The story of King Grisly-Beard and a beautiful princess is a story similar to Beauty and the Beast. Although, in this one, the princess is the one who starts out as a rude person. She knows she is beautiful and she doesn’t want to accept any prince or king her father offers her to marry. She insults all the men until her father gives up in trying to get her to be happy, and promises to make her marry the next man who comes to the castle. She must learn how to be happy and how to see beyond how the men look.
At the beginning of the story, the princess is judging a bunch of men and finding an insult for each one. She reaches the end of the row where there is a king with a messy beard, and decides to call him King Grisly-Beard. Her father was furious about her awful treatment of the men and swore she would be forced to marry the next man to walk through the castle doors. Two days later, a fiddler plays under the window of the castle, where the king hears and invites him in. As a payment for his beautiful playing, and to hold out his word to his daughter, he tells the fiddler that he could marry his beautiful daughter. The princess puts up a fight, but in the end has no say.
The princess is forced to leave the castle to travel with her fiddler husband, and on the way she sees beautiful landscapes, in which the fiddler says belongs to King Grisly-Beard, and she then wishes she had married the king when she had a chance. When she arrives at the fiddlers home, he tries to get her to cook and do other household chores, as he had no maids, but she couldn’t do any of it because she was raised a princess and never had to do anything for herself. The fiddler keeps trying to find jobs for her to do, as they can’t get by with no money, but she couldn’t do anything right.
Eventually, the fiddler sets up a stand in the market and has the princess run the stand. At first, she fights it, as she doesn’t want to be seen by one of her father’s men because of the shame, but being the fiddlers wife, she has no say and must do it anyway. The stand ended up doing very well because everyone wanted to buy something from the beautiful woman, but one day a drunk soldier rode by her stand and crashed into everything, leaving nothing left to sell. The princess cries, afraid of what her husband will think and what will happen to her, so she runs home and tells him. He sent her to work as a kitchen maid in the king's castle, but it wasn’t long before she met the king's son, who was on his way to get married. When she was about to leave, she realized it was King Grisly-Beard, and he asked her to dance. She wanted to run, but he admitted that he was the fiddler she had married and he was the one to knock over the stand. He told her he had done all this to teach her to not be so cruel, and he believed that she was better now, and ready to join him in the public eye.
Over the course of the story, the princess goes from being cruel, and self centered, to being less judgmental and more knowledgeable on what it’s like to be lower than a princess. The theme is to not judge a person by their looks, and to try and see the world from a different perspective, or you could end up being forced to come to that conclusion in the worst way possible. She used to laugh in the face of men who had the slightest problem, but ended up married to a seemingly poor fiddler until she learned what it was like to live outside of a castle and to not judge a man too harshly just because of his appearance, but to look instead at who he truly is.
