Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version (9 page)

‘These are better than pebbles!’ said Hansel, dropping some in his pocket.

‘I’ll take some too,’ said Gretel, and filled her apron with them.

‘And now let’s go,’ said Hansel. ‘Let’s leave these witchy woods behind.’

After walking a few hours, they came to a lake.

‘It’s going to be difficult to get across,’ said Hansel. ‘I can’t see a bridge anywhere.’

‘There aren’t any boats either. But look,’ said Gretel, ‘there’s a white duck. I’ll see if she can help us get across.’

She called out:

‘Little duckling, little duck,

Be kind enough to bring us luck!

The water’s deep and cold and wide,

And we must reach the other side.’

The little duck swam up to them, and Hansel climbed on her back.

‘Come on, Gretel!’ he said. ‘Climb on with me!’

‘No,’ said Gretel, ‘that would be too much of a cargo. We should go one at a time.’

So the good little bird took them one after the other. When they were safely ashore again they walked on further, and soon the forest began to grow more familiar. At last they saw their own home in the distance, and they ran up and rushed inside and threw themselves into their father’s arms.

The man hadn’t had one happy moment since he’d left his children in the forest. Not long after that, his wife had died, and he was all alone, and poorer than ever. But now Gretel unfolded her little apron and shook out all the jewels so that they bounced and scattered all over the room, and Hansel threw handful after handful after them.

So all their troubles were over, and they lived happily ever after.

The mouse has run,

My tale is done –

And if you catch it, you can make yourself a great big furry hat.

***

Tale type:
ATU 327, ‘Hansel and Gretel’

Source:
story told to the Grimm brothers by the Wild family

Similar stories:
Alexander Afanasyev: ‘Baba Yaga and the Brave Youth’ (
Russian Fairy Tales
); Giambattista Basile: ‘Ninnillo and Nennella’ (
The Great Fairy Tale Tradition
, ed. Jack Zipes); Italo Calvino: ‘Chick’, ‘The Garden Witch’ (
Italian Folktales
); Charles Perrault: ‘Little Thumbling’ (
Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales
)

The best-known tales, of which this is certainly one, have lived on in countless anthologies and picture-books and theatrical adaptations (and, in this case, opera) until familiarity threatens to dull their fine qualities. But this is a great and ferocious classic. The wonderful invention of the edible house, together with the implacable cruelty of the witch and the wit and bravery of Gretel in dealing with her so neatly, make it unforgettable.

Mother, or stepmother? In the Grimms’ first edition, of 1812, the woman is simply ‘the mother’. By the time of the seventh edition of 1857 she had become a stepmother, and so she remains. Marina Warner, in
From the Beast to the Blonde
, is very interesting on the Grimms’ reasons for this (the only way they could preserve an ideal vision of the Mother was to banish and replace her) and also on Bruno Bettelheim’s Freudian interpretation (the mother/stepmother split allows the listening children to deal guiltlessly with their anger at their own mother’s threatening side). From the storytelling point of view, I go for simplicity.

Jack Zipes, in
Why Fairy Tales Stick
, points out that underlying this tale, which to many seems a matter of pure fancy, is the unhappy reality of rural poverty and the prospect of real starvation for many families. Desperate times, desperate remedies, no doubt, but shouldn’t the story condemn the father a little more? And the death of the stepmother is very convenient, especially given the association of stepmother and witch that many modern storytellers have built on (including myself). It would have been a sorry ending for the children to come home and find her still ruling the roost. Perhaps the father killed her. If I were writing this tale as a novel, he would have done.

The episode of the duck is a curious little intervention in the story from the Grimms’ final edition. It didn’t exist before that, at least in print, but I think it works, so I’ve included it too. The lake is an impassable barrier between the threatening forest and the safety of home, and a barrier is a desirable thing to have unless you’re on the wrong side of it; but it can be crossed with a combination of the benevolence of nature and human ingenuity.

TEN

THE THREE SNAKE LEAVES

Once there was a poor man who couldn’t support his only son any more. When the son realized this, he said, ‘Father, it’s no use my staying here. I’m just a burden to you. I’m going to leave home and see if I can earn a living.’

The father gave him his blessing, and they parted sorrowfully.

The king of a nearby country was a powerful ruler, and at that time he was waging war. The young man enlisted in his army and soon found himself at the front where a great battle was being fought. The bullets flew like hail, the danger was hideous, and his comrades were falling dead all around. When the general himself fell dead, the last of the troops were going to flee, but the young man took his place and yelled: ‘We won’t be defeated! Follow me, and God save the king!’

The men followed him as he led the charge, and they soon had the enemy on the run. When the king heard of the young man’s part in the victory, he promoted him to field marshal, gave him gold and treasure, and bestowed on him the highest honours in the kingdom.

Now the king had a daughter who was very beautiful, but she had one strange obsession. She had sworn an oath not to marry any man unless he promised to let himself be buried alive with her if she died first. ‘After all, if he really loves me,’ she said, ‘why would he want to go on living?’ And she said that she would do the same and be buried with him if he was the first to die.

This grim condition had put off many young men who would otherwise have begged to marry her, but the soldier was so struck by her beauty that nothing would discourage him. So he asked the king for her hand.

‘Do you know what you must promise?’ said the king.

‘If she dies before me, I must go to the grave with her,’ said the soldier. ‘But I love her so much that I’m willing to risk that.’

The king consented, and the wedding was celebrated with great splendour.

For a while they lived together happily, but one day the princess fell ill. Doctors came from all over the kingdom, but none of them could help her, and presently she died. And then the young soldier remembered the promise he’d had to make, and shuddered. There was no way of getting out of it, even if he’d wanted to break the promise, because the king was going to put sentries at the grave itself and all around the cemetery in case he tried to escape. When the day came for the princess to be buried, they carried her body to the royal vault, made sure the young man was inside, and the king personally locked and bolted the door.

They had put some provisions in there: on a table there were four candles, four loaves of bread and four bottles of wine. The soldier sat there beside the princess’s body day after day, taking only a mouthful of bread and a sip of wine, making them last as long as possible. When he’d taken the last sip but one and eaten the last mouthful but one, and when the last candle was down to its last inch, he knew that his time had nearly come.

But as he sat there in despair, he saw a snake crawl out of a corner of the vault and move towards the body. Thinking it intended to eat her, the young man drew his sword. ‘While I live, you shan’t touch her!’ he said, and struck the snake three times, cutting it to pieces.

Shortly afterwards, a second snake came crawling out of the corner. It came to the body of the first snake, and looked at it, piece by piece, and then crawled away again. Soon it came back, and this time it had three green leaves in its mouth. Carefully moving the first snake’s body together again, it laid a leaf on each of the wounds, and in a moment the dead snake stirred into life, the wounds closed up, and it was whole again. The two snakes hurried away together.

But the leaves were still lying where they’d left them, and the young man thought that if their miraculous power had brought the snake back to life, it might do the same for a human being. So he picked up the leaves and laid them on the dead princess’s white face, one on her mouth and the other two on her eyes.

And as soon as he did this, her blood began to stir. A healthy pink came into her cheeks, and she drew a breath and opened her eyes.

‘God in heaven!’ she said. ‘Where am I?’

‘You’re with me, my dear wife,’ said the soldier, and told her all that had happened. He gave her the very last mouthful of bread and the very last sip of wine, and then they banged on the door and shouted so loudly that the sentries outside heard them and went running to the king.

The king came to the graveyard himself and personally unlocked and unbolted the door of the vault. The princess tumbled into his arms, he shook the young man’s hand, and everyone rejoiced at the miracle that had brought her back to life.

As for the snake leaves, the soldier was a careful man, and he told no one about how the princess had been revived. But he had an honest and reliable servant, so he gave this servant the three snake leaves to look after. ‘Take good care of them,’ he said, ‘and make sure you keep them with you wherever we go. You never know when we might need them again.’

Now after she was brought back to life, a change came over the princess. All the love she had for her husband drained away from her heart. She still pretended to love him, however, and when he suggested making a sea voyage to visit his old father, she agreed at once. ‘What a pleasure it’ll be to meet the noble father of my dearest husband!’ she said.

But once at sea she forgot the great devotion the young man had shown her, because she felt a lust growing in her for the captain of the ship. Nothing would satisfy her but to sleep with him, and soon they were lovers. One night in his arms she whispered, ‘Oh, if only my husband were dead! What a marriage we two would make!’

‘That is easily arranged,’ said the captain.

He took a length of cord and, with the princess at his side, crept into the cabin where the young man was sleeping. The princess held one end of the cord and the captain wound the other around her husband’s neck, and then they pulled so hard that, struggle as he might, he couldn’t fight them off, and soon they had strangled him.

The princess took her dead husband by the head and the captain took him by the feet, and they threw him over the ship’s rail. ‘Let’s go home now,’ said the princess. ‘I’ll tell my father that he died at sea, and I’ll sing your praises, and he’ll let us be married and you can inherit the kingdom.’

But the faithful servant had seen everything they’d done, and as soon as their backs were turned he untied a boat from the ship and rowed back in search of his master’s body. He soon found it, and after hauling it into the boat he untied the cord from around the young man’s neck and put the three snake leaves on his eyes and mouth, and he came back to life at once.

Then the two of them rowed with all their might. Day and night they rowed, stopping for nothing, and their boat flew over the waves so fast that they reached the shore a day before the ship, and went straight to the palace. The king was amazed to see them.

‘What’s happened?’ he said. ‘Where’s my daughter?’

They told him everything, and he was shocked to hear of his daughter’s treachery.

‘I can’t believe she’d do such a terrible thing!’ he said. ‘But the truth will soon come to light.’

And so it did. Very soon the ship arrived at the port, and on hearing of this the king made the young man and his servant wait in a hidden room, where they could listen to everything that was said.

The princess, dressed all in black, came sobbing to her father.

‘Why have you come back alone?’ he said. ‘Where’s your husband? And why are you wearing mourning?’

‘Oh, father dear,’ she said, ‘I’m inconsolable! My husband took ill with the yellow fever and died. The captain and I had to bury him at sea. If he hadn’t helped me, I don’t know what I would have done. But the captain’s such a good man – he looked after my dear husband when the fever was at its height, no matter what the danger. He can tell you all about it.’

‘Oh, your husband’s dead, is he?’ said the king. ‘Let’s see if I can bring him back to life.’

And he opened the door and invited the other two to come out.

When the princess saw the young man, she fell to the ground as if she’d been struck by lightning. She tried to say that her husband must have been hallucinating in his fever, that he must have fallen into a coma so deep they mistook it for death; but the servant produced the cord, and in the face of that evidence she had to admit her guilt.

‘Yes, we did it,’ she sobbed, ‘but please, father – show some mercy!’

‘Don’t speak to me of mercy,’ said the king. ‘Your husband was ready to die in the grave with you, and he gave you back your life, but you killed him in his sleep. You’ll get the punishment you deserve.’

And she and the captain were put on board a ship with holes drilled in the hull, and sent out over the stormy sea. Soon they sank with the ship, and were never seen again.

***

Tale type:
ATU 612, ‘The Three Snake Leaves’

Source:
stories told to the Grimm brothers by Johann Friedrich Krause and the von Haxthausen family

Similar stories:
Italo Calvino: ‘The Captain and the General’, ‘The Lion’s Grass’ (
Italian Folktales
)

A vivid and intriguing tale, which falls into two halves, the first half being magic and the second romantic/realistic. The version in Grimm ties both halves together skilfully by means of the leaves in the title. I haven’t altered it apart from the business of the young man’s murder. In the original he’s just thrown over the side of the ship, but in the two similar tales in Calvino the hero is executed, by firing squad in the first case and on the gallows in the second, and is thus incontrovertibly dead before being brought back to life by means of the magic leaves. I thought that the young man in this story ought to be unmistakably and dramatically killed too, hence the strangling, which also allows the servant to prove the wife’s guilt by producing the cord.

But into how many pieces is the snake cut? This vital question seems to have foxed everyone, including the Grimms themselves. The text has unequivocally ‘
und hieb sie in drei Stücke
’ – ‘and cut it into three pieces’ – and David Luke, Ralph Mannheim and Jack Zipes all leave that as it is in their translations of the story. Yet to do that would only take two blows of the young man’s sword, and consequently there would be only two places to put the leaves, not three. We need to look at what’s essential, and what’s essential is the number three (the three leaves, the princess’s eyes and mouth, the classic fairy-tale ‘three’), so there need to be three places for the second snake to put the leaves, hence there need to be three blows of the sword, which would cut the snake not into three but into four. But to say that introduces the idea of
four
unhelpfully into the reader’s or listener’s mind. I think the best solution is what I’ve done above.