Dat meerkats
Dat Erdmänneken is a fairy tale ( ATU 301). It is in the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm at position 91 (KHM 91) in Low German .
content
A rich king curses anyone who takes an apple from his tree. The youngest daughter says he probably doesn't mean her by that, picks one and offers it to her two sisters. Then they sink into the ground. The king promises whoever finds her one of the three as a wife. So three hunter boys come into a house where food is always warm, which they ultimately eat. You decide that two are always looking for the daughters while one stays. The first two are beaten up by a male who first asks for bread and then falls on them when they want to pick it up for him. The youngest does not do it, but beats it up. Then it shows him a dry well into which he has to lower himself alone, since his journeymen mean it dishonestly with him. Downstairs, the king's daughters have to scratch the heads of three dragons, which he has to cut off. He tells the brothers, who wind down with the rope, but let themselves be pulled up again immediately. But the youngest frees the king's daughters. He lets them be pulled up, then instead of himself he puts a stone in the basket. The brothers cut the rope and let the king marry their daughters, who are not allowed to reveal anything. The youngest goes downstairs until he finds a flute. When he blows it, meerkats come and carry him up. When he comes into the castle, the daughters faint. The king lets them reveal their secret to the stove and overhears them. The wicked brothers are hanged, the youngest married to the youngest.
Grimm's note
Grimm's note notes “From the Paderbörnischen” (by Ludowine von Haxthausen ) and compares a variant “from the area around Cologne on the Rhine” (probably from the same): The three royal daughters are lost at the party in the garden walk in the evening, whoever finds them should them marry. Three knights come looking in the forest to a magnificent but empty castle with only one raw piece of meat for food. The youngest fries it while the others fetch wine. He lets a meerkat sit by the fire and turn the roast, which always nibbles on the broth until he grabs it by the beard and chases it away. In the morning they rappel him down into a hole. There he frees the princesses by chopping off three, seven and nine heads of three dragons on the advice of the male, which they had to louse. The journeymen pull her up and want to let him down. He calls the meerkats with a bell and a flute, they make a staircase for him. At the top he hits with a rod, they disappear. In a "story from the Hanöverischen" (probably by Georg August Friedrich Goldmann ) the princesses get away while bathing. The third sticks the old man's beard into a piece of wood with an ax. He tears himself away, they follow the blood trail to the cave. A handsome man brings the princess clothes to the flute blowing. The hero becomes a tailor's journeyman until the youngest recognizes him by the wedding dress he has ordered. A version “from Steinau im Hanauischen” differs from the Paderbörnische only so far that the dragons are giants. The daughters hide the hero under the bed, he has to pick up a heavy pole and kill the drunken giants. The male shows him an underground stream as an exit, the princesses recognize him by their overcoats and gold rings. The two wicked brothers are executed. The Brothers Grimm compare KHM 166 The strong Hans , "Hungarian at Gaal No. 5" and especially the Siegfried saga .
Comparisons
For the three brothers with the despised youngest see z. B. KHM 63 The three feathers . Their food here parallels the fall of the three daughters into sin (cf. Genesis 3). For the Joseph motif of the fountain as the entrance to the world beyond (Genesis 37) cf. KHM 24 , 116 , 127 . For scratching the scorpionfish, cf. KHM 129 , for oven confession KHM 89 . For the final sentence about the glass shoes cf. KHM 84 , 70a .
Cf. The three musicians in Ludwig Bechstein's German fairy tale book (in the 1845 edition also Die Nun, der Bergmann und der Schmied ) and The tiny, tiny little man in New German fairy tale book .
interpretation
Hans-Jörg Uther judges that the fairy tale depicts stages of human maturation in common motifs and mythologisms and would have been suitable as a prototype for interpretations, but the dialect text probably didn't interest anyone. The fact that one should not beg for the basic food of bread and drop it speaks for the strictly Christian view of the Brothers Grimm, as in KHM 194 , 205 . See e.g. B. Gen 3,19 EU , Mt 4,3 EU , Mt 26,26 EU , Joh 6,48 EU , 1 Cor 10,16 EU .
For Regina Kämmerer , the male wants to test Hans' moral attitude, indignation and courage, which we need to defeat the demons in life.
Movie
- From the brave blacksmith ( O Statecnem Kovari ) to Božena Němcová's fairy tale The intrepid Mikesch ČSSR 1983 with Pavel Kříž as the blacksmith Mikesch, Jan Króner as Köhler Ondra and Martina Gasparovicová as Mikesch's princess; Božena Němcová's fairy tale The intrepid Mikesch varies the motifs of AT 301 and thus forms a narrative form closely related to Grimm's Dat Erdmänneken ; both fairy tales describe the subject of the three stolen princesses and also the probation in the underworld and the betrayal of the hole in the ground. In Němcová's fairy tale, however, the film also integrates the motif of the giant without a heart , which in Grimm's fairy tale does not show Dat Erdmänneken , but The Crystal Ball.
literature
- Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm : Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition . With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. 19th edition. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf / Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-538-06943-3 , pp. 460-464 .
- Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm : Children's and Household Tales. With an appendix of all fairy tales and certificates of origin not published in all editions . Ed .: Heinz Rölleke . 1st edition. Original notes, guarantees of origin, epilogue ( volume 3 ). Reclam, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-15-003193-1 , p. 174-178, 482 .
- Hans-Jörg Uther : Handbook to the "Children's and Household Tales" by the Brothers Grimm. Origin, effect, interpretation . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 , pp. 208-211 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans-Jörg Uther : Handbook on the "Children's and Household Tales" by the Brothers Grimm. Origin, effect, interpretation . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 , pp. 208-211 .
- ↑ Regina Kämmerer: Fairy tales for a successful life. KVC-Verlag, Essen 2013, pp. 68–70.
- ↑ Božena Němcová: The golden spinning wheel , pp. 103–122; Paul List-Verlag Leipzig, oA; circa 1960.