The Juniper Tree (also "The Almond Tree"; Low German: Von dem Machandelboom) is a German fairy tale first published in the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Grimm's Fairy Tales) in 1812, where it appears as tale number 47 (KHM 47). It is classified in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index as type 720.
Origin and publication history
The Grimms' version was recorded in Low German and was supplied to them by the Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810). Runge's telling had first appeared in 1808 in the journal Zeitung für Einsiedler, edited by Achim von Arnim. A somewhat different version of Runge's text was also published by Johann Gustav Büsching under the title "Von dem Mahandel Bohm" in his Volks-Sagen, Märchen und Legenden (1812), which appeared a few months before the Grimms' collection. The tale was retained, with stylistic and dialect variations, in subsequent editions of the Grimms' collection.
Plot
A wealthy, pious couple who long for a child live beside a juniper tree. In winter, while peeling an apple beneath the tree, the wife cuts her finger and sees drops of blood fall on the snow; she wishes for a child "as red as blood and as white as snow." She later eats juniper berries, falls ill, and asks her husband to bury her beneath the juniper tree if she dies. She gives birth to a son and dies of joy. The husband buries her as promised and eventually remarries.
The second wife bears a daughter (named Marlene or Marlinchen, depending on the translation) and comes to resent her stepson, fearing he will deprive her daughter of the inheritance. One day she lures the boy into a room, offers him an apple from a heavy-lidded chest, and slams the lid down on his neck, decapitating him. She binds the head back onto the body with a cloth and props the corpse on a chair with an apple in its hand. When the daughter, unaware, strikes the boy on the ear as her mother instructs, the head falls off. The stepmother then dismembers the body and cooks it into a stew (translated in some versions as "black puddings"), which the unwitting father eats and praises. Marlene gathers the bones beneath the table, ties them in a silk handkerchief, and buries them beneath the juniper tree.
A mist and fire rise from the tree, and a beautiful bird emerges, singing a song recounting the murder: "My mother, she killed me, / My father, he ate me, / My sister Marlene, / Gathered all my bones..." The bird obtains a golden chain from a goldsmith, a pair of red shoes from a shoemaker, and a millstone from millers in exchange for repeating its song. Returning home, it gives the chain to the father and the shoes to Marlene, then drops the millstone on the stepmother's head, killing her. In a burst of smoke and flame, the boy reappears in human form, and he, his father, and his sister are reunited.
Themes and motifs
The tale is noted as one of the Grimms' darker and more mature stories, containing themes of child abuse, murder, cannibalism, and biblical symbolism. The offering of the apple has been read as an allusion to the temptation of Eve, and the millstone as evoking Luke 17:2, in which a millstone is associated with punishment for harming a child. Scholars including Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes have discussed the tale's explicit treatment of stepmother–stepchild conflict over inheritance and its implications for the classification of such stories as children's literature. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his essay "On Fairy-Stories," cited "The Juniper Tree" as an example of what he regarded as the evils of censoring fairy tales for children.
Related tales
Type 720 has analogues in other traditions. The English fairy tale "The Rose-Tree" belongs to the same tale type, though it reverses the sexes of the principals; the more common pattern, as in "The Juniper Tree," involves a murdered boy.
Adaptations
The tale has been adapted in various media, including the novel The Juniper Tree (1985) by Barbara Comyns Carr; the 1985 opera The Juniper Tree by Philip Glass and Robert Moran; the 1990 Icelandic film The Juniper Tree directed by Nietzchka Keene and starring Björk; and numerous later literary and musical works.
