Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/482

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400
GRIMM'S HOUSEHOLD TALES.

Danish ballad Mariböquelle; in the German saga Das ertrunkene Kind (1. St. 62), illusively in Pfaffe Amis; in the Negro story of Nanni, who is taught by her mother to eat the flesh of a young chicken, and put its hones and feathers together again. Zeus restores life to the bones of the child which has been eaten, and replaces with ivory the shoulder-blade which Demeter has eaten. See Gruber's Mythological Dictionary, 3. 377. Thor collects the bones of the buck which has been eaten, and brings them back to life by shaking them (Dämesage, 38). Other stories need not be mentioned. The punishment of a mill-stone falling on the head from above the door is found in the Edda in the story of the two dwarfs, Fialar and Galar (Copenhagen edition, p. 84). Compare No. 90.

[A Devonshire story The Rose-tree, which is allied to this, is given by Mr. Henderson in his Folklore of the Northern Counties. London, 1866. For Almond-tree birth refer to Pausanias, VII. 17.—Tr.]


48.—Old Sultan.

From two stories which complete each other, one from Lower Hesse, the other from the district of Paderborn. In the latter it is the fox and the bear which are about to have a combat, and the story opens with the tale, so well known from the Reinecke Vos, of the fox luring the bear to the honey, and shutting him fast in a tree. The latter then demands to be set free that he may revenge himself. According to a third story, likewise from the region of Paderborn, the fox has the dog and the bee as well as the cat to support him. The bee gets into the ear of the swine which is on the side of the bear, and stings it; the cat catches a mouse and throws it into the bear's open mouth, it bites his tongue, and the two run screaming away. On the second day they arrange that whichsoever of them can first run up a mountain, shall be lord of the others. The fox has a brother who resembles him so much that they cannot be distinguished from each other; he sends him on in front (as in The Hedgehog and his Wife, No. 187), and then begins the race at the same time as the bear, but remains behind intentionally and conceals himself. When the bear reaches the top the fox is there, and the bear thinks that it is the right fox, and cries angrily, "I wish the storm would overwhelm me." A youth is, however, silting in the very tree under which the bear is standing, who has fled thither to escape when he saw the animals running towards him, and in his terror he lets his axe fall, and it hits the bear's head and kills him. This incident occurs likewise in a story from Transylvania; see Haltrich, No. 14 and No. 34. In a fourth story also from the district of Paderborn a discourse is interwoven in which the bear describes his meeting with a hunts-