The Juniper Tree (fairy tale)

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The Juniper Tree is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm.^[1]

It is tale number 47 and Aarne-Thompson type 720: "my mother slew me, my father ate me". Another such tale is the English The Rose-Tree, although it reverses the sexes from The Juniper Tree; The Juniper Tree follows the more common pattern of having the dead child be the boy.^[2]

Contents 1 Synopsis 2 Commentary 3 Adaptions 4 References

[edit] Synopsis

A woman wishes for a child as red as blood and as white as snow. She knows she is about to die, so she requests that she be buried under a juniper tree that they have outside. She gives birth to a boy, and dies a few days later. Her husband grieves, and gets married again. His second wife gives birth to a daughter, Melinda, but hates the son because he would be the one to inherit all the family's money, and she wishes it to be her daughter. One day, she offers the boy an apple that is inside a chest. As he reaches in to get it, she slams its heavy lid on him, knocking his head off. She then takes a bandage and ties his head back to his body, and tells Melinda to ask him for the apple, and if he doesn't give it, to give him a good box on the ear. Melinda kindly asks for the apple, and then boxes him on the ear, resulting in the boy's head falling off. Melinda goes to her mother and tells her in sobs that she killed her brother. Her mother reassures Melinda and turns the boy's body into black puddings.

The father eats the puddings, but Melinda takes up the bones and buries them beneath a juniper tree. A beautiful bird flies out of the tree. It goes and sings a song to a goldsmith, who gives it a golden chain, to a shoemaker, who gives it a pair of red shoes, and to millers, who give it a millstone. It then flies back home and sings its song. The father goes out to see what is singing such a beautiful song and the golden chain falls about his neck. Then he says to everyone that a beautiful bird gave him a chain. It sings again, Melinda goes out to see if this is true, and the red shoes fall to her. She comes in giggling happily and tells everyone how happy she is with what the bird gave her. All this time the stepmother is complaining of heat, claiming she has a horrid fire burning in her veins. It sings a third time, the stepmother goes out, and the bird drops the millstone on her, crushing her, and killing her. The father and Melinda go out to see what caused the loud crash, but find nothing but a swirl of smoke and a stone. The brother is standing there, looking happy, and they go inside for dinner.

[edit] Commentary

Many folklorists interpret evil stepmothers as stemming from actual competition between a woman and her stepchildren for resources. In this tale, the motive is made explicit: the stepmother wants her daughter to inherit everything.^[3]

The millstone in the story would have had Biblical connotations for the readers of the Grimms' days, especially as the verse Luke 17:2 says that anyone who causes a child to sin would be better off being thrown into the sea with a millstone about his neck; both refer to a millstone as a punishment for those who harm the young and innocent.^[4]

In his essay "On Fairy-Stories", J.R.R. Tolkien cited The Juniper Tree as an example of the evils of censorship for children; many versions in his day omitted the stew, and Tolkien thought children should not be spared it, unless they were spared the whole fairy tale.^[5]

[edit] Adaptions

• The story was adapted for the comic book Grimm Fairy Tales as issue 16. The story goes that a woman kills her stepson in order to prevent him from eloping with her daughter, then buries his body underneath the juniper tree in their yard. The next day, a bird on the branch of the tree tells the daughter the truth, and out of grief, she hangs herself from the tree. The story is told to a woman named Patricia, who was contemplating having her drug-addict stepson Bryan killed because of the horrible example he set for her daughter, Carolyn. But, in a sense of twisted irony, her daughter dies anyway from a drug overdose.
• The story was also adapted by Barbara Comyns Carr in her novel The Juniper Tree which was published by Methuen in 1985. In Comyns Carr's adaptation the step mother is a sympathetic character and the son's death an accident. Whereas in Grimm's fairy tale it is Marlene (the daughter) who buries the bones of the son, Comyns Carr makes Marlene ignorant of the death and has the step-mother, desperate to prevent her husband finding out and in the throes of a nervous breakdown, bury the little boy under the juniper tree. At the end of the adaptation the step mother does not die but is treated and begins a new life. The Juniper Tree was Barbara Comyns Carr's first novel after an 18 year hiatus in her work and was described in The Financial Times at the time of publication as "delicate, tough, quick-moving .... haunting"^[6].

[edit] References