Back to the Brothers Grimm, and a short tale of rampant naughtiness. I’m not going to type it all out here but you can read a translation of it by D.L. Ashliman (from 2001) here. A Cock and Hen go up the mountain to gather nuts but when dusk comes neither of them wants to carry all the heavy nuts home, so the Cock builds a cart of nutshells, but then neither of them wants to pull the cart... According to the notes at the bottom of the Ashliman translation, this story has been given many different names so you might find it in another collection of Grimms’ tales as ‘The Adventures of Chanticleer and Partlet: How They Went to the Mountains to Eat Nuts’, ‘The Vulgar Crew’ or ‘Riffraff’, to give just a few. The German title is ‘Das Lumpengesindel’ which, apart from being a lovely word in its own right, means something like ‘mob’, ‘riff-raff’ or ‘rabble’.
(Horst Lemke, Die Schönsten Märchen der Brüder Grimm, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lesering, 1965; found here)
Joyce Crick, who translated the Oxford World’s Classics edition which I have, tells us that this one was contributed by August von Haxthausen ‘from the Paderborn region’. An exuberant celebration of out-and-out knavery, it lacks the cruelty of ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’, the other ‘beast fable’ I’ve read in this collection, although I did wince for the poor innkeeper’s face and bum. What carries it along is a certain charm and good humour:
When they [the Cock and Hen riding in the cart drawn by the Duck] had gone part of the way they met a pin and a needle going on foot. These called ‘Stop! Stop!’, saying it would soon be dark as stitch, and they couldn’t go a step further, and the road was so muddy, mightn’t they ride in the cart for a little. They’d been staying at the tailor’s hostel outside the town gate and had lingered over a beer. As they were very thin and didn’t take up much room, Cock let them both get in, but they had to promise not to tread on his toes, nor on Hen’s neither.
The Grimms and Joyce Crick have been at pains here to retain the sense of a storytelling voice (rather than text) through little colloquial touches and it all bounces along with cheery energy – it’s pretty much all narrative, there are no extraneous flourishes. The birds, needle and pin are of course being used to reflect human weaknesses but the storyteller isn’t really condemning them, he’s indulging our fantasies, our wish to identify with the tricksters who take what they want and never have to pay the price. There is a moral at the end, given to the unlucky innkeeper:
Then he made an oath that he would never again take a pack of low-life ruffians into his inn, who would eat his pantry empty, pay not a penny, and on top of that, by way of thanks, get up to all sorts of no good.
But this isn’t his story: it’s a sensible oath for an innkeeper but I think most of us have flown away with the fowls.
(Edited to add: I’ve just remembered that it’s April Fool’s Day, so a good moment to be thinking of misrule, tricksters and ne’er-do-weels.)
Next week: ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’.