The Juniper Tree and Other Tales E-Book

The Brothers Grimm

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This volume contains a carefully chosen selection from the Grimms' Children's and Household Tales, the most famous and influential of all the great nineteenth century folklore collections.The fairy tales collected by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were first published in 1812-15. While no one knows where the tales first came from, features of many are found in myths from all over the world. Through the oral tradition, they were passed down for centuries by illiterate storytellers, until at last collectors began recording them in print for the world of today, where they still captivate and delight. The award winning translator Anthea Bell has selected, edited and written a foreword for this new collection.

Leseprobe

JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM

THE JUNIPER TREE

AND OTHER TALES

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

PUSHKINPRESSLONDON

CONTENTS

Title Page

Translator’s Foreword

The Boy Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Is

The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids

Little Brother and Little Sister

The Three Little Men in the Forest

The Fisherman and his Wife

Ashypattle

Mother Holle

The Seven Ravens

Little Red Cape

The Tailor and his Three Sons

The Robber Bridegroom

The Juniper Tree

King Throstlebeard

The Coat of Many Furs

The Singing, Springing Lark

The Goosegirl

Bearskin

The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Little Cat

The Blue Lamp

One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes

Snow-White and Rose-Red

Copyright

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786–1859), were born in Hanau, the two eldest surviving children in a large family whose father, a lawyer, died when Jacob was only eleven. By then the Grimms had moved to their mother Dorothea’s home town of Kassel, where the brothers went to school. They went on to Marburg University, intending to study law, but soon found that their special interests lay in the study of the German language and old German literature. Both brothers became first librarians, then university professors. Only Wilhelm was ever married, to a friend of their youth called Dorothea Wild, Dortchen for short, and much of the time Jacob lived with his brother and sister-in-law.

All their lives the Grimm brothers worked closely together. They began collecting the famous Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Stories) quite early, originally at the request of their friend, the poet Clemens Brentano. Brentano and his brother-in-law Achim von Arnim had collected and published a famous collection of German folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn(The Boy’s Magic Horn), familiar to us today from Mahler’s later settings of some of the texts, and an interest in old songs, legends and stories was an outstanding feature of the Romantic movement of the time. In the end the Grimm brothers published the tales themselves, and the first volume of the first edition dates from 1812, with a second volume published a couple of years later. They continued to work on the tales for many years, and the seventh edition, published in 1857, is generally regarded as the standard text. It has been used for this selection of stories. Jacob was also a noted linguist, studying the phonology of the German language and its early consonant changes, while Wilhelm came to take on most of the editorial work on the tales. They also collaborated on the compiling of a vast German dictionary, completed after their deaths by other scholars.

This selection is a personal choice, and I have left out some of the most familiar stories, such as Snow White and Hänsel and Gretel, in order to include several less well-known tales. But essential in any selection are the two fine stories (in Low German dialect in the original text) contributed by the Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge, The Fisherman and his Wife and The Juniper Tree. The latter transports the savage theme of a child killed, cooked and eaten, ultimately deriving from the ancient Greek myth of the House of Atreus, to a bourgeois German setting, and is often supposed to be too horrific for children, although the Grimms’ title of ‘children’s and household tales’ makes it clear that the stories were not necessarily all meant for children in the first place. In any case, there’s a happy ending, and I have heard a child of seven, who found it in a Victorian translation, retell it to me as one of the best stories he had ever read.

The Juniper Tree is not the only story to contain an ancient classical theme—or rather, the Greek and Latin classics contain elements of folk tale. The Grimms’ version of the huge ‘Cinderella’ group of tales contains an episode where the heroine must pick lentils out of the ashes, first recorded by Apuleius in The Golden Ass of the second century ad, where it occurs in the story of Cupid and Psyche. Ashypattle here (Aschenputtel in German) is recognizably the Cinderella story best known to us (and to the pantomime tradition) from Perrault’s courtly version, but with some different features: the heroine is more self-reliant in her sad plight, calling on the birds of the air for help with the lentils, and tending the tree on her mother’s grave from which a dove throws down three beautiful dresses for her to wear to the King’s court on successive evenings. The Coat of Many Furs is another of the Cinderella group, with a strong theme in that the heroine must run away from home to escape the imminent threat of incestuous rape by her father. Certain tales included in the first edition of the Tales were later removed for showing too much literary influence, so in later editions there was no Puss in Boots or Bluebeard, although The Robber Bridegroom, translated here, is a variant of the Bluebeard theme. Some of the features of Beauty and the Beast, again best known to us in a courtly French version by Mme Leprince de Beaumont (and also based on the Cupid and Psyche story), appear here in The Singing Springing Lark.

The stories had been current in oral versions, passed on by successive generations of storytellers, for a long time before anyone thought it worthwhile to write them down and thus fix them in recorded versions. One of the first collectors was Giambattista Basile in seventeenth-century Italy; the Grimms took a great interest in his collection, the Pentamerone. The heyday of collecting from oral sources, however, was the nineteenth century. The Grimms did not go around visiting rustic storytellers themselves; they lived some decades before those composers and scholars—the names of Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger spring to mind—who went out collecting folk songs in the field with early devices capable of recording the human voice. But some of their particularly good sources came to visit them. One was a tailor’s widow called Dorothea Viehmann, who used to come into Kassel to sell produce from her garden, and whose father had been an innkeeper; she had probably heard old stories told in his establishment in the evenings. Another was an old soldier, Johann Friedrich Krause, who told the Grimms stories in exchange for old clothes. Many of the stories, however, came to them at one remove from the oral tradition, from young women among their circle of friends who had heard them from their nursemaids or other household servants. One of these young women was Dortchen Wild, Wilhelm’s future wife; others were the sisters of Ludwig Hassenpflug, who married the Grimms’ only sister Lotte in 1822. Jacob’s friend Werner von Haxthausen, who shared his interest in folklore, and his sisters provided others.

On the whole the Grimms edited the tales that they collected in a remarkably scrupulous way. Modern readers cannot help noticing the addition of pious Christian references to a number of them; it is likely that this was mainly Wilhelm’s doing, since we know that he asked his younger brother Ludwig, an artist who was the first illustrator of fifty of the tales, to add pictorial details such as a Bible on a table. These additions can sometimes be obtrusive, and I have not included here, for instance, The Girl with No Hands, where a veneer of piety is given to a particularly savage story: to save her father from the Devil, the heroine must let him chop off her hands, although as a reward for virtue she is protected by an angel and grows new hands.

A pact with the Devil in Bearskin, however, one of ten Grimm tales about soldiers (from various sources, not only the retired soldier Krause), is mined from a different seam of tradition. The archetype is the legend of Faust and his bargain with Mephistopheles, memorably dramatized first by Marlowe and then by Goethe, but the Evil One is just as keen to acquire the soul of the humble soldier in this folk tale. The hero, dismissed from the army penniless once the wars are over, is well aware of the risks he runs but succeeds in outwitting the Devil, to be rewarded with marriage to the daughter not, for once, of a king but of a prosperous bourgeois citizen whose fortune he has previously restored. Elements of boisterous farce were associated with the Devil in medieval German tradition, and we have a hint of that here when he turns up at the end to congratulate himself on winning not one but two human souls—those of the heroine’s sisters, who commit suicide and seem to pass entirely unmourned.

A number of the stories clearly derive from very ancient magical themes. Mother Holle is originally an old Germanic nature goddess who makes the snow fall. The Goosegirl is full of mysterious taboos—do the three drops of blood on the white cloth represent a menstruation taboo, why is an oath sworn “under the open sky” so binding, what prohibition exactly allows the heroine to tell her troubles to the stove but not directly to any human being? She herself is a mistress of wind magic, calling up winds to blow away the hat of the boy who pesters her.

All the themes and motifs of folk tale and fairy tale were classified in the first half of the twentieth century by two scholarly folklore experts, Antti Aarne of Finland and Stith Thompson of the United States, and are listed in a work known as the Aarne-Thompson index. As even a glance at the handful of stories in this selection shows, folk tales combine these themes and motifs again and again in different ways, yet somehow from tale to tale they appear both familiar and fresh. While it took the Romantic movement to make them respectable as works of literature and subjects for study, their echoes resonate in much earlier works. Proverbially, you can find almost anything you like in the Bible and Shakespeare, and the story of Jephthah’s daughter in the Old Testament is a common folk-tale theme, represented here by the opening of The Singing Springing Lark. Of the plays of Shakespeare, King Lear is particularly rich in references to folklore. The plot itself begins with a version of the Cinderella story, the one in which the heroine’s sisters make extravagant professions of love for their father, while she herself protests that she loves him as bread or meat loves salt—that is to say, in the right way for a daughter to love her father. Edgar, in his pretended madness, rants, ‘Childe Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.’ And one at least of his snatches of song, ‘Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd? Thy sheep be in the corn,’ sounds very much like an early version of the nursery rhyme Little Boy Blue.

Magic is not an essential in folk tales such as those collected by the Grimms, and The Robber Bridegroom,included here, has none, but features an intrepid heroine and a plot building up to a dramatic revelation of her would-be bridegroom’s true nature. This tale is known in English as Mr Fox and Lady Mary, a very close parallel to the German story. It is the “old tale” to which Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing refers in his line, ‘Like the old tale, my lord; It is not so, nor ’twas not so, and indeed, God forbid it should be so.’ The Grimms’ version also contains the interesting feature of an alliance between the young bride and the old woman who helps her to escape and goes with her. Folk and fairy tales are sometimes said to be anti-feminist, but it appears to me that if you read them without prejudice, you find that about half the time it is the heroine who takes the initiative—unmasking a villain, climbing the glass mountain to rescue her brothers (in The Seven Swans), or her lover, whose memory of her usually has to be revived—and about half the time seems right.

Once these tales were written down, they showed scope in the nineteenth century for adaptation. Snow-White and Rose-Red (no relation to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves) is a story that I enjoyed as a child; I liked the fact that the two sisters are fond of each other. But in fact sisters in folk and fairy tale have no business liking each other; typically we have one good and one bad sister, or one good and two bad. This story, although included by the Grimms—surely with some extra touches of piety added in the editing—seems to be a kind of transitional stage, making the traditional tale into a more conventional type of nineteenth-century moral story designed to edify. Also in the nineteenth century, the Kunstmärchen, the “art” or “literary” fairy tale flourished, for instance in ETA Hoffmann’s story of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and the genre continues to this day in works of fantasy that sometimes hover on the borderline between children’s and adult literature. Authors who may well draw on traditional themes are now known and named. Particularly famous is Hans Christian Andersen, and the traditional Scandinavian equivalent to another of the Grimms’ soldier tales in this selection, The Blue Lamp, stands behind Andersen’s first story, The Tinder Box of 1835. Folk and fairy tales live on, even if not so often now in oral tradition, but they still owe a debt to the Grimms and other international collectors who published the traditional tales.

ANTHEA BELL 2011

THE BOY WHO SET OUT TO LEARN WHAT FEAR IS

THE BOY WHO SET OUT TO LEARN WHAT FEAR IS

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a man who had two sons. The elder son was clever and handy, and did everything well, but the younger son was a simpleton who couldn’t seem to learn anything at all. When they saw him people used to say, “Ah, his poor father’s going to have trouble with that one!”

Whenever there was a job to be done the elder boy had to do it, but if his father sent him to fetch something late in the evening, or at night when it was dark and he would have had to pass the churchyard or some other eerie place, he said, “No, Father, I’m not going that way. It makes my flesh creep!” because he was afraid. And when stories fit to make you shudder were told around the fire in the evening, those who heard them would sometimes say, “Ooh, that really scares me!”

The younger boy, sitting in a corner and listening, didn’t understand what they meant. “People are always saying, ‘Ooh, it makes me shudder with fear!’ or ‘It makes my flesh creep,’” he said. “But I don’t know what fear is—it must be some kind of clever trick that I don’t understand.”

One day his father said to him, “Listen, you there in the corner, you’re growing big and strong. It’s time you learnt a trade so that you can earn your own living. Just see how hard your brother works—but as for you, you’re a hopeless case.”

“Oh, Father, I’d be happy to learn a trade,” said the boy. “In fact what I’d really like to learn is how to shudder with fear. I haven’t the slightest idea how to do it.”

The elder son laughed when he heard that, and thought: Dear me, what a fool my brother is! Well, he’s been simple from birth, and he’ll never amount to anything.

The boy’s father sighed and replied, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll learn what fear is soon enough, but that won’t earn you a living.”

Soon after that the church sexton came visiting, and the boys’ father poured out his troubles and told him what a simpleton his younger son was. He knew nothing and would learn nothing, said the father. “Guess what, when I asked him what trade he’d like to learn, he said he wanted to learn to shudder with fear.”

“If that’s all,” said the sexton, “he can learn what fear is from me. Send him along and I’ll soon teach him.”

The father was glad to hear it, thinking that at least the sexton would lick the boy into shape. So the boy went home with the sexton, who gave him the job of ringing the church bell. After a few days the sexton woke him at midnight and told him to get up, climb the church tower and ring the bell. You’ll soon learn what fear is now, he thought, going ahead of him in secret. And when the boy reached the top of the tower and turned round to take hold of the bell rope, he saw a figure all in white standing at the top of the stairs opposite the belfry window.

“Who’s there?” called the boy, but the figure gave no answer and didn’t move.

“Come on, either tell me who you are or get out,” said the boy. “You’ve no business up here by night.”

But the sexton just stood there perfectly still, to make the boy think he was a ghost.

“What are you doing here?” asked the boy for the second time. “Speak up if you’re an honest fellow, or I’ll throw you down the stairs.”

He doesn’t really mean it, thought the sexton, so he made not a sound and went on standing there as if he were carved from stone.

So the boy asked him what he was doing for the third time, and when there was still no answer he took a run-up and pushed the ghost downstairs. It fell ten steps, landed in a corner and lay there. After that the boy rang the bell, went back to bed without a word to anyone, and fell asleep again.

Meanwhile the sexton’s wife waited and waited for her husband, but he didn’t come home. At last, feeling alarmed, she woke the boy and asked, “Do you know where my husband is? He climbed the tower ahead of you.”

“No, I don’t,” said the boy, “but there was someone standing on the stairs opposite the belfry window, and since he didn’t answer when I spoke to him and wouldn’t move, I thought it was some rascal up to no good and pushed him down the steps. Go and look, and if it’s your husband then I’m sorry.”

The sexton’s wife hurried off and found her husband lying in a corner of the staircase, moaning. He had broken a leg. She carried him down the tower and went off to see the boy’s father, complaining angrily.

“Your son has done a shocking thing,” she said. “He threw my husband down the stairs so that he broke his leg. Get that good-for-nothing out of our house!”

The horrified father went round to the sexton’s house and scolded the boy. “What sort of trick was that? The Evil One must have put it into your head.”

“No, Father, please listen to me,” said the boy. “I’m perfectly innocent. He was standing in the dark like someone up to no good, and since I didn’t know who he was I asked him three times to speak or go away.”

“Oh, dear me,” said his father, “you’re nothing but bad luck! Get out of my sight. I never want to set eyes on you again.”

“Very well, Father, anything you say. Just wait until day and I’ll set out to learn to learn what fear is. Then at least I’ll know a trade that will earn me a living.”

“Learn what you like,” said his father, “I don’t care. Here are fifty talers. Take them, go out into the world, and don’t put me to shame by telling a soul where you come from or who your father is.”

“Very well, Father,” said the boy. “If that’s all you want, I can easily remember it.”

So when day dawned the boy put his fifty talers in his pocket and started out along the high road, saying to himself out loud all the time, “Oh, if only I could shudder with fear! If only I knew what fear is!”

A man caught up with the boy and heard him talking to himself, and when they had gone a little further and a gallows came in sight, the man said to him, “Look, there’s the tree where seven men married the ropemaker’s daughter, and now they’re learning to fly. Sit down under it and wait for night, and you’ll soon learn what fear is.”

“If that’s all there is to it, it’s easily done,” said the boy. “And if I learn what fear is so quickly then you can have my fifty talers. Come back and see me tomorrow morning.”

So the boy went over to the gallows, sat down underneath it and waited for evening to come. It was chilly, so he lit a fire, but around midnight such a cold wind blew that in spite of the fire he couldn’t get warm. And when the wind moved the hanged men in the air, and made them bump into each other, he thought: If I’m cold down by this fire, then those poor fellows dangling up there must be freezing.

He felt so sorry for them that he put up a ladder, climbed it, untied the nooses around the hanged men’s necks one by one and brought all seven down. After that he stirred up the fire, blew on the flames and settled them around it to get warm. But there they sat, never moving, until the fire set their clothes alight. “Mind what you’re doing, or I shall hang you up again,” said the boy. However, the dead men couldn’t hear him. They gave no answer and let their rags go on burning. So the boy grew angry with them and said, “If you can’t take better care of yourselves there’s nothing I can do for you. I don’t want to burn too.” And he hung them all up on the gallows again one by one. Then he lay down by his fire and went to sleep.

Next morning the man came back hoping for the fifty talers. “Well,” he asked, “have you learnt to shudder with fear now?”

“No, how could I?” said the boy. “Those fellows up there never opened their mouths, and they were stupid enough to let the few old rags they’re wearing catch fire.”

The man saw that he wasn’t going to get the fifty talers today, so off he went, saying to himself: I never met such an oddity before.

The boy went on his way too, and once again he began saying to himself, “Oh, if only I could shudder with fear! If only I knew what fear is.”

A carter coming up the road behind him overheard what he was saying and asked, “Who are you?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy.

“Well, where do you come from?” asked the carter.

“I don’t know.”

“Who’s your father, then?”

“I mustn’t say.”

“And what’s that you keep muttering to yourself?”

“Oh,” said the boy, “I want to learn to shudder with fear, but no one can teach me how.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense,” said the carter. “Come along with me, and I’ll find you a place to sleep.”

The boy went with the carter, and in the evening they reached an inn and decided to spend the night there. As they went in the boy said again, “Oh, if only I could shudder with fear! If only I knew what fear is.”

Hearing him, the landlord laughed and said, “If that’s what you want, then this is your big chance.”

“Oh, do be quiet,” said the landlord’s wife. “So many rash folk have already lost their lives. It would be a shame for a fine young man like this never to see the light of day again.”

But the boy said, “However hard it is to shudder with fear, I really want to learn. That’s why I’m on my travels.”

And he would give the landlord no peace, but pestered him to say what he meant. Not far from there, the landlord told him, there was a haunted castle, and anyone who spent three nights in it was bound to learn what fear is. The King had promised his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who dared to do it, and the Princess was the loveliest girl in the world. This castle, said the landlord, was full of treasures, enough to make a poor man rich, but they were guarded by evil spirits. Many men had already gone into the castle, but none of them ever came out again.

Next morning the boy went to see the King and said, “I’d like to spend three nights in the haunted castle, Your Majesty.”

The King looked at the boy and liked him, so he said, “You may ask for three gifts to take into the castle with you, but they mustn’t be living things.”

“In that case,” said the boy, “I’ll have a fire, a lathe and a woodworker’s bench with a clamp and knife.”

The King had all these things brought to the castle by daylight. As darkness began to fall, the boy went in, lit a bright fire in one of the rooms of the castle, put the woodworker’s bench and the knife beside the fire, and sat down at the lathe. “Oh, if only I knew what fear is!” he said. “But I don’t suppose I shall learn here either.”

Around midnight, as he was about to stir up the fire and was blowing on it, he heard a sudden yowling from a corner. “Meow, meow! Oh, we’re so cold!”

“Then why are you making such a noise about it, you fools?” called the boy. “If you’re cold, come and sit down by my fire and get warm.”

When he had said that, two big black cats came leaping up, sat down one on each side of him and stared fiercely at him with their fiery eyes. After a while, when they were warmer, they said, “How about a game of cards, friend?”

“Why not?” said the boy. “But show me your paws first.”

The cats put out their paws.

“My word, what long nails you have!” said the boy, seeing their claws. “Wait a moment, I must trim them for you first.” So saying, he took the cats by the scruff of the neck, put them on the woodworker’s bench and clamped their paws down. “Now that I’ve seen your fingers,” he said, “I don’t think I fancy a game of cards with you after all.” So he killed them and threw them into the water of the lake outside the castle.

But once he had dealt with those two monsters and was going to sit down by his fire again, black cats and black dogs on red-hot fiery chains came pouring out of every nook and cranny, more and more of them, and he couldn’t fend them off. They howled horribly and trampled over his fire, scattering the embers and trying to put it out. He sat and watched for a while, but when he felt they had gone too far he picked up his knife and said, “Get away from here, you nuisances!” and made for them. Some ran away, and he killed the others and threw them into the lake. Then he came back, blew up the sparks of his fire again and warmed himself.