The Princess Blog

Though it feels like fairy tales have been around forever, the popular versions that we know today have actually only been circulating in English-speaking countries for a little over a hundred years. Much of this is thanks to a name that we rarely hear associated with fairy tales, Andrew Lang . Lang didn't write any fairy tales himself, but he was one of the first people to translate stories from the Brothers Grimm , Hans Christian Andersen , Charles Perrault , Madame d"Aulnoy , and others into English to introduce them to a wider audience of fantasy lovers with the Fairy Books of Many Colors , a 12-volume encyclopedia of fairy tales from all over the world. Lang was a scholar who published a number of periodicals, poems, and fiction, but he was most famous for annotating these stories that were translated by his wife and illustrated with beautiful ink drawings by H.J. Ford . Thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to acquire a full set of the Fairy Books at a relative...

Many people like to talk about how much darker the Brothers Grimm stories were than their movie counterparts. Yes, we all know Cinderella's stepsisters had their eyes pecked out by birds, and Snow White's stepmother was forced to dance in burning hot iron shoes until she died. However, I find medieval punishments for wicked deeds far less disturbing than glorifying or rewarding characters for malicious actions. Did you know that in the story of "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,"  Aladdin wins the princess's hand in marriage by teleporting her into his bed on her wedding night and teleporting her new husband outside to sleep in the cold? Author A.G. Marshall  wrote a fantastic short story about this aspect of the fairy tale called "The Princess and the Lamp."  Women being treated as property is quite disturbing by today's standards, but here are three examples of even more disturbing stories where princesses are rewarded for downright wicked behavior ....

Yesterday, a friend of mine shared an image she saw on Claire Keane's Twitter that sparked her interest. If you're out of the loop, Claire Keane is the daughter of the legendary Disney Princess animator Glen Keane  who did concept art for the Tangled  movie and series . She tweeted a drawing from a short Russian movie that was released in 1952 called The Scarlet Flower . The movie is a Russian adaptation of "Beauty and the Beast."  After watching this lovely work of art on YouTube , I found a link to another animated Russian fairy tale from 1968 called  Rusalochka , which is the story of "The Little Mermaid."  The artwork in Rusalochka completely blew me away. Every frame looks like something that you would find hanging on the walls of a fine art museum. It was refreshing to see such a unique perspective on my favorite fairy tale. Both of these movies have a classic and otherworldly feel to them. The Scarlet Flower  tells Charles Perrault's versi...

In case you haven't heard, yesterday was a big day for princess fans. Yes, it was the International Day of the Girl , but it was also announced that Broadway idol  Kristin Chenoweth  is going to star in an upcoming ABC series entitled The Real Fairy Godmother . Judging from the description, the show will be just as magical it sounds. Kristin is going to star as a "self-absorbed 'real housewife' who learns that she's descended from a secret order of Fairy Godmothers and has an inescapable destiny to use her powers to help those in need." Is anyone else getting True Blood faery princess vibes from this description? Just like Sookie, Kristin's character will learn that she is descended from a magical race and receive powers that she doesn't want but has a responsibility to use because of her birthright. However, this story appears to go much deeper than that. Kristin must not only deal with her unwanted powers, but she must also use them to better hersel...

What stories are left to tell after a princess finds her prince and lives happily ever after? That's the question Mattel decided to explore when they created  Ever After High  in 2013. The series detailed the lives of the teenage offspring of famous fairy tale characters through dolls, books, and animated shorts. It was initially created as a companion franchise to their already popular  Monster High  series from 2010 and was clearly inspired at least somewhat by the Disney Princesses. Though this was not the first time fairy tale characters were documented to have offspring, it was the first story about all of their children attending school together and exploring their own identities in relation to their famous parents. The franchise was so successful that many other companies tried to create knock-off versions of it, including Disney with their cringe-worthy  Descendants  movies. Princesses having offspring dates back to the days when the fairy ta...

It's a  tale as old as time . "Beauty and the Beast," the story that teaches us to find the beauty within, is next in this week's series of fairy tale princess breakdowns. The most famous version of this story is  the one by Charles Perrault . Countless adaptations have been made, some more loosely inspired than others. Several of them, including  this lovely 1984 feature by Don Bluth , never got to see the light of day. Not everyone can learn to love a beast. The beast marks one of very few  flawed princes  in fairy tale history. He was not a nameless savior like the prince in  Snow White  or  Cinderella 's tales. Instead, he was aggressive, dark, and self-pitying. Likewise, Beauty was not a passive heroine. She willingly gave herself up to the beast to save her father. Some people argue that her romance was a result of Stockholm Syndrome, but in all versions of the story, the beast gives her an opportunity to leave him, and she always retur...

It's time to talk about  everyone's favorite makeover story . Cinderella has been done and redone so many times that she's turned into more of a trope than an actual character. Every time I have dressed up as a princess for Halloween that I thought was at least fairly recognizable someone has asked me if I was supposed to be Cinderella. It never fails. I've been asked it as Belle, Ariel, Princess Peach, and more. She is by far the most common character to pop into anyone's head when they think of the word "princess." With  Disney's 2015 remake  and the  the recent Broadway revival , that is unlikely to stop any time soon. What is it, exactly, that makes Cinderella such a timeless character? The story goes so far back through so many cultures that no one actually knows where or when it began. The most famous version is  the one by Charles Perrault , which incorporates the fairy godmother, pumpkin, mice, and glass slippers that have become so...