Donkey skin

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Donkey skin (French original title: Peau d'âne ) is a fairy tale by Charles Perrault . It was published in verse in 1694, then in 1695 together with Griseldis and Die förichten Wünsche with a new preface. A prose version appeared in 1696 under the name of his friend Cathérine Bernard and later with his other fairy tales in the Contes de ma Mère l'Oye collection .

content

A king swears to his dying wife not to marry anyone after her who is no more beautiful than she. So he falls for the desire to take his daughter. On the advice of her godmother - a fairy - she asked him to wear a dress like the sky, then one like the moon and third like the sun, and finally even the skin of his gold-making donkey. When she receives it herself, she flees in the ugly donkey skin far away to the kitchen of a poultry farm, where the servants torture her. There the prince falls in love with her when one Sunday he watches her putting on her clothes through the keyhole. He demands a cake from her; in it he finds her ring and then only wants to marry the one who fits this ring. All noble ladies try in vain to make their fingers narrow enough until they finally get donkey skin. Her father and godmother also come to the wedding.

Explanations

At the beginning Perrault justified the simple style and at the end he enumerated the lessons of his fairy tale: suffering is better than breach of duty, virtue is rewarded, love overcomes all reason, expensive food is not needed, but clothes and women generally consider themselves beautiful. It suits his style to indirectly parody the plot himself. The ironic idealization of king and prince with the futile effort of all women to please him is reminiscent of Perrault's Griseldis , the idiosyncratic ring is later the shoe in Cinderella .

Doris Distelmaier-Haas notes that here, as in Griseldis , Perrault is still very much attached to ancient models. B. the prince's love affliction is described as an illness. But he also shows his humorous distance in references to the fashion of his time and (in the prose version) tinted glasses, which were introduced because of the dazzling sun dress. He strives for an oral narrative style that speaks directly to the reader.

Cf. in Grimm's fairy tale Allerleirauh and Princess Mäusehaut , in Giambattista Basiles Pentameron II, 6 Die Bärin , in Giovanni Francesco Straparola's Le piacevoli notti I, 4 Thebaldo .

Movie

music

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari used motifs from the fairy tale for his opera Das Himmelskleid, which premiered at the National Theater in Munich in 1927 .

literature

  • Doris Distelmaier-Haas (Ed.): Charles Perrault. All fairy tales. Reclam, Ditzingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-008355-0 , pp. 34-48, 135-136. (Translation by Doris Distelmaier-Haas after Charles Perrault: Contes de ma mère l'Oye. Texts établi, annoté et précédé d'un avant-propos par André Cœuroy. Éditions de Cluny, Paris 1948)
  • Walter Scherf: The fairy tale dictionary. 2 volumes. Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-39911-8 . Lemmata Allerleirauh , Vol. 1, p. 14; Die Bärin , Vol. 1, p. 49; The donkey skin , vol. 1, p. 286.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Doris Distelmaier-Haas (Ed.): Charles Perrault. All fairy tales. Reclam, Ditzingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-008355-0 , p. 136. (Translation by Doris Distelmaier-Haas after Charles Perrault: Contes de ma mère l'Oye. Texts établi, annoté et précédé d'un avant- propos par André Cœuroy. Éditions de Cluny, Paris 1948)
  2. ↑ Doris Distelmaier-Haas (Ed.): Charles Perrault. All fairy tales. Reclam, Ditzingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-008355-0 , pp. 34-48, 135-136. (Translation by Doris Distelmaier-Haas after Charles Perrault: Contes de ma mère l'Oye. Texts établi, annoté et précédé d'un avant-propos par André Cœuroy. Éditions de Cluny, Paris 1948)
  3. ↑ Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbook on the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm. de Gruyter, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 , p. 160.

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