Several Grimm stories have mentioned wise women in terms that sound very much like fairy godmothers.
In this week’s story, The Goose-Girl at the Well, the old woman who is helping the banished princess is a wise woman. She has certain magical abilities, which are subtle through most of the story, for example, making things heavy for the young count to carry, but then not so subtle at the end when she transforms her cottage into a palace before she disappears into thin air.
In the epilogue, the narrator reveals that this wise woman was the same one present at the princess’s birth who gifted the princess with crying pearls instead of tears. Clearly, this is fairy territory.
Let’s see what we’ve learned about wise women / fairies from this story in Grimm:
Appearance:
- very old woman
- hobbles with a crutch
- acts younger than one her age
- mistaken for a witch
Activities:
- blesses baby princess with a gift (pearls instead of tears)
- takes in banished princess (presumably is the one who gives her a disguise to wear to make her look old and ugly)
- cuts grass for her geese, picks pears and apples
- tests the willingness of a young count to work
- plants a seed of falling in love “go into the house….he could fall in love with you”
- gives a present to the count that would reveal the identity of the princess
Overall: the wise woman works behind the scenes to provide a safe space for a girl to live, to bring reconciliation, to find a love interest, and reward the kind.
Fun note:
I typed in the first line of this story into an AI language generator to see what would come of it. I generated three different versions, but only liked the first. Here it is:
Once upon a time there was a very old woman who lived with a flock of geese in a lonely place on a mountain.
One day while sitting in her yard she heard an old song on the birds’ tongues. This made her very pleased, and she took down the goose-pen and hung it in the center of her yard, and then sat there and sang it herself.
But while she was singing and talking to herself, two men came into her yard and said, “Why are you hanging goose-pens all around your yard? How did you get them?”
The old woman answered them, “I took them off of my geese; they have got them because it has been so very warm lately, and they like the warmth, and because they can sing a pretty song. Besides, I wish to have my own song, and I think you must know what you are saying; so I’ll tell you.”
Try it yourself:
https://talktotransformer.com/
Built by Adam King (@AdamDanielKing) as an easier way to play with OpenAI’s new machine learning model. In February, OpenAI unveiled a language model called GPT-2 that generates coherent paragraphs of text one word at a time.
Here are the other stories we read this week:
