Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm Read online

  One month went by, and the snow vanished.

  Two months went by, and the world turned green.

  Three months went by, and flowers bloomed out of the earth.

  Four months went by, and all the twigs on all the trees in the forest grew stronger and pressed themselves together, and the birds sang so loud that the woods resounded, and the blossom fell from the trees.

  Five months went by, and the woman stood under the juniper tree. It smelled so sweet that her heart leaped in her breast, and she fell to her knees with joy.

  Six months went by, and the fruit grew firm and heavy, and the woman fell still.

  When seven months had gone by, she plucked the juniper berries and ate so many that she felt sick and sorrowful.

  After the eighth month had gone, she called her husband and said to him, weeping, ‘If I die, bury me under the juniper tree.’

  This is wonderful, but (as I suggest in my note to the story) it’s wonderful in a curious way: there’s little any teller of this tale can do to improve it. It has to be rendered exactly as it is here, or at least the different months have to be given equally different characteristics, and carefully linked in equally meaningful ways with the growth of the child in his mother’s womb, and that growth with the juniper tree that will be instrumental in his later resurrection.

  However, that is a great and rare exception. In most of these tales, just as the characters are flat, description is absent. In the later editions, it is true, Wilhelm’s telling became a little more florid and inventive, but the real interest of the tale continues to be in what happened, and what happened next. The formulas are so common, the lack of interest in the particularity of things so widespread, that it comes as a real shock to read a sentence like this in ‘Jorinda and Joringel’:

  It was a lovely evening; the sun shone warmly on the tree trunks against the dark green of the deep woods, and turtledoves cooed mournfully in the old beech trees.

  Suddenly that story stops sounding like a fairy tale and begins to sound like something composed in a literary way by a Romantic writer such as Novalis or Jean Paul. The serene, anonymous relation of events has given way, for the space of a sentence, to an individual sensibility: a single mind has felt this impression of nature, has seen these details in the mind’s eye and written them down. A writer’s command of imagery and gift for description is one of the things that make him or her unique, but fairy tales don’t come whole and unaltered from the minds of individual writers, after all; uniqueness and originality are of no interest to them.

  This is not a text

  William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, or any other literary work, exists as a text first of all. The words on the page are what it is. It’s the job of an editor or a literary critic to pay attention to what exactly those words are, and to clarify places where there are divergent readings in different editions, to make sure that the reader can encounter exactly the text that the work consists of.

  But a fairy tale is not a text of that sort. It’s a transcription made on one or more occasions of the words spoken by one of many people who have told this tale. And all sorts of things, of course, affect the words that are finally written down. A storyteller might tell the tale more richly, more extravagantly, one day than the next, when he’s tired or not in the mood. A transcriber might find her own equipment failing: a cold in the head might make hearing more difficult, or cause the writing-down to be interrupted by sneezes or coughs. Another accident might affect it too: a good tale might find itself in the mouth of a less than adequate teller.

  That matters a great deal, because tellers vary in their talents, their techniques, their attitudes to the process. The Grimms were highly impressed by the ability of one of their sources, Dorothea Viehmann, to tell a tale a second time in the same words as she’d used before, making it easy to transcribe; and the tales that come from her are typically structured with marvellous care and precision. I was equally impressed when working on her tales for this book.

  Similarly, this teller might have a talent for comedy, that one for suspense and drama, another for pathos and sentiment. Naturally they will each choose tales that make the most of their talents. When X the great comedian tells a tale, he will invent ridiculous details or funny episodes that will be remembered and passed on, so the tale will be altered a little by his telling; and when Y the mistress of suspense tells a tale of terror, she will invent in like manner, and her inventions and changes will become part of the tradition of telling that tale, until they’re forgotten, or embellished, or improved on in their turn.

  The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put a robin redbreast in a cage.* If you, the reader, want to tell any of the tales in this book, I hope you will feel free to be no more faithful than you want to be. You are at perfect liberty to invent other details than the ones I’ve passed on, or invented, here. In fact you’re not only at liberty to do so: you have a positive duty to make the story your own.*A fairy tale is not a text.

  ‘A tone licked clean’

  Can the writer of any version of a fairy tale ever come near to James Merrill’s ideal tone, ‘serene, anonymous’? Of course, the writer might not wish to. There have been many, and there will be many more, versions of these tales that are brimful of their author’s own dark obsessions, or brilliant personality, or political passions. The tales can stand it. But even if we want to be serene and anonymous, I think it’s probably impossible to achieve it completely, and that our personal stylistic fingerprints lie impressed on every paragraph without our knowing it.

  The only thing to do, it seems to me, is to try for clarity, and stop worrying about it. Telling these stories is a delight it would be a pity to spoil by anxiety. An enormous relief and pleasure, like the mild air that refreshes the young count when he lies down to rest in ‘The Goose Girl at the Spring’, comes over the writer who realizes that it’s not necessary to invent: the substance of the tale is there already, just as the sequence of chords in a song is there ready for the jazz musician, and our task is to step from chord to chord, from event to event, with all the lightness and swing we can. Like jazz, storytelling is an art of performance, and writing is performance too.

  Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.’

  But we may do our best by these tales, and find that it’s still not enough. I suspect that the finest of them have the quality that the great pianist Artur Schnabel attributed to the sonatas of Mozart: they are too easy for children and too difficult for adults.

  And these fifty tales are, I think, the cream of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. I have done my best for the sprites who attend each one, as did Dorothea Viehmann, Philipp Otto Runge, Dortchen Wild, and all the other tellers whose work was preserved by the great Brothers Grimm. And I hope we all, tellers and listeners alike, live happily ever after.

  Philip Pullman, 2012

  * Which ‘puts all Heaven in a Rage’ (Wil
liam Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, 1803)

  * ‘The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it’ – Tuscan proverb quoted by Italo Calvino in his introduction to Italian Folktales (London: Penguin Books, 1982).

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The German edition of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) that I worked from is the most easily available, the seventh edition of 1857. It is published by Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag. The ‘tale type’ numbers I give in the notes to each story are based on The Types of International Folktales, the great index of tale types originally compiled by Antti Aarne and published in 1910, revised by Stith Thompson in 1928 and 1961, and most recently (2004) revised by Hans-Jörg Uther (see full details below) – hence ‘ATU’ or ‘AT’ for the earlier edition. This section otherwise includes the works I found most interesting and helpful.

  Aesop, The Complete Fables, tr. Olivia Temple (London: Penguin Books, 1998)

  Afanasyev, Alexander, Russian Fairy Tales, tr. Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945)

  The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights, tr. Malcolm C. Lyons with Ursula Lyons, introduced and annotated by Robert Irwin (London: Penguin Books, 2008)

  Ashliman, D. L., A Guide to Folktales in the English Language (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)

  Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment (London: Peregrine Books, 1978)

  Briggs, Katharine M., A Dictionary of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other Supernatural Creatures (London: Allen Lane, 1976)

  —— Folk Tales of Britain (London: Folio Society, 2011)

  Calvino, Italo, Italian Folktales, tr. George Martin (London: Penguin Books, 1982)

  Chandler Harris, Joel, The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1955)

  Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Brothers Grimm: Selected Tales, tr. David Luke, Gilbert McKay and Philip Schofield (London: Penguin Books, 1982)

  —— The Penguin Complete Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old, tr. Ralph Mannheim (London: Penguin Books, 1984)

  —— The Complete Fairy Tales, tr. Jack Zipes (London: Vintage, 2007)

  —— The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, tr. Margaret Hunt, ed. James Stern, introduced by Padraic Colum and with a commentary by Joseph Campbell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002)

  Lang, Andrew, Crimson Fairy Book (New York: Dover Publications, 1967)

  —— Pink Fairy Book (New York: Dover Publications, 2008)

  Perrault, Charles, Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales, tr. A. E. Johnson and others (London: Puffin Books, 1999)

  Philip, Neil, The Cinderella Story (London: Penguin Books, 1989)

  Ransome, Arthur, Old Peter’s Russian Tales (London: Puffin Books, 1974)

  Schmiesing Ann, ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the German Volkslied in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ (http://mahlerfest.org/mfXIV/schmiesing_lecture.html)

  Tatar, Maria, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)

  Uther, Hans-Jörg, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, vols. 1–3, FF Communications No. 284–86 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004)

  Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: Of Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995)

  —— No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (London: Vintage, 2000)

  Zipes, Jack, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)

  —— Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (New York: Routledge, 2006)

  —— (ed.), The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001)

  —— (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

  FAIRY TALES FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM

  ONE

  THE FROG KING, OR IRON HEINRICH

  In the olden days, when wishing still worked, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful; but the youngest daughter was so lovely that even the sun, who has seen many things, was struck with wonder every time he shone on her face. Not far away from the king’s palace there was a deep dark forest, and under a lime tree in the forest there was a well. In the heat of the day the princess used to go into the forest and sit by the edge of the well, from which a marvellous coolness seemed to flow.

  To pass the time she had a golden ball, which she used to throw up in the air and catch. It was her favourite game. Now one day it happened that she threw it a little carelessly, and she couldn’t catch it. Instead the ball rolled away from her and towards the well, and then it ran right over the edge and disappeared.

  The princess ran after it, and looked down into the water; but it was so deep that she couldn’t see the ball. She couldn’t even see the bottom of the well.

  She began to cry, and she cried louder and louder, inconsolably. But as she wept and sobbed, someone spoke to her. ‘What’s the matter, princess? You’re crying so bitterly, you’d move a stone to pity.’

  She looked round to see where the voice was coming from, and saw a frog who’d stuck his big ugly head out of the water.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, you old splasher,’ she said. ‘I’m crying because my golden ball’s fallen into the water and it’s so deep and I can’t see it.’

  ‘Well, you can stop crying now,’ said the frog. ‘I can help you, but what will you give me if I fetch your ball for you?’

  ‘Whatever you want, frog! Anything! My clothes, my pearls, my jewels, even the golden crown I’m wearing.’

  ‘I don’t want your clothes, and your jewels and your golden crown are no good to me, but if you love me and take me as your companion and your playmate, if you let me sit next to you at the table and eat from your dish and drink from your cup and sleep in your bed, then I’ll dive down and bring up your golden ball.’

  The princess thought, ‘What is this stupid frog saying? Whatever he thinks, he’ll have to stay in the water where he belongs. Perhaps he can get my ball.’ But of course she didn’t say that. Instead she said, ‘Yes, yes, I’ll promise you all of that if you just bring me my ball.’

  As soon as the frog heard her say ‘Yes’, he put his head under the water and dived to the bottom. A moment later he came swimming back up with the ball in his mouth, and he threw it on to the grass.

  The princess was so happy to see it that she snatched it up and ran off at once.

  ‘Wait, wait!’ called the frog. ‘Take me with you! I can’t hop as fast as you can run!’

  But she took no notice. She hurried home and forgot all about the poor frog, who had to go back down into his well.

  Next day the princess was sitting at table with her father the king and all the people of the court, and eating off her golden plate, when something came hopping up the marble steps: plip plop, plip plop. When it reached the top, it knocked at the door and called: ‘Princess! Youngest princess! Open the door for me!’

  She ran to see who it was, and opened the door, and there was the frog.

  Frightened, she slammed the door shut at once and ran back to the table.

  The king saw that her heart was pounding, and said, ‘What are you afraid of, my child? Is there a giant there at the door?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘it’s not a giant, it’s a horrible frog.’

  ‘What does the frog want with you?’

  ‘Oh, papa, yesterday when I was playing in the forest near the well, my golden ball fell in the water. And I started to cry and because I was crying so much, the frog got it for me, and because he insisted, I had to promise that he could be my companion. But I didn’t think he’d ever leave the water, not really. But
there he is outside the door and he wants to come in!’

  And then there came a second knock at the door, and a voice called:

  ‘Princess, princess, youngest daughter,

  Open up and let me in!

  Or else your promise by the water

  Isn’t worth a rusty pin.

  Keep your promise, royal daughter,

  Open up and let me in!’

  The king said, ‘If you make a promise, you have to keep it. Go and let him in.’

  She opened the door and the frog hopped in. He hopped all the way to her chair.

  ‘Lift me up,’ he said. ‘I want to sit next to you.’

  She didn’t want to, but the king said, ‘Go on. Do as he says.’

  So she lifted the frog up. Once he was on the chair, he wanted to be on the table, so she had to lift him up there as well, and then he said, ‘Push your golden plate a bit closer so I can eat with you.’

  She did, but everyone could see that she wasn’t enjoying it. The frog was, though; he ate her food with great pleasure, while every mouthful seemed to stick in the princess’s throat.

  Finally the frog said, ‘Well, I’ve had enough now, thank you, I’d like to go to bed. Carry me up to your room and get your silken bed ready so we can sleep in it.’

  The princess began to cry, because the frog’s cold skin frightened her. She trembled at the thought of him in her sweet clean bed. But the king frowned and said, ‘You shouldn’t despise someone who helped you when you were in trouble!’

  She picked the frog up between finger and thumb and set him down outside her bedroom door and shut it firmly.

  But he kept on knocking and called, ‘Let me in! Let me in!’

  So she opened the door and said, ‘All right! You can come in, but you must sleep on the floor.’