The Rooster Beam

There was once a magician who was standing in the midst of a great crowd of people performing his wonders. He had a rooster brought in, which lifted a heavy beam and carried it as if it were as light as a feather. But a girl was present who had just found a four-leaf clover, and had thus become so wise that she could see through every deception, and she saw that the beam was nothing but a straw. So she called out, "You people, do you not see that it is a straw that the rooster is carrying, and not a beam?"

The magic vanished immediately, and the people saw what it was, and drove the sorcerer away in shame and disgrace.

He, however, full of inward anger, said, "I will avenge myself."

Some time later the girl's wedding day arrived. She was all decked out, and went in a great procession across a field to the place where the church was. Suddenly they came to a swollen brook, and there was neither a bridge nor a walkway to cross it. So the bride nimbly lifted up her clothes, and was about to wade through it. She had just stepped into the water when a man near her, and it was the magician, called out mockingly "Aha! What kind of eyes do you have that think they see water?"

Then her eyes were opened, and she saw that she was standing with her clothes lifted up in the middle of a field that was blue with flax blossoms. Then all the people saw it too, and they chased her away with ridicule and laughter.

• Source: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Der Hahnenbalken, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales -- Grimms' Fairy Tales), no. 149

• The Grimms' source: A poem by Friedrich Kind (1768-1843), "Der Hahnenbalken," published in the Becker'schen Taschenbuch (1812), plus an unidentified oral source from Paderborn.

• This tale was added to the Grimms' collection in 1815 as vol. 2, no. 63. In later editions it has been no. 149.

• Translated by Margaret Hunt (1884). Translation revised and corrected by D. L. Ashliman. © 2000.

• This tale does not have an Aarne-Thompson classification, although the final episode resembles Aarne-Thompson type 1290, A Fool Mistakes a Flax Field for a Lake. The story's emphasis on hypnotic deception also resembles any number of Faust legends, as well as well known stories about the forest spirit Rübezahl, especially as recorded by Johann Karl August Musäus (1735-1787), whose work was well known by the Grimm brothers.

• The tale's unusual title contains an interesting double meaning. The main roof beam in a simple cottage was called the "rooster beam" because chickens were allowed to roost there. And it is a rooster that appears to be carrying such a beam in the magician's show.

• The story's final episode, and especially the wedding guests' extreme reaction to the bride's lifting her clothing to cross an imaginary body of water, is best understood when one recalls that in pre-industrial Europe women's underwear normally consisted solely of one or more petticoats.

Related links

• D. L. Ashliman's folktexts, a library of folktales, folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.

• The Grimm Brothers' Home Page.

• The Grimm Brothers' Children's and Household Tales (Grimms' Fairy Tales).

• Faust legends, a collection of stories about Germany's most famous magician, a master of hypnotic deception.

• Legenden vom Rübezahl. Five legends about another uncanny illusionist, in the original German, written by Johann Karl August Musäus (1735-1787).