Week 2 Extra Credit Reading Notes (Hans Christian Andersen Part A)

This extra credit reading assignment note is from the week 14-15 reading of fairytale anthologies by
Hans Christian Andersen Part A.

As I am thinking about doing a suitor test focused storybook, I decided to write these notes on The Princess and the Pea.

Plot:

• A prince wants to marry a real princess
• He has been going around meeting princesses, but something about them is always not quite right
• A girl comes in during a stormy night drenched in rain and a mess but says she is a real princess
• The old queen puts down a pea under twenty mattresses and tells the girl to sleep there as a test
• The next day the queen asks her how she slept and she says terribly because she was bruised by something
• The queen knows she is a real princess because she felt the pea through all those mattresses
• The prince and princess are married
• The pea is put in a museum

Characters:

• The prince looking for a princess
• The old queen who devises the test
• The princess who comes in with the storm

Ideas:

• A longer storybook focused on suitor tests kind of like this with a series of suitor tests, testing for various traits/virtues and eliminating a series of suitors rather than just the one test and the one suitor.

(Peas in a Pod from Wikipedia Commons)