Array The Brothers Grimm - Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm - A New English Version

Now all this time the wicked stepmother had thought that the brother and sister must have been torn to pieces by wild animals. But when she read in the paper that Little Sister had become a queen, and that her constant companion was a deer, it didn’t take her long to work out what had happened.

‘That wretched boy must have drunk from the stream I put the deer-magic on!’ she said to her daughter.

‘It’s not fair,’ the daughter whined. ‘I ought to be a queen, not her.’

‘Shut your moaning,’ said the old woman. ‘When the time comes you’ll get what you deserve.’

Time went past, and the queen gave birth to a child, a handsome little boy. The king was out hunting at the time. The witch and her daughter went to the palace disguised as chambermaids, and managed to find their way to the queen’s bedchamber.

‘Come now, your majesty,’ the witch said to the queen, who was lying weak and exhausted in her bed. ‘Your bath is ready. It’ll make you feel so much better. Come with us!’

They carried her to the bathroom and put her in the tub. Then they lit a fire underneath it, such a great fire that the queen suffocated from the smoke. To hide their crime they closed the wall up by magic where the door had been, and hung a tapestry over it.

‘Now you get into the bed,’ the witch said to her daughter, and when the girl had clambered in, the old woman put a spell on her so that she looked exactly like the queen. The one thing she couldn’t do anything about was the missing eye.

‘Lie with that side of your head on the pillow,’ she said, ‘and if anyone speaks to you, just mumble.’

When the king came home that evening and heard that he had a little son, he was delighted. He went to his dear wife’s bedchamber and was about to open the curtains to see how she was, but the false chambermaid said, ‘Don’t, your majesty! Don’t open the curtains on any account! She needs rest, and she mustn’t be disturbed.’

The king tiptoed away, and he didn’t discover that a false queen was lying there in the bed.

That night the deer wouldn’t sleep in his stable. He climbed the stairs to the nursery where the baby lay, and refused to leave it. He had to do so without explaining, for since the death of the queen he had lost the power to speak, so he lay down beside the cradle and went to sleep.

At midnight the nurse who slept there awoke suddenly to see the queen coming into the nursery, and she seemed to be wet from head to foot, as if she’d just come from the bath. She bent over the cradle and kissed the baby, and then she stroked the deer and said:

And then she went out without another word.

The nurse was too frightened to tell anyone. She had thought the queen was still lying in bed recovering from childbirth.

But next night the same thing happened again, except that this time the queen seemed to be covered in little flames, and she said:

The nurse thought she should tell the king. So next night he waited in the nursery with her, and when midnight struck, once again the queen came into the room. This time she was wreathed in thick black smoke.

The king cried, ‘Dear God, what’s this?’

The queen ignored him, but went to the child and the deer as she’d done before, and said:

The king tried to embrace her, but she faded into smoke and drifted out of his arms and mingled with the air.

The deer tugged the king’s sleeve, and pulled him to the place where the tapestry hung. Then he tugged the tapestry down and butted the wall with his little horns. The king understood, and ordered his servants to knock the wall down. In all the disturbance the false queen got out of bed without anyone noticing and tiptoed away. When the wall was down they discovered the bathroom all blackened with soot, and the queen’s body lying clean and pale and fresh in the bath.

The king cried, ‘My wife! My dear wife!’

He bent to embrace her body, and by the grace of God she came alive again. She told him about the dreadful crime that had been committed, and the king sent his swiftest messenger to the palace gates, just in time to tell the watchmen to arrest the witch and her daughter as they tried to creep out.

The two of them were brought before the court. Judgement was pronounced: the daughter was to be led into the woods where the wild beasts would eat her, and the witch was to be burned. As soon as the old woman was reduced to ashes, her spell lost its power over the deer and he was transformed into Little Brother, human again. And he and Little Sister lived happily together for the rest of their lives.

Tale type:ATU 450, ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’

Source:a story told to the Grimm brothers by the Hassenpflug family

Similar stories:Alexander Afanasyev: ‘Sister Alionushka, Brother Ivanushka’ ( Russian Fairy Tales ); Giambattista Basile: ‘Ninnillo and Nennella’ ( The Great Fairy Tale Tradition , ed. Jack Zipes); Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: ‘The Little Lamb and the Little Fish’, ‘The Three Little Men in the Woods’ ( Children’s and Household Tales ); Arthur Ransome: ‘Alenoushka and Her Brother’ ( Old Peter’s Russian Tales )

One of the few ghost stories in the collection, and similar in that way to ‘The Three Little Men in the Woods’.

According to David Luke, in his introduction to Brothers Grimm: Selected Tales , the first transcription of the story in 1812 only had one bewitched stream, so that the brother was changed into a deer at once, but Wilhelm Grimm in a later edition added the other two for the sake of the fairy-tale three-ness.

The tale as the Grimms have it begins well and tails off limply. The final section has several unhelpful gaps and transitions which leave this reader at least puzzling: if the witch and her daughter murdered Little Sister in the queen’s bathroom, what happened to the body? Why didn’t the deer speak up when he saw her ghost? In fact, why hasn’t the deer got anything to do at all? Why did the nurse not say anything about the apparition of the queen until ‘many nights’ had passed? Did the witch’s daughter remain in bed all that time?

These are not just the sort of thing that fairy tales don’t bother with, and to which it’s silly to expect answers; they are more than that: they are clumsy storytelling. I thought it was possible to deal with them and improve the story.

There once lived a husband and wife who longed to have a child, but they longed in vain for quite some time. At last, however, the wife noticed unmistakable signs that God had granted their wish.

Now in the wall of their house there was a little window that overlooked a magnificent garden full of every kind of fruit and vegetable. There was a high wall around that garden, and no one dared go into it, because it was the property of a very powerful witch who was feared by everyone. One day the woman was standing at that window, and she saw a bed of lamb’s lettuce, or rapunzel. It looked so fresh and so green that she longed to taste some, and this longing grew stronger every day, so that eventually she became really ill.

Her husband was alarmed at her condition, and said, ‘My dear wife, what is the matter?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘if I can’t have any of that rapunzel in the garden behind our house, I’ll die.’