Frau Holle

7-9 min read
16 pages

Frau Holle, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. A girl falls down a well into another country, where shaking the beds makes it snow.

A widow had two daughters. One was her own and did no work at all; the other was her stepdaughter, and did all of it.

Every day the stepdaughter sat by the well and spun until her fingers bled. One afternoon she leaned over to rinse the blood off the spindle, and it slipped out of her hand and went down.

Her stepmother said she could go and get it. So the girl looked into the dark of the well, and then she climbed onto the rim and let go.

She landed in a meadow, on grass, in sunshine, and it was not the country she had fallen from. She got up and walked, because there was nothing else to do.

She passed an oven full of bread, and the loaves called out, «Take us out, we're burning.» So she found the peel and took out every one of them.

She passed an apple tree so heavy that the branches were bent to the ground, and it said, «Shake me, my apples are all ripe.» So she shook it until the last apple was down, and stacked them in a heap.

At last she came to a small house with an old woman at the door, and the old woman had teeth so long that the girl turned to run.

«Don't be afraid,» said the old woman. «I am Frau Holle. Stay and work for me, and do it properly, and you'll do well here. The important thing is the beds: shake them hard enough for the feathers to fly. When my feathers fly, it snows in the world.»

The girl stayed. She shook the beds every morning until the air was white, and she was fed well and spoken to kindly, and nothing hurt.

After a long while she grew heavy-hearted all the same, and she could not explain it even to herself, except that it was not her own country.

«You want to go home,» said Frau Holle. «Good. You've earned your wages.» She took her by the hand and led her to a gate and opened it, and as the girl stepped through, a shower of gold came down over her and stuck to her, head to foot.

Her spindle was handed out after her, and the gate shut, and she was standing in her own yard. The cock on the wall called out: «Our golden girl is home again.»

Her stepmother had never in her life been so pleased to see her. And then she began to think.

The next morning she sent her own daughter to the well with the spindle, and the girl pricked her finger on a thorn to get blood on it, because that was the part she had understood, and threw the spindle down and jumped after it.

She came to the meadow, and to the oven, and the bread called out, and she said she was not going to dirty her hands. She came to the apple tree, and it asked to be shaken, and she said one might fall on her head. She came to the house and she took the work at once, because she had heard about the gold.

The first day she shook the beds a little. The second day she stayed in bed herself. On the third morning Frau Holle led her to the gate — and what came down over her at the threshold was a kettle of pitch, and it did not wash off, and it stayed on her as long as she lived.

…read the rest in the Marytale app.

Marytale is an app of illustrated bedtime stories to read to your child — a picture on every page, no ads and no internet needed. The bookmark stays where your child fell asleep.

Try it free

Scan with your phone to get Marytale

Text source: Plot by the Brothers Grimm (1812), public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Want to know where these stories come from? The articles are here

Frau Holle

More stories to read