German Folk Tales — Part 2 (The Lily and the Lion · The Fox and the Horse)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part two of the shelf. Two more tales from the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in Margaret Hunt's English translation (1884), heard here in a fresh telling from the printed text, continuing in the Hunt volume's order after Part 1. In The Lily and the Lion, a merchant plucks a winter rose for his youngest daughter in a castle garden where summer and winter stand side by side, and a lion claims whatever first meets him at home — Lily herself. She keeps her father's word and marries the lion, an enchanted prince who is a lion by day and a man by night; when a ray of torch-light at her sister's wedding turns him into a dove for seven years, Lily follows his falling feathers round the world, asks the sun, the moon, and the night-wind, and wins him back at last. In The Fox and the Horse, a farmer turns out his old horse unless it comes back stronger than a lion — and a fox's trick, a feigned death and a lion tied fast to the horse's tail, brings the horse home in triumph and softens the farmer's heart for good. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Ancient Canopy, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:38 The Lily and the Lion
18:04 The Fox and the Horse
Six further tales were read in full for this pack and are not read here, set aside by name: The Turnip (its poor brother is bound and hanged in a sack on a tree as the tale's central mechanism), Clever Hans (it closes with Hans cutting out the calves' and sheep's eyes), The Three Languages (the father orders his son killed in the forest, and a deer's eyes and tongue are cut out as the token), The Fox and the Cat (the hunter's dogs seize the fox and hold him fast), The Four Clever Brothers (the huntsman brother shoots the dragon through the heart as the rescue's climax), and The Blue Light (the witch is shown hanging on the gallows and the dwarf cudgels the judge, the constables, and the king). Carried forward from Part 1, named there as here: The Golden Goose (set aside — its elder brothers' refusals are answered by narrated axe wounds) and Mother Holle (benched at screen — the blood-on-the-spindle device and the heroine's jump into the well). The Juniper-Tree class is excluded by standing register. No claim of completeness for the book is made.
From Kinder- und Hausmärchen by Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), final edition 1857, in Margaret Hunt's translation (1884), public domain — Project Gutenberg #2591; the two tales complete and in the Hunt volume's order, in a fresh telling. Narrated by Morgana. Theme: Ancient Canopy.
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