The glass coffin
The glass coffin is a fairy tale ( ATU 552, 410). It is in the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm from the 3rd edition from 1837 at position 163 (KHM 163) and was published by Wilhelm Grimm in 1836 in the Pfennig magazine for children . It comes from the novel Das Pampered Mother-Söhngen or Polidor's very special and extremely funny curriculum vitae at schools and universities by Sylvano from 1728.
content
A poor tailor gets lost in a forest . First he tries to sleep in a tree . Then he sees the light of a house where he finds a place to sleep, although the resident wants to turn him away first. He wakes up to the sound of a fight between a black bull and a large stag . The stag kills the bull and carries the tailor on his antlers to a rock wall, the door of which he slams open. When a voice calls out , the tailor steps into a hall made of square stones . A falling stone in the middle leads to a second hall of the same size with smoke-filled glass vessels in the walls. He is looking at the image of a lock in a box on the floor when the voice calls him to a girl sleeping in a glass case. He frees the awakening woman who tells him that she and her homestead were turned into this form and her brother into a deer when she turned down a black artist's proposal. They bring the vessels to the surface and open them, whereupon all are redeemed.
origin
The fairy tale of redemption is taken from the student novel from the spoiled mother's boy, published under the pseudonym Sylvanus in Freiburg in 1728, where it is inserted on pp. 22–32. Grimm's comment suspects a real but revised legend. In fact, it is an early fairy tale proof of the corresponding fashions in Germany, which the author calls silly to be on the safe side and has an old auntie tell. Wilhelm Grimm borrowed the book from Karl Hartwig Gregor von Meusebach . He censored the description of the woman's nudity in the glass case, the term magician, German foreign words and, as in Snow White and Rose Red, added the brother's redemption.
Both the light-footed tailor and the gray man often meet in Grimm's fairy tales. The plot is similar to KHM 82a The Three Sisters , the glass coffin KHM 53 Snow White . The magic of glasses reminiscent in KHM 99 the spirit in the bottle of alchemy . The psychotherapist Jobst Finke sees the motif of death sleep , also in KHM 50 Sleeping Beauty and KHM 53 Snow White , as a possible metaphor for the constrictions in severe depression .
literature
- Grimm, Brothers: Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. Pp. 686-692. 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. P. 255, P. 505. (Reclam-Verlag; 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. 288–303, 571. (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. 338-340. (de Gruyter; ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 )
- Edzard Storck: dealing with three fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. Turm-Verlag, 1996; ISBN 3-7999-0245-7
Individual evidence
- ^ 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. 193, 198.
