Episode Details

The Virtue of Beauty, the Beauty of Virtue: A king is cursed to live as an old man with his servant– now animal attendants–until they are saved by one with kindness for all life.  A poor woodcutter goes hungry while his three daughters get lost in the wood.  The birds of the forest bewilder them to save the kingdom from darkness.

Plot Synopsis of the Story: 

A poor woodcutter, his wife, and three daughters live on the edge of the forest.  When the woodcutter goes out to work, he tells his wife for his eldest daughter to bring his dinner.  He strews a path of millet on the ground so that she can find him, but by dinner-time when she goes out with the soup the birds of the forest have eaten all the seeds up. 

Lost, she sees a glimmer through the trees and finds a hut with all its windows lit up.  She calls to it, and a gravelly voices tells her to come in, where she finds an old man with a beard down to the floor at a table, and three animals around the stove: a hen, a cock, and a brindled cow.  She asks for food and shelter, and he asks the animals, who reply, “Duks.”  She makes dinner from the plentiful cupboard, and she and the old man eat.  She asks where she should sleep, and the animals reply in a jingle that she has had no thought for them and must find her own.  The man directs her upstairs to beds she should make; she does so and falls asleep without waiting for him, and he sends her through a trap door into the cellar.

The woodcutter comes home without his dinner, and the next day he sets out lentils, which are bigger and harder for the birds to pick up, but the birds get them anyway.  The middle daughter goes out with the soup, and the same thing happens.  Down to the cellar.

Then it was the third and last daughter’s turn.  Mother objects, but father says she’s always been the most caring and obedient, and she’ll come through, especially since he will strew the heaviest food–peas.  This time the wood-pigeons get it, but when the youngest comes into the hut, she caresses the animals, and when she makes dinner, she goes out and gets food and draught for the animals, and she eats what is leftover of the man’s dinner.  The jingle of the animals praises her, and she waits for the old man after making the beds, and she is not sent down to the cellar.  

In the middle of the night, she is awoken by loud creaking and bursting sounds, but she falls asleep again, and wakes up in an ivory bed with a velvet canopy.  The man is now a handsome youth, and three servants come to do her bidding.  The man–a King cursed until a girl whose heart was full of love not only for mankind but for animals came and rescued them–orders the servants to get her parents for the wedding.  Her sisters, however, would be servants of charcoal-men deep in the woods until they learned to be kinder, and not let poor animals suffer.

Chapters:

00:00 “The Hut in the Forest” Summary

10:50 Like Beauty and the Beast

13:50 Love Breaks the Spell 

20:50 The Hyperfocused Woodcutter

21:46 In the Fullness of Being

22:18 Why was the Prince Bewitched?

(From a discussion on “The Hut in the Forest”)

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