Reading Diary B: Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen

The Princess and the Pea

I really enjoyed this story, especially because of how short and sweet it was. The story starts by saying that there is a Prince who wanted to marry a princess, but only a "real" princess. He had found many princesses, but they were not "real". When I first read this, I thought it meant he did not love the other princesses or something like that. As I read on, I soon found that this was not the case. The way his family determined whether or not it was a real princess was placing a bunch of mattresses on top of a pea, and if the princess feels the pea while she slept, then she would be deemed a "real" princess. Sure enough, a princess shows up at the gates in the middle of a storm and sleeps on top of the mattresses. She complained of sleeping poorly because of something pointing her back and was thus deemed a "real" princess. The Prince went on to marry the "real" princess.

The Wicked Prince

This story was very entertaining and had a good ending. The prince in the story kind of reminded me of Xerxes from the movie 300, when the Persians tried to conquer Sparta. Similar to that movie, the wicked prince also wants to conquer everyone, destroying many kingdoms and killing men, women, and children along the way. The wicked prince ends up believing he can defeat God, which is ridiculous. In 300, Xerxes believes he is a god and won't stop until he conquers everyone. I think he honestly believed he was an immortal God in the movie, until Leonidas made him bleed. Apparently, Xerxes, in real life, actually sentenced the sea 300 lashes for destroying two of his bridges. They are both oblivious to their own tyranny, which I have noticed is very common throughout history. The whole time, the wicked prince, like Xerxes, believes that there is no wrong in what they are doing. In order to challenge God, the wicked prince has his people build a giant ship with a thousand guns and had hundreds of eagles attached to it to give it flight. Picturing the eagles carrying a giant ship is pretty funny and clearly unrealistic, but is also cool. Not surprisingly, he ends up being no challenge to God and his angels. In the end, he ends up being humiliated by a single gnat. Everyone laughed because the prince thought he could defeat God and ended up being defeated by a single gnat. Although it wasn't the harshest of lessons, I thought it was a good one. The wicked prince deserved much worse for what he had done, but these stories are more fitted for children. The descriptions of what the wicked prince had done to the lands he conquered never went into much depth and left it for the imagination of and interpretation to the reader.

(Rodrigo Santoro playing Xerxes in the movie 300)