The first literary version of the entire tale was written in a Low German dialect (Plattdeutsch) by the painter Philip Otto Runge, and published in Achim von Arnim's Journal for Hermits (Zeitung für Einsiedler) in 1809. The Grimms then included it in their first collection of tales in 1812. Some critics argue that Runge's economical yet poetic versions of this tale and of ‘The Fisher and his Wife’ profoundly influenced the Grimms' treatment of their tales.
Runge's version goes like this: A mother, who has long wished for a child, at last becomes pregnant, but dies (after eating juniper berries) as her son is born and is buried under the juniper tree. Her son is mistreated and finally decapitated by his stepmother, who then serves his mangled body to his father in a stew. His half‐sister, however, convinced that she is responsible for his death, remains faithful to his memory, buries his bones under the juniper tree, and watches as a bird rises through mist and fire from the grave. The bird then sings a song recounting a compressed version of his story:
My mother, she killed me.
My father, he ate me.
My sister Marlene
Gathered up my bones,
Put them in a silken scarf,
Buried them under the juniper tree.
Keewit, keewit, what a fine bird am I.The bird repeats the song to a goldsmith, to a shoemaker, and to some millers, and receives a gold chain, a pair of red shoes, and a millstone in return. He then flies back to the juniper tree and, singing his song again, drops the gold chain around his father's neck, the red shoes in his sister's lap, and the millstone on his stepmother's head. Her eyes and hair shoot fire, but after she is crushed the brother appears in the flames and smoke. The father, sister, and brother joyfully return to the house to eat together.
The tale was certainly well known in German‐speaking cultures long before Runge and the Grimms wrote it down. Beginning with the earliest versions of Faust (1774), Goethe has his Gretchen sing a version of the bird's song in prison, strangely appropriating the voice of her murdered child as her own.
Many versions of this tale are told in cultures around the world. In Russia the juniper tree becomes a birch, in England a rose‐tree; in England the murdered child is usually a girl. But the motifs of family violence and cannibalism, of death, retribution, and resurrection are always present.
Maurice Sendak, Randall Jarrell, and Lore Segal chose ‘The Juniper Tree’ as the title tale for their two‐volume collection of the Grimms' tales (1973). Margaret Atwood uses motifs from the tale in her poem ‘The Little Sister’ and in some of the legendary folk material in her 1972 novel Surfacing.
Bibliography
- Belgrader, Michael, Das Märchen von dem Machandelbaum (1980).
- Tatar, Maria, “‘Telling Differences: Parents vs. Children in “The Juniper Tree”’”, in Off With Their Heads! (1992).
- Wilson, Sharon Rose, Margaret Atwood's Fairy‐Tale Sexual Politics (1993).
— Elizabeth Wanning Harries
