King Grisly-Beard

"King Grisly-Bear"
Maria McMahon

The Tale:

"King Grisly-Bear"
Murice Sendak

We start with a princess; beautiful, but haughty and conceited. She found a fault in each prince that came to ask for her hand in marriage and made sure to mention the fault, spitefully and rudely. She laughed most at a king with a beard like a mop, and called him “Grisly-Beard”.

Her father was very angry with the way his daughter behaved, and so he vowed that he would marry her off to the first beggar that came to the door.

Two days later the beggar arrived in form of a traveling musician, and the king immediately married his daughter to him, ignoring her tears and pleas. He then told his daughter that she will be leaving at once, to go with her new husband to her new home. As the new couple traveled, they passed a grand forest, beautiful meadows and a great city. At each, the princess asked who they belonged to, and the musician told her they were King Grisly-Beard's, and that if she had married him, they would have all been hers. Each time the princess laments her stupid decision, and wishes she had married the king instead of mocking him.

When they reach the musician's home, nothing more than a little dirty hole, he expects her to do the

"King Thrushbeard"
Walter Crane

housework. Since she doesn't know anything about cooking, cleaning, fire-making etc., the beggar had to help her. For two days he wakes her up early to do house chores, and then he tells her she must find work so that they may have a source of income. She tries and fails to weave baskets and spin threads, so the beggar decides that she will sell pots and pans at the market. He sets her up a stool, and she is an instant success, not because of her merchandising skills but because of her beauty. One day a drunken solider riders by and crashes into the stool, breaking all the pots and pans. The girl returns to the beggar in tears. The beggar tells her he got her a job as a castle maid and she begins her work there, taking scraps of meat back to feed her husband and herself; “Thus the princess became a kitchen-maid”.

While looking at the splendor in the palace preceding the prince's marriage, the girl “bitterly grieved for the pride and folly that brought her so low”. As she left to go home, the kings son dressed in golden clothes sees her beauty, takes her by the hand, and brings her into the ballroom to dance with her. The princess trembles in fear when she realizes it is King Grisly-Beard himself and realizes he is making fun of her. He brings her in and the basket of meat she was holding falls to the floor. All the nobles laugh at her and she is deeply embarrassed. She turns to run but King Grisly-Beard catches her and tells her the truth: he was the beggar and the solider that knocked over her wares and he loves her. All that happened to her he planned in order to rid her of her pride and to punish her for the way she mocked him. Now that her faults are gone, he will marry her. There is another marriage feast which was grand and merry, and the narrator wishes you and I had been there too ;)

Discussion Points:

I must admit I find it hard to see clues in fairy tales, because more often than not, they have nothing to do with what you think they will. But here the clues are laid out so perfectly, I feel like I got much more out of the second time I read the tale than the first. The path that King Grisly-Beard lays out for the princess is perfect.

"King Hawksbeak"
Margaret Evans Price

The first stage is remorse (while the prior stage is marrying the beggar, who is far beneath her class). The princess feels quite stupid for not marrying King Grisly-Beard when she sees the many lands in his estate, and even more so when she sees the poor little hovel she must now live in.

Next come the stages in which her pride is slowly destroyed. First she must give up her pride in the privacy of her home by doing household chores. Then she must give up her pride on a public scale-in the market place, any one from her father's court could pass any moment and mock her (a fact she points out to the beggar). Then she must return to surroundings similar to her former life (a castle), but now she is the lowliest of servants instead of the highest of nobles. It is at this moment when she admits her fault, realizes for what it is, and thus truly gets rid of it. Now all that remains is an 'eye for an eye'. King Grisly-Beard mocks her in front of the whole court, as she once did to him. Now that she has totally been abolished of her former faults, and her pride and haughtiness are gone, she has learned her lesson and she can return to her former status, as princess and wife of a king.

I’m not quite sure what I feel about King Grisly-Beard's lesson. He claims he loved her, but what did he know of her other than her pride and her beauty? He decides to get rid of the only personality the princess shows before. So what exactly did he love- her beauty? I would like to think that perhaps he saw the person she could turn out to be once she was humbled. Or perhaps he started off in order to teach her a lesson in retribution, and but slowly learned to love her once he got to know her better when she was his wife (and he was the beggar).

So, do you think the princess got what she deserved, or was King Grisly-Beard's ploy overkill? Which

"King Thrushbeard"
Arthur Rackham

of the couple do you like more? Both have quite a lot of personality, which is sometimes missing in fairy tales, and I feel like both could easily be characters from a novel without too much tweaking.

*Heidi at “Surlalune Fairy Tales” has annotated “King Grisly-Beard” under a slightly different name “King Thrushbeard”. I did not read what she had to say before writing this, but I love her site in general, and I'm sure she has a lot of interesting information to add :)