Do You Know the Real Story of the Princess and the Frog?
Before you see the Disney film The Princess and the Frog, keep this in mind: everything you know about the fairy tale may be wrong. You may know the story of the Frog Prince: a handsome young prince was innocently minding his own business when, for no apparent reason, an evil witch cursed him and turned him into a particularly ugly little frog. He was doomed to live in this miserable, lowly condition until a princess with a pure, loving heart saw past his ugly exterior and kissed him. Her purity and sweetness would break the evil spell and turn him back into a handsome prince-and the perfect boyfriend for the lucky princess. That’s how the story goes, right? Wrong. Pick up Grimm’s Fairy Tales and you’ll read an entirely different version. The true story of the Frog Prince is better still. You see, the witch in the story wasn’t really evil at all. Her name was Ellspeth, and as she told it in her autobiography Ellspeth’s Book of Shadows, Prince Heinrich wasn’t as innocent as he later cla
