The poor boy in the grave

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The poor boy in the grave is an example text ( ATU 1408C, 1296B, 1313). In the Grimm Brothers' Children's and Household Tales from the 5th edition from 1843 onwards, it is at position 185 (KHM 185) and is based on Ludwig Aurbacher's Des poor Orphan Life and Death in his booklet for the youth of 1834.

content

A poor orphan boy lives in the house of a rich, stingy farmer. While he is herding, the hen goes through a hedge fence and is stolen by the hawk. He yells after the thief. The man hears it and hits him. Now the orphan boy has to look after the chicks without a mother hen. To keep them together, he ties them on a string, but this is how the hawk takes them all at once from the tired and hungry boy. The man beats him even more and the next time he sends him as a messenger to the judge with a basket of grapes. When he reads the letter and counts it, the boy confesses that he ate two because he was hungry. When he has to bring the judge a new basket, he puts the letter under a stone to eat so that he cannot betray it. The judge laughs at this simplicity and writes to the peasant that he should better keep him and teach him right and wrong. The farmer has the boy cut straw into chaff while he and the others go to the fair. The boy works so hard in his fear that he accidentally cuts his skirt, which he had placed on the straw in the heat. Because he would rather kill himself than wait for the man, he first takes a pot of poison under the farmer's bed, then a bottle of fly poison from the farmer's wardrobe, which contains honey and wine. He wonders about the sweet taste. But when the wine is working, he lies down in a grave in the churchyard and dies in the cold to the music of a wedding next door. When the farmer learns this, he faints for fear of punishment. The farmer's wife burns the house with the fat in the pan. They live in poverty and remorse.

origin

The source mentions Grimm's note, Aurbacher's little book for young people, p. 71. 72. (1834; correct number of pages: 167–172.) And also compares Hans in school in Vogl's little grandmother p. 100-103.

Wilhelm Grimm rewrote the original sentence by sentence without changing the plot. In places he formulates a little more clearly, e.g. B. that the peasant woman only said that the honey was poison to hold back the nibblers , and that the embers of the hot wine and the cold dew of the night caused death. He deleted Aurbacher's opening sentence about the difficult lot of the orphans and replaced the final sentence with the interpretation of fire as God's punishment through remorse in poverty and misery . The bird of prey became a hawk (cf. phrase in KHM 107 ), and brandy or kirsch became Hungarian wine . However, characteristic details were also omitted, such as the fact that the boy with a weak head and a petty heart was assigned to the stingy man with his father's belongings by the judge , which also gives context to the letters to the judge. He wants to “go to the grave himself so that the meager man can save the costs.” Cf. in Giambattista Basiles Pentameron I, 4 Vardiello .

The episode with the robbery of chicken and chick tied by the hawk and subsequent suicide attempt with alleged poison is a simple-minded husband since Lawrence Abstemius ' Hecatomythium secundum often in 1505 than Schwank received. Other individual motifs also come from foolish cocks (cf. KHM 7 , 34 , 59 , 104 ). Nevertheless, the message here is clear, not to rise above people with their weaknesses, but ... to integrate into the community and ... to give a new home ( Hans-Jörg Uther ).

interpretation

The power struggle with the child for diligence, accuracy and subordination takes place with a limited range of emotions in deep insecurity: All characters show, in different roles, extreme accuracy, responsibility and fear of loss or punishment, as in an obsessional neurosis (see also KHM 178 Master Pfriem ) . The fairy tale revolves around the motif of existential lack. Homeopathic literature mentions this fairy tale to illustrate the drug picture of arsenic with symptoms such as deep-seated insecurity, restlessness, exhaustion, sensitivity to cold, greed, blame, desperate fear of death.

Wilhelm Grimm's word " Ungarwein" seemed so peculiar that Hermine Mörike took it up in her parody about Rumpelstiltskin .

literature

  • Grimm, Brothers: Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. Pp. 752-754. Düsseldorf and Zurich, 19th edition, Artemis & Winkler Verlag; Patmos Verlag 1999, 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. S. 267, 511. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition, Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-15-003193-1 )
  • Rölleke, Heinz (Ed.): Grimm's fairy tales and their sources. The literary models of the Grimm fairy tales are presented synoptically and commented on. 2., verb. Edition, Trier 2004. pp. 432–439, 579. (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier; series of literature studies, vol. 35; ISBN 3-88476-717-8 )
  • Uther, Hans-Jörg: Handbook to the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Berlin 2008. pp. 380-382. (de Gruyter; ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 )
  • Uther, Hans-Jörg: Geese on a leash. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 5. pp. 683-686. Berlin, New York, 1987.
  • Conrad, Jo Ann: Man believes himself dead. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 9. pp. 210-215. Berlin, New York, 1999.

Web links

Wikisource: The Poor Boy in the Grave  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 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. S. 267, 511. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition, Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-15-003193-1 )
  2. ↑ Rölleke, Heinz (ed.): Grimm's fairy tales and their sources. The literary models of the Grimm fairy tales are presented synoptically and commented on. 2., verb. Edition, Trier 2004. pp. 432–439, 579. (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier; series of literature studies, vol. 35; ISBN 3-88476-717-8 )
  3. ↑ Uther, Hans-Jörg: Geese on a leash. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 5. pp. 683-686. Berlin, New York, 1987.
  4. ↑ Uther, Hans-Jörg: Handbook to the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm. Berlin 2008. pp. 380-382. (de Gruyter; ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 )
  5. ^ Rudolf, Gerd: Obsessional neurosis. In: Rudolf, Gerd u. a. (Ed.): Psychotherapeutic medicine and psychosomatics. An introductory textbook on a psychodynamic basis. 6th, revised edition 2008. Thieme, ISBN 978-3-13-125176-3 , p. 187.
  6. ^ Bomhardt, Martin: Symbolic Materia Medica. 3rd, enlarged and redesigned edition. S. 185. Berlin, 1999. (Verlag Homeopathie und Symbol; ISBN 3-9804662-3-X )
  7. ↑ Vithoulkas, Georgos: Homeopathic Medicines. Materia Medica Viva - Volume III. Apium graveolens - Asterias rubens. Limited special edition, Munich 2009. Elsevier, Urban & Fischer, ISBN 978-3-437-55061-4 , pp. 139–187.
  8. ↑ Hermine Mörike: What became of Rumpelstiltskin. In: Wolfgang Mieder (ed.): Grim fairy tales. Prose texts from Ilse Aichinger to Martin Walser. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt (Main) 1986, ISBN 3-88323-608-X , pp. 224–226 (first published in: Fliegende Blätter. Vol. 178 / 89th year, no. 4577, April 20, 1933, p. 245-246.).