Ivan is again upset because he will have to appear with a frog while his brothers have beautiful wives, but when he tells the frog she must make an appearance, she again tells him not to worry. After this, the king commands the wives be presented to him the next day so he can thank them in person for their work. The king then asks them to make him a carpet woven of gold and silver, and again, Ivan’s wife creates the best while the other two are insulted for their efforts. The two other women spy on the frog to see how she is creating such magnificent things, but they cannot replicate them. The story follows the paradigm of most folktales by inverting traditional customs & rites while delivering an important cultural message.Īfter the shirt, the king demands the wives bake him a loaf of bread, and the same thing happens, with Ivan’s wife’s bread declared the best. He is astounded by Ivan’s shirt, however, and commends Ivan’s wife for having made a garment so beautiful it will be worn only on special occasions. He looks over the second brother’s shirt and dismisses it as only good enough to wear to the bath. His father examines the eldest brother’s shirt and declares it fit only for a peasant. The next morning, Ivan brings the shirt to his father along with his brothers. The frog tells him not to worry, and after he has gone to bed, she performs a magic spell, and the shirt is created. Ivan returns home with his linen despondent and tells the frog she is expected to make his father a fine shirt by morning, which, he says, is impossible and they will be shamed. He tells each to take a piece of linen from his storehouse and have their wives make him a shirt by the next morning. In time, the king summons his sons and tells them he wants to see how their wives perform household tasks. Ivan is hardly pleased with this outcome but treats the frog kindly, marries her, and brings her back to their new home where they live together happily. ![]() The king reminds him that his word is law and decrees that he must marry the frog. He tells them the story but refuses to marry the frog who is obviously beneath his status as a prince. Ivan returns to the castle with the frog only to be mocked by his older brothers and their beautiful fiancés. In this same way, The Frog Princess relies on the suspension of disbelief at a talking frog who is able to perform transformational magic. For the tale to be effective, an audience must accept the world of the tale in which foxes can speak, reason, and rationalize. In the tale of The Fox and the Grapes, for example, the fox behaves like a petulant child when he cannot reach the overhanging grapes and finally walks away saying they were probably sour anyway (inspiring the phrase "sour grapes" referring to someone who rationalizes a failure to get what they want). The hearer is required to suspend belief and see the animal speaking, thinking, and acting like a human being. However, the area of contact between the didactic, moralizing fable and folklore is slight, for the animal tale proper is meant essentially to entertain. The line between the literary and folk fable is not easy to determine, since tales from collections like that attributed to Aesop have had wide popular circulation and have been taken from and gone back into oral traditions of large groups of people. ![]() Scholars Maria Leach and Jerome Fried comment: ![]() how the dog got its tail) or to impress some moral on an audience (as in the well-known Aesop tale, The Fox and the Grapes). An animal tale uses animals as characters either to explain something (e.g. The form of the story derives from one of the most ancient, the animal tale, made famous through Aesop’s Fables but first appearing in Mesopotamia. Baker which formed the basis for the 2009 Disney animated film of the same name. The Slavic tale has nothing to do with the modern-day novel The Frog Princess by E. The tale is representative of the animal bride and offended supernatural wife motif, which appears in several legends from different cultures. The Russian version is well-known for the dramatic twist it puts on the character of Baba Yaga who is seen here as a helpful entity, rather than as an evil, child-devouring hag, whose mystical powers are symbolized by the number three as there are three baba yagas, each of whom progress the plot.
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