The devil with the three golden hairs

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The devil with the three golden hairs is a fairy tale ( ATU 930, 461). It is in the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm at position 29 (KHM 29). In the first edition, the title was From the devil with three golden hairs .

Content (from the 2nd edition)

A poor woman gives birth to a son with happy skin . This should ensure in his further life that everything he starts will turn out for the better. He is also prophesied that he will marry the king's daughter at the age of 14. But the king has a hard heart. He buys their child from the poor, puts it in a box and throws it into the water. However, it does not go under, but drifts to a mill, where the child is taken in by the millers and raised in love. When the king came to the mill fourteen years later and heard the story, he sent the young man with a letter to the queen with the order that he should be killed immediately. On the way to the queen, the young man spends the night with robbers in the forest. They read the letter, exchanging the letter out of pity, so that it is married to the king's daughter. But the king demands the three golden hairs of the devil from him.

On the way to hell, two gatekeepers ask him why a well that otherwise gave wine dries up and why a tree withers that normally carried gold apples, and a ferryman asks why no one takes it over. In Hell the devil's Ellermutter (Low German for grandmother) hides him as an ant in the folds of her skirt. She tears off the sleeping devil's hair three times and says that she dreamed of the well, the tree and the ferryman. This is how the lucky child gets the hair, gives the devil's ferryman advice to give the next one the oar pole, and lets the toad in the well and the mouse in the tree root kill, for which he gets two donkeys with gold each.

He tells the greedy king that the gold lies like sand on the other bank. There the ferryman gives him the pole to drive.

Comparisons

Very similar: KHM 125 The Devil and His Grandmother , KHM 165 The Griffin , KHM 75a Phoenix Bird .

The motif of the swapped letter, which instead of death brings the wedding to the king's daughter, can also be found in the Hamlet tradition. In Shakespeare's "Hamlet", Claudius interrogates Hamlet and suddenly sends him to England with Rosenkranz and Güldenstern. He gives them a letter requesting the King of England to execute Hamlet as soon as he arrives. Hamlet meets pirates on his boat trip to England. Rosenkranz and Güldenstern are executed in his place in England because of the royal letter forged by Hamlet. In the Historiae Danicae, a possible source of Shakespeare's "Hamlet", the similarity of the motif is even clearer: Feng sends Amleth to England with company, along with a letter asking the English king to execute Amleth. Amleth replaces his name with that of the companion and adds that he will be married to the daughter of the English king.

origin

The fairy tale is in Grimm's children's and house fairy tales from the 2nd edition from 1819 in place 29 (KHM 29). According to her note, it comes from Zwehrn (by Dorothea Viehmann ). They name a less complete story from the Main area , which they reprinted as the Phoenix bird in the 1st edition (KHM 75a), then one from Niederhessen , which provided the text of the 1st edition (KHM 29a): The king's daughter falls in love with you Wood chopper in front of her window. He fetches the golden hair, which many sons of the king failed to do, answers why a market well dries up and a fig tree withers (cf. Isa. 36:16; Mat. 21:19), and receives two regiments that force the king to keep his word.

You name further references: KHM 165 Der Vogel Greif ; Büsching's Folk Tale No. 59; Wolfs Hausmärchen p. 184 the five questions ; Meier No. 73 and 79; Prohle's Fairy Tale for Young People No. 8; Zingerle p. 69 the dragon feathers ; Swedish in Afzelius ' Volkssagen 2, pp. 161–167; Norwegian at Asbjörnsen No. 5; Wendish at Haupt and Schmaler No. 17; in Hungarian at Mailath No. 8 the brothers ; Mongolian in the Eesser Ghan p. 142; as an introduction Grimm's Deutsche Sagen No. 486 and Gesta Romanorum No. 2; Pentameron 4, 3. Thorfill travels to Hell Utgard and tears a fiery hair out of Utgard's lofe ( Saxo Grammaticus 8th book). In Iceland the happy skin is kept hidden, the spirit in it accompanies the child for life. In Belgium they say helmets and draw conclusions about happiness from the color ( Del Rio disquisitt. Magicae 4, 2. 9. 7 ; cf. Edda Sämundar 2, 653 notes ). The devil's mother or grandmother or the giant's daughters like to help strangers, as in Hans and the Beanstalk .

The Brothers Grimm owned a Czech novel from 1794, which has the structure of the first fairy tale part with a death letter. The first German version of the improper suitor with unsolvable tasks and hair from the demon is the fairy tale of the Popanz published in 1812 by Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching .

The oldest literary forerunner of the first part is the legend of origin of the Iberian king Habis , according to Junianus Justinus : The illegitimate king's grandson survived all persecutions of the grandfather and, suckled by a doe, grows up in packs (similar to Cyrus , Romulus and Remus , that of a bitch or she-wolf are fed). The letter of death first appears in a Buddhist text about bodhisattva . The second part resembles a cuneiform fragment from Nineveh (7th century BC): Izdubar visits his ancestor on the other side of the ocean, he is crossed by a ferryman, there is talk of a wonderful tree, a dried up well, a girl in the castle . Particularly similar are the children of the parizade (AaTh 707), I don't know where I'm going, I don't know what to get (AaTh 465a), Marko the Rich and Vasilij Ohnglück from Aleksandr Afanas'ev's collection.

Structure and language

The fairy tale, which is comparatively long for the Brothers Grimm, extends the type of fateful tale of supernatural origin (AaTh 930) through the three supernatural tasks (AaTh 461). The visit to hell concludes both as the fourth threat to the hero after birth, exposure and the robber's house, as well as the resolution of the three tasks. The text contains many verbatim speeches, for example the saying “I smell, smell human flesh”, which characterizes the devil (cf. KHM 15 , 25 , 165 , 59a , 82a ).

interpretation

According to Hedwig von Beit's depth psychological interpretation , the king means, as always, the attitude that has previously dominated consciousness. He fears the repression, which symbolically equates to killing, by the poor foundling, but addressed by a deity. The new life through forgotten spiritual power is conveyed through the anima , in that the initially inconspicuous hero child survives the usual threat of exposure (see CG Jung Divine Child : Moses etc.). The box in the river repeats the skin of happiness in the amniotic fluid, the night sea voyage is reminiscent of a death ship and the rebirth of the sun's course from the sea. The mill as a symbol of the reality-processing course of fate becomes his adoptive home, as in the practice of sham adoption , which expresses that man is actually a child of two worlds. The robbers in the forest are a preliminary stage of the devil and Ellermutter, thanks to the latter ( cf.Gilgamesh ) they also quickly lead to the king's daughter (anima), but not in the long run because the confrontation with the chthonic (earthly) has not yet taken place (cf. Danish fairy tale The Health Tree , No. 13). The three golden hairs from the head signify knowledge and reflect the heavenly trinity also in its red-gold color, which, like gold, means both fire and light (cf. Prometheus ' fire-robbery). Possession of the hair of an enemy turns him into a helper (see Lévy-Bruhl, soul of the primitive , p. 253; see The three hunters , Russia No. 18). They are often related to question and answer ( Bolte-Polivka ). Knowledge enables life by eliminating opposites. With hell, after birth, exposure and robbery, the hero has survived danger from the unconscious four times and it is also the fourth station on the journey to hell in the second part of the text. The ferryman (cf. Charon ) embodies the effect and suffering of evil in one. The back and forth expresses an unsolved problem of opposites (cf. Sisyphus , Danaiden ), mediated as a shadow between the ego and the unconscious (profane and magical world) what the king now takes over as empirical ego.

Verena Kast diagnoses positive narcissism as a result of the confidence shown in such a child. This also arouses envy until the new has proven itself and is used. Happiness falls to him, awareness of it only grows through prolonged suffering. Well, tree, toad and mouse are motherly, earthy symbols that are displaced by the prevailing consciousness and therefore become negative (well as an enclosed spring), the wine indicates Dionysian joie de vivre and inspiration ( the donkey also goes with Dionysus ). Also Heinz-Peter Röhr takes the story as a parable for happiness in life without adjustment. The psychiatrist Wolfdietrich Siegmund finds the desperate inhibition in endogenous depression well represented in the tree that bears no fruit, the well that does not flow and the ferryman who is not relieved.

In Janosch's parody, the wood chopper creates a shaggy hairstyle at the hairdresser's, learns there that there is no devil, and brings the father-in-law three gold-dyed hairs.

Adaptations

The devil and his grandmother - Photo Waldbühne Sigmaringendorf from 2008
The devil with the three golden hairs at the Rod Theater Ravensburg 2010
  • The hat is to blame for everything! (1917), opera by Siegfried Wagner
  • The devil with the three golden hairs (before 1961), staging of the Radebeul puppet shows by Carl Schröder
  • The devil with the three golden hairs (1980), radio play by Katrin Lange (GDR radio)
  • The devil with the three golden hairs (1986), an adaptation for open-air stages by Gerold Rebholz and Friedrich-Wilhelm Mielke
  • From the devil with the three golden hairs (1995), opera for children, Matthias Schlothfeld , Wolfgang Hufschmidt , Dieter Süverkrüp , Ben Süverkrüp
  • From the devil with the three golden hairs , narrative theater piece, by FK Waechter , played by Verena Reichhardt. In: FK Waechter: Narrative theater. Publishing house of the authors, Frankfurt am Main 1997
  • Das Teufelsbrünnlein (no year, probably after 2000), staging of the Piccolo puppet shows by Gerd J. Pohl
  • The devil with the three golden hairs (2008, premiere: June 18, 2008), JG Herder & GC Lichtenberg.

The devil with the three golden hairs is the basis of the children's opera of the same name, which the composer Stefan Johannes Hanke wrote in 2011/12 on behalf of the Hanover State Opera . Dorothea Hartmann wrote the libretto. The approximately one-hour opera has been published by Schott Music .

Film adaptations

literature

  • Brothers Grimm: 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. Reclam, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-15-003193-1 , pp. 68-69, p. 455.
  • Hedwig von Beit: Symbolism of the fairy tale. Francke, Bern 1952, pp. 375-387.
  • Verena Kast: The devil with the three golden hairs. About trust in your own fate. 5th edition. Kreuz, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-268-00017-7 .
  • Walter Scherf: The fairy tale dictionary. Second volume LZ. Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-39911-8 , pp. 1181-1186.
  • Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbook to the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. de Gruyter, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 , pp. 77-79.
  • Heinz-Peter Röhr: About the happiness of loving yourself. Ways out of anxiety and depression. 5th edition. Patmos, Düsseldorf 2009, ISBN 978-3-491-40124-2 .

Web links

Wikisource: The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/amleth.html
  2. ↑ 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. 77.
  3. ↑ Walter Scherf: The fairy tale dictionary. Second volume LZ. Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-39911-8 , pp. 1184-1185.
  4. ↑ Hedwig von Beit: Symbolism of the fairy tale. Francke, Bern, 1952, pp. 375-387.
  5. ↑ Verena Kast: The devil with the three golden hairs. About trust in your own fate. 5th edition. Kreuz, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-268-00017-7 .
  6. ↑ Heinz-Peter Röhr: About the happiness of loving yourself. Ways out of anxiety and depression. 5th edition. Patmos, Düsseldorf 2009, ISBN 978-3-491-40124-2 .
  7. ↑ Frederik Hetmann: dream face and magic trace. Fairy tale research, fairy tale studies, fairy tale discussion. With contributions by Marie-Louise von Franz, Sigrid Früh and Wolfdietrich Siegmund. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-596-22850-6 , p. 123.
  8. ↑ Janosch: The devil with the three golden hairs. In: Janosch tells Grimm's fairy tale. Fifty selected fairy tales, retold for today's children. With drawings by Janosch. 8th edition. Beltz and Gelberg, Weinheim and Basel 1983, ISBN 3-407-80213-7 , pp. 232-239.