Storytelling "Hans the Hedgehog"

Hans riding his rooster (Source)

This is the story of how Hans the Hedgehog became engaged to a princess.  Hans was a very special little creature.  His parents had tried for so long to have a child, but when Hans was born, they were horrified to see that their little baby had the head and torso of a hedgehog but the legs of a boy.  Although they did their best to love him, from an early age Hans could tell that they were horrified and ashamed of their child.  He grew very depressed and spent most of his time in the barn with the other animals, like the pigs, donkeys, and his best friend of all, the rooster.

Since he was half hedgehog, Hans stopped growing very quickly and remained quite small.  Although this surely disappointed his father, it was perfect, for Hans was able to ride around on top of the rooster as if it were a colorful horse.  He rode the rooster everywhere, even flying up around the trees that lined his father’s fields.  From there, Hans could see all the way to the dark forest and often dreamed of living there, away from his apathetic family.

Hans at last decided that he should put his mother and father out of their misery and so informed his father that he would be leaving the house as soon as his father had given him a set of bagpipes to play and two pigs to look after.  Relieved that they could be rid of their troublesome child without resorting to some un-Christian like act, Hans’s father went out immediately to the town to procure some bagpipes and a pair of swine for his son.

The next day, without so much as a proper goodbye, Hans the Hedgehog left his home and set off for the forest, proudly riding the glistening rooster and with two very confused pigs trailing behind from a rope.  Hans travelled deep into the forest, away from where any men ever dared to venture and settled into a little clearing.  He spent much of the next months building a small hut for himself and his rooster and caring after the pigs.  The sow was already pregnant, so Hans knew that soon he would have a whole family to care for.  Whenever Hans was not working, he sat high up in a tree, perched on top of his trusty rooster, and played his bagpipes as loud as he desired, for no one would ever hear the beautiful music that he made.

And so, time moved on, with Hans building more and more houses for all the pigs and playing music all afternoon long.  Several summers had passed and Hans soon had a large herd of several dozen pigs, most of them still suckling piglets.  Besides the sound of the rooster crowing every morning, the chorus of piggy squeals, and the beautiful sound of his bagpipes, Hans never heard nor saw anything out of the ordinary.

One day, however, this all changed.  Pausing between songs on his bagpipe, and straining to hear over the cacophony of various piglets, Hans thought that he heard human voices.  If this were true, that would be the first time that he had heard or seen another person since leaving his family’s farm.  Perhaps they had come at last to look for him, Hans reasoned. But upon closer inspection, the little hedgehog boy could see that the men in the forest below were not his parents at all, but rather they appeared to be royalty.  Hans could clearly see which one was king, and as he watched him walk below, Hans began again to play his bagpipes.

The king and his entourage stopped and began to talk among themselves, wondering at the beauty of the music and from where it could come.  They spotted Hans’s humble hut in the nearby clearing and began to walk towards it, hoping to find the man who produced such lovely notes.  Knocking at the door, the king asked who lived there and if they would consider being a minstrel in his court.

High up above them Hans called back that he would much prefer to stay where he was, but thanked them for their compliments.  The king looked around with even more confusion, as he was certain that the voice had not come from inside the hut, and that it was the voice of a young boy.  The king called back that he would still reward the boy with whatever he desired as a gift for his beautiful music.  Surely the king was thinking that whoever it was, they would not ask for anything unreasonable.   Hans replied that he simply desired whatever the king first met when he returned to his kingdom.   The king readily agreed, supposing that in all likelihood, it would be a fine horse or something similar.

When the king finally returned home, his young daughter saw him from a ways off and ran all the way out of the castle to meet him.  She met him just after he crossed the bridge into his kingdom and jumped up, throwing her arms around the king’s neck.  In that moment, the king realized that this was first thing that he met upon his return to the kingdom and he had now betrothed his youngest daughter to a mysterious boy that he had never even met.

Author’s Note: This story comes from Household Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Margaret Hunt.  The original story has quite a bit more, especially dealing with what happens later in life to young Hans, but I wanted to focus specifically on his earlier life.  In the full version of the story, Hans is rejected by the king and his daughter once he reveals to them his true appearance, and they try to kill him.  He has his revenge, and later is engaged to another princess, who is willing to marry him.  After their wedding, he is able to turn himself fully into a human and he invites his long-lost parents to come live at the castle that he will one day inherit.  It was such a delightful and imaginative story that I just had to write it for myself.