago, against his own daughter, twice.
Things you might not know
There is no kiss. In the Brothers Grimm text the princess loses her temper and throws the frog against the wall, and he turns back into a prince at that exact instant. English Wikipedia says the kissing version apparently first appeared in English translations; German Wikipedia dates a kiss to variants from the end of the nineteenth century. Either way, it is a later softening.
The Frog King is KHM 1, the very first tale in the Brothers Grimm's Children's and Household Tales of 1812. Of all the stories they collected, this is the one they put at the front.
The full German title is Der Froschkoenig oder der eiserne Heinrich, The Frog King or the Iron Heinrich. Heinrich is the servant who had three iron bands put round his heart so it would not break while his master was cursed. Almost every retelling cuts him, and German Wikipedia records that some nineteenth century editors found him so unnecessary that they simply left him out.
The famous opening, In the old days, when wishing still worked, was not there at the start. It was only attached to the first tale from the third edition onward, and the Grimms borrowed it from a completely different story, KHM 127, The Iron Stove.
In some other early versions the frog does not get thrown at all. Stith Thompson records that it was enough for him to sleep three nights on the princess's pillow, and then he changed back on his own.
The oldest known trace of the tale is Scottish, not German. The Grimms themselves quoted a sixteenth century reference from the Complaynt of Scotland, which German Wikipedia still calls the earliest evidence of the story anywhere. It carries the line: open the door, my hinny, my hart, open the door, mine ain wee thing.
The folklorist Lutz Roehrich pointed out that unlike other animal bridegroom tales, this one is not broken by love or by self-conquest. The release happens against the heroine's intention. She is not rewarded for being good to him. She is rewarded for finally saying what she thinks.
The Grimms printed a second, different frog story called Der Froschprinz as tale number thirteen in volume two of the first edition in 1815, and then cut it. Because it never appeared again, almost nobody has read it.
What things stand for
- The golden ball
- The only thing she wants, and the only thing she is willing to trade for. She gets it back in the first five minutes, and it is never mentioned again.
- The well
- Deep enough that she cannot see the bottom, only her own face a long way down. Everything she agrees to, she agrees to while looking at herself.
- The little golden plate
- Sharing a plate is the smallest possible favour and she cannot do it. The frog does not ask for gold, a crown or a kingdom. He asks to be treated as company.
- The wall
- The one moment in the tale where she does exactly what she wants instead of what she is told, and it is the moment that breaks the spell. Not a kiss. A lost temper.
- The three iron bands
- Heinrich had them put on so his heart would not break while his master was gone. He never mentioned them to anyone. You only find out they were there when they come off.
The same story elsewhere
Folk tales are not owned by whoever wrote them down first.
Der Froschprinz
Germany, 1815
The Grimms' own second frog tale, printed as number thirteen in volume two of the first edition and then dropped from every edition afterwards. Because it never reappeared it has stayed almost unknown.
Oda und die Schlange
Germany, 19th century
Collected by Ludwig Bechstein. The same tale with a serpent in place of the frog, which removes the comedy and leaves only the bargain.
Little White Dog
Latvia, recorded 1928
A girl is set the impossible task of drawing water from a well without wetting the bucket. A little white dog offers to help if she will accept him as her bridegroom.
The Toad Bridegroom
Korea, 20th century
Recorded by Zong In-Sob. One of the rare tellings of this type collected well outside Europe, with a toad rather than a frog.
Where you might already know it from
Most children meet a screen version first. Here is what those changed.
The Frog Prince
animation, Lotte Reiniger, 1954
A ten-minute film made entirely of black paper silhouettes cut out by hand. The frog wears a tiny crown so you always know who he is, and he dances on the dinner table. The story of who cursed him is left out.
The Frog Prince
book, Walter Crane, 1874
A brightly coloured picture book in Routledge's shilling toy book series, engraved and printed by Edmund Evans, with the Grimm tale told in English beside Crane's large pictures.
The Frog
film, Segundo de Chomon, 1908
A very short silent film, and the first time the tale was ever put on screen.
Questions parents ask
- What is the moral of The Frog King?
- A promise you did not mean is still a promise, and somebody is always keeping count.
- What is The Frog King about?
- A princess drops her golden ball into a well and promises a frog anything to get it back. She does not mean a word of it. Her father makes her keep every word of it, and the frog is turned back into a prince not by a kiss but by the moment she finally loses her temper.
- What age is The Frog King for?
- The Frog King suits ages 4-9.
- How long does The Frog King take to read?
- About 9 minutes read aloud.
- Where does The Frog King come from?
- The Frog King is a traditional tale from Germany.
Sing it
Every story here has its own song. This one is hushed, patient, quietly enormous at the end, about 84 beats a minute.
A Band From My Heart
dark chamber folk waltz
There is no recording yet. The words are here so you can sing it yourself.
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