Reading Notes 12 Dancing Princesses Part B

 

The 12 princesses traveling through the woods toward the underground castle.
Image from Fandomentals.

The story I want to focus on today is The 12 Dancing Princesses. Basically, the King's 12 conniving daughters would sneak out somehow in the middle of the night to go dancing. The only evidence of this dancing was the princesses' exhaustion and their worn out shoe soles the next morning. The King told every man in the kingdom that if they could find out where his daughters went dancing during the nights, that man could marry one of his daughters and become the King's heir. Every man had failed except for an old soldier who, with the help of some old woman's tips to not drink the wine brought to him at night, succeeded in finding where the daughters went to dance. The soldier tricked the young daughters and found evidence of the palace they danced at underground and presented it to the King on the third day. I really want to focus on the attitudes of the daughters. They would bring wine to the overnight guests with sleeping remedies in it so that the men would sleep through the night and the daughters could sneak out to dance. The daughters did not care that they were submitting innocent men to death, they just laughed, said "oh well", and continued on their way to have fun of their own. These selfish attitudes were shocking to me, and it was also shocking that it seemed to be the eldest daughter's plan all along to do this to the men, yet the soldier chose her to be his bride in the end. An important element in this story is the attitude of the 12 daughters in my opinion; therefore, I might alter these attitudes a bit if I rewrite this in my own story.


Bibliography: Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm, an audiobook recording available at LibriVox based on a Project Gutenberg publication.

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