The selfish giant
The Selfish Giant ( Engl. The Selfish Giant ), also known as the selfish giant translated into German, is a literary fairy tale by Oscar Wilde . It appeared in 1888 in the prose collection, The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales, which is best known for its cover story .
content
In the fairy tale, a giant chases children away from his garden and builds a wall around his property. This means that there is eternal winter there:
“The only ones who still liked the garden were the snow and frost. […] The snow covered the grass with its thick white coat and the frost made all the trees appear silver. [The] north wind [...] roared incessantly through the garden and blew down the chimney panes. "
Only when the children gain access to the garden through an opening in the wall does nature awaken to new life. The giant watches the children from the window of his house and only now realizes the reason for the lack of spring. He steps outside to help a little boy who is not tall enough to climb one of the trees like his playmates. All the children run away, except for the little boy, who has too tearful eyes to see the giant coming. He lets him help him up the tree and kisses the giant, whereupon the other children return to the garden:
“And when all the other children saw that the giant was no longer angry, they came back in a hurry - and with them came spring. 'From now on, children, this is your garden,' said the giant, took a huge ax and tore down the wall. "
The children now play regularly in the garden of the giant, who, however, misses the little boy among them who once kissed him. The children don't know the boy, he hasn't been seen for years. One winter morning the giant, who has meanwhile grown old and frail, looks out the window:
“In the farthest corner of the garden a tree was covered all over with beautiful white flowers. Its branches were gilded and silver fruits hung from them. And under the tree stood the little boy whom the giant had taken so deeply into his heart. "
He rushes out into the garden and realizes that the boy has stigmata on his hands and feet. When the giant asks him who inflicted these wounds on him, the little boy describes them as "the wounds of love" and invites the giant into his garden, paradise . The children find the giant dead under the blossoming tree at noon.
Design and interpretation approaches
Oscar Wilde wrote this like other art fairy tales, which are now among the best known of their genre, for his two sons, Cyril (1885–1915) and Vyvyan (1886–1967). The authorially told fairy tale The Selfish Giant is linguistically characterized by its emphatically artless language with a slight tendency towards pathos .
In terms of content, the moral and didactic aspect is typical of the genre . In this story, Wilde tries, among other things, to amalgamate the artistic views of his two mentors : the aestheticist L'art-pour-l'art concept of the British essayist Walter Pater and John Ruskin's teaching, influenced by medieval Gothic , that beautiful can only be combined come into play with the true and the good. In Wilde, also in The Selfish Giant , Pater's ideas appear as a stage that has to be overcome in order to conform to a Christian ideal. To do this, Wilde uses the traditional fairy tale motif of the person who, in the course of the plot, recognizes the comparatively higher value of charity compared to his material possessions. In addition to the wounds on the boy, alluding to Jesus Christ's injuries sustained in the Passion , the twelve peach trees, which refer to the twelve apostles in the gospels of the Bible , can be interpreted as a further Christian motif . Not unusual for Wilde, whose works are attributed to the fin de siècle , is the transfiguration of death . However, the ironic sprinkles of other art fairy tales are missing in this story .
Some aspects can be found in Wilde's essay Socialism and the Soul of Man (1891), in which the author represents a socialist - libertarian worldview.
Adaptations
In 1971, the Canadian cartoon The Selfish Giant was released , which was nominated for an Oscar . The 2013 film The Selfish Giant by Clio Barnard is inspired by the fairy tale.
Graeme Koehne composed a ballet based on the fairy tale.