Hans My Hedgehog

Hans My Hedgehog Illustration By Maurice Sendak

"Hans My Hedgehog" is a Brothers Grimm fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. Since the second edition published in 1819, it has been recorded as Tale no. 108.^[1] The tale follows the events in the life of a human-hedgehog hybrid named Hans.

Synopsis

A wealthy but childless merchant wishes he had a child, even a hedgehog. He comes home to find that his wife has given birth to a baby boy that is a hedgehog from the waist up. They then name him "Hans My Hedgehog".

After eight years, Hans leaves his family astride a shod cockerel to seek his fortune. He goes off into the woods and watches over his donkeys and pigs. A few years later, a lost king stumbles upon Hans after hearing him play beautifully on the bagpipes. Hans makes a deal with the king, he will show him the way home if the king promises to sign over whatever first comes to meet him upon his return. However, the king thought Hans was illiterate, and decided to trick him by writing an order that said Hans should receive nothing. When they arrived at the kingdom, the king’s daughter ran to greet him. The king told her about the deal Hans had tried to make and how he tricked him. Unconcerned by the betrayal, Hans continues to tend to his animals in the forest. A second lost king stumbles upon Hans and agreed to his deal. Upon his return, the second king's only daughter rushed out to greet him, and in doing so became the property of Hans. For the sake of her father, the princess happily agreed to Hans’s deal. In time, Hans My Hedgehog goes to claim his promises. The first king attempts to withhold his daughter, but Hans forces him to yield her. Hans then makes her to take off her clothing, pierces her all over with his quills, and sends her back to the kingdom in disgrace. The second king agrees to the marriage; the princess holds herself bound by her promise and Hans My Hedgehog marries her. On their wedding night, he tells the king build a fire and to post guards at his door. Hans takes off his hedgehog skin and quickly has the guards throw it in the fire. Hans appears black, as if he had been burned. After physicians clean him he is shown to be a handsome young gentleman. After several years Hans returns home to collect his father and they lived together in the kingdom.

Characters

Characters List

• Hans-Main character who is a cross between a man and a hedgehog. He has a humanoid body but possesses the head and quills of a hedgehog. Transforms into a handsome man at the end of the story and marries the second princess.
• Merchant (Hans' father)-Wishes for a son “even if it’s a hedgehog”. He hates Hans’s deformity and convinces him to leave town by buying him bagpipes and a shod cockerel. Is brought back to the castle to live with Hans after the curse is lifted.
• Merchant's Wife (Hans' Mother)
• King-Betrays Hans and breaks his promise. Orders his men to attack Hans on sight.
• Second King-Agrees to fulfill his promise and becomes Hans’s father in-law
• Princess-Refuses to marry Hans and is punished by being pricked by Hans quills until she bleeds and runs away in disgrace.
• Second Princess-Honors her father’s wishes and agrees to marry Hans. She becomes Hans’s wife and is the catalyst that causes Hans’s transformation.

Analysis

Meaning and Interpetation

"Grimm’s tale, “Hans, My Hedgehog,” has a leitmotif of “burning the animal skin”. This leitmotif is found in other Grimm's fairytales and myths as a symbol of psychological transformation. Hans was born half-hedgehog and he cannot break the spell until he is able to burn his prickly hedgehog skin".^[2]This same leitmotif of the burning of false or alternative skins in the attempt to create a single whole can also be found in the Grimm's tale of The Donkey (fairy tale)

Clothing

Hans uses his deformity to discover his “true” identity. Hiding his handsome appearance allows him to discover and judge the moral character of the people he meets throughout the story. By disguising himself within the hedgehog skin, Hans is identifying himself as deformed, “Dress enables people to identify themselves—socially, sexually, morally, aesthetically—to be recognized or to be misrecognized.” ^[3]This leads to the creation of a fragmented identity, he is simultaneously a man and a giant, bipedal, anthropomorphic, mutant hedgehog creature. To create a whole being with a single identity, Hans had to shed his skin and have the husk burned into ash, “Now when the clock struck eleven he went into the room, stripped off his hedgehog skin, and left it lying in front of the bed and the men quickly came and fetched it and threw it into the fire, and when the fire had consumed it the curse was broken”. ^[4] The formation of a single identity is completed once Han’s physical appearance matched that of his Jacques Lacan mirror stage Ideal I.

Gender

The function of gender within the play is suggestive of the role of both the men and women during the time period of the story. The males provide while the females nurture, as seen with Hans’s father and mother. The “gender” of the story can be discovered by examining the use of descriptive language and what is important to the themes presented. The description of “masculinity and femininity are written on bodies in different ways, [within the context of the Grimm fairytale collection] prioritizing beauty, blood, hair, and skin descriptions for women and size, age, violence, and transformations for men."^[5] The use of all of the “masculine” descriptive words seen throughout the story would suggest that this is a masculinity based story. Hans is young, large, and violent toward the first princess. Furthermore, he transforms himself from a deformed monster into a handsome man for a female when he need to enter the marriage bed.

Morals

The moral lessons taught through folktales exist to convey values that, at the time, would have held a family unit, and by extension the entirety of society, together. These values are found throughout the Grimm’s tales and include but are not limited to “diligence, honesty, generosity, dependability, perseverance, courage, and a unique balance of self-reliance and selflessness.” ^[6] The values in Hans my hedgehog includes honor, integrity, self-reliance, and kindness. These values can be seen within the king when he decides to honor his promise to Hans, and within Hans when he leaves his father to live on his own and when he returns and gives up his animals for the welfare of others. The connotation of the words describing a situation or person can inform a reader of the quality of the object, and thus creates a situation in which values are presented as desirable.

Overall, Grimms' Fairy Tales convey conservative social harmony, as they convey morals as being the "most important social driving force over economic or political interests."^[7] The tales offer a sense of social wholeness and completeness that again convey traditional, conservative principals, such a heteronormativity, the nuclear family, and the important sense of community.

Physical Transformation/Shapeshifting Abilities

It is seen that Hans is able to shed his skin at will and it is assumed that he had the ability to change into a human being throughout the entirety of the play. To break the curse, the remaining hedgehog husk must be burnt to ash. It is only after his deformity is burnt away that Hans was able to become a whole human, the former animal self was destroyed and washed away in the flames. When Hans sheds his skin, he appears to be burnt black. After being washed by physicians, he is presented as a handsome young man who then marries the princess and eventually becomes king of the land.

Abstract Elements

• The differentiation in size between the protagonist (Hans) and his rooster.
• The Hedgehog Skin.
• The Transformation of Hans.

The strong presence of abstraction is a typical component in German tales, this is not symilar in other cultures around Europe. As stated by Ralph S. Boggs, "The Germans tend towards abstraction, the Russians and Spaniards towards richness of detail". ^[8]

Often times, Grimms' tales characters are often seen as "cripple" or "super cripple".^[9] In some cases, the main character's disabilities are often exaggerated, and then the rest of the story is focused on how the character overcomes or corrects their disability. In addition, the protagonist is often viewed as a freak (cripple) or super freak (supercripple). Because of this, the character is often outcasted or disliked by the rest of society. Such is the case of the protagonist Hans, in Hans My Hedgehog. Hans would be labeled as a supercripple, mainly because his disability essentially thwarts pity, as his deformity is overlly grotesque or callous. As Hans tries to survive in society as a half hedgehog young man, his overt "enfreakment" is repaid for by the sudden absence of his deformity to reveal a more whole and perfect self. Rather than other Grimms' tale characters that are portrayed as a fully animal form, hans is the only half-animal half-human hybrid, thus increasing his overall outlandishness. His deformed birth is likely due to Hans' father's brash desire to have a child. because of this, they have received a divine punishment, thus resulting in the abnormal and deformed birth of their son. In addition, Hans' parent's disdain towards their son is unique in the way that it is so much stronger than any other parents portrayed in Grimms' fairy tales. Physically abnormal births, as in the case of Hans, are often portrayed as a disability or deformity that the child is born with. In the middle ages, for instance, children born with physical abnormalities were often questioned as to whether the child was actually human or not. Anomolous births were often related or regarded as animals, rather than humans. Thus, Hans My Hedgehog has helped shed light unto the ancient idea of deformity at birth being related to animals. ^[10]

Other Adaptations

Books

• Hans my Hedgehog was readapted by by the German writer, Janosh, in erzählt Grimm’s Märchen 1972, translated as Not so Grimm. Janosch's fairy-tale book, distinguishes itself from all previous fairy-tale books . It lives from the lively language stamped by the oral tradition. It demands reading aloud: it is acoustic and at the same time porous enough so that the child can make something out of the telling by himself or herself. In short, the anachronistic language of the children's book that has been polished for children is missing. The form of the fairy-tale material that the Brothers Grimm had gathered loses its conservative form. In reading Janosch the reader leaves the ceremonial fairy-tale seriousness of the Brothers Grimm. This does not mean that he has less than what the brothers have too much. As Jack Zipes states in his The Changing Nature of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, "Hans is transformed from a porcupine looking character into a hippy rock singer, who plays the harmonica. When his father gives him sunglasses and a motorcycle to get rid of him, he goes into the city and eventually becomes a movie star named Jack Eagle. In the end the father is proud of him, and everyone from the village wants to look like him.”^[11]

• It was adapted into a children's book in 2012. The book is titled Hans My Hedgehog and is written by Kate Coombs and illustrated by John Nickle. The book is published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers and has the ISBN 978-1416915331.

Television

• The story was featured as a cel animated short in the "Hungarian Folktales" episode of the 1989~1993 U.S.A. TV series Long Ago and Far Away.
• A version of it was also produced as an episode of Jim Henson's The Storyteller which stars Jason Carter as Hans' human form, Terence Harvey as the voice of Hans the Hedgehog, Abigail Cruttenden as the Princess, David Swift as the King, Pauline Moran as the Queen, Eric Richard as the Farmer, and Maggie Wilkinson as the Farmer's Wife.
• Another television adaption took place in Germany in 2008 which based several films on Grimms' fairy tales. This adaption "constitute[s] a significant national project that presents highly appealing notions of the German past to an audience divided over national conflict and demands of globalization." ^[12]

References

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Hans the Hedgehog