"The Glass Coffin" is a German fairy tale collected by the

Brothers Grimm The Brothers Grimm ( or ), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), were a brother duo of German academics, philologists, cultural researchers, lexicographers, and authors who together collected and published folklore. They are among the ...

, tale number 163.

Andrew Lang Andrew Lang (31 March 1844 – 20 July 1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University o ...

included it in ''

The Green Fairy Book ''The Langs' Fairy Books'' are a series of 25 collections of true and fictional stories for children published between 1889 and 1913 by Andrew Lang and his wife, Leonora Blanche Alleyne. The best known books of the series are the 12 collections ...

'' as ''The Crystal Coffin''. It is Aarne-Thompson type 410,

Sleeping Beauty ''Sleeping Beauty'' (french: La belle au bois dormant, or ''The Beauty in the Sleeping Forest''; german: Dornröschen, or ''Little Briar Rose''), also titled in English as ''The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods'', is a fairy tale about a princess cu ...

. Another variant is ''

The Young Slave The Young Slave is an Italian literary fairy tale written by Giambattista Basile in his 1634 work, the ''Pentamerone''. It is Aarne-Thompson type 709, Snow White; other variants include ''Bella Venezia'' and '' Myrsina''.D.L Ashliman"A Guide to ...

''.

Synopsis

A tailor's apprentice became lost in a forest. When night came, he saw a light shining and followed it to a hut. An old man lived there and, after the tailor begged, allowed him to stay for the night. In the morning, the tailor awoke to witness a fight between a great stag and a

wild boar The wild boar (''Sus scrofa''), also known as the wild swine, common wild pig, Eurasian wild pig, or simply wild pig, is a suid native to much of Eurasia and North Africa, and has been introduced to the Americas and Oceania. The species is ...

. After the stag won, it bounded up to him and carried him off in its antlers. It set him down before a wall of stone and pushed him against a door in it, which then opened. Inside the door, he was told to stand on a stone, which would bring him good fortune. He did so, and it sank down into a great hall, where the voice directed him to look into a glass chest. The chest contained a beautiful maiden, who asked him to open the chest and free her, and he did so. The maiden told him her story: She was the daughter of a rich count, and after the death of her parents, she had been raised by her brother. One day, a traveler stayed the night and used magic to get to her in the night, to ask her to marry him. She found the use of magic repellent and rejected his proposal. In revenge the magician then turned her brother into the stag, imprisoned her in the glass chest (coffin), and enchanted all the lands around them. The tailor and the maiden emerged from the enchanted hall and found that the stag had been transformed back into her brother. The wild boar he had killed had been the magician. The tailor and the maiden then married.

Analysis

The Glass Coffin has been compared to

Snow White "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is a 19th-century German fairy tale that is today known widely across the Western world. The Brothers Grimm published it in 1812 in the first edition of their collection '' Grimms' Fairy Tales'' and numbered as T ...

, which shares the motif of the woman inside a glass casket. “The Glass Coffin” first appeared in the 1837 collection of the Grimms’ fairy tales. It is not a collected folktale like others in the collection. Instead, the Brothers Grimm adapted it from a section in the 1728 novel ''Das verwöhnte Mütter-Söhngen'' by Sylvanus. They considered it to have “some affinity to a genuine saga.”

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Glass Coffin Glass Coffin Fiction about shapeshifting Glass Coffin ATU 400-459

Synopsis

Analysis

See also

References