True love’s kiss has been a fairy tale trope longer than anyone can remember. But is it actually a common in fairy tales?
I think you’d be surprised how little people kiss in fairy tales. Disney and other largely popular media outlets would have you think that all curses are broken with a kiss. But I’m here to let you know that in some of the oldest and most enduring fairy tales, kisses just didn’t cut it. Or people just didn’t think to kiss before other strange alternatives.
The three most famous examples? The Frog Prince, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty.
The Frog King’s Lover Threw Him At a Wall
We all know the story where a prince is cursed into a frog and the princess takes pity on him and kisses him. Voila! He’s a handsome prince again!
Well…not always. The Brothers Grimm first wrote down the tale as “The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich,” in which a rather spoiled princess accepts a frog’s help in retrieving a golden ball she dropped in a well. In exchange for retrieving her ball, he asks for relatively little.
“…if you will love me and accept me as a companion and playmate, and let me sit next to you at your table and eat from your golden plate and drink from your cup and sleep in your bed, if you will promise this to me, then I’ll dive down and bring your golden ball back to you.”
That’s not so much to ask, right? The princess accepts this offer, thinking she can easily weasel her way out of the deal. As soon as she has her ball back, she runs home, abandoning the frog entirely. But he shows up at the door, reminding her of her promise.
The king of the castle admonishes his daughter that she must keep her promises, even promises made to frogs. He even reprimands her, saying, “You should not despise someone who has helped you in time of need.”
Points for good parenting? I think so. And that can be pretty rare sometimes.
The princess continues to whine about having to carry the frog around everywhere, letting him eat from her plate and everything. When it’s time for bed, she puts him in a corner and climbs into bed alone. So the frog hops over and reminds her of her promise.
With that she became bitterly angry and threw him against the wall with all her might. “Now you will have your peace, you disgusting frog!”
But when he fell down, he was not a frog, but a prince with beautiful friendly eyes.
That’s one way to lift a curse. And he didn’t even seem to mind. Friendly eyes? I think I’d be kinda mad that I got thrown at a wall.
Still, if it works…
Snow White Was Beaten Awake
Snow White is another story the Brothers Grimm gave us in its most original form, but did you know that even the Brothers Grimm revised it several times? There are some stark differences between the tale they wrote down and published in 1812, and the tale as it was transformed in 1857.
For one, it’s not Snow White’s stepmother who wants to kill her out of jealousy for her beauty, but her own mother. Yeah, the woman who wished for a child white as snow, black as ebony, and red as blood after seeing her own blood in the snow on an ebony windowsill.
Well…when you put it like that maybe it’s not so surprising. But honestly, if you’re going to wish for a child like that, you should be prepared to have a beautiful (or frightening) child. Even more beautiful than you.
Either way, it takes three tries for the queen in both versions to finally kill Snow White. First it was laces to lace up her bodice or corset. Then it was a poisoned comb. Then came the poisoned apple. Snow White, the sweet, darling, naive child she is, can’t seem to learn the lesson not to talk to strangers and keeps accepting these cursed gifts.
It’s the apple that kills her. Without an obvious cursed object on her person, the dwarves who have been saving her don’t know what to do. So Snow White stays dead. Eventually they decide her life-like beauty is too precious to hide away, so they place her in a glass casket and keep it in their home.
Until a visiting prince sees it, falls in love with the dead girl, and begs the dwarves for the casket. You know. Like one does.
Oh, and it gets worse. He doesn’t just take it with him to set somewhere else, in a place of honor or a mausoleum or something.
The prince had it carried to his castle, and had it placed in a room where he sat by it the whole day, never taking his eyes from it. Whenever he had to go out and was unable to see Snow-White, he became sad. And he could not eat a bite, unless the coffin was standing next to him.
Yeah, he had it carried around for him. Everywhere he went, he had his servants bring it to him. Obviously this would get kind of tiresome, right? The servants certainly thought so.
Now the servants who always had to carry the coffin to and fro became angry about this. One time one of them opened the coffin, lifted Snow-White upright, and said, “We are plagued the whole day long, just because of such a dead girl,” and he hit her in the back with his hand. Then the terrible piece of apple that she had bitten off came out of her throat, and Snow-White came back to life.
Bet they weren’t expecting that. Can you imagine? One minute you think you’re just casually disrespecting a pretty dead body and the next the dead body isn’t dead.
That oughta teach him, right? I guess we can at least commend the man on excellent life-saving techniques. How To Stop Choking 101.
Or not. Don’t actually try that at home. Leave all Heimlich maneuvers and CPR to the certified.
For the curious, in the 1857 version, Snow White is awakened when one of the servants carrying the casket stumbles, and the jostling dislodges the apple. Much kinder to the poor girl than one of them dragging her out and smacking her.
Sleeping Beauty’s Awakening Was Much More Violent
Before there was “Sleeping Beauty” by the Brothers Grimm (which does involve a kiss of awakening), there was Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia.” Be warned, this can get a little graphic.
In this fairy tale, wise men present at Talia’s birth predicted she would be in danger if she ever touched flax, though they never say what that danger is. When she does come across flax, she falls into a death-like state. Her father sets her up in a country mansion, sitting upon a throne, and leaves. Soon, much sooner than one hundred years, a young king happens by and investigates the mansion. Where, of course, he finds Talia. One translation puts it like this.
Crying aloud, he beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins. He lifted her in his arms, and carried her to a bed, where he gathered the first fruits of love. Leaving her on the bed, he returned to his own kingdom, where, in the pressing business of his realm, he for a time thought no more about this incident.
So much for true love’s kiss. Don’t let the flowery language fool you. This king is one of the worst you’ll find in fairy tales.
And not only does he just randomly rape unconscious women lying in abandoned mansions, it doesn’t even wake her. The only thing that wakes her is when, nine months later, she gives birth to twins, a boy and girl she calls Sun and Moon. These babes were understandably hungry, but found her finger before her breast, and sucked the flax from her finger.
And somehow didn’t die from ingesting cursed flax at the age of hours old?
Sometime after their birth, the Rapist King remembers Talia and decides to pay another visit. For what I don’t dare to imagine. But he’s more than surprised to find Talia awake, and also with two lovely babies.
He was overjoyed, and he told Talia who he was, and how he had seen her, and what had taken place. When she heard this, their friendship was knitted with tighter bonds
It really blows my mind. He just tells her he raped her in her sleep and they become friends? This is one of those stories I desperately wish would be retold. Better than the original.
There’s more to the story after that. Mostly just the king’s current wife (yeah he was married when he was doing all this) finding out about Talia and her babies and trying to get rid of them. Until the king gets rid of her.
It’s hard to tell whether she deserved it. I mean, she ordered Sun and Moon to be killed and fed to her husband, so yeah, kinda, but…let’s just say there are a lot of mixed messages on what the moral of that story ought to be.
On a lighter note, however, Charles Perrault’s version is much kinder to the sleeping beauty. She gets the usual one hundred years’ curse, and by the end of it an adventurous prince braves the thorns to her castle. When he finds her, Sleeping Beauty is awoken as his knees hit the floor in wonder. Probably with a very loud thud.
I mean…wouldn’t you wake up too?
Honorable Mention: Beauty Gives Beast a Cold Water Bath
So in most Beauty and the Beast stories, and even retellings, true love’s kiss isn’t really the curse breaker, it’s usually a confession of love. But even that doesn’t pop up in the originals. Or at least the Beaumont original.
Originally Beauty has to douse the Beast in cold water to wake him from his hunger coma. Because he decided to starve himself when he thought Beauty wasn’t coming home. That doesn’t break his curse, either, though. It’s not until Beauty agrees to marry him, rather than saying the infamous “I love you” line, that the curse breaks.
Kind of anti-climatic, isn’t it?
Tell me what you think! Are there any other curse-breaking stories you love? Do they involve curse-breaking kisses?
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