Present Imperfect

Germans Pass Along the Darndest Folklore! | January 03, 2004

Just browsing the Internet this morning, I found this article on fairy tales by A.S. Byatt. Now, we all know the Grimm brothers' Cinderella where the stepsisters fill the glass slipper with blood by trying to jam it onto their feet after hacking off their toes and heels (don't we?), but this one is way more frightening:

The most terrifying tale I have ever read in the Grimms is a one-paragraph tale about the obstinate child, in German "das eigensinnige Kind", which means literally the child with its own mind. In German a child is neuter in gender. All we are told about this one is that it would not do what its mother wanted, that God had therefore no goodwill towards it, and it died. When it was buried, it kept pushing its arm up through the earth. Until its mother came and knocked its arm down with a stick. After that it was for the first time peaceful under the earth. The real terror of that is implicit in its bleak little form and the complete absence of character (we do not know if the child was a boy or a girl). It doesn't feel like a warning to naughty infants. It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.

I found a translation of this whimsical little tale, too:

The Willful Child
Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed.

He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn't help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and as soon as she had done that, it withdrew, and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth.

Then I learned that this is just one of many "Hand from the Grave" tales so popular in the German folk tradition. Check 'em out! Some highlights include "The Withered Hand in the Church at Bergen," "A Mother Disciplines Her Deceased Child" and the time-honored favorite, "The Parent Murderer of Salzwedel."

Good times.