The Princess and the Pea
by Hans Christian Andersen · 1835 · 2 min read
The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Andersen is a fairy tale about a prince whose search for a real princess ends with a strange test involving a pea. He travels around the world but returns home unhappy because he cannot be sure that any princess he meets is genuine. One evening, during a storm with thunder, lightning, and heavy rain, the old king answers a knock at the city gate. A soaking wet young woman stands outside and declares that she is a real princess. The old queen secretly places a pea beneath twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down beds, where the visitor spends the night. In the morning, the princess says she barely slept because something hard in the bed left her bruised. The royal family takes her extreme sensitivity as proof of her identity. The prince marries her, and the pea goes into a museum, where the narrator says it remains unless someone has stolen it.
Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess; but she would have to be a real princess. He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not as it should be. So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real princess.
One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.
It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.
“Well, we’ll soon find that out,” thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went into the bed-room, took all the bedding off the bedstead, and laid a pea on the bottom; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds on top of the mattresses.
On this the princess had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.
“Oh, very badly!” said she. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!”
Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds.
Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.
So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the pea was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.
There, that is a true story.
What it means
The story makes extraordinary sensitivity the proof of royal identity. The prince cannot judge the princesses he meets, and the visitor’s soaked clothes offer no clear sign of her rank. Instead, the queen trusts a hidden test: a single pea beneath an enormous pile of bedding. The princess’s bruises and sleeplessness settle the question for the royal family. Yet the contrast between the tiny cause and the grand conclusion also makes their standard seem comic. The closing detail about preserving the pea gives this ordinary object the importance of a royal treasure. Rather than stating a lesson about good behavior, the tale turns the search for certainty about social rank into an unlikely, playful test.
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Three questions to think about
- What does the prince’s unsuccessful journey reveal about his idea of a real princess?
- How does the visitor’s appearance in the storm contrast with the royal family’s eventual judgment of her?
- How do the museum detail and the narrator’s final claim shape your understanding of the story?
Free for 3 months
200,000+ classics. Every format, free to start.
eBooks and 15-minute summaries, and any book printed at cost, large print too.
