The crystal ball

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The crystal ball is a fairy tale ( ATU 552, 518, 302). From the 6th edition of 1850 onwards, it is in place 197 (KHM 197) in the children's and house tales by the Brothers Grimm . There the title was written The Crystal Ball . It comes from Friedmund von Arnim's collection, Hundred New Fairy Tales collected in the mountains from 1815 (No. 14 Vom Schloß der Goldennen Sonne ).

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A sorceress who does not trust her three sons transforms the eldest into an eagle and the middle one into a whale, but the youngest decides to escape before his mother casts a spell on him into a “bear or a wolf”.

The third son makes his way to the Castle of the Golden Sun, where he wants to redeem the cursed king's daughter , a task that has already killed 23 youngsters.

On the way he meets two giants who are fighting over a wish-hat. The youth offers himself as a referee , puts on his hat and walks on. The giants should race against his call. However, he forgets the agreement of the giants and sighs: "Oh, I would be in the castle of the golden sun!" The wish-hat promptly pushes him to his destination.

The cursed king's daughter suffers from a curse that makes her look old to everyone. Only those who look into a magic mirror can see them in their full beauty. After seeing her in this way, the young man becomes more ready to redeem her. To do this, he must obtain the crystal ball and hold it up to the evil wizard who cursed the king's daughter. But this can only happen after a whole series of dangerous subtasks.

So the young man has to defeat an aurochs waiting at a spring, then a "fiery bird" flies up and has to be forced to lay an egg, the yolk of which forms the crystal ball. This “egg” must not hit anywhere, because otherwise it will start a fire in which the crystal ball is destroyed.

The youth wins the fight with the aurochs. When the firebird flies up, the eagle brother chases him until he drops an egg. This ignites a wooden hut by the sea, but the whale brother puts out the fire. The youngest brother brings the crystal ball into the castle, the magician declares himself defeated and the king's daughter appears in her true beauty. The fairy tale ends: "The young man hurried to the king's daughter, and when he stepped into her room, she stood there in the full splendor of her beauty, and both exchanged rings with joy."

origin

The fairy tale has been included in children's and household tales since the 6th edition of 1850 as no.197. It comes from Friedmund von Arnim's collection, Hundred New Fairy Tales collected in the mountains from 1815 (No. 14 Vom Schloß der Goldennen Sonne ). In the original, the story goes even further: he takes his bride away against her wishes to show her to others, but she leaves him alone with iron shoes that he has to walk (like KHM 92 The King of the Golden Mountain ). He comes to a robber's hut where a helpful old woman hides him and he finds three wonderful things. With it he flies to the sun, moon and winds, the last of which leads him to their castle. He invisibly eats her soup from the spoon so that she goes outside, where he shows up and says that she has found her old key again (like KHM 67 The Twelve Hunters ), then the new king leaves. The reproduced part of the story is exactly the same (the stealing from the giants seems less spontaneous in the original, no rooms in the castle are mentioned, the dialogue with the princess is more detailed: "If I had known that you looked so terrible, so I wouldn't have come here at all. " ). Grimm's comment also compares Prohle's children's fairy tale No. 1 , Musäus No. 1 the three sisters and Im Pentamerone (4, 3) the three kings.

interpretation

Eugen Drewermann considers in his work Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let your hair down - Grimm's fairy tale interpreted deeply psychologically (dtv 35056) a subjective fairy tale interpretation is appropriate (p. 8 and 107-164), according to which the three brothers have three souls in a person's chest symbolize: the soaring intellect, the blurred feeling and "your own ego", which fights with violent urges until it comes to an integration, which is symbolized by winning the crystal ball. In the three fairy tale brothers Drewermann recognizes an analogy to Dostoyevsky's fictional characters in The Brothers Karamazov . Drewermann then interprets “The Crystal Ball” as a magical fairy tale with animal transformation and a “search for love”.

In addition to Drewermann, an objective fairy tale interpretation could also be made. It would be based on the family situation of a single mother, whose demands that the sons should "become different" (parents always want the children to change) lead to their transformation: the eldest son who becomes an eagle develops into someone who “takes off” in the intellect. The second son mutates into a personality who protects himself from the great demands by "diving" into the emotional world or perhaps accumulating a lot of fat in a whale-like manner to compensate for the feeling of inferiority created by the mother. The third son chooses the solution "to run away". In doing so, he brings the wishful hat to himself: the giants' dispute over this symbol of femininity could indicate that the son does not care which of several applicants (for a child, huge men) the mother gets under the hood again. The image of the mother continues to determine the image of women in the son, so that at first he can only evaluate the king's daughter, the coveted life companion, as ugly. Only when he has managed to deal with his inner tensions and aggressions (aurochs, firebird), whereby the intellectual advice of the eagle brother and the soulful advice of the whale brother (emotional intelligence, warmth of heart) can help, the young man can help the woman to see his choice in the right angle. The fairy tale suggests that there are also family problems on the woman's side: the magician who is defeated should be understood as the “father of the bride” who does not want to let go of the daughter and who is condemned to the fate of an “old maid”.

In the background of this Grimm fairy tale there is certainly an idea of ​​cosmic harmony if 23 men fail to redeem the woman in the castle of the sun and only the 24th succeeds. This indicates the 24 hours it takes to round off a day.

The crystal ball as a symbol of the integrated, autonomous self is close to the golden ball of the king's daughter in the fairy tale The Frog King (cf. KHM 82a The Three Sisters ). A quarrel between two giants over a magical object still occurs in The King of the Golden Mountain , The Raven , The Drummer .

Cartoons

  • The stolen face , cartoon (GDR 1979, 34 min .; director: Lothar Barke )
  • Gurimu Meisaku Gekijō , Japanese cartoon series 1987, episode 26: The crystal ball
  • SimsalaGrimm , German cartoon series 1999, season 2, episode 5: The crystal ball

filming

  • From the brave blacksmith or O Statecnem Kovari to Božena Němcová's fairy tale The intrepid Mikesch ČSSR 1983 with Pavel Kříž as blacksmith Mikesch, Jan Króner as charcoal burner Ondra and Martina Gasparovicová as Mikesch's princess; The theme of Gimms The crystal ball is taken up in the fight with the black king of the underworld and integrated into the filmed fairy tale of Němcová; here, too, the princess regains her beauty when the heartless giant is defeated. Otherwise, Němcová's fairy tales and the film The Brave Blacksmith are similar to Grimms Dat Erdmänneken .

literature

  • Friedmund von Arnim: A hundred new fairy tales collected in the mountains. Edited by Heinz Rölleke. First edition, Cologne 1986. pp. 96-100. (Eugen Diederichs Verlag; ISBN 3-424-00891-5 )
  • 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. 274, 515. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition, Stuttgart 1994. (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. 518-523, 583. (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier; series of literature studies, vol. 35; ISBN 3-88476-717-8 )

Web links

Wikisource: The Crystal Ball  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Božena Němcová: The golden spinning wheel , pp. 103–122; Paul List-Verlag Leipzig, oA; circa 1960.