The master thief (fairy tale)

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Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde , 1909

The master thief is a fairy tale ( ATU 1525 A, 1740, 1737). It is in the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm from the 5th edition of 1843 at position 192 (KHM 192) and comes from Moriz Haupt's magazine for German antiquity from 1843 ( A fairy tale from Thuringia , by Georg Friedrich Stertzing ). Based on the same model, Ludwig Bechstein took it over in his German fairy tale book as Die Samples des Meisterdiebes (1845 No. 5, 1853 No. 4).

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A master thief has become a wealthy man by practicing his trade all over the world . Eventually, however, he moved back to his homeland and told his godfather , the count in the castle near his father's house, about his abilities. At first he is angry and wants to let the master thief down immediately. Then he gives him the chance to prove his skills with three tasks.

First, the master thief must steal the best horse from the count's stable, which is guarded by soldiers . The thief disguises himself as an old woman and sells soporific wine to the guards. Then he goes into the stable to the three bodyguards, who have since been anesthetized: one holds the reins of the horse in his hand, the other the tail and the third snores leaning forward in the saddle. He gives the first a rope, the second a bundle of straw , he lets the rider sit in the saddle, but lifts the saddle with several ropes down from the beams so high that he can pull the horse away from under him unnoticed. He wraps rags around the horse's hooves and silently guides it to the stable and out of the castle.

The second task is: The master thief is supposed to steal the bed sheet from under the count's body and steal the wedding ring from the countess's finger during the night . He solves this task by fetching a corpse from the gallows hill and putting it on his shoulders. He places a ladder in front of the Count's bedroom and climbs up with the corpse on his shoulders until the corpse's head appears at the window. The count who has been waiting for it shoots the corpse "dead" with his pistol. But because it was his godchild, the count goes into the garden to bury the man who was shot. Meanwhile, the master thief climbs into the bedroom, pretends to the countess that he is her husband and that he needs the sheets to wrap the man who has been shot. He also asks her to give the godchild the wedding ring to the grave and disappears with it.

The third task: He is supposed to steal the pastor and the sexton from the church. The master thief solves this task by exposing crabs with burning candles on their backs at night in the churchyard and loudly proclaiming that these are the souls of the dead who have risen from the graves; The last day has come and he is Peter who brings people into the kingdom of heaven . The priest and the sexton want to be the first to go to heaven and willingly crawl into a sack. The master thief drags the sack through the village up to the castle and into the dovecote. He leaves the two of them and tells them that they heard the angels flapping their wings.

Motif story

Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde , 1909

The motif of the courageous and cunning master thief appears in many cultures (also presumably independently of one another) and is in any case very old and wandered far; Herodotus found it in Egypt and took it into his Histories, Book 2, Chap. 121 on. It appears in 1001 Nights and also has a Low German parallel De Gaudeif un sien Meester , Grimms Märchen Nr. 68.

See also: Trickster

Machining

Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde , 1909

The Schwankmärchen comes from Georg Friedrich Stertzing in the magazine for German antiquity . The sentence “Trees must be pulled while they are young” is already there. Wilhelm Grimm added other phrases here , as in other Grimms fairy tales : "You speak as you understand it"; “To give grace for justice” (cf. KHM 12 , 36 ); “To marry the Seiler daughter” (cf. KHM 4 ); “It goes to your neck” (cf. KHM 81 , 98 ); "For money and good words"; "What a long face the count drew"; "For this time you will get away with a whole skin" (cf. KHM 18 , 45 ); "So you can count on your exaltation on the gallows." The many euphemisms of legal life are striking. Grimm's hero sees himself as a “master thief”:… “Don't think that I steal like a common thief, I only take from the abundance of the rich. Poor people are sure: I would rather give them than take something from them. So also, what I can have without effort, cunning and skill, I don't touch. ”The father fears that it will not end well, the godfather and count will now" swing him on the gallows rope "instead of the baptismal font in his arms. to let. At Stertzing, the son is “a robber” whom the count would rock “on the rabensteine” (probably the local gallows). He then makes a “good face to the bad game” and after the successful horse theft decides to kill him. Only when the pastor and schoolmaster crawl out of the sack does he laugh: “You are an arch thief”, gives him the life “that you actually would have ruined.” The fact that the old woman is hoarse in the cold makes it easier to disguise her voice. The procedure of lifting the sleeper with the saddle from the horse is explained by pushing a bar under the saddle and ropes hanging from the ceiling. At Grimm, only ropes are attached to the saddle from the wall. The pastor and schoolmaster become pastor and sexton (cf. KHM 138 ), the chicken house becomes a dovecote. There is “Hungarian wine” in the barrel (see KHM 185 ).

Hans-Jörg Uther looks at Grimm Fluctuating Exemplary identified and safeguarded the magisterial order: The Count recognizes the victory of the crafty, but it is assigned boundaries in the country's reference (as in Eulenspiegel history object no. 26).

Comparisons

Grimm's note names the source, Georg Friedrich Stertzings A fairy tale from Thuringia in Moriz Haupt's magazine for German antiquity , and compares Kuhn and Schwarz “S. 362 ", Wolf's house fairy tale " S. 397 ", Zingerle " S. 300 ", Meier No. 55, in Norwegian by Asbjörnsen " S. 218 ”, Italian from Straparola 1,2 The thief Cassandrino , an Egyptian story from Herodotus , an old Dutch poem De deif van Brugghe “ in Haupts Zeitschrift 5, 385–404. ”

Cf. on the thief KHM 68 De Gaudeif un sien Meester , KHM 129 The four artful brothers , on the sack KHM 61 The Burle , KHM 146 The Turnip . Cf. Basiles Pentameron III, 7 Corvetto .

interpretation

Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde , 1909

Hans-Jörg Uther notices that for such a Robin Hood story it is vague, that is, irresponsible, and at the same time authoritarian. That the story of a thief always appears to be ropes seemed appropriate to the author. As an earlier version of this Wikipedia article noted, the hero could have replaced the master in the ring theft. In Bechstein's version, he demands a ransom.

Receptions

Ludwig Bechstein's Die Samples of the Master Thief is very similar, but tells a little more exciting, in that the reader does not recognize the disguised thief immediately. The godfather is a nobleman, gives him the tasks as a pretext to hang him, and buries the allegedly shot to avoid a stir. The groom falls drunk from his horse, so the rope construction is unnecessary. Finally, the hero keeps the horse and the ring and continues with his parents.

In Peter-Paul Zahls The master thief it comes to real estate transactions.

Theater adaptations

Movies

literature

  • Heinz Rölleke (Ed.): Grimm's fairy tales and their sources. The literary models of Grimm's fairy tales are synoptically presented and commented on (= literature series literary studies. Volume 35). 2nd Edition. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 2004, ISBN 3-88476-717-8 , pp. 486-501, 582.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lothar Bluhm and Heinz Rölleke: “Popular speeches that I always listen to”. Fairy tale - proverb - saying. On the folk-poetic design of children's and house fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. New edition. S. Hirzel Verlag, Stuttgart / Leipzig 1997, ISBN 3-7776-0733-9 , pp. 159-160
  2. ↑ Heinz Rölleke (Ed.): Grimm's fairy tales and their sources. The literary models of Grimm's fairy tales are synoptically presented and commented on (= literature series literary studies. Volume 35). 2nd Edition. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 2004, ISBN 3-88476-717-8 , pp. 486-501, 582.
  3. ↑ Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbook on the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm. de Gruyter, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 , pp. 391-395.
  4. ↑ Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbook on the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm. de Gruyter, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 , p. 394.

Web links

Wikisource: The Master Thief  - Sources and full texts