Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Until recently, I had never read the Grimm's version of "The Frog King," nor had I read any other versions of the story. I did see Disney's Princess and the Frog over the holidays, and growing up I certainly heard stories with vague bits about a frog, a girl, a kiss, a prince, and someone's Happily Ever After. But still treating this as little prior knowledge of the story, I have to ask:

In what language does "she became bitterly angry and threw him against the wall with all her might" translate to "

the princess kissed the frog gently on the tip of his nose"?

To be fair, the latter is crafted as the princess's remorseful apology to the frog for throwing him against the wall, but it is a profound disappointment to find that the kiss was probably pulled out of someone's arse at story time one day.

I can just see it now – a young, thirty-something woman, the mother of a little boy and a little girl, tucks her children into bed one night with the frog story. She tells the story as she remembers it from her own childhood, but as soon as she relates that the nice princess threw the frog harshly against a wall, the woman's tenderhearted young son interrupts with a gasp, saying, "Mommy! No! How could she?" Of course, the mother doesn't have the heart to tell her wide-eyed little tykes that the story's princess was just a selfish brat with no sense of gratitude about her. No, no, no. Instead the young mother improvises. She says to her children, "Yes, that wasn't very nice was it? Which is why the princess felt so bad that she rushed over to gently pick up the frog from where she threw him, lifted him to her lips, and........" The little boy grows up to be a fairy tale anthologizer, so the "Princess + Frog + Kiss = Prince" tale lives happily ever after.

If you're thinking that's probably not the way it happened, then you're probably right. But doesn't it make you wonder? We have read the opinions of Bettleheim, Darnton, Tatar, and now Zipes on the changing of fairy tales, and we blame poor dead guys like Walt Disney for changing them (check out this one of the week's blogs). But Walt certainly wasn't around for the production of his studio's latest creation, so we know it was not he who made the alterations this time.

So who did? Who can claim responsibility for changing the Frog Becomes Prince When Princess Throws Him Into A Wall motif to the Frog Become Prince When Princess Kisses Him motif? Whose line is it, and why was it changed?

My last blog, "So It Is Written," would have looked toward the shift from oral to literary traditions as the beginnings of an answer to this Wall-to-Kiss question. However, the Wall version made it into the literary tradition, so that hypothesis is null. Any ideas?