The Brothers Grimm’s ”The Juniper Tree”

The Brothers Grimm’s "The Juniper Tree”

(The Juniper Tree is a dark tale and will be disturbing to some.)  Two thousand years ago, a rich man and his wife are unable to have a child.  She goes to the juniper tree in their courtyard paring an apple and cuts her finger, dropping blood onto the snow.  She suddenly feels her wish will be realized.  One month passes, then two; the snow melts, spring blooms and the tree fills in.  After eight months she eats from the tree and grows sick, and dies from joy when the snow white and blood red boy is born.  The father remarries and they have a daughter, but the stepmother grows to hate the boy and hits him. He knows no peace outside of school.  One day, the daughter comes home and wishes for an apple.  The mother unlocks the cupboard and hands her one, then angrily takes it back after the daughter asks about the son.  The devil enters her heart and when he comes up and asks for an apple, she gets him to go over to the cupboard and decapitates him.  She then uses a handkerchief to hide the wound and gets the girl to think she killed him.  She then cooks the boy into a black pudding, with Marlinchen’s tears for salt, and the father hungrily devours all the pudding himself.  Marlinchen then gathers the bones from under the table in a silk handkerchief and goes down and out to the juniper tree, where she sees a mist and then fire, and a beautiful bird soars out.  Her grief turns to exuberance and the bundle is gone. The bird sings beautifully atop the goldsmith’s shop, and the goldsmith comes outside, leaving a slipper.  The bird won’t repeat his song for nothing, and the goldsmith gives him the gold necklace he’d been working on, and he repeats his song: Mother killed me, father ate me, sister gathered my bones and laid them beneath a juniper tree, kwitt what a beautiful bird I am! At the shoemaker, coatless, red shoes are paid after the whole family is brought out, then millers at work all agree to the gift of the millstone.  (All these are sacrifices of the fruit of their work, except for the millstone, which is the very implement of their work, so that the bird can, instead of a gift for, a job done to, the stepmother)

 

(Sorry about the bad sound on my end.  It’s been corrected in future episodes.)

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