Mr. Korbes

Abstract

Mr. Korbes The Brothers Grimm THE BROTHERS GRIMM [Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, 1785–1863; Wilhelm Carl Grimm, 1786–1859] were distinguished German scholars who came to be universally known for the collections of folktales and fairytales they worked to gather over five decades during the nineteenth century. All over the world, millions of adults and children continue to encounter—in one way or another, in more than a hundred languages and a variety of forms—stories that these brothers first began to publish in 1812: among the most immediately familiar are those of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, and Rapunzel, though there are many lesser known tales that remain arresting and provocative, as the one presented here would suggest. The first compilation of Children's and Household Tales (1812) contained eighty-six stories; a second volume, appearing in 1815, offered seventy more. These texts were revised and the collections expanded seven times before the final edition, containing 211 stories, was published in 1857, but a two-volume compilation was translated into English as early as 1823–1826. The two brothers were barely known before they published their first collection of stories, but over the course of their lives they achieved recognition for their important contributions to philology, lexicography, and cultural history. Among other projects, in 1838 they undertook an immensely ambitious and comprehensive German dictionary, which did not begin to appear until 1854; left unfinished at the time of their deaths, it was taken up by others and expanded until the mid-twentieth century. Among the many works that Jacob produced were detailed studies of medieval German poetry, German mythology, German grammar, and a two-volume account of the development of the German language, the subject of which, in the view of a prominent Oxford scholar writing in 1910, was "indeed, nothing less than the history which lies hidden in the words of the German language"; and this extraordinarily demanding investigation, he observed, "will always be one of the most fruitful and suggestive that have ever been written." Wilhelm's interests generally tended to be more recognizably literary and aesthetic, and it was he who took responsibility for repeatedly revising and rewriting the tales they had decided to publish while Jacob sought to identify the chief organizing principles. In their work together, the far-reaching research involved in gathering tales from many sources, including oral traditions as well as written texts, and discovering recurrent imaginative patterns within them would place these brothers at the forefront of the deepening explorations into folklore which increasingly came to occupy the minds of many thinkers in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, culminating in such comprehensive works as J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough and ranging into the speculations of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The story we've selected is taken from Household Stories, from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, translated from the German by Lucy Crane and done into pictures by Walter Crane, published in London by Macmillan & Co. in 1886. —SD [End Page 206] A cock and a hen once wanted to go a journey together. So the cock built a beautiful carriage with four red wheels, and he harnessed four little mice to it. And the cock and the hen got into it, and were driven off. Very soon they met a cat, who asked where they were going. The cock answered, "On Mr. Korbes a call to pay, And that is where we go to-day!" "Take me with you," said the cat.The cock answered,"Very well, only you must sit well back, and then you will not fall forward." "And pray take care Of my red wheels there; And wheels be steady, And mice be ready On Mr. Korbes a call to pay, For that is where we go to-day!" Then there came up a millstone, then an egg, then a duck, then a pin, and lastly a needle, who all got up on the carriage, and were driven along. But when they came to Mr. Korbes's house he was not at home. So the mice drew the carriage into the...