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

There was once a little boy, seven years old, so sweet and beautiful that no one could look at him without loving him, and as for his mother, she loved him more than anything else in the world. One day without any warning he fell ill and died; nothing could console his mother, and she wept day and night.

Soon afterwards, not long after he was buried, the child began to appear every night in the places where he used to sit and play when he was alive. If his mother cried, he cried as well, and when morning came, he disappeared.

But his mother would not stop crying, and one night the child appeared in the white shroud in which he’d been buried, and with the little wreath on his head that had been placed in the coffin with him.

He sat on her bed and said, ‘Oh, mother, please stop crying, or else I won’t be able to fall asleep! My shroud’s all wet from the tears you keep dropping on it.’

That startled the mother, and she stopped crying.

Next night the child came to her bed again, holding a little light in his hand. He said, ‘See, my shroud’s nearly dry now. I’ll be able to rest in my grave.’

His mother offered her grief to God and bore it patiently and quietly; and the child never came again, but slept in his little bed under the earth.

Tale type:unclassified

Source:a story from Bavaria, told to the Grimm brothers by an unknown informant

See my note to the following story.

Once a father and his wife and their children were sitting around the table for their midday meal, and a good friend of the family, who had come to visit, was sitting with them. While they were sitting there the clock struck twelve, and just then the visitor saw the door open and a deathly-pale child, dressed in snow-white clothes, come into the room. He didn’t look around or say a word, but went straight into the next room. A few moments later he came out, still saying nothing, and went out of the door again.

Next day, and the next, the child came back in the same way. Finally the visitor asked the father who this beautiful child was who came in and went into the next room at noon every day.

‘I didn’t see him,’ said the father. ‘I’ve got no idea who he can be.’

Next day, when the child came again, the visitor pointed him out, but neither father nor mother nor the other children could see a thing. The visitor got up and went to the door of the next room, and opened it a little way. There he saw the child sitting on the floor, probing the cracks between the floorboards with his fingers; but as soon as he saw the visitor, he disappeared.

The visitor told the family what he’d seen and described the child exactly. The mother recognized him at once, and said, ‘Oh, it’s my dear son, who died four weeks ago.’

They lifted the floorboards and found two pennies that the mother had given the child to give to a poor man. However, the child had thought, ‘I can buy myself a cake with that,’ and hidden the pennies under the floor.

That was why he had had no peace in his grave, and came every day at noon to look for them. The parents gave the money to a poor man, and after that the child was never seen again.

Tale type:ATU 769, ‘The Child’s Grave’

Source:a story told to the Grimm brothers by Gretchen Wild

I’ve put the notes to this and ‘The Little Shroud’ together because of their obvious similarity. ‘The Little Shroud’ is unclassified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, and the only tale listed there to exemplify this type is this tale itself, under the title of ‘The Child’s Grave’.

Each of these tales is straightforward and pious. They are pure ghost stories, but their intention is not to make us shiver so much as to point a simple moral. The belief system they come from is almost pre-Christian: the dead deserve their rest, and the living can help them find it; excessive grief is self-indulgent; sin must be atoned for. Once the human action has been taken, the supernatural withdraws.

The effect is to give them the character of ghost stories of the traditional ‘true’ type, such as those gathered in the well-known Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book (1934), or more recently in Peter Ackroyd’s The English Ghost (2010). All that would be needed to make them identical to that sort of story is names for the characters concerned and for the places where the events took place. To complete the illusion, a source cunningly disguised by means of an initial and a dash could be invented, thus: ‘Herr A—, a highly respected official of the town of D—, was travelling in the Duchy of H— when he heard the following story…’

There was once a young hunter who went out to his hide in the forest. He was happy and light-hearted, and he whistled on a blade of grass as he went along.

All at once he came across a poor old woman. She said, ‘Good morning, my fine young hunter. I can see you’re in a good mood, but I’m hungry and thirsty. Can you spare me any change?’

The hunter felt sorry for the old woman, so he put his hand in his pocket and gave her the few coins he had. He was about to go on his way when the old woman clutched his arm.

‘Listen, my good hunter,’ she said. ‘You’ve been kind to me, so I’m going to give you a gift. Carry straight on, and in a little while you’ll come to a tree with nine birds sitting in it. They’ll have a cloak in their claws, and they’ll be fighting over it. Take your gun and shoot right into the middle of them. They’ll drop the cloak all right, and one of the birds will fall dead at your feet. Take the cloak with you, because it’s a wishing cloak. Once you throw it round your shoulders, all you’ve got to do is wish yourself somewhere, and you’ll be there in a flash. And you should take the heart from the dead bird, too. Cut it out and then swallow it whole. If you do that, you’ll find a gold coin under your pillow every morning of your life.’

The hunter thanked the wise woman and thought to himself: ‘These are certainly fine gifts she’s giving me; I hope she’s telling the truth.’

He’d gone no further than a hundred yards when he heard a great squawking and flapping in the branches above him. He looked up and saw a flock of birds all tearing at a piece of cloth with their claws and beaks, as if each one wanted it for itself.

‘Well,’ said the hunter, ‘this is odd. It’s happening just as the old girl said it would.’

He took his gun and fired a shot right into the middle of the birds. Most of them shrieked and flew away at once, but one fell to the ground dead, and the cloak fell too. The hunter did just as the old woman had advised. He cut the bird open with his knife, took out the heart and swallowed it, and went home with the cloak.

When he woke up next morning, the first thing he thought of was the old woman’s promise. He felt under his pillow, and sure enough, there was a gleaming gold coin. Next day he found another one, and then another, and so it went on each time he woke up. Quite soon he had a fine heap of gold, and then he thought, ‘It’s all very well collecting this, but what use is it to me here? I think I’ll go out and see the world.’

He said goodbye to his parents, slung his gun and his knapsack over his shoulders, and set off. After walking for a few days, he was just coming out of a dense forest when he saw a beautiful castle standing in the open country beyond the trees. He went closer, and saw two people standing at one of the windows, looking down at him.