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Author
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Comment
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andrael
Registered User
(1/9/06 11:01 am)
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Looking for a few good princes
Hello! I love this site; I've found it an invaluable resource for quite a while now. Anyway, to get to the point, I was hoping to ask for help looking for examples of fairy tales where a prince rescues a maiden -- most preferably a princess, but in a pinch any girl will do. :D The guy needs to be a prince though. For all that this is supposedly a fairy tale cliche, I'm kind of drawing a blank on any specific examples aside from the obvious Sleeping Beauty. Also fairy tales where a prince fights against some kind of monster or villain. I need as many as I can find. I'm mostly looking for European fairy tales, and preferably original ones rather than novel or movie adaptations; but anything you can suggest will be very much appreciated!
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princessterribel
Registered User
(1/9/06 1:10 pm)
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hmmm...you are right.
Now that I think about it I always assume that the majority of fairy tales are about a prince, rescuing a princess...but it has occured to me that this isn't the case...how about Thumbelina?
Snow Whites prince charming (barely does anything actually!)
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aka Greensleeves
Registered User
(1/9/06 1:29 pm)
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Re: hmmm...you are right.
I think you could argue fairly convincingly that Cinderella's prince rescues her from a life of servitude and poverty (and unloving family).
Who's the fellow in Rapunzel? I thought he was noble, too.
Edited by: aka Greensleeves at: 1/9/06 1:29 pm
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andrael
Registered User
(1/9/06 1:47 pm)
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Re: hmmm...you are right.
Oh yeah, Rapunzel's prince. Except it seemed like he didn't really rescue her so much as get her and himself in more trouble, but somehow it worked out for them in the end.
I suppose what I'm looking for is princes who have to take slightly more active roles. Something difficult or dangerous, like climbing a tower or getting past thorns. Well, going around making hundreds of women try on a glass shoe is a fairly difficult undertaking I guess, but it's somehow not the same. :)
Edited by: andrael at: 1/9/06 1:48 pm
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Erica Carlson
Registered User
(1/9/06 2:31 pm)
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Re: Looking for a few good princes
My favorite male protagonists tend to be “foolish” younger sons, woodcutters, or soldiers, but here are two princes that sprung to mind when I read your question.
There’s a variant of “The Goosegirl” with a male (he’s a prince and a knight) protagonist who wins the princess. No web version, but you can find it by looking for “Roswal and Lilian” in A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, edited by Katherine M. Briggs.
And check out The Annotated Firebird on this site.
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MMusicOfTheNight
Unregistered User
(1/9/06 4:33 pm)
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DonkeySkin
It's a bit of a stretch, but you could say that the prince in Donkeyskin saves Donkeyskin from both her servile lifestyle and the pursuit by her father
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princessterribel
Registered User
(1/9/06 5:13 pm)
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...
Well, I was going to mention rapunzel but then it struck me that he doesn't actually do anything...well, at least nothing that resembels rescue...if anything she rescues him from his blindness and loneliness.
Cinderella's prince is also rather inactive, he does not really partake in the action of the story and is not truely active in her rescue (from one domestic role into another). Also in many versions he either sends for the girls to come to him or sends someone else to track down his 'princess'.
Nope...I am at a loss.
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Random
Registered User
(1/10/06 5:45 pm)
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Good Princes
Well, there is the Six Swans or, I think, any other fairytale of this type (with avian brothers), in which the princes show up at the end to rescue their sister from execution, but it is only necessary for them to do this because she is rescuing them, and it may be that you were only looking for fairytales in which there is a romantic link between the prince and rescuee.
Mme. d'Aulnoy had a couple of fairly good princes, though they don't seem to have been generally successful in the rescuing department. However, in the White Cat the prince rescues the princess from her feline form (which was the result of enchantment), after she has rescued him a number of times. I believe that in the Green Serpent, the serpent (who, if I remember correctly, is a cursed prince) prevents the heroine from drowning and nurses her back to health.
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Random
Registered User
(1/10/06 7:50 pm)
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Good Princes
By the way, I hadn't noticed your name when I replied, but I'd like to take the opportunity to say that I love No Rest for the Wicked.
I've been thinking more about the heroic princes, and drawing a bit of a blank. Going through various Grimm's stories, I found some that almost fit the criteria, though, so I'll post them on the grounds that they're better than nothing.
Firstly, there's the White Bride and the Black Bride, in which it is a king, not a prince, who rescues a girl (not a princess) by cutting off her head (she was a duck at the time).
In Iron Hans, the prince distinguishes himself by his bravery in battle, though goodness knows how much of that was just help from his friend. However, he doesn't rescue anyone.
One that's almost ideal, in much the same vein as the Golden Bird, is the Elves. The only problem is that it's a huntsman, not a prince, who beats out his elder brothers in slaying a dragon and rescuing not just one, but three princesses.
Finally, here's one that seems to fit the bill bang on: the King's Son who Feared Nothing. In this one, a king's son goes forth and gets an apple from the tree of life, fights a giant (though to be fair, it's his lion companion who is responsible for our hero's survival at this point), recovers from having his eyes put out, and endures horrors to rescue a cursed princess.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(1/13/06 1:48 am)
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Russian tales etc
Russian tales have a lot of dragon slaying and princess rescuing; check other northern / Scandinavian sources.
I think it's mentioned in Propp's MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE. :-)
It is odd that we have the 'cliche' but the actual tales like that aren't much used here. I think the most well-known one is 'Dragonslayer.'
Hm, England had some dragon slaying, and a bit of maiden rescuing too iirc. Try Jacobs?
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princessterribel
Registered User
(1/13/06 10:13 am)
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good point
Thats a good point, perhaps it says something about our culture...the fact that we cannot think of any tales that include the masculine ideal of a prince. i.e. dragon slaying and maiden rescuing. Perhaps it is a western thing, or a feminism thing?
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(1/13/06 11:22 am)
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Re: good point
The Two Brothers (www.surlalunefairytales.c...hers.html)
has a dragon, but it's a peasant that slays it to rescue a princess.
The Hobbit made the whole dragon slaying thing popular.
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TeacherLibrarian
Registered User
(1/14/06 7:44 pm)
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Re: Looking for a few good princes
What about "Snow White and Rose Red"?
Besides the stories already mentioned (Cinderella & Rapunzel) I don't think the prince actually does any rescuing in:
"Frog Prince" - "Princess and the Pea" - "Six Swans" - "The Goose-Girl" - "Beauty and the Beast"
Maybe "Princess Furball" - but then again that prince doesn't do battle either; perhaps "East of the Sun, and West of the Moon"?
Given all the fairy tales out there it seems that there ought to
be a few 'good princes' floating about...
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andrael
Registered User
(1/18/06 10:45 am)
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Re: Looking for a few good princes
Thanks to everyone for their suggestions; quite a few interesting ones I hadn't managed to read before. As I suspected, the "action hero" type prince seems rather more elusive than one would think at first!
Quote:
By the way, I hadn't noticed your name when I replied, but I'd like to take the opportunity to say that I love No Rest for the Wicked.
Thank you very much! I'm happy to hear it.
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Raedyn L
Registered User
(1/22/06 5:03 pm)
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Re: Looking for a few good princes
For this I looked toward my good friend The Green Fairy Book. In the story "The Little Soldier," although he's really a soldier and not a prince, he rescues a beautiful lady from a curse that has turned her into a snake with a human head. She later betrays him about seventy bajillion times, and he uses his wits to try and win her back, then sees what a backstabber she is after being tricked about five times and humiliates her, then marries another girl.
...Hey, if he rescues a princess, gets married, and lives happily ever after, who cares which girl he marries? :D
And in the same collection, there is "Mannekin," in which a prince manages to rescue a bazillion people, then gets on the good side of a princess despite her lack of a heart, then rescues about a bazillion more people after he climbs a perilous mountain to get said princess' heart which is encapsulated in ice. All while being ridiculously short and raised by common folk.
Those are AWESOME stories. Don't you think? That's why I love the Green Fairy Book :D.
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(1/29/06 4:11 pm)
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Re: Looking for a few good princes
In the story of Melisande by Edith Nesbit, the princess is saved
by a clever prince. Amazon
link for Melisande Thanks to a misfortunate use of a fairy god-mother's
wish, Melisande's hair grows non-stop, at an ever-increasing rate.
At the suggestion of the fairy godmother, various princes attempt
to stop this wish-turned-curse but without any luck. She falls in
love with one of the princes who tells her to tie her hair to a
hook then jump out the window. As she painfully hangs by her hair,
he cuts her off and explains that the hair grew longer because it
was cut off from her every day. He, however, cut her off from the
hair. Unfortunately, this solution backfires and now she begins
to grow, at an ever-increasing rate. There are several adventures
with the princess as a giant before the prince finds a way to communicate
with her and has her cut her hair again. She shrinks back to normal
size, but with the hair-growing curse intact. The fairy godmother
suggests that they use scales, and the prince immediately finds
human sized scales and places the princess on one side. They cut
her hair, and as it grows at a furious pace, it's gathered on the
other side of the scale. When the scale reaches equipoise--she and
her hair exactly balance each other--the prince cuts the hair so
that neither her hair nor her body is sure which has been cut from
whom, thereby getting rid of the curse.
Best,
Alice
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kellykat79
Registered User
(1/29/06 4:34 pm)
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Re: Looking for a few good princes
In the 12 Dancing Princesses the hero does save the princesses from the curse they are under. Although this depends on which version of the story you have. In many the princesses try to stop the hero from saving them.
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Heidi Anne Heiner
ezOP
(1/30/06 1:39 am)
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Re: Looking for a few good princes
The text for Melisande is also available on SurLaLune.
Heidi
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