The young giant

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The young giant is a fairy tale ( ATU 650A). It is in the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm at position 90 (KHM 90). In the first edition, the title was From a young giant .

content

A farmer takes his thumb-sized son into the field because he cries and wants to go with him. There a giant fetches him and suckles him on his chest until he can uproot trees. When the young giant comes home, his parents are terrified of him. He plows much better than his father, but they cannot fill him up or get him an iron stick that he does not break. He can be employed by a blacksmith without pay, but he wants to give him two blows on the pay day. But because he breaks the iron apart and the anvil into the ground, he is immediately dismissed, only hits the blacksmith once over the haystack and continues with the thickest iron rod as a stick. He becomes a foreman of a bailiff, as stingy as the blacksmith, whom he only wants to give three pranks every year. He gets up two hours after the other to cut wood, eats in peace and yet is faster than everyone else. After a year the bailiff wants to avoid the blows, asks him to think about it and first sends him to clean the well, where a millstone is dropped on his head, then grain is ground in an enchanted mill. There he dines with invisible people at a table. Then they slap him in the dark, but he always hits back until morning. So the mill is redeemed. Then he kicks the cowardly bailiff and his wife, causing them to blow up through the window.

Narrative typological classification

The young giant corresponds to the narrative type of the strong Hans ( AaTh 650A), which is particularly popular in Northern Europe, but is occupied until China and Africa. The earliest record comes from Sweden in the early 18th century. Herakles , Siegfried , Cú Chulainn or Beowulf are of course older . In Grimm's fairy tales there is still KHM 166 The strong Hans .

In many variations he is a bear's son or forged from iron or the like (cf. KHM 136 Der Eisenhans ), but also often mother's boy who is breastfed for a long time. His fate usually ends somewhere in the world, rarely well. His dumb fight with rich masters often has socially critical features.

Grimm's note

Grimm's comment compares the fairy tale from the Leine area (probably by Georg August Friedrich Goldmann ) with Siegfried , Thor and other legends of giants and heroes who are raised and suckled by giants or dwarfs: Tschurilo from Prince Wladimir's round table , the Persian Gushtasp and Rustem, the Bohemian Scharmack, Thorgil from the Floamanna saga, KHM 92 The King of the Golden Mountain . The fairy tale shows the closeness of such heroic characters to Eulenspiegel . The Finnish giant owl mirror Kalffi burns the blacksmith's child with the cradle, lets bears and wolves eat the cattle, turns the bones into horns and drives the wolves home. The Nordic Grettir plays similar tricks, Florens in Octavian wastes the oxen on Clemens. Grimms analyze that the heroic expresses itself here in youthfulness and disregard for normal human life.

Kürdchen Bingeling in a story from Hessen (probably by Werner Henschel's sister Sophie Franziska) was suckled for seven years, is huge, voracious and naughty. When someone tries to kill him, he escapes by blocking the path behind him, then into a well. You throw a millstone and church bell at him, but he calls out: “Oh, what a nice collar!” And “Oh, what a nice Bingelmütze!” The strong Hans von Mezel knocks the anvil into the ground of a blacksmith and tears up oak trees , throws horse-drawn carts and defeats the devil in a long throw. In a story from Zwehrn (probably by Dorothea Viehmann ) he defeats cats and ghosts in the mill. In a Magdeburg story, he serves hell, lets out all souls and is released. In a Jutland version, his master promises his daughter that if he takes her ring out of the well, the millstone falls around his neck again, and later he lets the devils grind in hell for him.

Comparisons

parody

In Janosch's parody Tom Thumb does everything in vain to help his father, and finally becomes a giant, which is also not right, so he wanders away. In another, he's too big and wrecks everything at home, he apprentices a mouse and becomes as small as a thumb, when his lover laughs at him.

literature

  • Grimm, Brothers: Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. Pp. 453-460. 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. Pp. 170-174, 481-482. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition, Stuttgart 1994. (Reclam-Verlag; ISBN 3-15-003193-1 )
  • Uther, Hans-Jörg: Handbook to the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Berlin 2008. pp. 206-207. (de Gruyter; ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 )
  • Lox, Harlinda: Strong Hans. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 12. pp. 1179-1185. Berlin, New York, 2007.
  • Röhrich, Lutz: Proportional Fantasy. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 10. pp. 1432-1435. Berlin, New York, 2002.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Janosch: The Thumbnail. 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. 124-132.
  2. ↑ Janosch: The young giant. 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. 140-146

Web links

Wikisource: The Young Giant  - Sources and full texts