In stark contrast to the long, intricate tales penned by other literary fairy tale writers, in particular those practicing their arts in French salons, most of the fairy tales collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are quite short—in many cases, easily squeezed into just one or two pages, or even just a few paragraphs. One major exception: “The Juniper Tree,” one of the longest tales in the original 1812 Children’s and Household Tales, which also happens to be one of the most horrifying tales in the original collection.
In their notes, the Grimms gave full credit to painter Philip Otto Runge (1777-1810) for providing them with the tale. Although some scholars have argued that the story is an original tale penned by the Grimms, who were inspired by Runge’s paintings, the only other confirmed original tale by the Grimms, “Snow White and Rose Red,” did not appear until the 1833 edition. This suggests that Runge may well have penned “The Juniper Tree,” especially since unlike the other tales in the original 1812 edition, it has no clear oral or written source. Or perhaps Runge did simply write down an otherwise lost oral tale.
Runge, born into a large, prosperous middle-class family, spent much of his childhood sick, which allowed him to both miss school and indulge in various arts and crafts. Seeing his talent, an older brother paid for him to take art lessons at the Copenhagen Academy. Unfortunately, Runge developed tuberculosis only a few years later, cutting short what had been an exceptionally promising career.
Before his death, Runge painted a number of portraits, as well as more ambitious paintings intended to be displayed with music. Since this was well before the age of recordings, those paintings presented some logistical problems, but the effort signified Runge’s desire to fuse together various art forms—which may in turn perhaps explain what he was attempting to achieve in “The Juniper Tree,” a tale laced with repetitive poetry.
The story opens with a familiar fairy tale motif: a wealthy woman longing for a child. One snowy day, she steps outside to cut an apple beneath a juniper tree. I have no idea why she doesn’t stay in a nice warm room to cut the apple. Sometimes rich people can be strange. Moving on. She cuts her finger, letting a few drops of blood fall beneath the juniper tree, and wishes for a child red as blood and white as snow—consciously or unconsciously echoing the mother of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” She feels considerably better after cutting herself and wishing for this child—the first of many disturbing elements in the tale.
Nine month later, she has a child, and dies.
As requested, her husband buries her under the juniper tree.
Eventually, he remarries.
He and his new wife have a daughter—Marlinchen, or, in a recent translation by Jack Zipes, Marlene. That’s shorter to type, so we’ll stick with Marlene. His new wife knows that her stepson will inherit everything. Her daughter, nothing. It’s the evil stepmother motif, with a clear cut financial motive. She begins physically abusing the boy.
And one morning, after her daughter asks for an apple, which this family, for whatever reason, keeps in heavy chests, the mother has a terrible thought. She tells her daughter that she must wait until her brother returns from school. When he does, she coaxes the boy towards the chest, and murders him with its lid, decapitating the poor kid within seconds.
THIS IS NOT THE MOST DEPRESSING OR GROSS PART OF THE STORY, JUST SO YOU KNOW.
Like many murderers, her immediate concern is to not get caught, so, she props up the body and ties the head to it with a nice handkerchief like that is not really what those things are for and then puts an apple in the dead kid’s hand and then tells her little daughter to go ask the kid for the apple and if he says no, hit him. Marlene does, knocking the boy’s head off, proving that handkerchiefs, however useful in other situations, are not really the most reliable way to secure heads to necks after decapitation. Consider this your Useful Information for the Day.
While I’m being useful, SIDENOTE: I must warn my younger readers not to try to reenact this scene with Barbie, Ken and Skipper Growing Up dolls. Grown-ups will not be in the least appreciative and you may not get a replacement Barbie doll.
Moving on.
Marlene, naturally, is more than a bit freaked out. Her mother then manages to worsen the situation by saying that they absolutely must not let anyone know that Marlene has killed her own brother (!) and thus, the best thing to do is to turn the boy into stew. She then feeds it to the father, who finds it very tasty, as Marlene watches, sobbing.
This bit with the stew, incidentally, was edited out of most English editions of the tale, much to the irritation of several scholars, perhaps most notably J.R.R. Tolkien, who remarked:
Without the stew and the bones—which children are now too often spared in mollified versions of Grimm—that vision would largely have been lost. I do not think I was harmed by the horror in the fairy tale setting, out of whatever dark beliefs and practices it may have come.
Granted, this is from the same man who later conjured up an image of a giant hungry spider blocking the entrance to a monstrous land of fire and despair, so, I dunno, maybe you were harmed just a tad, Tolkien. Or maybe not. But the belief that he was not harmed by reading about kiddie soup formed a central plank of a longer essay urging us not just to stop relegating fairy tales to children, but also to stop shielding children from fairy tales. They’ll live. And they probably won’t try to turn their siblings into soup. Probably.
Back in the story, Marlene carefully gathers up her brother’s bones and places them beneath the juniper tree. The tree reacts the way many of us would, when offered human bones: it moves. It then does something most of us can’t do: it releases smoke, and then a white bird. Marlene sees the bird and cheers up instantly, heading back inside to eat.
Which is kinda a mistake on her part, since it means missing one of the great ghost outings of all time, as the bird decides to fly through the town, pausing at various places to sing a cheery little song about his murder, ending with the line “What a lovely bird I am!” Incredibly enough, the goldsmith, shoemaker and the various workers at the mill don’t respond to the line, “My father, he ate me,” with a “What the hell?” but rather with a “Can you sing that again?” On the other hand, plenty of people like rewatching horror movies and TV shows, so, maybe the story is onto something here. The bird has figured out how to monetize this: offer something for free the first time around, and then demand payment for a repeat. As a result, he gains a gold chain, a pair of red shoes, and a millstone.
And then the bird returns home.
The final scene could almost be lifted out of a modern horror movie, particularly if it’s read out loud by someone very very good at doing ghost voices. Even if not read out loud, the image of a bird singing happily about his sister gathering his bones as he tosses red shoes at her is… something.
But this story gains its power, I think, not so much from the repetitive poetry, or the bird’s revenge, or even the image of a father eagerly swallowing stew formed from his son’s legs, or his daughter carefully gathering up his son’s bones from the floor, but for its focus on an all too real horror: child abuse, and how that abuse can be both physical and mental. It’s notable, I think, that this story starts with emotional and verbal abuse before ramping up to child murder and cannibalism, and that it emphatically places the murder of children on the same level as cannibalism. These things happen, the story tells us, and the only fantastic part is what happens afterwards, when Marlene gathers her brother’s bones and soaks them with her tears.
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It holds another horror as well: the people in the town are more than willing to listen to the singing of the bird, and more than willing to pay the bird for the performance, but not willing to investigate what is a pretty terrible crime. Instead, they just ask to hear the song again, finding it beautiful.
The story also touches on something else that almost certainly came from Runge’s personal experience, and direct observations from the Grimms: the problems with inheritance laws in large families. As a middle child, Runge had no hope of inheriting much from his prosperous parents. His training was paid for by an older brother, not a parent. The Grimms had nothing to inherit from their father, who died young, so this was less of a concern for them—but they presumably witnessed multiple cases of older sons inheriting, leaving younger siblings to scramble, the situation that the mother in this story fears for her daughter, Marlene.
In the end, it can be assumed that this particular son will take very good care of this particular younger sister, even if the father marries a third time. And he might: he’s well to do (and now has an added gold chain, courtesy of a terrifying singing bird), single again, and clearly not overly cautious or discriminating in his choices of women. It’s quite possible that Marlene and her brother might find themselves with more half siblings turned potential rivals—or at least seen as such by their new stepparent—allowing the cycle to start again.
Though even if the father embraces chastity after this, I still can’t help thinking that both Marlene and her brother will find themselves frozen from time to time, especially at the sight of bones, and that neither one of them will be able to eat apples without a shiver of memory—if they can eat apples at all. Because for all its happy ending, and promise of healing and recovery, and for its promise that yes, child abuse can be avenged, “The Juniper Tree” offers more horror, and terror, than hope. But it also offers something else to survivors of childhood abuse: a reminder that they are not alone.
Mari Ness lives in central Florida.
I agree with Tolkien that we shouldn’t shield our children from the evils of the world but man are the original Grimm fairy tales dark dark dark. I would see this one as an aberration except for following along with this series and having translated some from the original German to practice my language skills. Along with the middle school realization of what “I can’t get no satisfaction was really about” the high school realization of the darkness of the original fairy tales is one of my defining memories of advancing from childhood to adulthood.
Marlinchen is just a diminutive for Marlin, which is a northern German form of Marlene, so that’s all good.
Runge was apparently also the source for “The Fisher and His Wife”, which also features repetitive poetry. He claimed to have both stories from local oral tradition, but I bet he prettied them both up.
Pretty sure that Tolkein’s trauma was more from war than fairy tales. I had forgotten this one existed, but once memory was jogged, I remember being pretty happy that the murderer died.
Um… Mari, you mention the bird throws the shoes. But you left out the transformation of the bird, and what he does with his payments.
I went and read the ending of the fairy tale. Without knowing that, it makes your article confusing. Yes, it’s a fairy tale, so most readers can guess that things are made right again. Myself, I’d thought perhaps these shoes were like some other famous shoes in fairy tales.
I don’t think I’d read this tale before.
Best,
Anne*—
I’m confused. The brother comes back to life at some point?
The version I read growing up, she made him into black pudding iirc. (Not sure where that copy is.) I’m not sure that’s what I’d call shielding kids, since I suspect most of them will do what I did and promptly try and find out what black pudding is. The answer seemed a tad darker than a generic “stew” would have. (This was pre-google and I had no trouble finding out.)
Anyway, this was one of my favorite Grimm tales.
The Grimm Brothers were very aptly named.
necessary_eagle he does comes back to life. After he drops the millstone on his stepmother she dies and bursts into flames. Dad and the sister rush outside to see what’s up, only to see the boy (who was a bird 10 seconds ago) walk out of the smoke alive and well. They noticed the stepmom’s body too, but apparently don’t care, no big deal. Then the Dad, brother and sister go inside, happy to be together again. It’s a weird one lol
It’s essentially Medea’s revenge on her husband when she stewed their children and fed it to them with a bit of Philomel who transformed into a bird to sing of being raped by her brother-in-law so her sister chops up the kids to feed to dear old rapist dad. So, the classic Greeks beat them to this story.
@9/MByerly: Of course they did. Myths and fairy tales reiterate the same themes all the time.
The folk singer Emily Portman uses this story (I assume) as inspiration for her song Stick Stock. It’s definitely worth a listen but, warning, no happy ending here:
https://youtu.be/77WunUs_Yt4
My mother she cooked me/My father he ate me/My little sister Anne Marie/She gathered up the bones of me/And tied them in a silken cloth/To lay under the juniper/Tweet twee/What a pretty bird am I!
That was the translation I grew up with, in an edition illustrated with some surprisingly adult Maurice Sendak engravings.
I also think of Titus Andronicus when I think of chopping up kids to feed to the parent, but that was on purpose (and to punish all the parties).
I first heard this story not as a fairy tale, but as a terrifying ghost story. Perhaps it fits better there. In that version, there’s no magical bird and the daughter is not complicit in the knowledge of the murder, having only been made to bury the remains. The father is told his son ran away so after dinner (only he eats the presumed pork), he goes to look for him. That night, the daughter and father hear the song in a dream. Both realize the truth. The father heads home and she goes out to look for him. The stepmother also hears the song in a dream and awakens to see a dark figure by her bed. The father and daughter return to find her throat cut, seemingly in a suicide.
The version was called “Pennywinkle” as pennywinkle (perrywinkle) flowers pop up when the daughter buries the remains, and are mysteriously on the chests of the father and daughter when they sit up after waking, falling into their laps. They find the stepmother with the same flowers in her hand.
My father had told us this variant, based on it in Richard and Judith Dockery Young’s “Ozark Ghost Stories,” which collected various ghost stories the pair had heard from the Ozarks area. Directly following it was “Blood Red Cedar,” which was a more proper retelling of the original Grimm story, with the switch that the gold chain is given to the daughter and boots are given to the father, who is not noted to be pious at all.