Mouscedes and The Mouse King

How little did the romantic writers of the late XIXth century imagine that their most terrifying characters would have to deal with the problems of their adolescent children in the XXIth century like the most vulgar of the mortals.

One of these romantic monsters is the Mouse King, father of the adorable and lactose intolerant, Mouscedes King. ETA Hoffmann, multi-talented romantic author and, we could say "grandfather" of Mouscedes King, was inspired by an ancient legend from the Plague days to create this seven-headed villain in his Christmas tale "The Nutcracker and The Mouse King" that later would inspire the Tchaikovsky's ballet although took after the Alexander Dumas adaptation . We could say that Hoffmann's stories, which have been portraited in ballet and opera, were a kind of Black Mirror of the time in which the plot revolves around an everyday object or "technology" and the dangers that could unravel with many doses of fantasy and a rather dark point.

In the Nutcracker, a battle happens in Marie's room (Klara in the ballet) between an army of toy soldiers led by the Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The Mouse King is defeated and the girl shows her parents, as proof, the seven crowns of the king but they do not believe her. But ... was it seven heads or seven mice? Since the year 1500 aprox there has been evidence of sightings in central Europe of a kind of amalgam of many rats that survived despite being all joined by the tail in a knot impossible to undo due to grow up in a small space. This phenomenon that people began to call Rattenkönig (Mouse King) has been a mistery for zoologists and scientists who nowadays do not believe that this is possible and attribute the ones that are in some museums to "fakes" made by human hands. Probably, a rat would bite its own tail to free itself before living like this, however, this phenomenon became a legend.

The daughter of Dracula, the daughter of Frankestein, the daughter of the Mouse King ... It seems that the Monster High line created by Garrett Sander, apart from being an excellent concept as a toy, has a lot more history than most people think and would be an excellent tool to introduce children, in a soft and understandable way, to that romantic horror literature that has given us such glorious stories!

by The Barbiest