Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Prince

There are a lot of stories where the lead protagonist is a prince. Even though the term prince can be a number of things, it is often the son of a king in these stories. Grimm stories often simply refer to them as "a king's son" for this very reason. So many of them begin with someone of great wealth and influence, but there is so much more to it than just a rich guy.

I don 't know everyone who reads these spotlights, but I'm going to assume that most of you are not royalty. So, why do so many fairy tales have us trying to relate to people in high places? Why do we even put up with that? Well, why not? There's nothing wrong from seeing things from alternate perspectives. And besides, these princes are usually not allowed to just throw money at their problems.

In these stories, the king is still the absolute power in the region. The prince is still subject to his rule and can even be executed when committing a wrong. Grimm stories often make this point very clear. Even though the prince is wealthy, he still has to work through his problems by his own wit. That often means leaving the safety of his castle. The moment he does this, he is like any other man, only better educated than your standard peasant.

The prince's job in these stories is to strive for heroism. He has to be extremely clever to outwit the monsters of the world. The end goal should be to save a damsel and inherit either his own kingdom or another tied to the woman. The Grimm stories were very predictable as to the latter.

There are also stories where the prince would give up his riches and become a vagabond. He would live as a peasant and search for adventure. As usual, he would find a woman who he loved, and once she is removed from danger, he would break his disguise and bring her home to be married. Well, I suppose it's good to have your wealth to fall back on, but understand that he has to overcome an important struggle before he is allowed to to that. Otherwise, it would be considered cheating.

A lot of people today don't like glorifying the rich. They just want to see them as spoiled people who never know anything of the dangers of the world. There IS some truth in that; however, that doesn't mean that someone with wealth cannot be noble as well. If we entirely had thrown out the idea of a rich hero, we wouldn't have cool properties like Batman and Iron Man. Rich is not exclusively corrupt. Corrupt is corrupt. Let's put these men to the test and see how they fair in this world before we cast judgement against them. Think about it.

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