Two Grimm Folktales

The Stolen Pennies & How Some Children Played At Slaughtering

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

It's Storytime with Mitch Jesserich. Today, two short German folk tales written down by the Grimm Brothers. The Grimm fairy tales are arguably the most well known folk stories in the Western world. Disney has popularized many of them with such films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Cinderella. We were told many of the stories as kids like Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumpel Stillskin. The Grimm Brothers, Jakab and Wilhelm, set out in the early eighteen hundreds to collect and write down oral stories in the German language. The writing down of oral stories is what a fairy tale is. The brothers, who were academics, saw how industrialization was changing the world, and they feared the loss of these stories. So they talked to many, many people, mostly women, and ended up collecting hundreds of tells. Today the stories are seen as innocent tells meant for children. Disney played a big role in that, but so did the brothers themselves, who revised the stories many times over the years to make them more socially acceptable. But with the first publication of these tells in eighteen twelve, the original stories they were told were much darker and stranger than the ones popularized later on. Today, I read for you two short tells. The first, a ghost story, connected to the high rate of infant mortality of the day. It's called the Stolen Pennies. The second one is shockingly gruesome and shows these weren't necessarily for kids. These are oral stories that was the media of their day and meant for everyone. The stolen pennies. One day a father was sitting at the table with his wife and children, and a good friend who was visiting him, and they were having their noonday meal. As they were sitting there, the clock struck twelve, and the visitor saw the door open, and a pale child dressed in snow white clothes entered. He didn't look around or say anything, but went silently into the next room. Shortly thereafter he returned and went away just as quietly as he had entered. On the second and third day the child came again. Finally, the visitor asked the father who the beautiful child was that entered the room every day at noon. The father answered that he knew nothing about him. He hadn't seen anything. The next day, as the clock struck noon, the child entered again, and the visitor pointed the child out to the father. But he didn't see the boy. Neither did the mother nor the children. The visitor stood up, went to the door, opened it a little, and looked inside. There he saw the pale child sitting on the floor, digging and rummaging in the cracks of the boards. However, as soon as the child noticed the visitor, he disappeared. Now the visitor told the family what he had seen and gave an exact description of the boy. The mother was then able to recognize the child and said Alas, it's my own dear child who died four weeks ago. Then they ripped up the boards on the floor and found two pennies that the boy had received from his mother at one time to give to a poor man, but the child had thought, You can buy yourself a biscuit for that. Therefore, he had kept the pennies and had hidden them in the cracks of the floor. This is why he hadn't been able to rest in his grave, and had come back every day at noon to look for the pennies. So the parents gave the money to a poor man, and after that the little child was never seen again. The second tell is part two of a story called How Some Children Played at Slaughtering. There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, You be the little pig, and I'll be the butcher. He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother's throat. Their mother was upstairs in a room bathing another child, and when she heard the cries of her son, she immediately ran downstairs. Upon seeing what had happened, she took the knife out of her son's throat and was so enraged that she stabbed the heart of the other boy, who had been playing the butcher. Then she quickly ran back to the room to tend to her child in the bathtub, but while she had been gone, he had drowned in the tub. Now the woman became so frightened and desperate that she wouldn't allow the neighbors to comfort her, and finally hung herself. When her husband came back from the fields and saw everything, he became so despondent that he died soon thereafter. Two Tales from the Grim Brothers. And that does it for story time. Until next time, be well.