The Princess Who Never Smiled
The Princess Who Never Smiled, The Unsmiling Tsarevna or The Tsarevna who Would not Laugh (, Tsarevna Nesmeyana) is a Russian folk fairy tale collected by Alexander Afanasyev in "Narodnye russkie skazki", as tale number 297. Synopsis. There was once a princess who never smiled or laughed. Her father promised that whoever made her smile could marry her, and many tried, but none succeeded. Across the town, an honest worker worked hard for his master. At the end of the year, the master put a sack of money before him and told him to take as  much as he wanted. To avoid sinning by taking too much, he took only one coin, and when he went to drink from a well, he dropped the coin and lost it. The next year, the same thing happened to him. The third year, the worker took the same amount of coin as before, but when he drank from the well, he did not lose his coin, and the other two coins floated up to him. He decided to see the world. A mouse asked him for alms; he gave him a coin. Then he did the same for a  beetle and a catfish. He came to the castle and saw the princess looking at him. This astounded him, and he fell in the mud. The mouse, the beetle, and the catfish came to his aid, and at their antics, the princess laughed. She pointed him out as the man, and when he was brought into the castle, he had been turned into a handsome man. The honest worker, now a handsome man, married the princess. Translations. The tale was translated as "The Princess Who Would Not Smile". Analysis. Soon after he developed his classification of folktales, Finnish folklorist Antti  Aarne published, in 1912, a study on the collections of the Brothers Grimm, Austrian consul Johann Georg von Hahn, Danish folklorist Svend Grundtvig, Swiss scholar Laura Gonzenbach and Afanasyev. According to this primary system, developed in 1910, the tale fits type 559, "Making the Princess Laugh (The Dungbeetle)". Professor Jack Haney confirmed the typing: it belongs in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type AT 559, "Making the Princess Laugh". In this tale type, the poor boy wins the hand of the princess through a bizarre presentation of small creatures and bugs that makes her laugh. Scholar Stith Thompson  explained that the name of the tale type is due to the presence of the dung beetle "in nearly all versions of the narrative". Motifs. Making the princess laugh, or smile, is a common fairy tale motif of various uses. The culmination of Golden Goose and The Magic Swan (both classified as ATU 571, "All Stick Together"), where the goose or swan causes other characters to stick to each other, is that the sight causes a princess to laugh for the first time, resulting, as in this story, in her marriage. Peruonto and the frame story of Giambattista Basile, however , combine it with a curse, caused by the angry person laughed at, to force the princess to marry someone. Before the edition of Antti Aarne's first folktale classification, Svend Grundtvig developed - and later Astrid Lunding translated - a classification system for Danish folktales in comparison with other international compilations available at the time. In this preliminary system, two folktypes were grouped together based on "essential characteristics": folktypes 20A "Hold fast!" ("Stick to! [The Golden Goose]") and 20B "Skellebasserne" ("The Scarabees"). Both tales were grouped under the banner "The Princess who can not help laughing". Variants. An early literary version of  the tale type was published in "Pentamerone", with the title "Lo scarafone, lo sorece e lo grillo" ("The Scarab, the Mouse and the Cricket"). In an "Irish fairy tale" compiled by authors Ada M. Skinner and Eleanor L. Skinner, "How Timothy Won the Princess", a poor widow sends her son Timothy to sell her three white cows to put food on the table. However, the boy becomes delighted by the performance of a dwarf man, who produces a tiny mouse, a cockroach and a bee - all dressed in fine clothes - to play and dance for the crowd. Fascinated by the  little creatures, he trades the cows for them and takes them home. His mother looks disappointed in him, even after he shows her the strange little animals. Some time later, the boy uses the little musicians to make the princess laugh and ends up marrying her. Retellings. A Sesame Street Book Club book entitled "The Sesame Street Alphabet Storybook" (which interspersed different objects starting with subsequent letters into infamous stories as told by Sesame Street characters) included a quick telling of "The Princess who Never Laughed" using a xylophone and yo-yo's (X and Y) as props used by  two people trying to make the princess laugh to no avail. It comes to end when Cookie Monster, who was lurking behind them, ate both items, which the princess did think was funny. A 1978 episode of Yeralash retells the story by having a king order his prime minister to make his daughter laugh. A number of real-life comedians are summoned, including Gennady Khazanov and Oleg Popov, but all fail. Then the minister brings forth a young boy to sit at the royal table, and his complete lack of manners does make everyone laugh, including the princess. The Princess