Page:Grimm's household tales, volume 2 (1884).djvu/427

Rh the Deutsche Sagen, 1. No. 255, 256, and 257. The cutting off and dividing the garments of the sleeping princess remind us of the cutting up of Brünhild's armour (slita brynin) by Sigurd. Cutting out the tongue occurs very often; the captain is the master of the kitchen (Truchsess), in Tristan. At the end the story changes into that of King Thrushbeard (No. 52).

From near Paderborn. A story from the province of Münster comes to us in another guise. The King proclaims that whosoever can tell the best lie shall have his daughter. The courtiers try in turn, but all do it too delicately, and cannot produce one single good strong bold lie. Then a poor peasant lad comes into the King's presence and says, "Lord King, once on a time there was a cabbage in our garden which grew bigger and bigger, and began to shoot up in the air until at last it touched heaven itself. Then I climbed up it just to have a look at heaven for once. The door happened to be open, and I saw such splendour and magnificence that I was just going to jump straight in when it was shut in my face, and I was left hanging among the clouds. I let myself down by a rope, it is true, but it broke when I had got half-way, and I fell, and straight into a pebble; but I soon came to myself, ran home, got an axe, and cut myself loose."

"That is rodomontade!" said the King, "I call those the greatest lies that I have ever heard in my life!" "So much the better," replied the peasant, "for then your daughter is mine." The King was alarmed, and gave him a great heap of money to get rid of him. That suited the peasant, for he had already seen that the princess had blear eyes, and was fearfully ugly. Münchhausen knew the end of our story, and made use of it in his Travels (p. 53). The majority of those popular lies are not invented by him, but are old properties, and only require to be related in another tone to appear as widely spread myths. For instance, making a rope of chaff, quite answers to the "vinda or sandi síma" (Harbardsl, 17), "vinde Reb af Sande og med de Reb op til Maanen löbe" (Danske Viser, 1, No. 43, and note), and the Latin ex arena funem nectere, is like the whip twisted out of water and wine, see the Ditmarsenlied, in the Wunderhorn, 2. 411. The words which Calderon puts into the mouth of Persius, in Zenobia, are conceived altogether in this spirit, and doubtless had their origin in a popular story (Gries, 1. 46, 48). He is to fetch grapes for the army from a vineyard in which every grape is as large, as a barrel. In order to conceal himself from the watchman of the mountain, who is a giant, Persius cunningly hollows out a grape and creeps into the skin. The giant, however, had a fancy to eat one, and took the