"The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" (), also simply known as "The Nutcracker", is a literary fairy tale from 1816 by the German author E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which a young girl's favorite Christmas toy, the Nutcracker, comes alive and, after defeating the evil Mouse King in battle, whisks her away to a magical kingdom populated by dolls. The story was originally published in Berlin as part of the collection ("children's stories"), while being written in a novel-styled format.
In 1892, the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov turned Alexandre Dumas's adaptation of the story into the ballet The Nutcracker.
Summary On Christmas Eve, at the Stahlbaum house, Marie and her siblings receive several gifts. Their godfather, Drosselmeier (Droßelmeier), a supreme court justice, clockmaker and inventor, gifts them a clockwork castle with mechanical people moving around inside. However, they quickly tire of it. Marie notices a nutcracker, and asks who he belongs to. Her father says that he belongs to all of them, but since she is so fond of him, she will be his special caretaker. The siblings pass him amongst themselves, cracking nuts, until Marie's brother, Fritz, tries to crack one that is too big and hard, and the nutcracker's jaw breaks. Marie, upset, bandages him with a ribbon from her dress.
When it is time for bed, the children put their Christmas gifts away in the cabinet where they keep their toys. Marie begs to stay up with the nutcracker a while longer and is allowed to do so. She tells him that Drosselmeier will fix his jaw. At this, his face seems to scowl and his eyes flash. She is frightened, but decides it was her imagination.
The grandfather clock begins to chime, and Marie believes that she sees Drosselmeier sitting on top of it, preventing it from striking. Mice begin to come out from beneath the floorboards, including the seven-headed Mouse King. The dolls in the toy cabinet come alive, the nutcracker taking command and leading them into battle after putting Marie's ribbon on. They are overwhelmed by the mice. Marie, seeing the nutcracker about to be taken prisoner, throws her slipper at the Mouse King. She then faints into the toy cabinet's glass door, cutting her arm badly.
Marie wakes up in her bed the next morning with her arm bandaged and tries to tell her parents what happened the previous night, but they do not believe her. Days later, Drosselmeier arrives with the nutcracker, whose jaw has been fixed, and tells Marie the story of Princess Pirlipat and Madam Mouserinks, known as the Queen of the Mice, which explains how nutcrackers came to be and why they look the way they do.
Madam Mouserinks tricked Pirlipat's mother into allowing her and her children to gobble up the lard that was supposed to go into the sausage that the King was to eat at dinner. The King, enraged at Madam Mouserinks for spoiling his supper and upsetting his wife, had his court inventor, Drosselmeier, create traps for the Mouse Queen and her children.
Madam Mouserinks, angered at the death of her children, swore that she would take revenge on Pirlipat. Pirlipat's mother surrounded her with cats which were supposed to be kept awake by being constantly stroked. The nurses who did so fell asleep, however, and Madam Mouserinks magically turned Pirlipat ugly, giving her a huge head, a wide grinning mouth, and a cottony beard like a nutcracker. The King blamed Drosselmeier and gave him four weeks to find a cure. He went to his friend, the court astrologer.
They read Pirlipat's horoscope and told the King the only way to cure her was to have her eat the nut Crackatook (Krakatuk), which must be cracked and handed to her by a man who had never been shaved nor worn boots since birth. He must, without opening his eyes, hand her the kernel and take seven steps backwards without stumbling. The King sent Drosselmeier and the astrologer out to look for both.
The two men journeyed for years without finding either the nut or the man. They then returned home to Nuremberg and found the nut with Drosselmeier's cousin, a puppet-maker. His son turned out to be the young man needed to crack the Crackatook. The King promised Pirlipat's hand to whoever could crack the nut. Many men broke their teeth on it before Drosselmeier's nephew cracked it easily and handed it to Pirlipat, who swallowed it and became beautiful again. But Drosselmeier's nephew, on his seventh backward step, stepped on Madam Mouserinks and stumbled. The curse fell on him, making him a nutcracker. The spoiled and ungrateful Pirlipat, seeing how ugly he had become, refused to marry him and banished him from the castle.
Marie, while she recuperates from her wound, hears the Mouse King, son of the deceased Madam Mouserinks, whispering in the middle of the night, threatening to bite the nutcracker to pieces unless she gives him her sweets and dolls. She sacrifices them, but he wants more and more. Finally, the nutcracker says that if she gets him a sword, he will kill the Mouse King. Fritz gives her the one from his toy hussars. The next night, the nutcracker visits Marie's room bearing the Mouse King's seven crowns, and takes her to the doll kingdom by way of the sleeve of her father's coat. After viewing the magical scenes there, she seems to rise higher and higher; but then suddenly falls and finds herself back in bed. She tries to tell her mother what happened, but again she is not believed, even when she shows her parents the seven crowns, and is forbidden to speak of her "dreams" anymore.
Marie sits in front of the cabinet one day while Drosselmeier is repairing one of her father's clocks. She swears to the Nutcracker that if he were ever really real, she would never behave as Pirlipat did, and would love him whatever he looked like. Then, there is a bang and she faints, falling off her chair. Her mother comes in to announce that Drosselmeier's nephew has arrived from Nuremberg. By swearing that she would love him in spite of his looks, Marie broke the curse and made him human again. He asks her to marry him. She accepts, and in a year and a day, he takes her away to the doll kingdom, where she is crowned queen.
Publication history
The story was first published in Berlin in 1816 by the in a volume entitled ("children's stories"), which also included tales by and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. It consisted of 14 chapters, perhaps intended to be read over the 14 days between Christmas and Epiphany. The title page included a colored plate of the Mouse King from a drawing by Hoffmann himself. Chapters 7 to 9 are known as the Fairytale of the Hard Nut, the story within the story. This is the story which Godfather Drosselmeier tells to Marie over three nights following the battle of the Nutcracker and Mouse King. It describes the birth and enchantment of Princess Pirlipat, and continues until Drosselmeier's nephew breaks the enchantment, restores her beauty and is transformed into the nutcracker. This part of the story is typically omitted from ballet adaptations.
The story was republished in the first volume of Hoffmann's story collection The Serapion Brethren. It was preceded and followed by a conversation among four fictionalized "Serapion Brethren" about its merits. It had the same chapter structure as the original, but Hoffmann's illustration was omitted. The Serapion Brethren was the name of a literary club that Hoffmann formed in 1818.
Nutcracker was reprinted in Germany again in 1840, with the title (loosely translated into English): Nutcracker and Mouse King, a most adorable children's tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann; or Latest Picture Fun, in 10 finely illuminated copperplates after original drawings by .
David Blamires (lecturer at Manchester University's Department of German Language and Literature) observed that William Makepeace Thackeray was the first to publish The Fairytale of the Hard Nut portion of the story in English, which he titled The History of Krakatuk. It appeared in a British newspaper, the National Standard, in 1833. It seemed to be lost but was recovered by Lewis Melville and republished in 1929 in Great German Short Stories, edited by Melville and Reginald Hargreaves.
The first full version of the story to appear in Britain was by Ascott R. Hope, and was published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1892 in his "Children's Library" series. According to Blamires, "[Hope] does not attempt to explain features of German life that may seem strange to his readers, but instead eliminates them or gives English equivalents".
Blamires also described a British adaption called Nutcracker and Mouse-King, published by George G. Harrap and Company. He gave a publication date of 1919, though the book itself indicates that it was published in 1916. Hoffmann was not mentioned on the title page, only E. Gordon Browne, the adaptor. All German references were removed, as was the trend at the time: Fritz and Marie became Dick and Molly, Godfather Drosselmeier became Uncle Christopher, etc. Four color plates by Florence Anderson depicted a pretty side to the story as opposed to the starker engravings by Bertall (illustrator for the Dumas adaptation), which Blamires deemed more consistent with the darker aspect of Hoffmann's tale.
Hoffmann's Nutcracker was not as extensively published in Britain in the 19th century as other German stories. Blamires speculated that it was not sufficiently educational or moralistic for the time.
The story was published in full in 1853 in the U.S. in a translation by Mrs. St. Simon in New York by D. Appleton and Company with wood-engraved illustrations by Albert H. Jocelyn.
An English version was published in 1886 in a translation of the first volume of The Serapion Brethren by Alexander Ewing. The preface to this translation states that the already well-known story was only familiar to English readers at the time indirectly, through a secondary translation of an earlier French edition.
In 1930, an edition of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King" was published by Whitman and Company in Chicago in a translation by Louise F. Encking, with illustrations by Emma L. Brock. Encking was Supervisor of Children's works at the Minneapolis public library at the time. Brock, also a librarian, went on to become a prolific writer of children's books. Their version omitted Hoffmann's ending in which Marie's love restores Nutcracker to his human form as well as their return to the Kingdom of the Dolls.
Ewing's translation was included in the 1967 collection The Best Tales of Hoffmann released by Dover Publications. In 1996, Dover also published a version of the translation, abridged by Bob Blaisdell with illustrations by Thea Kliros, as The Story of the Nutcracker. It was part of the Dover Children's Thrift Classics series. It contained 30 new illustrations. Blaisdell and Kliros were both prolific contributors to this genre.
Ewing's translation was also included in the 2018 collection, The Nutcracker, The Sandman, and other Dark Tales: The Best Weird Tales and Fantasies of E. T. A. Hoffmann introduced and edited by Grant Kellermeyer by Oldstyle Tales Press, with gothic-style sketches by Kellermeyer including one of a sinister Godfather Drosselmeier holding Nutcracker. Kellermeyer is a publisher and contributor to many publications primarily dealing with classic ghost and horror stories. According to the Oldstyle Tales Press website, he is its founder and editor.