The three little men in the forest

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Illustration by Anne Anderson , 1922

The three little men in the forest is a fairy tale ( ATU 403). It is in the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm at number 13 (KHM 13).

content

Marry a widower and a widow, each with a daughter. The man has his daughter fill an old boot with water before the oracle. The woman promises her beforehand that she will prefer her and treat her own daughter normally. However, after a while, she breaks her promise and treats her stepdaughter badly. In winter she orders her to look for strawberries outside in a paper dress. In the forest the girl meets three Haulemännerchen in a little house. It greets politely and shares its meager bread with them. You let it sweep away the snow behind the house where it finds strawberries. They give her that it will be more beautiful every day, that pieces of gold will fall out of her mouth when she is talking and that a king will marry her. When she comes home, the envious stepsister also wants to look for strawberries. But because she is naughty and angry, the little men give her that she becomes uglier every day, that toads fall out of her mouth when she talks and that she dies unhappy. When the good girl slides yarn at an ice hole on the order of her stepmother, she meets the king who marries her.

When she has a son a year later, stepmother and sister pay a visit. In an unobserved moment they push the young queen out of the window into the river. In their place, the ugly stepsister goes to bed. The stepmother tells the king that his wife is sweating, and that is probably where the toads came from. At night the kitchen boy sees a duck coming through the gutter. She speaks:

King what are you doing
do you sleep or wake up

When the kitchen boy doesn't answer, she goes on to ask:

what are my guests doing?
they sleep soundly!
what is my child doing?
it sleeps well in its cradle.

Then she takes care of her child in the form of the queen. The third night she lets him fetch the king, so that he swings the sword three times over her, whereby his wife stands before him again. He unwittingly lets the stepmother speak her own judgment, after which she and her daughter are rolled into the river in a barrel studded with nails.

origin

The text of the 1st edition from 1812 (after Dortchen Wild ) describes the boot episode, the strawberries in winter and briefly the drowning and the transformation of the duck. The rest was added from 1819 after Dorothea Viehmann (only the toads out of the mouth after Amalie Hassenpflug ). Haulemännerchen are cave forest men who steal unbaptized children. Grimm's comment further compares wages and punishments from Austria with Franz Ziska , connected with KHM 24 Frau Holle ; Prohle's fairy tale for young people No. 5; Perraults les fées ; in the Pentameron The three fairies . You also mention sources for the punishment with a nailed barrel.

Similar fairy tales are in Grimm's KHM 135 The White and the Black Bride (type of underscored bride , AaTh 403), KHM 11 little brother and sister (see the poem), also KHM 89 The Goose Girl (AaTh 533), KHM 24 Frau Holle , KHM 201 Saint Joseph in the forest . Many motifs come up again and again: supernatural helpers in need and their gifts, the prince as a reward for virtue and diligence, toads as a symbol of the sinner, punishment according to one's own standards.

The fairy tale is similar to Perrault's Die Feen , but it lacks the prehistory and the aftermath of the bride who was put under it. The original version after Dortchen Wild or the toad motif after Amalie Hassenpflug could, as in other cases, go back to Perrault's influence, but the text does not clearly show it. Both Perrault and Grimm were also familiar with Giambattista Basile's early collection of fairy tales, Pentameron , which could include III, 10 The three fairies , IV, 7 The two small cakes , V, 2 The months and V, 9 The three lemons . The fairy tale researcher Hans-Jörg Uther sees no direct literary models for Grimm's version. The motif of the winter garden with holy fruits or plants occurs in legends of saints, as well as toads from the mouth as a punitive motif in medieval example texts. Lothar Bluhm and Heinz Rölleke find evidence of the widespread phrase width and breadth in Goethe , and for spinnefeind in Daniel Casper from Lohenstein's Ibrahim Bassa from 1689.

interpretation

False bride and stepmother are shadowy figures in depth psychology who displace the self. According to Hedwig von Beit , the false promise to the good daughter shows that this originally happens through weakness in relation to worldly promises, on the other hand through the oracle also through fate and tragic.

The duck's address to the kitchen boy “King, what are you doing?” Indicates a shadowy identity of the kitchen boy with the king, who in turn corresponds to her father's animus , who also behaved indecisively at the marriage.

According to psychiatrist Wolfdietrich Siegmund , the fairy tale deals with the decision between right and wrong.

See also

literature

  • Grimm, brothers. Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. Pp. 107-112. 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. 34–35, 447. 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. 29–31. (de Gruyter; ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 )
  • von Beit, Hedwig: Symbolism of the fairy tale. Bern, 1952. pp. 764-767. (A. Francke AG, publisher)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uther, Hans-Jörg: Handbook to the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm. Berlin 2008. p. 30. (de Gruyter; ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 )
  2. ↑ Lothar Bluhm and Heinz Rölleke: “Popular speeches that I always listen to”. Fairy tale - proverb - saying. On the folk-poetic design of children's and house fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. New edition. S. Hirzel Verlag, Stuttgart / Leipzig 1997, ISBN 3-7776-0733-9 , p. 52.
  3. ↑ Frederik Hetmann: dream face and magic trace. Fairy tale research, fairy tale studies, fairy tale discussion. With contributions by Marie-Louise von Franz, Sigrid Früh and Wolfdietrich Siegmund. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-596-22850-6 , p. 122.

Web links

Wikisource: The three little men in the forest  - sources and full texts