Tale of the toad

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Fairy Tale of the Toad is the title of three legends ( ATU 285, 672B), which are in the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm in place 105 (KHM 105). Until the 2nd edition the title Mährchen von der Toke was written .

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A little child who gets milk and bread rolls from his mother in the afternoon lets a toad drink from it in the courtyard and even calls her if she doesn't come: "Toad, toad, come quickly, come over here, you little thing, you should have your piece of bread have, feast on the milk. “ The toad thanks her with stones, pearls and golden toys from her secret treasure. Because she only drinks milk, the child once admonishes her to eat bread rolls and gently hits her head with the spoon. When the mother, who heard it, sees this, she comes and kills the toad with a log. The child becomes emaciated and dies.

An orphan is sitting by the city wall and is crazy. When it sees a toad, it puts out its blue silk scarf. The toad places a golden crown on it. The girl puts it on. When the toad sees that it is gone, she hits the wall with her head until she is dead. The story closes with the sentence: If the girl had left the crown lying around, the toad would probably have brought more of her treasures from the cave.

A child asks a toad whether she saw his sister Rotstrümpfchen, to which the toad replies: “Ne, ik og nit: How do you? huhu, huhu, huhu. "

Origin and meaning

The texts are from the second part of the 1st edition of Children's and Household Tales from 1815 as No. 105 (No. 19 of the second part). According to the Grimm brothers' note, the first two come from Hesse , the third from Berlin . With the toad is Ringelnatter meant a non-toxic snake that likes to drink milk. The third text seems to refer to the call of the fire-bellied toad . It is believed that they heard the first story in 1813 in Kassel in variants by Dortchen Wild and her sister Lisette Wild .

The note mentions a fairy tale about an impoverished knight who gets rich with the help of an adder. On the advice of his wife, he tries to kill her with a hammer, but only hits the milk bowl that he has placed in front of her. She cannot be reconciled and makes him poor again. A farmer's daughter gets a crown from the adder at her wedding because she provided her with milk every day. In front of the castle in Lübenau, someone steals his crown from the water snake king, which he has placed on a white cloth to play with the other snakes. On horseback he escapes the snakes into the city and becomes rich.

The confusing meanings of the term ' toad ' in the various dialects is an indication of the mythological relationship between toad and snake. They often appear together in fairy tales (KHM 135 The White and Black Bride , KHM 13 The Three Little Men in the Forest ). They hoard treasures and knowledge, can be helpful (KHM 127 The Iron Furnace , KHM 63 The Three Feathers , KHM 17 The White Snake ), but also unforgiving and deadly ( KHM 16 The Three Snake Leaves , KHM 92 The King of the Golden Mountain , KHM 145 The ungrateful son , KHM 201 Saint Joseph in the forest ). The transition to dragons ( lindworms ) is also fluid (KHM 88 The singing, jumping lion's corner ).

According to Lutz Röhrich , the idea of sympathetic snakes , with which individual family members share their fate, is particularly old and originally more natural than it is depicted in this fairy tale. He cites Michael Heberer, the 1592 by Nyköping traveled south: he wanted to eat during a horse change, but in every house he saw tame snakes that ate with sitting on the floor children from the same bowl porridge; then he lost his hunger. According to Hedwig von Beit , the toad in the primitive mentality is here the child's vital center, inner wealth and life-giving archetype of the mother, which is taken from him by the uncomprehending behavior of the real mother. The psychiatrist Wolfdietrich Siegmund sees a decline in a parent figure who is unable to be replaced, with a counter-example of a happy replacement in the Scottish fairy tale The Frog . In addition to sympathizing, there are also sympathetic things like the knife in The Two Brothers and sympathetic plants like the lilies in The Twelve Brothers .

The children's and house fairy tales contain a whole series of short fabulous or vacillating texts that seem to serve to characterize individual fairy tale creatures: The old Sultan , The Dog and the Sparrow , The Three Children of Fortune , The Wolf and the Man , The Wolf and the fox , the fox and the woman godmother , the fox and the cat , the fox and the geese , the fox and the horse , the owl , the moon . Compare in Ludwig Bechstein's German fairy tale book The Man and the Snake , in New German Fairy Tale Book Das Natterkrönlein , The Snake with the Golden Key , Snake House Friend and The Snake Lamb .

literature

  • Grimm, brothers. Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. 19th edition, Artemis & Winkler Verlag; Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf and Zurich 1999, ISBN 3-538-06943-3 , pp. 513-514.
  • 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. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition, Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-15-003193-1 , pp. 196–198, pp. 486–487.
  • Röhrich, Lutz: Fairy Tales and Reality. Second expanded edition. Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden 1964, pp. 72-73.
  • Tuczay, Christa : soul animal. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 12. pp. 489-493. Berlin, New York, 2007.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hedwig von Beit: Symbolism of the fairy tale. A. Francke, Bern 1952, pp. 148-149.
  2. ↑ 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. 124.
Wikisource: Tales of the Toad  - Sources and full texts