The Valiant Little Tailor

8-10 min read
16 pages

The valiant little tailor, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. He kills seven flies at once, and then lets everybody guess what he means by it.

A tailor was sitting at his window with a piece of bread and jam beside him, and the flies came to the jam, and he lost his temper and hit them with a cloth.

When he counted, there were seven of them dead on the table. He looked at the seven flies for a while. Then he cut himself a belt and stitched on it, in his best gold thread: SEVEN AT ONE BLOW.

He put a cheese in his pocket and a bird in his other pocket and set off, because a man with a belt like that does not sit in a room sewing.

On a mountain he met a giant. The giant read the belt slowly and looked at the tailor, who was about the size of one of his hands, and decided to test him.

The giant picked up a stone and threw it out of sight. Then he waited.

The tailor took the bird out of his pocket and threw it. It went up, and it went away over the trees, and it did not come down at all. The giant did not know what to say about that.

So the giant squeezed a stone until water came out of it. The tailor took the soft cheese out of his pocket and squeezed that, and the whey ran down his wrist, and the giant stopped suggesting things.

Word of the belt reached a king, who had two giants in his forest doing a great deal of damage, and a daughter, and no one brave enough to help with either.

«Deal with the giants,» said the king, «and you may have her, and half the kingdom.»

The tailor went into the forest with his pockets full of stones and found the giants asleep under a tree. He climbed the tree and dropped one stone on the first giant's chest.

«Why did you hit me?» said the first giant, waking. «I didn't touch you,» said the second, and they went back to sleep. The tailor dropped a stone on the second one.

By the fourth stone they were on their feet shouting, and then they were fighting, and giants who fight each other in a forest do not stop until the forest has been rearranged. When it went quiet the tailor came down and walked back to the castle.

The king had not expected to have to keep his word. So he set another task, and then another, and the tailor did both of them, mostly by letting large animals run into trees.

In the end there was nothing left to ask, and the wedding took place, and the king looked at the floor throughout.

Some weeks later the tailor talked in his sleep, as tailors do: «Boy, get that jacket finished and mend the trousers, or I'll box your ears.» His wife lay and listened, and in the morning she went to her father and told him she had married a tradesman.

They made a plan for that night, involving servants and a rope. But the tailor, who had been listening at the right door for once in his life, lay still until the servants came in, and then said loudly, out of the dark: «Seven at one blow, two giants, a unicorn and a wild boar — and I should be afraid of the men outside this room?» They did not come in. And after that nobody in that castle ever raised the subject again.

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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.

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The Valiant Little Tailor

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