The Nutcracker

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is a literary fairy tale by the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, first published in Berlin in 1816 as part of the collection Kinder-Mährchen, told in the expansive style of a novel rather than a short bedtime story.

Marie and her brother Fritz are given Christmas presents in the house of their parents, and their godfather Drosselmeier, a supreme court justice who is also a clockmaker and inventor, brings a clockwork castle full of mechanical people. The children tire of it quickly, but Marie notices a nutcracker and adopts him as her own charge; when Fritz tries to crack a nut that is too large and hard, the jaw breaks and Marie binds the wound with a ribbon from her dress.

That night the cabinet comes alive. The dolls go to war with the Mouse King and his mice, and the nutcracker commands them, taking the fight that the humans have slept through. Hoffmann's tale of a favoured toy, an old family story about the nutcracker's own ugliness, and a kingdom of dolls behind it became the source of Alexandre Dumas's adaptation and, through it, of Tchaikovsky's ballet.