The goose-girl at the well

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The goose-girl at the fountain is a fairy tale ( ATU 923). It is in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm from the 5th edition of 1843 instead of 179 (KHM 179) and is based on Andreas Schumacher The Gänselhüterin in Hermann Kletkes Almanac German folk tales of the 1840th

content

An old woman lives in a house in the wilderness. She takes good care of her geese and is kind to everyone, but people don't particularly like her and think of her as a witch. A young count meets her while she is collecting grass and fruit in the forest, and she lets him carry it to her house. She makes fun of him because he is having a harder time than first thought, sits down on the sling and hits him on the legs with nettles. As a reward, he is allowed to rest on the bench in front of her door in the lovely surroundings. He just doesn't understand why the old woman thinks he could fall in love with her ugly old daughter, but leaves her refreshed with a little box made of emerald, which the old woman gives him as a present.

After three days he finds his way out of the wilderness to a city, where he is led into the castle. When he presented the little box to the queen, she passed out and he was to be taken away. But she wakes up and tells him in private about her youngest and most beautiful daughter, who even when weeping, pearls fell from her eyes as tears. There was such a tear in the little box. When asked how she loved him, the king had rejected her when she replied that she loved him as much as salt. The count is supposed to lead the royal couple to the witch.

The witch's daughter sits with her in the house and goes crazy. When a night owl cries three times, she has to go out to a well under three old oaks. She pulls the ugly skin off her face, washes herself and the skin she lets dry, and cries. When a branch cracks under the Count who is watching her, she is startled and disappears. The old woman sweeps the house and lets her take off her skin and put on her old dress as a king's daughter. The daughter is frightened that she wants to leave her. But the witch explains everything to the arriving parents, then she disappears and the little house is a castle with servants.

Stylistic peculiarities

In the course of the story, the perspective changes several times, which would be very untypical for a folk tale . It starts with the witch. The greater part then seems to have been told from the young count's point of view. Towards the end, the narrator jumps to the king's daughter and then intervenes: But I have to tell about the young count again.

The poem of the witch towards the beginning also appears somewhat redundant in its brevity, simplicity and dysharmony, especially since it remains the only one:

"don't look around
your hump is crooked "

Her next sentence is “Do you want to help me?” , As if she had enchanted the young count with it (as in Jorinde and Joringel ).

interpretation

The central motif is the misunderstood love of the king's daughter, who she compares to salt . Instead of tears, she cries pearls and precious stones. The old woman speaks of "pearls, more beautiful than they can be found in the sea" (the emerald green box goes with it), which, like the well at which she weeps, indicates great depth.

At the same time, the stone tears or the pearls are very hard. This combination of hardness and depth is symbolized by the salt that is created when seawater is dried. The old woman, who is presented as a very old mother in the first sentence , rushes the Count up the mountain in the hot sun, with the stones rolling away from under his feet. In many biblical passages pearls have to do with wisdom and salt with cursing, see especially Genesis 19:26 .

This motif of ambivalence or the misunderstood runs through the entire description. The area around the house in the wilderness turns out to be "quite lovely" . During the day, the king's daughter hides her beauty under her ugly skin, which she only shows at night. The owl's cry and moonlight go well with the witch-like what people see in the old woman, whose sickle already suggests the moon in its shape. The "young gentleman" is also greeted with friendly suspicion at the hut and in the city.

In comparison with the choice of Paris ( Iliad ), Cupid and Psyche , Cinderella , Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice , King Lear and The Goose Shepherdess at the Fountain , Sigmund Freud shows that the third daughter with her silent gift is the goddess of the dead, but she becomes the goddess of love is transfigured. Unfounded guilt and social withdrawal are also symptoms of depression, which homeopathic literature compares to the medicine sodium muriaticum (sea salt). The geese are an attribute of the mother archetype and resemble the duck in KHM 13 The three little men in the forest and KHM 135 The white and black bride , for humble service cf. KHM 24 Mrs. Holle .

Origin and variants

The fairy tale has been included in the Grimm Brothers' children's and house tales since the 5th edition of 1843 at position 179. In their comments they only write: According to a story by Andreas Schuhmacher in Vienna in Kletke's Almanac No. 2. The text there is overall longer, more lively and psychologically more informative. On the other hand, the poem is missing, the content of which is roughly in dialogue. The changes in perspective are less noticeable, the end not open. Servants are mentioned, but not related to the geese. The plot is identical. Before that, Andreas Schumacher's fairy tale appeared in Vienna in 1833 as D 'Ganshiadarin .

Princess Mouse Skin from the first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales belongs to the same type of fairy tale. Independent of this, there are numerous other oral variants and written versions. Here is an important variant Salt is more precious than gold , a Slovak fairy tale known from the collections of Pavol Dobšinský and Božena Němcová . Another salt fairy tale is The Most Valuable . They usually end with the outcast daughter initially going unrecognized to the father's court, where he realizes the importance of salt while eating. Cf. also KHM 31 The girl without hands , KHM 65 Allerleirauh , KHM 94 The wise farmer's daughter , KHM 54a Hans Dumm .

The art fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen is closely interwoven with the salt fairy tale : The wind tells of Waldemar Daa and his daughters . Here, however, the gold-loving king from the fairy tale has turned into a haughty father who sacrifices the happiness of his family to the alchemical search for gold. Salt and love rehearsal motifs have also receded into the background with Andersen. The youngest daughter annoys the father because she wants to stop the cutting of a forest. Jean-François Bladé narrates the southern French fairy tale The Turkey Maid : Here the salt fairy tale has become a framework for a Cinderella fairy tale . Even Joseph Jacobs in his collection presents German fairy tale , a fairy tale salt: Bins cap : Similar to Bladé experienced the protagonist in bins cap the three encounters with the loved one in the fleeing kind of Cinderella and Allerleirauh . The motif of existential salt shortage is as stunted in Jacob's fairy tales as in Grimm's goose-girl . The only complaint here is the lack of taste of the food. The origin of the salt motif becomes clearer in the Slovak fairy tale by Pavol Dobšinský and Božena Němcová . With William Shakespeare , the salt motif has completely disappeared - Lear's question about the love comparison remains in principle unanswerable for Cordelia. Cf. also The most indispensable in Ludwig Bechstein's New German Book of Fairy Tales .

photos

The image of the goose-girl at the fountain shaped the illustrations by Ignatius Taschner . He created his illustration program for the fairy tale for the Art Nouveau book series Gerlach's Jugendbücherei : The goose illustrations include two large-format square color pictures, four smaller color illustrations and five black and white vignettes of different sizes. The two square main pictures deal with the central fairy tale situations: 1. The young prince carries the happy old woman on his back and 2. The goose-she-princess sits at the edge of the fountain .

Movie 

Theater and musical

There are stage plays u. a. by Uwe Hoppe (world premiere 2000 in Bayreuth ), Robert Bürkner (world premiere 1947). The goose-girl at the fountain was part of the program at the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale Festival in Hanau in 2001.

literature

Brothers Grimm

  • Grimm, brothers. Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. Pp. 730-739. 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. S. 263, S. 509. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition, Stuttgart 1994. (Reclam-Verlag; ISBN 3-15-003193-1 )

Another variant

  • Necessity of salt. In: Zingerle, Ignaz: Children's and Household Tales from Tyrol. Collected by the Zingerle brothers, edited by Ignaz Vinc. Zingerle. Second increased edition 1870. pp. 155–156.

Interpretations

  • Schmitt, Christoph: As sweet as salt. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 8. pp. 1038-1042. Berlin, New York, 1996.
  • Scherf, Walter: The fairy tale dictionary. First volume A – KS 380–383. Munich, 1995. (Verlag CH Beck; ISBN 3-406-39911-8 )
  • Freud, Sigmund: The motif of choosing a box (1913). In: Sigmund Freud. Study edition. Volume X. Fine arts and literature. Pp. 181-193. Frankfurt am Main 1982. (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag; ISBN 3-596-27310-2 )
  • Freud, Sigmund: The guilty criminals. In: Sigmund Freud. Study edition. Volume X. Fine arts and literature. Pp. 252-253. Frankfurt am Main 1982. (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag; ISBN 3-596-27310-2 )

Web links

Wikisource: The goose-girl at the fountain  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Freud, Sigmund: The motif of the box choice (1913). In: Sigmund Freud. Study edition. Volume X. Fine arts and literature. Pp. 181-193. Frankfurt am Main 1982. (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag; ISBN 3-596-27310-2 )
  2. ↑ Dilling, H., Mombour, W., Schmidt, MH, Schulte-Markwort, E. (Ed.): World Health Organization. International classification of mental disorders. ICD-10 Chapter V (F). Diagnostic criteria for research and practice. 3rd, corrected edition. Pp. 104-111. (Verlag Hans Huber; ISBN 3-456-84098-5 )
  3. ^ Bomhardt, Martin: Symbolic Materia Medica. 3rd, enlarged and redesigned edition. S. 955. Berlin, 1999. (Verlag Homeopathie und Symbol; ISBN 3-9804662-3-X )
  4. ↑ by Beit, Hedwig: Symbolik des Märchen. Bern, 1952. p. 786. (A. Francke AG, Verlag)
  5. ^ Kletke: Almanac of German folk tales. Berlin 1840. pp. 37-64.
  6. ↑ Hans Christian Andersen : The wind tells of Waldemar Daa and his daughters in the Gutenberg-DE project
  7. ↑ Jean-François Bladé : The David Chariot - fairy tales from Gascon Volume 2 from Contes populaires de la Gascogne translated by Konrad Sandkühler; Free Spiritual Life Publishing House; Stuttgart, 1954 ISBN 3-7725-0495-7 - herein Die Putenmagd pp. 113-125
  8. ↑ Joseph Jacobs : Binsenkappe P. 93-99 in folk tales from England Volume 1: Anglo-Saxon fairy tales ed. by Alfred Ehrentreich; Ullstein-Verlag; Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna, 1980; ISBN 3-548-20090-7
  9. ↑ Salt is more valuable than gold pp. 138–145 in Das Sonnenpferd - First book from the collection of Slovak fairy tales by Pavol Dobšinský illustrated by L'udovít Fulla from the Slovak by Elisabeth Borchardt-Hilgert, Mladé Letá, 1975
  10. ↑ Božena Němcová : Salt is more precious than gold . in Das goldene Spinnrad , pp. 69–79; Paul List-Verlag Leipzig, o. A .; circa 1960.
  11. ↑ Gerlach's youth library : Children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm; Texts composed by Hans Faungruber , pictures by Ignatius Taschner ; Verlag von Gerlach & Wiedling , Vienna & Leipzig - newly published by Parkland Verlag Stuttgart in Die Gänsehirtin am Brunnen pp. 56–73
  12. ↑ Square image by Ignaz Taschner of the goose-girl at the fountain ( memento of the original from December 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.itgdah2.de