The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (78 page)

The knight answers: “Even if am to die right here and now, I won't leave until I know where the king's daughters have been concealed.”

“They are guarded by three dragons in this underground cave,” the gnome responds. “The eldest sits in the first part of the cave with a three-headed dragon next to her. Every day at noon the dragon lays its heads in her lap, and she must louse the dragon until it falls asleep. A basket is hanging in front of the door with a flute, cane, and sword in it along with the three crowns of the king's daughters. First, you must take this basket and carry it off to a safe place. Then you must take the sword, go back to the room, and slice off the dragon's three heads, but you must slice them off all at once. If you fail to do this, the other heads will awake, and nothing can save you.”

Then the gnome gives him a bell and tells him that if he pulls on it, the gnome will rush to help him. So after the knight rescues the first princess, he rescues the second, who has a seven-headed dragon guarding her, and the third, who has a nine-headed dragon guarding her. Then he leads them to the bucket in which he had been let down from the top of the hole. There he calls out to his companions and tells them that they should begin pulling the bucket up. So the two knights pull up the princesses one after the other. When they are above, the two disloyal knights throw the rope down the hole so that the young knight's life will end in a disaster. However, the young knight rings the bell given to him by the gnome. As soon as the gnome arrives, he tells him to blow the flute. Once the knight does this, thousands of gnomes appear from everywhere. Then the king of the gnomes orders them to build stairs for the knight, and he also tells the knight to take the cane out
of the basket when he reaches the top and to strike the earth with it. So the little gnomes get to work and build the stairs, and once the knight climbs to the top, he strikes the ground with the cane, and all the gnomes disappear.

The Grimms conclude the summary of the tale by relating it to other tales in which the hero rescues princesses from a dragon, is betrayed, and then reclaims the glory.

6. The King of the Golden Mountain (Der König vom goldenen Berg). Source: Based on a story told to the Grimms by a soldier.

The Grimms relate this tale to motifs in other Germanic and Nordic stories, especially those dealing with Chriemhilde, Brunhilde, and Siegfried in the
Nibelungenlied
.

7. The Raven (Die Rabe). Source: Georg August Friedrich Goldmann.

The Grimms trace several motifs such as the quarrel of the giants and the sleeping potion to old Germanic and Nordic tales.

8. The Clever Farmer's Daughter (Die kluge Bauemtochter). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

The Grimms draw parallels with the medieval story
Auslag-Sage
and discuss the widespread use of riddles in tales. In particular, they relate the riddle in “The Clever Farmer's Daughter” to one in Johannes Pauli's
Schimpf und Ernst
(1522).

9. The Genie in the Glass (Der Geist im Glas). Source: A tailor from Paderbörn.

The Grimms note the direct relationship to “The Fisherman and the Demon” and “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” in
The Thousand and One Nights
.

10. The Three Little Birds (De drei Vügelkens). Source: Ludowine von Haxthausen and a shepherd, whom Wilhelm Grimm met in the countryside of Wesphalia near Corvey.

After describing how Wilhelm met a shepherd in August of 1813 while visiting friends in Corvey and how the shepherd provided several tales in dialect, the Grimms point to the significance of Antoine Galland's “Histoire de deux soeurs jalouses de leur cadette,”
Les Milles et une nuit
(1712–17). This tale of “The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Younger Sister” was told to Galland in Paris by a Maronite Christian Arab from Aleppo named Youhenna Diab or Hanna Diab. There was no Arabic manuscript for this tale, and Galland created it from memory after listening to Diab and may have introduced elements from the European tales he knew. The Grimms also refer to Giovan Francesco Straparola's “Ancilotto Re di Prouino,”
Le piacevoli notti
(1550). The tale was widespread in Europe in both oral and literary traditions.

11. The Water of Life (Das Wasser des Lebens). Source: A combination of tales from Hesse and Paderborn. The tale from Padernborn was provided by the von Haxthausen family.

The Grimms discuss similarities between this tale and others in their collection such as “Bird Phoenix” and “The Three Little Birds” as well as the Arabian and Italian tales mentioned in the previous note.

12. Doctor Know-It-All (Doctor Allwissend). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

The Grimms note that there is also a very good Low German dialect version that they were not able to completely record.

13. The Frog Prince (Der Froschprinz). Source: Probably the Wild family.

The Grimms remark that the first version of “The Frog Prince,” which incorporates the closing anecdote about Iron Henry, is unusual but worth keeping because it is exceptional. They note that these tales are all related to Apuleius's “Cupid and Psyche” in
The Golden Ass
.

14. The Devil's Sooty Brother (Des Teufels rußiger Bruder). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

The Grimms cite a story about Bearskin in Johann Jakob Christoph Grimmelhausen's
Simplicisimus
(1670) as a major influence on this tale type. They claim that this tale that generally involved a pact with the devil was widespread throughout Europe, and both their friends Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim used key motifs from the Bearskin story in their own literary tales.

15. The Devil in the Green Coat (Der Teufel Grünrock). Source: Von Haxthausen family.

The Grimms regard this tale as basically a variant of “The Devil's Sooty Brother.” 16. The Wren and the Bear (Der Zaunkönig und der Bär). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

The Grimms believe that this tale belongs to the medieval cycle of tales about Renard the Fox, and like many other animals tales of this kind, the major theme is how the weaker animals use their brains to get the better of the larger more powerful animals.

17. The Sweet Porridge (Vom süßen Brei). Source: Henriette Dorothea Wild.

The Grimms explain that the word
Brei
(“porridge”) was like the word
Brot
(“bread”) and generally indicated food in general. The importance of porridge had a great deal to do with the wish and need for food, especially among lower-class people.

18. The Faithful Animals (Die treuen Thiere). Source: Ferdinand Siebert.

The Grimms remark that the animals in this tale are nothing but transformed heroes and people.

19. Tales about Toads (Mährchen von der Unke). Source: The first two tales were provided by Henriette Dorothea Wild and Lisette Wild and were said to be commonly heard in Hesse and neighboring regions. The third tale was a version from Berlin.

They summarize a tale from the
Gesta Romanorum
(thirteenth/fourteenth century) that they believe served as a model for tales of this type:

A knight becomes poor and is sad about this. He catches a viper that had been living in the corner of his room for some time. Then the viper says to him: “Give me milk every day and set it down yourself next to me, and I'll make you rich.”

So the knight brings milk to the viper every day, and soon he becomes rich again. However, the knight's dumb wife advises him to kill the viper because of the treasures that they would probably find in its nest. So the knight carries a dish of milk with one hand and a hammer with the other and brings the milk to the viper, which crawls out of its hole to lick the milk. As the viper is drinking the milk, the knight lifts the hammer to kill the viper but misses his mark. Instead he deals the dish a tremendous blow. So the viper immediately scatters away. From that day onward the knight begins to lose weight and to lose his property, in contrast to the way he had previously expanded his wealth and body. He repeatedly asks the viper to forgive him, but the viper says: “Do you think that I've forgotten the blow that you dealt the dish that was intended for my head? There will be no peace between us.” So the knight remains impoverished for the rest of his life.

20. The Poor Miller's Apprentice and the Cat (Der arme Müllerbursch und das Kätzchen). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

21. The Crows (Die Krähen). Source: August von Haxthausen, who wrote down the tale as told to him by a soldier from Mecklenburg.

The Grimms summarize a similar tale in Johannes Pauli's
Schimpf und Ernst
(1522):

A servant is tied to a tree by his master, and during the night wicked ghosts gather there and talk, and as they talk, they reveal that a certain herb growing under the tree has the power to restore sight to blind people. After he restores his own sight, the servant restores the sight of a rich man's daughter. Consequently, he is given a good deal of property and weds the daughter. His previous master also wants to obtain such wealth. He goes to the tree, but the ghosts peck out his eyes.

The Grimms also draw parallels with “Die wahrsagenden Vögel” in
Feen-Mährchdren
(1801) and with a tale in Christoph Helwig's
Jüdische Historien oder thalmüdischerabbinische wunderbarliche Legenden
(1612).

22. Hans My Hedgehog (Hans mein Igel). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

The Grimms cite Giovan Francesco Straparola's “Il re porco,”
Le piacevoli notti
(1550) as an important source, and they draw parallels with other beast/bridegroom tales in their collection that have donkeys and lions seeking brides. At one point they state: “People who implore God too impetuously to bless them with children are often punished with deformed creatures as animals. When the parents, however, have been humbled, the deformed creatures are transformed into human beings.”

23. The Little Shroud (Das Todtenhemdchen). Source: Ferdinand Grimm.

The Grimms note that the belief that tears wept for a dead person and that fall on the corpse in the grave disturb the dead person's peace appears in the second “Helgelied” and also in the Danish folk song about the knight Aage and the maiden Else.

24. The Jew in the Thornbush (Der Jud' im Dorn). Source: Old printed versions mixed with oral stories from Hesse and Paderborn (Von Haxthausen family).

The Grimms cite the following stories as influencing the development of their tale: Albert Dietrich,
Historia von einem Bauernknecht und München, welcher in der Dornhecken hat müssen tanzen
(1618), and Jakob Ayer's Shrovetide play,
Fritz Dolla mit seiner gewünschten Geige
(1620). Interestingly, there is no Jew in these stories. Instead, there is a thieving monk, and the tales are somewhat anti-Catholic. At the same time, there were other seventeenth-century folk versions in Czechoslovakia in which the Jew plays a negative role.

25. The Expert Huntsman (Der gelernte Jager). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

26. The Fleshing Flail from Heaven (Der Dresschpflegel vom Himmel). Source: Von Haxthausen family.

The Grimms trace this story to the tall tales told by the famous raconteur, Hieronymous Karl Friederich Baron von Münchhausen (1720–97). Some of his preposterous tales were printed in the
Vademeum für lustige Leute
(1781–83), and in 1885, Rudolf Erich Raspe published an English edition of Münchhausen's tales under the title
Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia
.

27. The Children of the Two Kings (De beiden Künnigeskinner). Source: Ludowine von Haxthausen.

The Grimms point to similarities in “The Singing, Springing Lark,” “Prince Swan,” “Sweetheart Roland,” and “Okerlo.”

28. The Clever Little Tailor (Vom klugen Schneiderlein). Source: Ferdinand Siebert.

29. The Bright Sun Will Bring It to Light (Die klare Sonne bringt's an den Tag). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

The Grimms note that in this story, “a profound, marvelous bourgeois motif is articulated. Nobody saw the murder, no human eye except for the sun (God), the heavenly eye. There are other stories about the sun and how it covers itself and doesn't want to view a murder is about to take place.” Then they close their note with a remarkable proverb: “Nothing can be so finely woven that the sun can't eventually expose it.”

30. The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht). Source: Told by a soldier to August von Haxthausen.

31. The Stubborn Child (Von einem eigensinnigen Kinde). Source: From the Hessian oral tradition.

The Grimms state that this is a simple didactic story for children similar to “The Old Grandfather and the Grandson.” Furthermore, they explain that the hand that sticks itself out of the grave was a widespread superstition and pertained to thieves as well as sinners tied to trees. They also recall another similar short version that appeared in Johannes Pauli's
Schimpf und Ernst
(1522).

32. The Three Army Surgeons (Die drei Feldscherer). Source: Dorothea Viehmann.

The Grimms summarize a similar tale from the
Gesta Romanurum
(ca. fourteenth century):

In order to settle an argument, two talented doctors decide to compete with each other and use each other to demonstrate their skills. Whoever loses the competition must serve as the assistant to the other. The first doctor takes out the eyes of the other doctor with the help of an ointment and without causing any damage or pain. After he lays the eyes out on a table, he puts them easily back into the other doctor's sockets. Now the second doctor wants to perform the same trick. He uses his ointment to take out the eyes of the first doctor and lays them out on a table. However, as he is preparing to put the eyes back into the sockets, a raven comes flying through a window, carries away one of the eyes, and eats it. The doctor who performed this operation is desperate because if he can't replace the eye, he will have to become the other doctor's assistant. So he looks around himself and notices a goat. Quickly he cuts out one of the goat's eyes and places it into the socket of his companion as the missing eye. Afterward he asks his companion how he feels, the other doctor says that he didn't experience any pain or damage, but one of his eyes constantly looks over to the bushes and trees (just as goats generally search for leaves) and the other eye keeps looking down.