The Nutcracker

10-12 min read
16 pages

The nutcracker and the mouse king by E. T. A. Hoffmann, to read aloud. A Christmas present that fights a battle on the parlour floor.

On Christmas Eve, in a house where the parlour doors stayed shut all afternoon, Marie and her brother Fritz waited for the bell. When it rang, the tree was lit from top to bottom and the presents were underneath it.

Among them, standing very straight, was a wooden man in a soldier's coat with a wide mouth and a lever at the back for cracking nuts. He was not handsome. Marie liked him at once.

Her godfather Drosselmeier, who mended clocks and made things that moved, said the nutcracker had been in the family a long while and had had a difficult life.

Fritz put the hardest nuts in the bowl into his mouth and broke three of his teeth, and after that Marie tied her ribbon round his jaw and would not let her brother near him.

That night she could not sleep, and she came down to the parlour, and the clock struck twelve in a way that clocks do not usually strike.

Then the floor began to move. Mice came out from under the boards and the skirting and behind the stove — hundreds of them — and at the front was one with seven heads and a small crown on each.

And the toys got up. The soldiers formed ranks on the carpet, the dolls carried ammunition, the cannon on the bottom shelf was loaded with sugar plums, and the nutcracker stood in front of them all with his sword out and his jaw still tied.

The battle went badly. The sugar plums did not stop the mice for long, the soldiers were pushed back past the footstool, and the nutcracker was surrounded near the leg of the sofa.

Marie pulled off her slipper and threw it at the mouse king as hard as she could — and then the parlour went sideways, and she felt the glass of the cabinet door break, and then nothing.

She woke in bed with her arm bandaged and everybody telling her she had had a fever and walked in her sleep. Her godfather, when he came, did not say that. He sat down and told her a story instead.

It was about a princess called Pirlipat, and a queen of the mice, and a young man who had broken a spell and been turned into a wooden nutcracker for it, and who could only be freed if somebody cared for him as he was. «That is a story about him,» said Marie. «It is a story,» said Drosselmeier, and looked at the ceiling.

The next night the mouse king came back — alone this time, and up onto her bed, and he wanted her sweets, and then her dolls, and then he began on what he would do if she did not hand them over.

So Marie gave the nutcracker her sword — Fritz's smallest tin one — and for three nights she heard fighting in the dark, and on the fourth morning the nutcracker was standing on her bedside table holding seven small crowns.

Then he asked her to come with him, and they went through the sleeve of her father's fur coat hanging in the hall, which turned out not to end where a sleeve ends.

On the other side was a country made of the things she knew from Christmas: a meadow of sugared almonds, a river of orange syrup, a town where the roofs were marzipan and the people were pleased to see the nutcracker home.

She came back. Nobody believed a word of it, and she stopped saying it out loud, and she kept the seven crowns in a box and looked at them when the talk turned to what she had imagined. A year later a young man came to the house with Drosselmeier and was introduced as his nephew, and he asked Marie, in front of everybody, whether she remembered the sword. And then the grown-ups had to think of something else to say.

…read the rest in the Marytale app.

Marytale is an app of illustrated bedtime stories to read to your child — a picture on every page, no ads and no internet needed. The bookmark stays where your child fell asleep.

Try it free

Scan with your phone to get Marytale

Text source: Plot in the public domain (E. T. A. Hoffmann, «The Nutcracker and the Mouse King», 1816). The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Want to know where these stories come from? The articles are here

The Nutcracker

More stories to read