Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version (30 page)

THIRTY-NINE

THE LITTLE SHROUD

There was once a little boy, seven years old, so sweet and beautiful that no one could look at him without loving him, and as for his mother, she loved him more than anything else in the world. One day without any warning he fell ill and died; nothing could console his mother, and she wept day and night.

Soon afterwards, not long after he was buried, the child began to appear every night in the places where he used to sit and play when he was alive. If his mother cried, he cried as well, and when morning came, he disappeared.

But his mother would not stop crying, and one night the child appeared in the white shroud in which he’d been buried, and with the little wreath on his head that had been placed in the coffin with him.

He sat on her bed and said, ‘Oh, mother, please stop crying, or else I won’t be able to fall asleep! My shroud’s all wet from the tears you keep dropping on it.’

That startled the mother, and she stopped crying.

Next night the child came to her bed again, holding a little light in his hand. He said, ‘See, my shroud’s nearly dry now. I’ll be able to rest in my grave.’

His mother offered her grief to God and bore it patiently and quietly; and the child never came again, but slept in his little bed under the earth.

***

Tale type:
unclassified

Source:
a story from Bavaria, told to the Grimm brothers by an unknown informant

See my note to the following story.

FORTY

THE STOLEN PENNIES

Once a father and his wife and their children were sitting around the table for their midday meal, and a good friend of the family, who had come to visit, was sitting with them. While they were sitting there the clock struck twelve, and just then the visitor saw the door open and a deathly-pale child, dressed in snow-white clothes, come into the room. He didn’t look around or say a word, but went straight into the next room. A few moments later he came out, still saying nothing, and went out of the door again.

Next day, and the next, the child came back in the same way. Finally the visitor asked the father who this beautiful child was who came in and went into the next room at noon every day.

‘I didn’t see him,’ said the father. ‘I’ve got no idea who he can be.’

Next day, when the child came again, the visitor pointed him out, but neither father nor mother nor the other children could see a thing. The visitor got up and went to the door of the next room, and opened it a little way. There he saw the child sitting on the floor, probing the cracks between the floorboards with his fingers; but as soon as he saw the visitor, he disappeared.

The visitor told the family what he’d seen and described the child exactly. The mother recognized him at once, and said, ‘Oh, it’s my dear son, who died four weeks ago.’

They lifted the floorboards and found two pennies that the mother had given the child to give to a poor man. However, the child had thought, ‘I can buy myself a cake with that,’ and hidden the pennies under the floor.

That was why he had had no peace in his grave, and came every day at noon to look for them. The parents gave the money to a poor man, and after that the child was never seen again.

***

Tale type:
ATU 769, ‘The Child’s Grave’

Source:
a story told to the Grimm brothers by Gretchen Wild

I’ve put the notes to this and
‘The Little Shroud’
together because of their obvious similarity. ‘The Little Shroud’ is unclassified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, and the only tale listed there to exemplify this type is this tale itself, under the title of ‘The Child’s Grave’.

Each of these tales is straightforward and pious. They are pure ghost stories, but their intention is not to make us shiver so much as to point a simple moral. The belief system they come from is almost pre-Christian: the dead deserve their rest, and the living can help them find it; excessive grief is self-indulgent; sin must be atoned for. Once the human action has been taken, the supernatural withdraws.

The effect is to give them the character of ghost stories of the traditional ‘true’ type, such as those gathered in the well-known
Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book
(1934), or more recently in Peter Ackroyd’s
The English Ghost
(2010). All that would be needed to make them identical to that sort of story is names for the characters concerned and for the places where the events took place. To complete the illusion, a source cunningly disguised by means of an initial and a dash could be invented, thus: ‘Herr A—, a highly respected official of the town of D—, was travelling in the Duchy of H— when he heard the following story . . .’

FORTY-ONE

THE DONKEY CABBAGE

There was once a young hunter who went out to his hide in the forest. He was happy and light-hearted, and he whistled on a blade of grass as he went along.

All at once he came across a poor old woman. She said, ‘Good morning, my fine young hunter. I can see you’re in a good mood, but I’m hungry and thirsty. Can you spare me any change?’

The hunter felt sorry for the old woman, so he put his hand in his pocket and gave her the few coins he had. He was about to go on his way when the old woman clutched his arm.

‘Listen, my good hunter,’ she said. ‘You’ve been kind to me, so I’m going to give you a gift. Carry straight on, and in a little while you’ll come to a tree with nine birds sitting in it. They’ll have a cloak in their claws, and they’ll be fighting over it. Take your gun and shoot right into the middle of them. They’ll drop the cloak all right, and one of the birds will fall dead at your feet. Take the cloak with you, because it’s a wishing cloak. Once you throw it round your shoulders, all you’ve got to do is wish yourself somewhere, and you’ll be there in a flash. And you should take the heart from the dead bird, too. Cut it out and then swallow it whole. If you do that, you’ll find a gold coin under your pillow every morning of your life.’

The hunter thanked the wise woman and thought to himself: ‘These are certainly fine gifts she’s giving me; I hope she’s telling the truth.’

He’d gone no further than a hundred yards when he heard a great squawking and flapping in the branches above him. He looked up and saw a flock of birds all tearing at a piece of cloth with their claws and beaks, as if each one wanted it for itself.

‘Well,’ said the hunter, ‘this is odd. It’s happening just as the old girl said it would.’

He took his gun and fired a shot right into the middle of the birds. Most of them shrieked and flew away at once, but one fell to the ground dead, and the cloak fell too. The hunter did just as the old woman had advised. He cut the bird open with his knife, took out the heart and swallowed it, and went home with the cloak.

When he woke up next morning, the first thing he thought of was the old woman’s promise. He felt under his pillow, and sure enough, there was a gleaming gold coin. Next day he found another one, and then another, and so it went on each time he woke up. Quite soon he had a fine heap of gold, and then he thought, ‘It’s all very well collecting this, but what use is it to me here? I think I’ll go out and see the world.’

He said goodbye to his parents, slung his gun and his knapsack over his shoulders, and set off. After walking for a few days, he was just coming out of a dense forest when he saw a beautiful castle standing in the open country beyond the trees. He went closer, and saw two people standing at one of the windows, looking down at him.

One of them was an old woman, and she was a witch. She said to the other, who was her daughter, ‘That man who’s just coming out of the forest has got a great treasure inside him. We must get it for ourselves, my honey, because we can make much better use of it than he’s doing. You see, he swallowed the heart of a particular bird, and as a result he finds a gold coin under his pillow every morning.’ She went on to tell her daughter the whole story of the hunter and the wise woman, and she finished by saying, ‘And if you don’t do exactly as I tell you, my dear, you’ll be sorry.’

As the hunter came closer to the castle he saw them more clearly, and thought, ‘I’ve been wandering about for quite a while now, and I’ve got plenty of money. Maybe I’ll stop at this castle for a day or two and have a rest.’

Of course, the real reason was that the girl was very beautiful.

He went into the castle, where they welcomed him and looked after him generously. Before long he was in love with the witch’s daughter, so much so that he could think of nothing else; he had eyes only for her, and whatever she wanted him to do, he did. In fact he was besotted.

Seeing this, the old woman said to the girl, ‘This is the time to act. We’ve got to get that bird’s heart. He won’t even notice it’s gone.’

She prepared a potion, and poured it into a cup for the girl to hand to the young man.

‘My dearest one,’ she said to him, ‘won’t you drink to my health?’

He drank it all down in one, and almost immediately he was so sick that he vomited up the bird’s heart. The girl helped him to lie down, with many soft words of concern, and then went straight back, found the heart, rinsed it in clean water and swallowed it herself.

From then on the hunter found no more gold coins under his pillow. He had no idea that they were appearing under the girl’s, and that the witch collected them every morning and hid them away. He was so infatuated that all he wanted to do was spend time with her daughter.

The witch said, ‘We’ve got the heart, but that isn’t enough. We must have the wishing cloak too.’

‘Can’t we leave him that?’ said the daughter. ‘After all, the poor man’s lost his fortune.’

‘Don’t you be so soft!’ said the witch. ‘A cloak like that is worth millions. There aren’t many of them about, I can tell you. I must have it, and I will have it.’

She told her daughter what to do and said that if she didn’t obey, she’d regret it. So the girl did as the witch said: she stood at the window gazing out as if she were very sad.

The hunter said, ‘Why are you standing there looking so sad?’

‘Ah, my treasure,’ said the girl, ‘out there lies Mount Garnet, where the most precious jewels grow. When I think of them I want them so much that I can’t help feeling sad . . . But who can go there and gather them? Only the birds, who can fly. I’m sure a human being could never get there.’

‘If that’s all that’s troubling you,’ said the hunter, ‘leave it to me. I’ll soon cheer you up.’

He took his cloak and swung it around his shoulders, and over her as well, so it enfolded both of them. Then he wished to be on Mount Garnet. The blink of an eye later, they were sitting near the top of it. Precious stones of every kind sparkled brilliantly all around them; they had never seen anything so lovely.

However, the witch had cast a spell to make the hunter sleepy, and he said to the girl, ‘Let’s sit down and rest a while. I’m so tired my legs can’t keep me up.’

They sat down, he laid his head in her lap, and a moment later his eyes began to close. As soon as he was fast asleep, she took the cloak from around his shoulders and wrapped it around herself, before gathering as many garnets and other jewels as she could carry and wishing herself back home.

When the hunter awoke and found himself alone on the wild mountain, and that his cloak had gone too, he realized that his beloved had deceived him.

‘Oh,’ he sighed, ‘I didn’t know the world was so full of treachery!’

He sat there too distressed to move. He couldn’t think what to do.

Now the mountain happened to belong to some ferocious giants, great thundering brutes, and it wasn’t long before the hunter heard three of them coming. He lay down quickly and pretended to be fast asleep.

The first giant prodded him with his toe and said, ‘What’s this earthworm doing here?’

‘Squash him,’ said the second. ‘I would.’

But the third one said, ‘Don’t bother. There’s nothing here for him to live on, so he’ll be dead soon in any case. Besides, if he climbs to the top, the clouds will carry him away.’

They left him alone and carried on talking as they walked off. The hunter had heard everything they’d said, and as soon as they were out of sight, he got to his feet and clambered up the mountain to the peak, which was surrounded by clouds.

He sat down on the jewelled pinnacle, while clouds came and bumped into him, and finally one of them grabbed him and tossed him on board. It floated around the sky for some time, and very comfortable it was too, and the hunter saw many interesting things as he peered over the side; but eventually it began to sink towards the ground, and soon enough he was deposited in someone’s kitchen garden, which had high walls around it.

The cloud floated up again and left him standing between the cabbages and the onions.

‘Pity there’s no fruit,’ he said to himself. ‘I wouldn’t mind a nice apple or a pear, and I’m so hungry. Still, I can always have a mouthful of cabbage. It doesn’t taste wonderful, but it’ll keep me going.’

There were two kinds of cabbages growing in the garden, pointed ones and round ones, and to begin with the hunter pulled a few leaves off a pointed one and started to chew. It tasted good enough, but when he’d only had a few bites, he felt the strangest sensation: his skin tickled all over as long hairs sprouted out of it, his spine bent forward and his arms lengthened and turned into hairy legs with hooves on the ends of them, his neck thickened and grew longer, his face lengthened and two long ears shot up from the sides of his head, and before he knew what was happening, he was a donkey.

Needless to say, that made the cabbage taste much better. He went on eating it with relish, and then moved on to a round cabbage. He’d only had a couple of bites when he found it all happening again, but in reverse, and in less time than it takes to tell it, he was a human being again.

‘Well,’ he said to himself, ‘how about that? Now I can get back what belongs to me.’

So he picked a head of the pointed cabbage and a head of the round one, put them safely in his knapsack, and climbed the wall and got away. He soon discovered where he was, and set off back to the castle where the witch lived. After some days’ walking he found it again, and kept out of sight while he dyed his face so brown that even his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.

Then he knocked at the door. The witch herself opened it.

‘Can you give me shelter for the night?’ the young man said. ‘I’m worn out, and I can’t go any further.’

‘Who are you, my dear?’ said the witch. ‘What brings you out this way?’

‘I’m a royal messenger, and the king sent me specially to look for the most delicious cabbage in the world. I was lucky enough to find it, and it really is delicious, but the weather’s been so hot that it’s beginning to wilt. I don’t think I’ll get it back in time.’

When the witch heard about this delicious cabbage, she couldn’t wait to try it herself.

‘Have you got a little bit my daughter and I could taste?’ she said.

‘I brought two heads of it. I don’t see why you shouldn’t have one of them, since you’re being kind enough to let me stay the night.’

He opened his knapsack and gave her the donkey cabbage. She took it eagerly and hurried to the kitchen, her mouth already watering. She put some water on to boil and chopped the cabbage up daintily, and boiled it for just a few minutes with some salt and a little butter. It smelt so good that she couldn’t resist, and before she brought it to the table she nibbled at one of the leaves, and then another, and of course as soon as she swallowed them she started to change. In a matter of seconds she was an old donkey, and she ran out into the courtyard to kick up her heels.

Next the serving girl came in, and smelling the buttery cabbage she couldn’t help having a bite herself. This was an old habit of hers, and sure enough, the same thing happened to her. She couldn’t hold the bowl with her new hooves, so she dropped it where it was and ran outside.

Meanwhile the witch’s daughter was sitting talking to the messenger.

‘I don’t know what’s keeping them,’ she said. ‘It does smell good.’

The hunter thought that the magic must have happened by this time.

‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and get it.’

When he got to the kitchen he saw the two donkeys running around the courtyard, and thought, ‘Good! Just as I planned it, and serve them right.’

He scooped up the cabbage that had fallen to the floor, put it in the bowl and brought it to the girl. She had some at once, and she too became a donkey and ran outside.

The hunter washed his face so that they could recognize him, and went out to the courtyard with a length of rope.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was me. I’ve got you good and proper, and now you’re going to pay for your treachery.’

He tied all three to the rope, and drove them ahead of him out of the castle and along the road till then came to a mill. He knocked on the door.

‘What d’you want?’ said the miller.

‘I’ve got three ugly bad-tempered beasts here, and as they’re no good to me I want to get rid of them. If you take them and treat them as I tell you, I’ll pay whatever you ask.’

That wasn’t the sort of offer the miller got every day, so he agreed at once.

‘How d’you want me to treat them, then?’ he said.

‘Beat the old one three times a day, and feed her once’ (that was the witch). ‘The middle one can have three feeds a day and one beating’ (that was the servant), ‘and the young one’s not too bad. Feed her three times and don’t beat her at all.’ He couldn’t bring himself to have the girl beaten.

He went back to the castle and put his feet up. After a couple of days the miller came to see him.

‘That old donkey,’ he said, ‘she wasn’t much good. She’s dead now. But the other two are looking really down in the mouth. I don’t know what to do with them.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said the hunter. ‘I think they’ve probably been punished enough.’

He told the miller to drive the other two donkeys back to the castle, where he spread some of the round cabbage leaves on the ground and let them eat, so they became human beings again.

The witch’s beautiful daughter fell on her knees and said, ‘Oh, my dearest, forgive me for all the evil I did you! My mother forced me to do it. I never wanted to betray you, because I love you with all my heart. The wishing cloak is in the hall cupboard, and as for the bird’s heart, I’ll drink something to make me bring it up again.’

‘No need for that,’ he said, because he’d found himself in love with her all over again. ‘You can keep it. It won’t make any difference who has it, because I want to marry you.’

Their wedding was celebrated soon afterwards, and they lived together very happily until they died.

***

Tale type:
ATU 567, ‘The Magic Bird-Heart’, continuing as ATU 566, ‘The Three Magic Objects and the Wonderful Fruits’