Princess and the Pea

You call this twenty mattresses? Anyone could feel a pea through this!

Today we look at the only time I know of where it's a good thing to bruise incredibly easily. It's the story of the Princess and the Pea and you can read it here. How did they stack so many mattresses, anyway?

Firstly, we need to look at the prince in this story. He wanted to be particular about his bride and he decided to use the justification that all of the candidates he saw weren't real princesses. Which is a terrible excuse. Princesses are pretty obvious what with the crowns and entire countries vouching for their position. I feel like there had to be more to the story there. If his only qualification for a bride was that she had to be a princess, he could have gone one kingdom over, or however many it took until a king had a daughter, and married the first one he met. In any case, he found something wrong with all of them and returned home a bachelor.

The queen is with him in this ridiculous quest. She is the one who has the idea about the twenty mattresses and twenty feather-beds with a single pea underneath it all. I wonder how the princess got into that bed, and how she kept from falling off of it in the night. I would imagine she was tossing and turning all night trying to be comfortable. I guess that's part of what proves that she is a princess: not only could she not fall asleep on a pea buried beneath a mountain of softness, but she also did not fall off the bed.

I am also amused that it's never made clear if the girl is actually a princess or not. The prince and queen believe she is because she was so sensitive, but that's not proof to me. Why was a princess wandering around alone in the middle of a storm? More importantly, if a pea bothered her, what did she usually sleep on? I feel pretty bad for everyone in her house. She must have been a real pain to deal with, whether she wanted to be or not. Poor princess. Hopefully the prince had a lot of delicate things for her to sleep on, sit on, and wear.

Have a folktale you want me to talk about? Comment below and I'll look it up!