The iron stove

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The iron stove is a fairy tale ( ATU 425, 425A). It is in the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm at number 127 (KHM 127). The title Der Eisen-Ofen was written up to the 2nd edition .

content

A prince is cursed by an old witch to sit in an iron stove in the woods. After many years a king's daughter comes by who is lost. He sends someone to take her home in silence. For this she is supposed to come back with a knife, free him and marry. Instead, she and her father send the beautiful miller's daughter, then the even more beautiful swineherd's daughter. Both scrape without success for 24 hours and then give themselves away. Under threat, the princess has to come herself and free him. She likes it, but she asks to be allowed to go to her father again, which he grants her if she only speaks three words. But because she speaks more, the iron stove is moved away. In her search, she comes to an old house with small, fat toads. The old toad gives her three needles, three nuts and a plow wheel. With it she overcomes a glass mountain, three cutting swords and raging water and lets herself be employed as a maid in the prince's castle. She obtains permission from his new bride three times to sleep in his room in exchange for the beautiful clothes made from the three nuts. Twice he only learns of their nocturnal wailing from the servants, so that the third time he does not take the sleeping potion and flees with her. The house with the toads has become a castle with children. They marry and also take in the lonely father.

Stylistic peculiarities

Compared to others from Grimm's collection, the fairy tale contains many literal speeches laden with meaning. The prince in the iron furnace asks the girl “Where are you from and where are you going?” (Cf. KHM 9 ). When he says “I think it's day outside” , the miller's and swineherd's daughter betrayed himself “That seems to me too, I mean, I hear my father's grinder rattle” and “I hear my father making croissants” , whereupon he threatens to “ in the whole kingdom everything should fall apart “ if the right one did not come. He says to her "You are mine and I am yours, you are my bride and have redeemed me" (cf. KHM 67 , 94 ). First she was shocked at his marriage proposal, “Dear God, what should I do with the iron stove!” , Then at the toads, “Oh, where are you going!” . The toads, which, like the iron stove, they find after nine days, repeat his initial question: “Where are you from? Where do you want to go? " .

The toad scene in the middle and the ending with the magnificent castle are highlighted by rhyming poems . The toad ( called Itsche here ) calls out: “Jungfer green and small, Hutzelbein, Hutzelbein's dog, Hutzel back and forth, let's see who is outside” and “Jungfer green and small, Hutzelbein, Hutzelbein's dog, Hutzel back and forth, bring the big box for me ” (as in The Three Feathers ). The many alliterations in connection with the contents of the instruction sound hasty. In the misplaced closing rhyme, the lack of seriousness becomes even clearer: A mouse came along , the fairy tale was over. (as in Hansel and Gretel , Hans my hedgehog )

The short, episodically structured story with its abundance of magical objects is a typical search fairy tale : The heroine finds her bridegroom, loses him through her own mistake and wins him again (cf. The singing, jumping lion beak ). There is also a magical escape over the water, swords and mountain of glass. In contrast, the tendency towards black and white painting in good and bad is relatively little pronounced.

interpretation

When you think of an iron stove, one thinks of a heating stove. More realistic is an abandoned smelting furnace for ore mining in the forest. Grimm's comment on the fairy tale interprets it as the gateway to the underworld . Iron was first known from meteorite rocks from the sky, later iron ore was also smelted in furnaces. It is therefore of heavenly origin in the old conception (see Die Sterntaler ). On the one hand fatal (knife, sword) it also had powers to ward off evil. In addition to this male symbolism, the oven psychoanalytically represents the womb. The prince, locked in there by a witch's curse , survives so many years .

The king's daughter is terrified of the hard, hot iron stove, but also of the soft, slippery toads. The decision is made more difficult by their strong ties to their father, which is expressed in the mutual attempts to thwart the marriage (and, on behalf of this, in the speeches of the brides who are being put under it). In the sentence "Oh, where are you going!" reveals the meaning of the old "spinster green and small" as a terrifying picture of one's own future. Her gifts also represent the resource of her newly developed determination. Walnuts have wrinkles ( knuckles ), like a toad or an old woman ( "knuckle leg" ). Due to their structure analogous to the female genitals, the nuts are a symbol of the adult woman (cf. KHM 65 , 88 , 113 ).

The lonely house in the forest, which the princess finds after the iron stove instead of the later castle, appears in many Grimm fairy tales as a witch's place, but also as access to redemption (e.g. Hansel and Gretel , Jorinde and Joringel , Das Waldhaus ). She says "Oh, I would have been redeemed" . Benjamin told his sister in The Twelve Brothers , when she found him in the house in the forest, the sentence of the toads "Where are you from and where are you going?"

The toad also has an ambivalent meaning. She was compared to the female uterus . It was believed that it could move around the body and cause suffering in different places. She has poison in her skin . Like the snake , it is a treasure keeper and witch. They appear together ( the three little men in the forest , the white and black bride ). At Pentecost , toads were stabbed with knives, like the iron stove here (see The Seven Ravens : Cutting off a finger with the knife to open the mountain of glass).

In stories, the man is usually enclosed in a mountain of glass , where the woman has to free him ( The Seven Ravens ). Together with the iron swords, the symbolism of the iron furnace is repeated again. In the very similar Grimm fairy tale The Raven , the prince has to climb a mountain of glass, to which the bride was transferred because of his three mistakes.

For Hedwig von Beit , the fairy tale is an unusually complete depiction of salvation from the alchemical furnace. The princess senses the power hidden in the unconscious, her pact with the devil shows her the way to overcome the rapture caused by the king as the ruling consciousness. The amphibious mother nature dissolves the dividing by opposing symbols. It is the earthly-material way to the chthonic- spiritual.

Heinz-Peter Röhr diagnosed a narcissistic personality disorder , for which the hard, distant iron stove is a good picture. Jobst Finke understands the plot as overcoming separation fears and gaining autonomy.

origin

The text is in Grimms Märchen from the 1st edition of the second volume from 1815 (there no. 41) at position 127. The Brothers Grimm heard it in 1813 from Dorothea Viehmann .

In their annotation they compare this story ( from Zwehrn ) with a different one from Kassel and one from the Maing area , which they published in the 1st edition of the first volume from 1812 as Prinz Schwan and Hurleburlebutz . In the first, instead of the toads, the girl meets three old women named Sun, Moon and Star, one after the other, who hide it from their man-eating men and give him a golden spinning wheel, spindle and reel, for which she then buys three nights with her husband on the glass mountain . Grimms compare here u. a. The singing, jumping Löweneckerchen and De two Künigeskinner . In the other, the king promises his daughter to a white male so that he can show him the way out of the forest. That appears as a fox after eight days. After the king tries to put two others on him, the one on the right redeems him by cutting off the head of one of three pigeons.

In the hot, dark iron stove they see hell or underworld . This is how you establish a connection to The Goose Girl. She complains to an iron stove, which no one is allowed to hear, a custom that also existed with stones or holes in the ground.

Compare in Giambattista Basiles Pentameron III, 3 Viso , V, 3 Pinto Smauto . Cf. On the boy who wanted to learn witchcraft in Ludwig Bechstein's New German Book of Fairy Tales .

cartoon

literature

  • Grimm, brothers. Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. Pp. 600-605. Düsseldorf and Zurich, 19th edition 1999. (Artemis & Winkler Verlag; Patmos Verlag, ISBN 3-538-06943-3 )
  • Grimm, brothers. Children's and Household Tales. Last hand edition with the original notes by the Brothers Grimm. With an appendix of all fairy tales and certificates of origin, not published in all editions, published by Heinz Rölleke. Volume 3: Original Notes, Guarantees of Origin, Afterword. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition, Stuttgart 1994. pp. 220–224, pp. 493–494. (Reclam-Verlag, ISBN 3-15-003193-1 )
  • Alvey, Gerald: Iron. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 3. pp. 1294-1300. Berlin, New York, 1979.
  • Ward, Donald: Glasberg. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 5. pp. 1265-1270. Berlin, New York, 1987.
  • Berlioz, Jacques: toad. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 8. pp. 494-499. Berlin, New York, 1996.
  • Meinel, Gertraud: Nut. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 10. pp. 159-164. Berlin, New York, 2002.
  • Toad; Pentecost. In: Dictionary of German Folklore. Founded by Oswald A. Erich and Richard Beitl. 3rd edition, revised by Richard Beitl with the collaboration of Klaus Beitl. Stuttgart 1974. p. 482; Pp. 642-645. (Alfred Kröner Verlag, ISBN 3-520-12703-2 )
  • Uther, Hans-Jörg: Handbook to the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Berlin 2008. p. 278. (de Gruyter; ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 )
  • Scherf, Walter: The fairy tale dictionary. First volume A – KS 257–261. Munich, 1995. (Verlag CH Beck, ISBN 3-406-39911-8 )
  • von Beit, Hedwig: Contrast and renewal in fairy tales. Second volume of «Symbolism of Fairy Tales». Second, improved edition, Bern 1956. pp. 121–125. (A. Francke AG, publisher)
  • Röhr, Heinz-Peter: Narcissism. The inner prison. (Walter-Verlag, March 1999, ISBN 3530400599 )

Web links

Wikisource: The Iron Furnace  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schüring, Joachim: Gift of Heaven. In: Adventure Archeology 3/2007, pp. 24–25.
  2. ↑ Max Höfler: The victim uterus as a spiked ball. In: Journal of the Association for Folklore 11, 1901, p. 82.
  3. ↑ Erwin Richter: Influence of medico-astrological folk thought on the origin and formation of the male toad sacrifice in spiritual healing practice. In: Sudhoffs Archiv 42, 1958, pp. 326-349; also in: Folk Medicine: Problems and Research History. Edited by Elfriede Grabner, Darmstadt 1967 (= ways of research , 63), pp. 372–398.
  4. ↑ by Beit, Hedwig: Contrast and Renewal in Fairy Tales. Second volume of «Symbolism of Fairy Tales». Second, improved edition, Bern 1956. pp. 121–125. (A. Francke AG, publisher)
  5. ^ Röhr, Heinz-Peter: Narcissism. The inner prison. 8th edition, Munich 2009. (German; ISBN 978-3-423-34166-0 )
  6. ^ Jobst Finke: Dreams, Fairy Tales, Imaginations. Person-centered psychotherapy and counseling with images and symbols. Reinhardt, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-497-02371-4 , pp. 161, 195, 201, 202, 203.