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.
What they are like
- Kind
- 4/10
- Brave
- 6/10
- Clever
- 8/10
- Honest
- 3/10
- Curious
- 7/10
- Patient
- 2/10
How we meet them
Alone at a well, playing a game she has never lost at, on the one afternoon she loses at it. The story introduces her by taking something away, which is the only way anybody in this tale gets introduced.
Personality
Quick, proud and used to being agreed with. She is not cruel, she is careless, which in this story turns out to cost about the same. The one honest thing she does all evening is lose her temper.
What they want
To get her ball back, and then to be left alone about it.
How they change
Goes from someone who says whatever gets her what she wants to someone who finally says what she actually means, and discovers that saying it is what changes everything.
How they speak
Whatever will end the conversation. She promises dresses, pearls and her own crown inside one breath, and means none of it. Her two truthful sentences arrive at the very end and are both short.
How the story treats them
Her father treats her as someone who has to be finished teaching. The frog treats her as a contract. The tale itself is unusually hard on her, and several scholars read it as the humiliation of a proud princess.
One surprising thing
She has no name. Grimm never gives her one, and every name you may have heard for her was invented by much later retellings.
If they were real today
She would be the one who agrees to help you move house and is astonished when you turn up with a van.
Things they say
- “Anything. My dresses, my pearls, the crown off my own head.”
- “You can sleep somewhere else.”
Key moments
She said yes at once
She agrees to every condition the frog names, in full, without hesitating, because she is looking at a frog and cannot imagine any of it happening.
“Anything. My dresses, my pearls, the crown off my own head.”
Supper with her hands in her lap
The frog eats off her plate while she sits beside him and does not touch anything, and her father says nothing further because he has already said it once.
The wall
Told in her own room, in the dark, to do one more thing, she stops being polite for the first time in the story. It is the moment the spell breaks.
“You can sleep somewhere else.”
Who they know
Characters like The Princess
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