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

‘I’ve got you,’ said the boy. ‘Now you’ll see who’s going to die.’

And he took an iron bar and beat the old man mercilessly, raining blows on him till he whimpered and moaned and cried, ‘All right! Stop! I give in!’

And he promised to give the boy great riches if only he’d let him go. The boy twisted the axe in the crack and released his beard, and the old man led him to another cellar deep under the castle, and showed him three chests full of gold.

‘One of these is for the poor,’ he explained, ‘one is for the king, and the third is yours.’

At that moment midnight struck, and the old man disappeared, leaving the boy in the dark.

‘Well, so much for that,’ he said. ‘I can find my own way back.’

Groping along the walls, he made his way back to the bedroom and fell asleep by the fire.

In the morning the king came in.

‘You must have learned how to shudder by now,’ he said.

‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I wonder what they can be, these shivers? I lay down with my dead cousin, and then an old man with a long beard came and showed me some treasure, but no one showed me how to shiver.’

They brought the gold up and shared it out, and then the boy and the princess were married. In due course he inherited the kingdom. But no matter how much he loved his wife, or how happy he was, the young king kept on saying, ‘If only I could get the shivers! If only I knew what it meant to get the shivers!’

In the end it got on the young queen’s nerves. She told her chambermaid, who said, ‘Leave it to me, your majesty. I’ll give him the shivers all right.’

The maid went down to the brook and caught a bucketful of minnows. That night when the young king was sleeping, the maid told the queen to pull the covers off and pour the bucket over him.

So that was what she did. The young king felt first the cold water and then the little fish wriggling and flipping about all over him.

‘Oh, oh, oh!’ he cried. ‘Ooh! What’s making me shiver? Ooh! Ow! Yes, I’m shivering! I’ve got the shivers at last! Bless you, dear wife! You did what no one else could do. I’ve got the shivers!’

Tale type:ATU 326, ‘The Youth Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is’

Source:A shorter version of this was published in the Grimms’ first edition of 1812, but the story as it is here was published in their second edition of 1819, following a written version sent to them by Ferdinand Siebert of Treysa, near Kassel.

Similar stories:Alexander Afanasyev: ‘The Man Who Did Not Know Fear’ ( Russian Fairy Tales ); Katharine M. Briggs: ‘The Boy Who Feared Nothing’, ‘The Dauntless Girl’, ‘A Wager Won’ ( Folk Tales of Britain ); Italo Calvino: ‘Dauntless Little John’, ‘The Dead Man’s Arm’, ‘Fearless Simpleton’, ‘The Queen of the Three Mountains of Gold’ ( Italian Folktales )

A widespread tale, another version of which was included in the Grimms’ volume of annotations to the Children’s and Household Tales that they published in 1856. Calvino’s ‘The Dead Man’s Arm’ is the most lively and amusing of his four versions, but as its hero does not specifically set out to learn fear, he doesn’t need the final lesson from the bucket of minnows. Neither does the heroine of Briggs’s ‘The Dauntless Girl’, a fine story from Norfolk, which does share with this one the unfortunate fate of the sexton and the ghost’s revealing of the treasure in the cellar. I think the Grimms’ version is the best of all.

High spirits colour most of the variants of this tale; the ghosts and dead men are comic rather than terrifying. Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde , suggests a sexual interpretation of the bucket of minnows.

Once upon a time there was an old king who fell ill, and as he was lying in pain he thought, ‘This bed I’m lying on will be my deathbed.’ And he said, ‘Send for Faithful Johannes — I want to speak to him.’

Faithful Johannes was his favourite servant. He had that name because he’d been true and loyal to the king all his life long. When he came into the king’s bedroom the king beckoned him close to the bed, and said, ‘My good and faithful Johannes, I’m not long for this world. The only thing that troubles me is my son. He’s a good lad, but he’s young, and he doesn’t always know what’s best for him. I won’t be able to close my eyes in peace unless you promise to be like a foster father to him, and teach him all he ought to know.’

Faithful Johannes said, ‘I’ll do that gladly. I won’t forsake him, and I’ll serve him faithfully even if it costs me my life.’

‘That’s a comfort to me,’ said the king. ‘I can die peacefully now. When I’ve gone, this is what you must do: show him over the whole castle, all the vaults, the chambers, the halls, and all the treasure they contain. But keep him away from the last room in the long gallery. There’s a portrait of the Princess of the Golden Roof in there, and if he sees that picture, he’ll fall in love with her. You’ll know if that’s happened, because he’ll fall down unconscious. And then he’ll put himself into all kinds of dangers for her sake. Keep him away from all that, Johannes: that’s the last thing I ask of you.’

Faithful Johannes gave his promise, and the old king lay back on his pillow and died.

After the funeral, Faithful Johannes said to the young king, ‘It’s time you saw all your possessions, your majesty. Your father asked me to show you over the castle. It belongs to you now, and you need to know about all the treasures it holds.’

Johannes took him everywhere, upstairs and downstairs, up in the attics and way below ground in the cellars. All the magnificent rooms were open to him — all but one, that is, because Faithful Johannes kept the young king away from the last room in the long gallery, where the portrait of the Princess of the Golden Roof was hung. The picture was displayed in such a way that anyone entering the room would see it at once, and it was painted so well and so vividly that the princess seemed to live and breathe. No one could imagine anything in the world more beautiful.

The king noticed that Faithful Johannes always ushered him past that door, or tried to distract him when they were near it, and said, ‘Come on, Johannes, I can see you’re trying to stop me going in there. Why do you never open this door?’

‘There’s something horrifying in there, your majesty. You don’t want to see it.’

‘I certainly do! I’ve seen the whole castle now, and this is the last room. I want to know what’s in it!’

And he tried to open the door by force, but Faithful Johannes held him back. ‘I promised the king your father that I wouldn’t let you see inside this room,’ he said. ‘It will bring nothing but bad luck for both of us.’

‘Well, you’re wrong about that,’ said the young king. ‘I’m so curious to see what’s inside, it’ll be bad luck if I can’t. I shall have no peace, day or night, till I know what’s in there. Johannes, open the door!’

Faithful Johannes saw that he had no choice. With a heavy heart and sighing deeply, he took the key from the ring and opened the door. He went in first, thinking that he might block the portrait from the young king’s eyes, but that didn’t work: the king stood on tiptoes and looked over his shoulder. And it happened just as the old king had said it would: the young man saw the portrait, and at once he fell unconscious to the floor.

Faithful Johannes picked him up and carried him to his room. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he thought, ‘this is a bad start to his reign. What bad luck will come to us now?’