The Regentrude

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The Regentrude is an art fairy tale by the German poet Theodor Storm . It dates from 1863.

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The first sentence of the story describes an excessively warm summer a hundred years ago . A terrible period of drought lets the plants wither and the cattle wither. The people suffer from the unbearable heat. Only the meadow farmer had bought a low-lying meadow years ago that still has enough moisture to make the hay harvest abundant. Agriculture, plagued by the heat, caused prices to rise from which only the meadow farmers profited. He can even afford to defer his neighbor, the 50-year-old mother Stine , a loan of 50 thalers beyond the repayment date. But even in doing so, he does not lose sight of his advantage and demands Stine's remaining lands as a pledge.

During this conversation he criticizes the relationship between Stine's son Andrees and his daughter Maren, for whom he is planning a better future now that his economy is doing brilliantly. Andrees, although known to the village as a capable young farmer, is no longer wealthy enough for him as a son-in-law. The meadow farmer proudly boasts of his cleverness, since he and Andrees' father once exchanged his now dry mountain meadows for the swampy lowlands.

The hot summers that followed had proven him right. Mother Stine remarks with resignation that the Regentrude must have fallen asleep. The Wiesenbauer thinks the rain is "drivel" and doesn’t care about the old stories. Mother Stine, however, knows that the Regentrude was awakened by her ancestor a long time ago in a similarly hot summer, and calls the meadow farmer a new believer . The farmer proudly explains that if Mother Stine succeeds “... within twenty-four hours today ...” to create rain, then Andrees should marry his daughter Maren.

Maren hears this and calls on old cousin Schulze and mother Stine, who happened to be present, to testify to this promise of marriage.

Mother Stine reports that the ancestor once awakened the Regentrude with a special saying; But with the best of intentions she can no longer remember the exact wording. The ancestor died when Stine was a child herself.

But then Andrees enters the room. He carries a thirsty sheep with him and reports that he had been in the pasture and met a goblin there who was singing fragments of the saying to himself.

With the help of these fragments, Stine can reconstruct the whole saying:


The Fireman (pen drawing by Rolf von Hoerschelmann )

Haze is the wave,
dust is the source!
The forests are silent,
Fireman dances across the fields!

Take care,
before you wake up, take
your mother
home into the night!

The only thing missing now is the way to the Regentrude. Andrees promises that he will try again to sniff out the secret from the goblin. In fact, he meets the fireman in his scorched fields, and he already knows about Andrees' plans.

The fireman thinks he is so infinitely wiser than the supposed stupid farm boy (his little finger is much smarter than many a big guy) and feasts on it. In his malice and arrogance he reveals everything, the way and the condition that only a virgin can wake up the rain. When Andrees leaves, the fireman is happy: “The kid's head, the farmer lummle thought he was duping me and doesn't yet know that Trude can only be woken up by the right little saying. And nobody knows the little saying as Eckeneckepenn, and Eckeneckepenn, that's me! ”Curiously, the goblin assigns himself the name Eckeneckepenn , which is actually a merman, a being of the moist element.

Maren goes to the well .
Illustration for the first publication (Anton Muttenthaler 1864)

The next day the two young people set off early in the morning and soon find the hollow pasture. By descending their dark trunk for a long time, they arrive in an underworld, the landscape of which, although different from theirs, also suffers from an enormous drought. They feel an unbearable heat as they walk along an endless avenue of dry trees. Andrees thinks that this heat is caused by the invisible company of the fireman. When Maren can't go any further, Andrees gives her the ancestral mead that Stine gave them to drink, which immediately strengthens her. Andrees accompanies her friend to a spacious garden with dried up river beds. From here she now has to walk alone through the basin of a dry lake to a rock wall from which a waterfall once poured. There in the rock face, as gray as the rock, she finds a sleeping female figure - a tall, noble figure that must have been very beautiful in the past, but now has pale and sunken eyes, lips and cheeks. “But she's not sleeping, she's dead!” Maren kneels down, takes all courage and recites the little saying. Regentrude has awakened to the fiery scream and stands in front of her. She asks what she wants. Maren describes the terrible suffering of nature under the drought. Then the rain woman realizes that it is high time. But the work is not yet done. First Maren has to unlock the fountain in a lock that towers up into the sky, before cooling the glowing key with scooped water, still threatened by the fireman. But no sooner has this happened than the Regentrude transforms into a beautiful blooming woman again, the web on the castle ceiling, which cannot be seen from a distance, turns into rain clouds, which are sent into the world by clapping by the Regentrude and also by Maren. The world has changed. The water is flowing again everywhere. The two young women are close. Maren learns how important it was that she woke the Regentrude. Otherwise she would have had to go down into the earth and the fireman would have become lord of the earth. Now the rushing water around the castle extinguishes the fireman with pattering and howling under the formation of a huge cloud of steam. The Regentrude tells Maren of the times when she was still honored and respected by people. However, when people later forgot her, she kept falling asleep from boredom.

The Regentrude accompanies Maren back to the waiting Andrees. But Maren is afraid that Andrees could lose his head at the sight of the beautiful Regentrude. The Regentrude accepts this and says goodbye to her before meeting Andrees with the words: “You are beautiful, fool!” She points to a boat with which both of them can now swim back to their village over the shortest route over the village stream.

Maren thinks twice that what she does is against her father's interests: she stole away, lied to him and did not prepare his warm beer in the morning to wake the rain. Now she sees her father's meadows flooded - his hay is washed away by the flood. She thinks: "What not to do for your treasure". Andrees squeezes her hand and says: "The price is not too high."

Bearing in mind his promise and following the cool business calculation that tells the meadow farmer that with the onset of rain he has again got the worse part with his lowland meadows, he organizes the wedding between Maren and Andrees. This takes place under a bright sky, from which only a tiny cloud sends a few raindrops down on the bride, the blessing of the rain. Then the couple enters the church "... and the priest does his work."

Emergence

The Regentrude first appeared on July 30, 1864 in the Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung no. 43, with the addition "a midsummer fairy tale". Storm wrote the fairy tale in Heiligenstadt   about Christmas 1863 in just 12 days when he had to stay in bed because of rubella , as he announced in his letter of January 18, 1864 to Harthmut Brinkmann. He was inspired by the picturesque Scheuche , a waterfall of the Geislede river in what is now the spa park of Heilbad Heiligenstadt .

meaning

The fairy tale Die Regentrude refers to the pre-Christian religions in northern Germany. The Regentrude is strongly reminiscent of Frau Holle , she brings water, the other the snow. Both can only be reached for humans by dangerous descents into the underworld (through the hollow willow or by falling into the well). They are images of archaic nature goddesses, to whom people brought offerings with the request for a rich harvest and favorable weather. In the course of Christianization , they were demonized and disappeared from people's minds. But they live on in the folk tales and legends. In 1881, in a letter to Erich Schmidt, Storm himself says that he borrowed the figures from them.

The fire man has similarities with the Rumpelstiltskin from the fairy tale of the same name by the Brothers Grimm .

Storm reveals that the balance between man and nature was severely disturbed when people refused to respect and worship the old goddesses of nature. Jacqueline Peter points out that the “rural village community is by no means a natural collective, but a 'modern society' whose bourgeois-capitalist structure is based on social and financial inequality”. “The dominance of the male in society is conspicuous and exclusively negative. The feminine takes on a more passive role and subordinates itself, entirely according to the bourgeois gender order. ”But salvation, healing consists in the resurrection, in the re-establishment of the feminine as the bearer of life in the social role due to him, equal to the masculine . "The key lies in returning to values ​​such as closeness to nature and respect for creation. ... Theodor Storm represents a divided world, which, however, will be overcome. The fairy tale culminates in a splendid union and dissolution of all opposites, a utopian place is created . "

Movie

radio play

  • The Regentrude. Radio play 1986, 49:01 minutes, with music by Reinhard Lakomy , released as LP by LITERA No. 865381, director: Jürgen Schmidt
  • The Regentrude. Radio play, Rundfunk der DDR 1989, 40:45 minutes with music by Hermann Naehring , directed by Angelika Perl and Heide Schwochow

literature

  • Theodor Storm: Die Regentrude , Artia, Prague 1972
  • Three fairy tales by Theodor Storm with 26 pen drawings by Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Musarion Verlag, Munich 1925

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Theodor Storm: Complete works in four volumes . Ed .: Peter Goldammer. 4th edition. tape 1 . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin Weimar 1978, p. 766 .
  2. The Regentrude - places of utopia. Retrieved May 17, 2020 .
  3. Theodor Storm: Complete works in four volumes . Ed .: Peter Goldammer. 4th edition. tape 1 . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin Weimar 1978, p. 767 .
  4. The Regentrude - places of utopia. Retrieved May 17, 2020 .