Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

‘But the wedding will be fun. Bears always dance well.’

What I especially like about this tale is the young hunter’s cheerful good nature. It’s remarkable how few details of behaviour we need to evoke a personality.

Now on the day when the princess turned fifteen, it happened that the king and the queen were away,

When the prince and his bride walked into the church, the older sister walked on their right and the younger sister on their left, and the doves flew down and pecked out one eye from each of them.

‘Oh, that’s not right,’ said the chief. ‘That’s a dirty trick.’ Even the robbers, hard-hearted as they were, were moved to pity.

Two Eyes was looking out of her bedroom window to see the tree standing happily in the castle courtyard, for in the middle of the night it had pulled its roots out of the ground and tiptoed all the way there to find her.

‘And what about you, Cinderella?’ he said.

He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren’t very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject – what a burden his life was.

‘The Little Shroud’ is unclassified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, and the only tale listed there to exemplify this type is this tale itself, under the title of ‘The Child’s Grave’.