Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm

by Philip Pullman

  They lived like that for some time. But one day it happened that the king held a great hunt in the forest. The trees resounded with the notes of the horn, the barking of the hounds, the joyful shouts of the huntsmen. The fawn pricked up his ears and longed to be outside with the hunt.

  ‘Let me go with them, Sister!’ he begged. ‘I’d give anything to join them in the hunt!’

  He pleaded so passionately that she gave in.

  ‘But,’ she said as she opened the door, ‘make sure you come back by evening. I’m going to lock the door in case the wild huntsmen come by, so to let me know it’s you, knock and say, “Sister dear, your brother’s here.” If you don’t say that, I shan’t open the door.’

  The young deer was out through the door in a flash, bounding away into the trees. He had never felt so good, so happy, or so free as when the huntsmen saw him and started after him, and failed to catch him; whenever they came near and thought they’d surely caught him this time, he leaped away into the bushes and disappeared.

  When it was getting dark he ran to the little house and knocked on the door.

  ‘Sister dear, your brother’s here!’

  Little Sister opened the door, and he trotted in happily and told her all about the hunt. He slept deeply all night.

  When morning came and he heard the distant music of the horn and the hounds once more, he couldn’t resist.

  ‘Sister, please! Open the door, I beg you! I must go and join in, or I’ll die of longing!’

  Unhappily Little Sister opened the door, and said, ‘Don’t forget the password when you come back.’

  He didn’t reply, but bounded away towards the hunt. When the king and his huntsmen saw the deer with the golden collar, they gave chase at once. Through brakes and briars, through thickets and across clearings the little deer ran all day long, and he led the hunt on a wild chase. Several times they nearly caught him, and when the sun was setting, a shot from a gun wounded him in the leg. He couldn’t run fast any more, and one of the huntsmen managed to follow him home, and saw him knock, and heard the words, ‘Sister dear, your brother’s here!’

  And the huntsman saw the door open, and the girl let in the deer and shut the door again. He went and told the king.

  ‘Is that so?’ said the king. ‘Well, we shall hunt him all the harder tomorrow.’

  Little Sister was frightened when she saw that her deer was wounded. She washed the blood off his leg, and bound a poultice of herbs there to help it heal. In fact the wound wasn’t a serious one, and when he woke up in the morning the little deer had forgotten all about it. He begged to go out for a third time.

  ‘Sister, I can’t tell you the passion in my breast for the hunt! I must go and join in, or I shall go mad!’

  Little Sister began to weep. ‘Yesterday they wounded you,’ she sobbed, ‘and today they’ll kill you. And I’ll be left alone in the wild woods – think of that! I’ll have no one left! I can’t let you out, I can’t!’

  ‘Then I’ll die here in front of you. When I hear the notes of the horn, I feel every atom of my body leaping with joy. My longing is too much for me, Sister! I beg you, let me go!’

  She couldn’t resist his pleas, and with a heavy heart she unlocked the door. Without a backward glance the deer leaped out and bounded away into the forest.

  The king had given orders to his huntsmen that they should do the deer with the golden collar no harm. ‘If you see him, put your guns up, and hold the hounds back. Ten golden talers to the man who sees him first!’

  They hunted the deer through every part of the forest all day long, and finally as the sun was setting the king called the huntsman to him.

  ‘Show me where that cottage is. If we can’t catch him one way, we’ll trap him another. What was the little rhyme he said?’

  The huntsman repeated it for him. When they reached the cottage, the king knocked on the door and said: ‘Sister dear, your brother’s here!’

  The door opened at once. The king walked in, and found standing there a girl more beautiful than any he had seen. She was frightened to see a man and not her little deer, but the man was wearing a golden crown, and he smiled kindly. He reached out his hand and took hers.

  ‘Will you come to my palace with me,’ he said, ‘and be my wife?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Little Sister. ‘But my little deer must come too. I won’t go without him.’

  ‘He can come by all means,’ said the king. ‘He shall live as long as you do, and he shall want for nothing.’

  And as he said that, the deer himself came bounding in. Little Sister caught his golden collar and tied the cord of rushes to it. The king lifted the girl on to his horse, and they went home to the palace, the deer trotting proudly behind his sister and the king.

  Soon afterwards the wedding was celebrated, and Little Sister became the queen. As for Little Brother the deer, he had the whole palace garden to play in, and a team of servants to look after him: the Groom of the Grass, the Valet of the Horns and the Hooves, and the Maid of the Golden Curry Comb, whose job it was to groom him thoroughly every day before he went to bed and deal with any ticks or fleas or lice he might have picked up. So they were all very happy.

  Now all this time the wicked stepmother had thought that the brother and sister must have been torn to pieces by wild animals. But when she read in the paper that Little Sister had become a queen, and that her constant companion was a deer, it didn’t take her long to work out what had happened.

  ‘That wretched boy must have drunk from the stream I put the deer-magic on!’ she said to her daughter.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ the daughter whined. ‘I ought to be a queen, not her.’

  ‘Shut your moaning,’ said the old woman. ‘When the time comes you’ll get what you deserve.’

  Time went past, and the queen gave birth to a child, a handsome little boy. The king was out hunting at the time. The witch and her daughter went to the palace disguised as chambermaids, and managed to find their way to the queen’s bedchamber.

  ‘Come now, your majesty,’ the witch said to the queen, who was lying weak and exhausted in her bed. ‘Your bath is ready. It’ll make you feel so much better. Come with us!’

  They carried her to the bathroom and put her in the tub. Then they lit a fire underneath it, such a great fire that the queen suffocated from the smoke. To hide their crime they closed the wall up by magic where the door had been, and hung a tapestry over it.

  ‘Now you get into the bed,’ the witch said to her daughter, and when the girl had clambered in, the old woman put a spell on her so that she looked exactly like the queen. The one thing she couldn’t do anything about was the missing eye.

  ‘Lie with that side of your head on the pillow,’ she said, ‘and if anyone speaks to you, just mumble.’

  When the king came home that evening and heard that he had a little son, he was delighted. He went to his dear wife’s bedchamber and was about to open the curtains to see how she was, but the false chambermaid said, ‘Don’t, your majesty! Don’t open the curtains on any account! She needs rest, and she mustn’t be disturbed.’

  The king tiptoed away, and he didn’t discover that a false queen was lying there in the bed.

  That night the deer wouldn’t sleep in his stable. He climbed the stairs to the nursery where the baby lay, and refused to leave it. He had to do so without explaining, for since the death of the queen he had lost the power to speak, so he lay down beside the cradle and went to sleep.

  At midnight the nurse who slept there awoke suddenly to see the queen coming into the nursery, and she seemed to be wet from head to foot, as if she’d just come from the bath. She bent over the cradle and kissed the baby, and then she stroked the deer and said:

  ‘How is my child? How is my deer?

  I’ll come here twice more, then I must
disappear.’

  And then she went out without another word.

  The nurse was too frightened to tell anyone. She had thought the queen was still lying in bed recovering from childbirth.

  But next night the same thing happened again, except that this time the queen seemed to be covered in little flames, and she said:

  ‘How is my child? How is my deer?

  I’ll come here once more, then I must disappear.’

  The nurse thought she should tell the king. So next night he waited in the nursery with her, and when midnight struck, once again the queen came into the room. This time she was wreathed in thick black smoke.

  The king cried, ‘Dear God, what’s this?’

  The queen ignored him, but went to the child and the deer as she’d done before, and said:

  ‘How is my child? How is my deer?

  I’ve come for the last time – I must disappear . . .’

  The king tried to embrace her, but she faded into smoke and drifted out of his arms and mingled with the air.

  The deer tugged the king’s sleeve, and pulled him to the place where the tapestry hung. Then he tugged the tapestry down and butted the wall with his little horns. The king understood, and ordered his servants to knock the wall down. In all the disturbance the false queen got out of bed without anyone noticing and tiptoed away. When the wall was down they discovered the bathroom all blackened with soot, and the queen’s body lying clean and pale and fresh in the bath.

  The king cried, ‘My wife! My dear wife!’

  He bent to embrace her body, and by the grace of God she came alive again. She told him about the dreadful crime that had been committed, and the king sent his swiftest messenger to the palace gates, just in time to tell the watchmen to arrest the witch and her daughter as they tried to creep out.

  The two of them were brought before the court. Judgement was pronounced: the daughter was to be led into the woods where the wild beasts would eat her, and the witch was to be burned. As soon as the old woman was reduced to ashes, her spell lost its power over the deer and he was transformed into Little Brother, human again. And he and Little Sister lived happily together for the rest of their lives.

  ***

  Tale type: ATU 450, ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’

  Source: a story told to the Grimm brothers by the Hassenpflug family

  Similar stories: Alexander Afanasyev: ‘Sister Alionushka, Brother Ivanushka’ (Russian Fairy Tales); Giambattista Basile: ‘Ninnillo and Nennella’ (The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, ed. Jack Zipes); Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: ‘The Little Lamb and the Little Fish’, ‘The Three Little Men in the Woods’ (Children’s and Household Tales); Arthur Ransome: ‘Alenoushka and Her Brother’ (Old Peter’s Russian Tales)

  One of the few ghost stories in the collection, and similar in that way to ‘The Three Little Men in the Woods’.

  According to David Luke, in his introduction to Brothers Grimm: Selected Tales, the first transcription of the story in 1812 only had one bewitched stream, so that the brother was changed into a deer at once, but Wilhelm Grimm in a later edition added the other two for the sake of the fairy-tale three-ness.

  The tale as the Grimms have it begins well and tails off limply. The final section has several unhelpful gaps and transitions which leave this reader at least puzzling: if the witch and her daughter murdered Little Sister in the queen’s bathroom, what happened to the body? Why didn’t the deer speak up when he saw her ghost? In fact, why hasn’t the deer got anything to do at all? Why did the nurse not say anything about the apparition of the queen until ‘many nights’ had passed? Did the witch’s daughter remain in bed all that time?

  These are not just the sort of thing that fairy tales don’t bother with, and to which it’s silly to expect answers; they are more than that: they are clumsy storytelling. I thought it was possible to deal with them and improve the story.

  SEVEN

  RAPUNZEL

  There once lived a husband and wife who longed to have a child, but they longed in vain for quite some time. At last, however, the wife noticed unmistakable signs that God had granted their wish.

  Now in the wall of their house there was a little window that overlooked a magnificent garden full of every kind of fruit and vegetable. There was a high wall around that garden, and no one dared go into it, because it was the property of a very powerful witch who was feared by everyone. One day the woman was standing at that window, and she saw a bed of lamb’s lettuce, or rapunzel. It looked so fresh and so green that she longed to taste some, and this longing grew stronger every day, so that eventually she became really ill.

  Her husband was alarmed at her condition, and said, ‘My dear wife, what is the matter?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘if I can’t have any of that rapunzel in the garden behind our house, I’ll die.’

  The man loved his wife dearly, and he thought, ‘Rather than let her die, I must get her some of that rapunzel. I don’t care what it costs.’

  So as night was falling he climbed over the high wall and got into the witch’s garden, where he pulled up a handful of rapunzel. He scrambled back hastily and took it to his wife, who made it into a salad at once, and ate it hungrily.

  It tasted good. In fact it tasted so good that her desire for it grew stronger and stronger, and she begged her husband to go and get some more. So once again, just as it was getting dark, he set off and climbed the wall. But when he set foot on the ground and turned to go to the bed of rapunzel, he had a shock, for there was the witch standing in front of him.

  ‘So you’re the wretch who’s been stealing my rapunzel!’ she said, glaring at him. ‘You’ll pay for this, let me tell you.’

  ‘That’s fair,’ said the man. ‘I can’t argue with that, but let me plead for mercy. I had to do this. My wife saw your rapunzel from our window up there, and she felt a craving – you know how it is; it was so strong she thought she might die if she couldn’t have some. So I had no choice.’

  The witch understood the reason. The anger went out of her expression, and she nodded.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well, if that’s the case, you can have as much rapunzel as you want. But there’s a condition: the child your wife is bearing shall belong to me. It will be perfectly safe; I shall look after it like a mother.’

  In his fear the man agreed to this, and hurried back home with the rapunzel. And when in due course the wife gave birth, the witch appeared by her bed and took up the little girl in her arms.

  ‘I name this child Rapunzel,’ she said, and vanished with her.

  Rapunzel grew up to become the most beautiful child the sun had ever shone on. When she was twelve years old, the witch took her into the depths of the forest and shut her in a tower that had no door, no stairs and no windows except one very small one in a room right at the top. When the witch wanted to go in she would call:

  ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

  Let down your hair.’

  Rapunzel had beautiful hair, as fine as spun gold, and of the same lustrous colour. When she heard the witch calling, she untied her hair and fastened it around the window hook before letting down its full length all the way to the ground, twenty yards down, whereupon the witch climbed up it to her little room.

  After she had been in the tower for some years, it happened that the king’s son was riding through the forest. As he came near the tower he heard a song so lovely that he had to stop and listen to it. Of course it was the lonely Rapunzel, singing to pass the time, and she had a sweet voice, too.

  The prince wanted to go up to her, but there was no door to be found. He was baffled, and he rode home determined to come again and see if there was another way to get up the tower.

  Next day he came back, but with no more success. Such a beautiful song, and no singer to be seen! But while he was pond
ering, he heard someone coming and hid behind a tree. It was the witch. When she was at the base of the tower, the prince heard her call out:

  ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

  Let down your hair.’

  To his astonishment, down from the window tumbled a length of golden hair. The witch seized hold and climbed all the way up, and clambered in through the window.

  ‘Well,’ thought the prince, ‘if that’s the way up, I’ll try my luck with it.’

  So the following day, as darkness was falling, he went to the tower and called out:

  ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

  Let down your hair.’

  Down came the hair, and the prince took its fragrant thickness into his hands and climbed up and jumped in through the window.

  At first Rapunzel was terrified. She had never seen a man before. He was nothing like the witch, so he was strange and unfamiliar to her, but he was so handsome that she was confused and didn’t know what to say. However, a prince is never lost for words, and he begged her not to be frightened. He explained how he’d heard her lovely voice singing from the tower, and how he couldn’t rest until he found the singer; and how, now that he’d seen her, he found her face even more beautiful than her voice.

  Rapunzel was charmed by this, and soon lost her fear. Instead she felt delight in the young prince’s company, and eagerly agreed to let him visit her again. Before many days had gone by their friendship had developed into love, and when the prince asked her to marry him, Rapunzel consented at once.

  As for the witch, she suspected nothing at first. But one day Rapunzel said to her, ‘You know, it’s funny, but my clothes no longer fit me. Every dress I have is too tight.’