This is the last time I read a “King Thrushbeard” retelling.

The folktale as the Brothers Grimm rendered it is very disagreeable regardless of whether you look at it literally­—as most people will—or metaphorically, as scholars and folklorists do. The reason is that everyone in the tale is obnoxious in some way: the king, the princess, the courtiers, and Thrushbeard. But despite everyone being pricks, only the princess both draws the short stick and gets a redemption. She’s proud, haughty, tactless, superficial, has no value by herself other than as “the king’s daughter,” and humiliates and is verbally abusive to others.

Unlikable person, this princess. It’s left to the men to teach her a lesson in humility through complete humiliation because she does nothing to better herself, which is the part no one likes. The Grimms passed on the version of the folktale in which she’s married off to a beggar against her will as punishment (there were other versions, including one in which she was responsible for this marriage, not her father, and the groom wasn’t a beggar), and their version’s ending puts her father and her beggar-king husband in a bad light as it’s implied they might have schemed together to teach her a lesson, which she does learn.

It’s not a folktale anyone can like, it’s one of two B&B-type folktales that I don’t care for. Not so much for the misogyny of her humiliation ritual as the fact that the princess isn’t innocent and her character did ask for comeuppance but got it from bigger bullies. It’s like a bully getting punished by bullies.

I’d have preferred the Grimms included in their collection the version in which the king doesn’t parade her to all and sundry and the princess alone is responsible for being married beneath her station (to a minstrel) because she attempts to be disloyal and break trust and her word out of petty pride. In that context, it makes sense that she needed to learn to tame her pride and haughtiness. But the Grimms chose what they choose, and we inherited a tale in which everyone sucks.

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