The Ditmarsh Tale of Wonders

I will tell you something. I saw two roasted fowls flying; they flew quickly and had their breasts turned to heaven and their backs to hell, and an anvil and a mill-stone swam across the Rhine prettily, slowly, and gently, and a frog sat on the ice at Whitsuntide and ate a ploughshare. Three fellows who wanted to catch a hare, went on crutches and stilts; one of them was deaf, the second blind, the third dumb, and the fourth could not stir a step. Do you want to know how it was done? First, the blind man saw the hare running across the field, the dumb one called to the lame one, and the lame one seized it by the neck.

There were certain men who wished to sail on dry land, and they set their sails in the wind, and sailed away over great fields. Then they sailed over a high mountain, and there they were miserably drowned. A crab was chasing a hare which was running away at full speed, and high up on the roof lay a cow which had climbed up there. In that country the flies are as big as the goats are here. Open the window, that the lies may fly out.

NOTES

From Vieth's Chronik. Compare Alterthumszeitung, 1813, No. 6, p. 29. An old poem about a liar, in a manuscript at Vienna (No. 428, St. 181), is quite in this spirit. Compare Keller's Fastnachtspiele, p. 93, and following. There is a lying-tale from the Odenwald, in Wolf's Hausmärchen, p. 422; and one from Holstein, in Müllenhoff, No. 32; a Swabian in Meier, No.76; and variants are to be found in Pröhle's Märchen fur die Jugend, No. 40, and in Kuhn und Schwartz, No. 12. Compare No. 138.

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Household Tales. Margaret Hunt, translator. London: George Bell, 1884, 1892. 2 volumes.

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