Thursday, May 14, 2015

Thursday's Tale: Clever Grethel (Gretel) by Brothers Grimm

Thursday's Tales are hosted by CarolsNotebook. I'm just a tagger on joining her in reading tall tales, fairy-tales and retellings every Thursday.

Today's tale is one I have not seen nor heard before. Clever Gretel is the story of a cook who likes to drink. And when she drinks she likes to eat. Her master has a guest coming over and the guest is very late. Her master leaves to fetch the guest and Gretel decides to have herself a drink. One drink leads to another and then to another and soon she is eating the two chickens that were meant for her master and his guest. But Gretel is clever and when her master comes back she tells him she will serve up the food promptly. Meanwhile the guest shows up and clever Gretel tells the guest to hurry away because her master wants to cut his ears off. She then tells her master that the guest ran off with the chickens leaving the master to run off after the guest begging for one of the chickens but the guest of course thinks the master is begging to cut off one of his ears.


I have to say I actually laughed when I read this one. It was a unique tale that had a great twist of an ending. I had not realized that there was any humor at all in the Grimm stories. I really enjoyed this one and hope I can find other "clever" tales like this one.


1 comment:

carol said...

That is a pretty funny one.