Soulless

Soulless is a fairy tale ( AaTh 302). It is at number 8 in Ludwig Bechstein's New German Fairy Tale Book and comes from Johann Wilhelm Wolf's German Fairy Tales and Legends from 1845 (No. 20: No- soul ).

content

Soulless eats lots of young girls, and insists on it when the lot falls on the king's daughter. The king promises her to the wife who saves her. A young soldier sets out. On the way, a lion, an eagle, a bear and a fly are fighting over a dead donkey. He mediates and, as a thank you, receives a fly's kiss and a feather, with which he can transform into a fly and an eagle. So he penetrates to the king's daughter, who asks the ogre for him: The soul lies in a gold chest on a glass rock in the Red Sea. The windmother gives the soldier a dowsing hat, the winch and the fish help him. As a trader he brings the soul soulless, there he is cured, and he gets the princess.

origin

Bechstein names the source, Wolf's Ohneseele , which he has completely rewritten. Similarly, in Wolf, No. 23, The Grateful Animals . The central feature of the magical fairy tale is the External Soul (AaTh 302), cf. The man without a heart , other motifs resemble the journeyman , in Grimm KHM 88 The singing, jumping little lion , KHM 93 The raven , KHM 111 The trained hunter , KHM 125 The devil and his grandmother , KHM 197 The crystal ball , KHM 82a The three sisters , at Basile The Three Beast Kings .

literature

• Hans-Jörg Uther (Ed.): Ludwig Bechstein. New German fairy tale book. After the edition of 1856, text-critically revised and indexed. Diederichs, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-424-01372-2 , pp. 58-66, 288.

Web links

• www.internet-maerchen.de: Soulless

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hans-Jörg Uther (Ed.): Ludwig Bechstein. New German fairy tale book. After the edition of 1856, text-critically revised and indexed. Diederichs, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-424-01372-2 , p. 288.