Grimm Reviews – “The Foundling Bird”

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“The Foundling Bird”

One day a mother sat under a tree with her baby and fell asleep. A bird grabbed the baby, but after hearing a gunshot had dropped it in the higher branches. The mother woke and ran off looking for her baby.

The hunter heard the baby, rescued it, and decided to take it home with him to raise with his daughter Lena. He named the baby Birdie.

Lena and Birdie were the best of friends, but the hunter’s cook didn’t like Birdie. One day, Lena saw her carrying in a bunch of water and asked what she was doing. The cook said that the next day she was going to boil the water and throw Birdie in it to cook for dinner.

So Lena told Birdie and they ran away before the cook could get Birdie. The cook wondered what the hunter would say when he came home and the children weren’t there (wasn’t the plan to kill one of them?) so she sent some servants to find them.

The girls saw the servants coming, so they changed into a rose tree and a rose. When the servants went back home, the cook told them they should have cut off some of the stems and the roses and brought them back.

The servants went out again and the girls changed themselves into a church and steeple. When the servants didn’t bring those back, the cook vowed to go with them the third time.

The third time, the girls transformed into a pond and a duck. When the cook saw the pond, she bent down to drink it all up, but the duck grabbed her hair and held her under until she drowned.

And they lived happily ever after.

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I guess the mother eventually just gave up looking?

Okay, I haven’t put much thought into this, but I’m assuming boiling a child alive is probably not the quietest or most subtle way to kill them. And then serving them for dinner? The story’s reasoning is as follows: “… the forester had an old cook, who was not fond of children, and she wanted to get rid of Birdie, who she thought was an intruder.” That’s it. That was enough to provoke child murder and cannibalism.

Also, shouldn’t the cook – living in the same household after all – have known that Lena and Birdie were friends? So why tell Lena that she was going to kill her best friend and serve her for dinner?

What’s more amazing, the kids were able to transform into amazing things, or that the cook was – apparently – able to know what they had transformed into from a distance?

That’s not something you see that often: death by duck.

Wednesday Writing Prompt for February 22, 2017

 

Write a sentence containing the following word: yard

Here is my example:

How long after an election is it okay to still have a candidate’s sign in your yard?

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Image from Pixabay.

Grimm Reviews – “The Elf”

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“The Elf”

There once was a king who really loved this apple tree. If anyone picked an apple from it, he wished them deep underground. Well, he had three daughters and they figured the “no picking apples” only applied to strangers. They picked an apple and each took a bite, and then all were whisked deep underground.

The king searched for his daughters but could not find them, so he offered that whoever found them could marry one.

Among the men who went searching for the daughters were three huntsmen. After searching for several days, they came to a castle. Nobody was there, but there was plenty of food that remained hot. They decided that one would stay in the castle while the other two went out searching.

The next day, the eldest stayed in the castle and a dwarf, or elf, showed up asking for some bread. The huntsman gave him some bread, but the dwarf dropped it and asked for more. When the huntsman went to give him more, the dwarf took a stick and beat him.

The next day, the middle huntsman stayed at the castle and the dwarf came and the same thing happened, because the eldest didn’t say anything. Later, the two shared their stories with each other, but didn’t saying anything to the youngest who they didn’t like.

The next day when the youngest stayed in the castle, the dwarf showed up again. But when he dropped the bread, instead of the youngest giving him more, he told the dwarf to just pick up what he dropped. And then he started beating the dwarf.

The dwarf begged the youngest to stop, and he would tell him how to find the daughters. He took the huntsman to a well and told him the three daughters were at the bottom in three rooms with multi-headed dragons. He also told the huntsman that his two brothers would mistreat him, and then he disappeared.

The next day, all three went to the well. The two oldest were each lowered in a basket so far, until they rang a bell asking to be pulled back up. But the youngest stayed in until he reached the bottom. He killed the dragons and the daughters all kissed him. He then sent them up in the basket one by one. But when the basket came down for him to go up, he remembered what the dwarf had said so he put a heavy rock in it. When the basket was halfway up, one of the other huntsman cut the rope so it fell back down. The two huntsman threatened the daughters not to say anything, and then they took them back to the king and asked that each get a wife.

The youngest stayed in the bottom of the well for some time, but then he saw that there was a flute hanging on the wall in one of the rooms. So he began to play it, and with each note a dwarf/elf appeared. He explained that he wanted to go back to the surface, so each grabbed a hair on his head and drew him back to the surface.

When he got to the kingdom, the three daughters fainted. The king thought he must have been cruel to them, so he had him locked up. Once the daughters woke, they told the king to set him free, but they couldn’t say why. So the king had them tell the stove. He stood in the doorway and heard what they said to the stove, so he had the two other huntsman hanged, and the youngest huntsman and the youngest daughter were wed.

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I don’t know if the three huntsmen were supposed to be brothers or not. Sometimes it read that way, and sometimes not.

So in the olden days you could find an empty castle where food remained hot and just move in without wondering who built it?

So just having each daughter guarded by a dragon wasn’t enough, they had to be multi-headed?

So they pulled him up by his hair. Didn’t they have stairs, or something?

The ending of this story came out of nowhere. This is the last sentence of the story: “Then [the king] caused the two brothers to be hanged on the gallows, and to the third he gave his youngest daughter, and on that occasion I wore a pair of glass shoes, and I struck them against a stone, and they said, ‘Klink,’ and were broken.” What? What do glass shoes have to do with the apples, and the dragons, and the … what?