The star child
The Star Child ( English title: The Star-Child ) is a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde . It appeared in the fairy tale collection Ein Pomegranate House in 1891 .
content
A poor woodcutter finds a toddler wrapped in a golden cloak in the snow-covered forest and takes him home. As one of his children, the boy grows up to be strikingly beautiful with him . But with the attention that he gets through his beauty, a cruelty to the animal world and humans develops . A beggar is also a victim of ridicule . With the greatest pride he rejects his own mother in beggar's garb, who tried to get him. Then she turns her back on him. This results in the change of his beauty into an abysmal ugliness and the loathing of all people for him.
In order to undo what has been done, he begins to look for his mother and gets into the hands of an evil wizard , who lets him, as his slave, search for three pieces of gold in the inaccessible thorny forest. He finds the treasure with the help of a grateful rabbit that he frees from a trap. However, he never succeeds in getting the gold to his tormentor, because he is moved by pity and gives the gold to a beggar. The angry wizard hits him several times and threatens to kill him completely. When he escapes this attempt, he comes to a castle.
Everyone there seems to be eagerly awaiting him. Its appearance has changed back to its former extraordinary beauty. There he meets his father , who approaches him as the beggar, and his mother, who pretends to be a beggar. He only wishes for forgiveness from them, which he finally receives in the laying on of hands of his parents, who have turned into king and queen, on his head. From now on he is to rule the castle as king .
His reign was only three years full of goodness and peace because of the years of privation . After his death, he is followed by an evil king.
output
- Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , HarperCollins Publishers 2003.
Adaptations
A film adaptation by the Russian director Leonid Alexejewitsch Netschajew was released in 1983.
The fairy tale opera Das Sternenkind by Hans-André Stamm with a libretto by Alexander Nitzberg premiered in 2005.
Web links
- German National Library: "The Star Child"
- visit-oscar-wilde.de: "The star child"
- eastoftheweb.com: "The Star-Child" (original version)
- The star child as a free audio book at vorleser.net
Individual evidence
- ↑ Skazka o zvezdnom malchike in the Internet Movie Database (English)