The Goose Girl
A German fairy tale, the Goose Girl was popularized by the Brothers Grimm when they included it in their 1815 anthology of children’s stories. It’s a tale of princesses, treachery, deceit and, ultimately, of justice. Unsurprisingly, it’s been translated many times into a number of different languages. In most cases, however, modern versions have left out some of the gorier details of earlier times.
The modern version is a colourful fable about the immorality of lying. It sticks closely to the original, with a princess sent off by her parents to meet her husband-to-be. She is accompanied on the long journey by her magic talking horse and a single servant girl. Before long, the servant refuses to obey orders, and so the princess is forced to fetch her own water from a river. At the river, she loses a special charm necklace her mother gave her. The servant threatens to tell the Queen unless the princess agrees to swap clothes. Once in the royal girl’s clothes, the commoner starts to pose as the princess, and it works. She lives a royal life, while the real princess is cast out as a lowly goose girl.
Eventually the king – to whom the princess was to be married – learns of the deception. In the modern version, he casts out the fraudster and weds her mistress. But in the early versions, the ending is far bloodier. Here, the king asks the fraudster to name an appropriate punishment for a servant who pretends to be a royal. Not knowing she’d been rumbled, she says they should be put naked in a barrel fitted with spikes on the inside and then rolled through the town. And so, this is the punishment she herself receives, dying in agony while the real princess watches on with satisfaction.