Then the hermit took the piece of wood, and went back into the world, which he had not seen for so long. He ate and drank nothing but what was given him at the doors; many petitions, however, were not listened to, and many doors remained shut to him, so that he often did not get a crumb of bread.
Once when he had gone from door to door from morning till night, and no one had given him anything, and no one would shelter him for the night, he went forth into a forest, and at last found a cave which someone had made, and an old woman was sitting in it. Then said he: “Good woman, keep me with you in your house for this night;” but she said: “No, I dare not, even if I wished, I have three sons who are wicked and wild, if they come home from their robbing expedition, and find you, they would kill us both.” The hermit said: “Let me stay, they will do no injury either to you or to me,” and the woman was compassionate, and let herself be persuaded. Then the man lay down beneath the stairs, and put the bit of wood under his head. When the old woman saw him do that, she asked the reason of it, on which he told her that he carried the bit of wood about with him for a penance, and used it at night for a pillow, and that he had offended the Lord, because, when he had seen a poor sinner on the way to the gallows, he had said he was getting his deserts. Then the woman began to weep and cried: “If the Lord thus punishes one single word, how will it fare with my sons when they appear before him in judgment?”
At midnight the robbers came home and blustered and stormed. They made a fire, and when it had lighted up the cave and they saw a man lying under the stairs, they fell in a rage and cried to their mother: “Who is the man? Have we not forbidden anyone whomsoever to be taken in?” Then said the mother: “Let him alone, it is a poor sinner who is expiating his crime.” The robbers asked: “What has he done?” “Old man,” cried they, “tell us your sins.” The old man raised himself and told them how he, by one single word, had so sinned that God was angry with him, and how he was now expiating this crime. The robbers were so powerfully touched in their hearts by this story, that they were shocked with their life up to this time, reflected, and began with hearty repentance to do penance for it. The hermit, after he had converted the three sinners, lay down to sleep again under the stairs. In the morning, however, they found him dead, and out of the dry wood on which his head lay, three green twigs had grown up on high. Thus the Lord had once more received him into his favor.
Our Lady’s Little Glass
ONCE UPON a time a waggoner’s cart which was heavily laden with wine had stuck so fast that in spite of all that he could do, he could not get it to move again. Then it chanced that Our Lady just happened to come by that way, and when she perceived the poor man’s distress, she said to him: “I am tired and thirsty, give me a glass of wine, and I will set your cart free for you.” “Willingly,” answered the waggoner, “but I have no glass in which I can give you the wine.” Then Our Lady plucked a little white flower with red stripes, called field bindweed, which looks very like a glass, and gave it to the waggoner. He filled it with wine, and then Our Lady drank it, and in the self-same instant the cart was set free, and the waggoner could drive onwards. The little flower is still always called Our Lady’s Little Glass.
The Aged Mother
IN A LARGE town there was an old woman who sat in the evening alone in her room thinking how she had lost first her husband, then both her children, then one by one all her relatives, and at length, that very day, her last friend, and now she was quite alone and desolate. She was very sad at heart, and heaviest of all her losses to her was that of her sons; and in her pain she blamed God for it. She was still sitting lost in thought, when all at once she heard the bells ringing for early prayer. She was surprised that she had thus in her sorrow watched through the whole night, and lighted her lantern and went to church. It was already lighted up when she arrived, but not as it usually was with wax candles, but with a dim light. It was also crowded already with people, and all the seats were filled; and when the old woman got to her usual place it also was not empty, but the whole bench was entirely full. And when she looked at the people, they were none other than her dead relatives who were sitting there in their old-fashioned garments, but with pale faces. They neither spoke nor sang; but a soft humming and whispering was heard all over the church. Then an aunt of hers stood up, stepped forward, and said to the poor old woman: “Look there beside the altar, and you will see your sons.” The old woman looked there, and saw her two children, one hanging on the gallows, the other bound to the wheel. Then said the aunt: “Behold, so would it have been with them if they had lived, and if the good God had not taken them to himself when they were innocent children.” The old woman went trembling home, and on her knees thanked God for having dealt with her more kindly than she had been able to understand, and on the third day she lay down and died.
The Heavenly Wedding
A POOR PEASANT-BOY one day heard the priest say in church that whosoever desired to enter into the kingdom of heaven must always go straight onward. So he set out, and walked continually straight onwards over hill and valley without ever turning aside. At length his way led him into a great town, and into the midst of a church, where just at that time God’s service was being performed. Now when he beheld all the magnificence of this, he thought he had reached heaven, sat down, and rejoiced with his whole heart. When the service was over, and the clerk bade him go out, he replied: “No, I will not go out again, I am glad to be in heaven at last.” So the clerk went to the priest, and told him that there was a child in the church who would not go out again, because he believed he was in heaven. The priest said: “If he believes that, we will leave him inside.” So he went to him, and asked if he had any inclination to work. “Yes,” the little fellow replied, “I am accustomed to work, but I will not go out of heaven again.” So he stayed in the church, and when he saw how the people came and knelt and prayed to Our Lady with the blessed child Jesus which was carved in wood, he thought: “That is the good God,” and said: “Dear God, how thin you are! The people must certainly let you starve; but every day I will give you half my dinner.” From this time forth, he every day took half his dinner to the image, and the image began to enjoy the food. When a few weeks had gone by, people remarked that the image was growing larger and stout and strong, and wondered much. The priest also could not understand it, but stayed in the church, and followed the little boy about, and then he saw how he shared his food with the Virgin Mary, and how she accepted it.
After some time the boy became ill, and for eight days could not leave his bed; but as soon as he could get up again, the first thing he did was to take his food to Our Lady. The priest followed him, and heard him say: “Dear God, do not take it amiss that I have not brought you anything for such a long time, for I have been ill and could not get up.” Then the image answered him and said: “I have seen your good-will, and that is enough for me. Next Sunday you shall go with me to the wedding.” The boy rejoiced at this, and repeated it to the priest, who begged him to go and ask the image if he, too, might be permitted to go. “No,” answered the image, “you alone.” The priest wished to prepare him first, and give him the holy communion and the child was willing, and next Sunday, when the host came to him, he fell down and died, and was at the eternal wedding.
The Hazel-Branch
ONE AFTERNOON the Christ-child had laid himself in his cradle-bed and had fallen asleep. Then his mother came to him, looked at him full of gladness, and said: “Have you laid yourself down to sleep, my child? Sleep sweetly, and in the meantime I will go into the wood, and fetch you a handful of strawberries, for I know that you will be pleased with them when you awake.” In the wood outside, she found a spot with the most beautiful strawberries; but as she was stooping down to gather one, an adder sprang up out of the grass. She was alarmed, left the strawberries where they were, and hastened away. The adder darted after her; but Our Lady, as you can readily understand, knew what it was best to do. She hid herself behind a hazel-bush, and stood ther
e until the adder had crept away again. Then she gathered the strawberries, and as she set out on her way home she said: “As the hazel-bush has been my protection this time, it shall in future protect others also.” Therefore, from the most remote times, a green hazel-branch has been the safest protection against adders, snakes, and everything else which creeps on the earth.
FOLKLORISTIC COMMENTARY
ONE
The Work of the Brothers Grimm
FRAU KATHERINA VIEHMANN (1755–1815) was about fifty-five when the young Grimm brothers discovered her. She had married in 1777 a tailor of Niederzwehren, a village near Kassel, and was now a mother and a grandmother. “This woman,” Wilhelm Grimm wrote in the preface to the first edition of the second volume (1815), “… has a strong and pleasant face and a clear, sharp look in her eyes; in her youth she must have been beautiful. She retains fast in mind these old sagas—which talent, as she says, is not granted to everyone; for there be many that cannot keep in their heads anything at all. She recounts her stories thoughtfully, accurately, with uncommon vividness and evident delight—first quite easily, but then, if required, over again, slowly, so that with a bit of practice it is possible to take down her dictation, word for word. Much was recorded in this way, and its fidelity is unmistakable. Anyone believing that traditional materials are easily falsified and carelessly preserved, and hence cannot survive over a long period, should hear how close she always keeps to her story and how zealous she is for its accuracy; never does she alter any part in repetition, and she corrects a mistake herself, immediately she notices it. Among people who follow the old life-ways without change, attachment to inherited patterns is stronger than we, impatient for variety, can realize.”*
It was from such people that Jacob and Wilhelm collected, through a period of years, the materials for their book: simple folk of the farms and villages round about, and in the spinning rooms and beer halls of Kassel. Many stories were received, too, from friends. In the notes it is set down frequently, “From Dortchen Wild in Kassel,” or “From Dortchen, in the garden house.” Dorothea Wild—later Wilhelm’s wife—supplied over a dozen of the stories. Together with her five sisters, she had been grounded in fairylore by an old nurse, die alte Marie.* Another family were the Hassenpflugs, who had arrived with a store of tales from Hanau;† still another, the von Haxthausens, who resided in Westphalia.‡ The brothers grubbed for materials also in medieval German manuscripts, and in the Folk Books and collections from the time of Luther.
The special distinction of the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785–1863 and 1786–1859) was its scholarly regard for the sources. Earlier collectors had felt free to manipulate folk materials; the Grimms were concerned to let the speech of the people break directly into print. Among the Romantics of the generation just preceding, folk poetry had been venerated profoundly. Novalis had pronounced the folk tale, the primary and highest poetical creation of man. Schiller had written extravagantly:
Tiefere Bedeutung
Liegt in dem Märchen meiner Kinderjahre
Als in der Wahrheit, die das Leben lehrt.*
Sir Walter Scott had collected and studied the balladry of the Scottish border. Wordsworth had sung of the Reaper. Yet no one before the Grimms had really acquiesced to the irregularities, the boorishness, the simplicity, of the folk talk. Anthologists had arranged, restored, and tempered; poets had built new masterpieces out of the rich raw material. But an essentially ethnographical approach, no one had so much as conceived.
The remarkable fact is that the Grimm brothers never developed their idea; they began with it full blown, as young students hardly out of law school. Jacob, browsing in the library of their favorite professor, the jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny, had chanced on a selection of the German Minnesingers, and almost immediately their life careers had stood before them. Two friends, Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim, who in 1805 had published, in the Romantic manner, the first volume of a collection of folk song, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, gave the brothers valuable encouragement. Jacob and Wilhelm assisted with the later volumes of the Wunderhorn, and began collecting from their friends. But at the same time, they were seeking out, deciphering, and beginning to edit, manuscripts from the Middle Ages. The book of fairy tales represented only a fraction of their immediate project. It would be, as it were, the popular exhibition hall of an ethnological museum: in the offices upstairs research would be going forward, which the larger public would hardly wish, or know how, to follow.
The program proceeded against odds. In 1806 the armies of Napoleon overran Kassel. “Those days,” wrote Wilhelm, “of the collapse of all hitherto existing establishments will remain forever before my eyes.… The ardor with which the studies in Old German were pursued helped overcome the spiritual depression.… Undoubtedly the world situation and the necessity to draw into the peacefulness of scholarship contributed to the reawakening of the long forgotten literature; but not only did we seek something of consolation in the past, our hope, naturally, was that this course of ours should contribute somewhat to the return of a better day.” While “foreign persons, foreign manners, and a foreign, loudly spoken language” promenaded the thoroughfares, “and poor people staggered along the streets, being led away to death,” the brothers stuck to their work tables, to resurrect the present through the past.
Jacob in 1805 had visited the libraries of Paris; his ability to speak French now helped him to a small clerkship in the War Office. Two of his brothers were in the field with the hussars. Just after his mother’s death, in 1808, he was appointed auditor to the state council and superintendent of the private library of Jerome Buonoparte, the puppet king of Westphalia. Thus he was freed from economic worry, but had considerable to do. Volume one of the Nursery and Household Tales appeared the winter of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow (1812); two years later, in the midst of the work on volume two, Jacob was suddenly dispatched to Paris to demand restitution of his city’s library, which had been carried away by the French. Then in 1816, after attending the congress of Vienna as secretary of legation, he was again dispatched, to reclaim another treasure of books. He found the predicament not a little awkward. The librarian, Langlès, seeing him studying manuscripts in the Bibliothèque, protested with indignation: “Nous ne devons plus souffrir ce Monsieur Grimm, qui vient tous les jours travailler ici et qui nous enlève pourtant nos manuscrits.”
Wilhelm was never as vigorous and positive as Jacob, but the more gay and gentle. During the years of the collection he suffered from a severe heart disorder, which for days riveted him to his room. The two were together all their lives. As children they had slept in the same bed and worked at the same table; as students they had had two beds and tables in the same room. Even after Wilhelm’s marriage to Dortchen Wild, in 1825, Uncle Jacob shared the house, “and in such harmony and community that one might almost imagine the children were common property.” * Thus it is difficult to say, with respect to their work, where Jacob ended and Wilhelm began.
The engraved portraits of the brothers reveal two very good looking youths, clear eyed, with delicately modeled features. Wilhelm’s forehead is the larger, his chin the sharper, his eyes look out from arched, slightly nettled brows. With firmer jaw Jacob watches, and a sturdier, more relaxed poise. His hair is a shade the darker, the less curled and tousled. Their mouths, well shaped, are identical. Both are shown with the soft, flaring, highly-stocked collars and the wind-blown hair-trim of the period. They are alert, sharp nosed, sensitive nostriled, and immediately interest the eye.
In the labor on the fairy tales Jacob supplied, apparently, the greater initiative, the stricter demands for scholarly precision, and a tireless zeal for collecting. Wilhelm toiled over the tales with sympathetic devotion, and with exquisite judgment in the patient task of selecting, piecing together, and arranging. As late as 1809, they had considered the advisability of turning over the manuscripts to Brentano. But Jacob mistrusted their friend’s habit of reworking traditional materials�
�shooting them full of personal fantasy, cutting, amplifying, recombining brilliantly, and always flavoring to the contemporary palate. He complained of the mishandling of the texts of the Wunderhorn. The poet, however, thought the scholar a little dull, and exhibited no interest whatsoever in the ideal of the chaste historical record. Achim von Arnim, on the other hand, aided and advised. Though he strove to persuade Jacob to relent a little, here and there, he did not reject the brothers when they insisted on their program. It was he who found a printer for the collection, Georg Andreas Reimer, in Berlin.
Volume one came out at Christmas time, with a dedication to Bettina, the wife of Achim von Arnim, for her little son, Johannes Freimund. In Vienna the book was banned as a work of superstition; but elsewhere, in spite of the political tension of the times, it was eagerly received. Clemens Brentano declared that he found the unimproved materials slovenly and often very boring; others complained of the impropriety of certain of the tales; newspaper reviews were few and cold. Nevertheless, the book enjoyed immediate success, and prospered. The Brothers Grimm had produced, in an unpredicted way, the masterpiece which the whole Romantic movement in Germany had been intending.
The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales Page 79
