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The Princess Who Never Smiled

There was once a princess who never smiled or laughed. Her father promised that whoever made her smile could marry her, and many tried, but none succeeded.

Across the town, an honest worker worked hard for his master. At the end of the year, the master put a sack of money before him and told him to take as much as he wanted. To avoid sinning by taking too much, he took only one coin, and when he went to drink from a well, he dropped the coin and lost it. The next year, the same thing happened to him. The third year, the worker took the same amount of coin as before, but when he drank from the well, he did not lose his coin, and the other two coins floated up to him. He decided to see the world. A mouse asked him for alms; he gave him a coin. Then he did the same for a beetle and a catfish.

He came to the castle and saw the princess looking at him. This astounded him, and he fell in the mud. The mouse, the beetle, and the catfish came to his aid, and at their antics, the princess laughed. She pointed him out as the man, and when he was brought into the castle, he had been turned into a handsome man. The honest worker, now a handsome man, married the princess.

The Princess Who Was Hidden Underground

A king had three sons and divided his property. The older two squandered theirs, but the youngest son was prudent, and became rich. He had an underground castle built, killed the architect, imprisoned his daughter there, and decreed that whoever could find her would marry her, but whoever tried and failed would die. Many did die.

A clever and handsome young man had a shepherd sew him into a golden sheep fleece and then bring him to the king. When the king wanted to buy the sheep, the shepherd said he could only lend it for three days. The king took the sheep to the daughter, using a magical charm to open her castle. In the night, the man threw off the sheepskin, and the princess fell in love with him. She told him that the king would insist on his finding her among her maids, after he had turned them into ducks. She would preen, and so he could identify her.

When the three days were up, the shepherd came for his sheep, and the king returned him, back in his sheephide. The young man found the princess by the same way as the king had gone, and the king demanded he identify her when he had turned her and all her maids to ducks. The young man did this, and the king had to yield.

Puddocky

Some variants open with the heroine, who is so greedy for one type of food — cherries in Cherry and parsley in Puddocky — that her mother steals it for her. In Puddocky, this is from a witch who demands her daughter, as in Rapunzel, but in both tales, the girl is seen by three princes, and because of her beauty, they quarrel over her. The witch in Puddocky and the abbess in Cherry whose cherries were stolen both curse the girl for the commotion, turning her into a frog, and the princes make up.

In all variants, the king wishes to know which son will best follow him, and so he sends them to find them a specific piece of cloth (a beautiful carpet, a linen piece fine enough to go through a golden ring, etc.). The youngest son sets out with the least and finds a frog who offers him cloth. It exceeds his brothers' discoveries. The king then sends them out to find either a dog that could fit in a walnut shell, or an excellent gold ring. Again, the frog provides.

For the third task, the king orders them to return with a bride. The frog either transforms another frog into a maiden, or herself goes with him and turns into a beautiful bride. His father selects his youngest son and the frog princess marries him. In the variants opening with the quarrel, the prince recognizes her as the beautiful woman over whom he had quarreled with his brothers.

The Queen Bee

Two king's sons went out to seek their fortune, but fell into disorderly ways. The youngest, Simpleton, went out to find them, but they mocked him. They traveled on, and Simpleton prevented his brothers from destroying an ant hill, killing some ducks, and suffocating a bee hive with smoke. Then they came to a castle with stone horses in the stable, and no sign of anyone. They hunted through the castle and found a room with a little gray man, who showed them to dinner. In the morning, he showed the oldest son a stone table, on which were written three tasks. Whoever performed them would free the castle.

The first was to collect the princess's thousand pearls, scattered in the woods. Whoever tried and failed would be turned to stone. The older brothers tried and failed. For the youngest, however, the ants collected the pearls. The second was to fetch the key to the princess's bedchamber from the lake, which the ducks did for him. The third was to pick out the youngest princess from the three sleeping princesses; they looked exactly alike, and the only difference was that the oldest had eaten a bit of sugar before they slept, the second a little syrup, and the youngest some honey. The queen bee picked out the youngest.

This woke the castle, and restored all those who had been turned to stone. The youngest son married the youngest princess, and his two brothers, the other princesses.

The Tale of the Queen Who Sought a Drink From a Certain Well

An ill queen sent each of her daughters to a well for healing water. They each met a losgann who asked her to marry him, for a drink. The first two refused him as an ugly creature and were unable to get water. The youngest agreed to marry him for the water. She took the water home and healed her mother.

The losgann came to the door and told her to remember her pledge. First she put him behind the door, then under a bucket, then in a little bed by the fireplace, then a bed beside her own bed, but nothing stopped him. Finally, he told her to take down a rusty sword behind the bed and cut off his head. She did, and he became a handsome young king, who married her

Rapunzel

A lonely couple, who want a child, live next to a walled garden belonging to an enchantress. The wife, experiencing the cravings associated with the arrival of her long-awaited pregnancy, notices a rapunzel plant (or, in some versions[7] of the story, rampion radishes or lamb's lettuce) growing in the garden and longs for it, desperate to the point of death. On each of two nights, the husband breaks into the garden to gather some for her; on a third night, as he scales the wall to return home, the enchantress, "Dame Gothel," catches him and accuses him of theft. He begs for mercy, and the old woman agrees to be lenient, on condition that the then-unborn child be surrendered to her at birth. Desperate, the man agrees. When the baby girl is born, the enchantress takes the child to raise as her own, and names the baby Rapunzel. Rapunzel grows up to be the most beautiful child in the world with long golden hair. When Rapunzel reaches her twelfth year, the enchantress shuts her away in a tower in the middle of the woods, with neither stairs nor a door, and only one room and one window. When the witch visits Rapunzel, she stands beneath the tower and calls out:

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, so that I may climb the golden stair. Upon hearing these words, Rapunzel would wrap her long, fair hair around a hook beside the window, dropping it down to the enchantress, who would then climb up the hair to Rapunzel's tower room. (A variation on the story also has the enchantress imbued with the power of flight and/or levitation and the young girl unaware of her hair's length.)

One day, a prince rides through the forest and hears Rapunzel singing from the tower. Entranced by her ethereal voice, he searches for the girl and discovers the tower, but is naturally unable to enter. He returns often, listening to her beautiful singing, and one day sees Dame Gothel visit, and thus learns how to gain access to Rapunzel. When Dame Gothel is gone, he bids Rapunzel let her hair down. When she does so, he climbs up, makes her acquaintance, and eventually asks her to marry him. Rapunzel agrees.

Together they plan a means of escape, wherein he will come each night (thus avoiding the enchantress who visited her by day), and bring her silk, which Rapunzel will gradually weave into a ladder. Before the plan can come to fruition, however, Rapunzel foolishly gives the prince away. In the first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Rapunzel innocently says that her dress is getting tight around her belly (indicating pregnancy); in subsequent editions, she asks the witch (in a moment of forgetfulness) why it is easier for her to draw up the prince than her.[8] In anger, Dame Gothel cuts short Rapunzel's braided hair and casts her out into the wilderness to fend for herself. When the prince calls that night, the enchantress lets the severed braids down to haul him up. To his horror, he finds himself staring at the witch instead of Rapunzel, who is nowhere to be found. When she tells him in anger that he will never see Rapunzel again, he leaps from the tower in despair and is blinded by the thorns below. In another version, the witch pushes him and he falls on the thorns, thus becoming blind.

For months he wanders through the wastelands of the country. One day, as Rapunzel sings while she fetches water, the prince hears Rapunzel's voice again, and they are reunited. When they fall into each others' arms, her tears immediately restore his sight. In another variation, it is said that Rapunzel eventually gives birth to twin boys (in some variations, a girl and a boy). The prince leads her to his kingdom, where they live happily ever after.

In another version of the story, the story ends with the revelation that the witch had untied Rapunzel's braid after the prince leapt from the tower, and the braid slipped from her hands and landed far below, leaving her trapped in the tower.

The Raven

A queen wished her naughty daughter would turn into a raven and fly away, so she could have some peace, and her wish was instantly fulfilled. She flew away to a forest.

In the forest, a man heard a raven tell him she was an enchanted princess, and he could deliver her if he went to a certain cottage and accepted no food from the old woman there. The raven would drive by in a carriage every day for three days. If he remained awake, he would break the spell. Each day, the old woman persuaded him to drink but one sip, and each day, overcome by weariness, he was fast asleep by the time the raven drove past. On the final day, the raven left the sleeping man a bottle of wine, a loaf, and a piece of meat, all three of which were inexhaustible and put a gold ring with her name on his finger. She also gave him a letter telling him there was another he might deliver her: by coming to the golden castle of Stromberg.

The man wandered, looking for the castle, and found a giant who threatened to eat him, but the man fed him with his magical provisions. Then the giant brought out his map, which displayed all the towns, villages and houses in the land – but not the castle. He asked the man to wait until his brother came home. The brother was able to find the castle on an older map, but it was thousands of miles away. The brother agreed to carry the man to within a hundred leagues of the castle, and the man walks the rest.

As the man approached the glass mountain on which the golden castle stood, he could see the bewitched princess drive her carriage around the castle and go in. But the glass mountain was too slippery for him to climb, and he lived in a hut at the foot of the mountain for a year. One day he met three robbers fighting over three magical items: a stick that opened doors, an invisibility mantle, and a horse that could ride up the glass-mountain. The man offered them a mysterious reward in exchange for the items, but he insisted on first trying them out, to see if they worked as promised. After he had mounted the horse, taken the stick, and was made invisible by the cloak, he hit the robbers with his stick and rode up the glass mountain. He used the stick and mantle to get into the castle and threw his ring into the princess's cup. She couldn't find her rescuer though she searched the entire castle, until he finally revealed himself by throwing off the mantle. They were married.