The Goose Girl: Of 7 Editions Checked, Iron Stove From 1840

Why can she not simply tell the king?

The 1815 text gives the oath on page 18. After the princess loses the cloth with her mother’s three drops of blood, the maid takes her horse and clothes, and the princess must swear under the open sky „daß sie am königlichen Hof keinem Menschen nichts davon sprechen wollte“: in this site’s rendering, as with every English rendering of German on this page, that at the royal court she would speak of it to no human being.

Had she refused, the text says, she would have been killed on the spot. The oath names people, not things, and when the king finally asks her why she behaves as she does, she repeats it in exactly those terms, saying she may not tell him or any other human being. Nothing in it forbids speaking to an object, and the whole stove scene depends on that gap.

In the 1857 text her answer adds a phrase, „darf auch keinem Menschen mein Leid klagen“: in this site’s rendering, she may not lament her sorrow to any human being. The king’s reply uses her own words, „so klag dem Eisenofen da dein Leid“, then lament your sorrow to the iron stove there. He takes the verb directly from her answer and changes only the listener.

The tale is ATU 533, as classified by D. L. Ashliman. A type number places the tale among others but says nothing about the stove, which is the detail this page follows from edition to edition.

How often do Falada’s head and the wind rhyme speak?

Before the stove, the truth is said aloud many times, but only to listeners who cannot or will not act on it. Falada, the princess’s talking horse, is killed at the false bride’s request, and its head is nailed under the dark town gate. Each morning the princess greets it, and the head answers with the same refrain the drops of blood spoke on the road: if your mother knew, her heart would break.

Counting every printed occurrence of the three repeated lines gives 11 in the 1815 text and 12 in the 1857 text. The refrain itself comes 5 times in 1815: twice from the drops of blood, twice from Falada’s head, and once in Kürdchen’s report, where the goose boy quotes the head to the old king. The greeting “Falada, da du hangest,” Falada, there you hang, is printed 3 times, and the wind rhyme 3 times.

Kürdchen is the boy who herds the geese with her; on the meadow she lets down her hair, he tries to pull some of it out, and she calls up a wind to blow his hat away, „weh’! weh’! Windchen“, blow, blow, little wind, in the 1815 spelling. On the third morning the old king sits behind the gate and hears her speak with the head, but neither text prints those words again, so the reader is told only that he heard them.

The rhyme is not quite fixed even inside a single text, as a comparison of the three days shows. On the first day of the 1815 text she says „nimm Kürdchen sein Hütchen“, take Kürdchen’s little hat; on the second, „nimm dem Kürdchen sein Hütchen“, the same words with an article before his name; on the third, with the king hidden in a bush, „Faß Kürdchen sein Hütchen“, seize Kürdchen’s little hat. The 1857 text keeps the third-day „faß“ and makes the first two days match.

Every repeated line, 1815 and 1857, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Die Gänsemagd, Kinder- und Haus-Märchen, vol. 2, 1815 (pp. 16–25) and 1857 (pp. 13–19), retrieved 2026-11-04

Read as a sequence, the repeats move the secret one listener closer to someone who can act. The drops of blood speak to the princess alone; the head speaks in front of Kürdchen; Kürdchen carries the words to the old king; the king hears the exchange himself and then watches the wind rhyme from a bush. The count shows how the repeats hand the story on, not why tellers or editors favoured threes, and this page makes no claim about that.

How did the stove change between editions?

The tiled stove and the iron stove are not the only difference between the two texts. In 1815 the princess answers the king, „Ja, das will ich wohl“, agreeing that she will, then crawls into the stove, and the narrator summarizes what she said: her whole heart, how things had gone for her, how the wicked maid had deceived her. In 1857 she gives no answer at all; the king walks away, and she climbs into the iron stove, weeps, and speaks a lament in her own voice.

In this site’s rendering, the 1815 king says she may at least tell it to the tiled stove, and the stove has a hole in the top where he lies in wait. The 1857 king tells her to lament her sorrow to the iron stove, and he stands outside by the stove pipe and hears what she says.

The 1857 lament ends on the tale’s refrain, turned into the first person: „Wenn das meine Mutter wüßte, das Herz im Leib thät ihr zerspringen“. Rendered here, it says that if her own mother knew, her heart would break. That is the sixth refrain in the count above, the only one spoken by the princess, whereas in the 1815 text the refrain never comes from her at all.

The seven editions compared, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Die Gänsemagd in seven editions of Kinder- und Haus-Märchen, vol. 2 (1815, 1819, 1837, 1840, 1843, 1850, 1857), retrieved 2026-11-04

The table dates the change, at least as far as these transcriptions go. In the seven editions checked here, the stove is tiled through the 3rd edition of 1837 and iron from the 4th edition of 1840, 25 years after the first printing; the lament in direct speech and the stove pipe arrive in the same edition.

The hair changes separately: “eitel Silber,” pure silver, in 1815 and 1819, and “eitel Gold,” pure gold, from 1837. The stove sentences of 1815 were also read on the page scans; those of 1840 and 1857 were read in the transcriptions only.

Each of these printings is a one-evening text: one dated witness of the tale, not the tale itself. In this site’s studio terms, the 1840 edition is a new pressing, and on it the stove scene gives the princess her own lines.

What Margaret Hunt’s English matches

Margaret Hunt’s English translation in Household Tales has the king say:

“If thou wilt not tell me anything, tell thy sorrows to the iron-stove there,”

translated by Margaret Hunt · Household Tales, no. 89, Project Gutenberg text; the printed edition is not stated

Her text also gives the lament in direct speech, ending “If my mother did but know that, her heart would break,” and puts the king “standing outside by the pipe of the stove.” All three details match the editions from 1840 on, not the 1815 text, so Hunt’s English cannot stand in for the tiled stove. Her goose boy is called Conrad, which matches the German texts’ own gloss of Kürdchen as „Conrädchen“, little Conrad, printed in both 1815 and 1857.

Who knows what, and when?

The reader is never in the dark, since from page 18 of the 1815 text onward the reader knows the bride at court is the maid; the suspense is about who else will find out, and how. The chart follows four characters through seven steps of the tale, and the same steps hold in the 1815 and 1857 texts. A craft reading of a different kind of withholding, where the narrator himself knows the answer, is the Rue Morgue narrator, who tells a case he has already seen solved.

Who knows what, step by step, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Die Gänsemagd, Kinder- und Haus-Märchen, vol. 2, 1815 (pp. 16–25) and 1857 (pp. 13–19), retrieved 2026-11-04

After the stove the story is told twice more. The old king first explains everything to his son, and then, at the feast, he tells the whole course of events to the false bride as a riddle and asks what such a woman deserves; she does not recognise the princess and names her own sentence, a nail-studded barrel dragged through the streets by two white horses.

Kürdchen is not mentioned after the stove; the feast is for all the people and good friends, so the texts leave open whether he hears the riddle.

This is a plot device in a tale, printed in both texts, not a record of any real punishment. The page reads it only for how the story is passed on: the false bride hears her own deeds told back to her and does not see that they are hers.

What the stove scene does not prove

The editions show when the wording changed in print, but they do not show why it changed. Nothing on these pages says who chose the iron stove, whether a second teller supplied it, or whether the change was meant to make the scene clearer, and this page does not guess. A stove that hears a confession is not unique to this tale, as the 1815 note itself points out.

That note, on pages V and VI of the 1815 volume, is headed “Das Gänsmädchen” and credits the tale “(Aus Zwehrn).” It ends: „Auch im Erdmänneken Nr. 5, wird die Erzählung an den Ofen gerichtet“, in “Dat Erdmänneken,” no. 5, the telling is also addressed to the stove. The note points to a parallel inside the same book; it does not say where either stove came from.

The same note remarks that „die Erzählerin“, the woman who told the tale, used the word Räthsel, riddle, as feminine. The 1815 preface names the woman from Zwehrn “Viehmännin,” and her story is followed in the profile of the teller the note credits only as Zwehrn; the brothers’ other named sources are in the register of named Grimm tellers, where she is one of many.

Bolte and Polívka’s commentary states that Jacob Grimm wrote the tale down (vol. 2, 1915, p. 273). The 1815 text is a telling from Zwehrn as Jacob wrote it down and the brothers printed it, and the tiled stove is the one in that print. The iron stove first appears, in the texts checked here, in the brothers’ edition of 1840.