Thumbling

8-10 min read
16 pages

Thumbling, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. He is no bigger than a thumb, and he never once lets that be the end of the matter.

A poor farmer and his wife had no children, and one evening the wife said she would be glad of a child even if he were no bigger than her thumb.

A year later she had a son, and he was exactly that: strong enough, quick enough, with a bright pair of eyes, and no bigger than a thumb. They called him Thumbling, and he did not grow another inch as long as he lived.

He was useful about the place at once. When his father went to the wood, Thumbling sat in the horse's ear and told him where to turn, and the horse minded him better than it had ever minded anyone.

Two men on the road watched a cart go by with nobody driving it and a small voice giving orders, and they followed it home and offered the farmer money for his son.

«Sell me,» said Thumbling into his father's ear. «I'll be back by tonight.» So his father took the coins, and Thumbling rode away on the brim of one man's hat.

Towards evening he asked to be put down. On the ground he ran straight into a mouse hole and out of sight, and the two men poked at the hole with sticks until it was dark and then went home poorer than they had set out.

He slept that night in an empty snail shell. He was woken by two thieves outside, planning to rob the priest's treasury and complaining that they could not get in.

«Take me,» said Thumbling from the shell. «I'll get through the bars and hand things out.» They laughed, and then they thought about the bars, and then they took him.

He got in easily. But instead of handing things out quietly, he called at the top of his voice, «Do you want all of it, or just some?» — and the housekeeper woke, and the thieves went over the wall, and Thumbling hid in the hay.

In the morning the housekeeper carried the hay out to the cow, and Thumbling with it, and the cow ate him.

It was dark inside the cow and the hay kept coming down, and Thumbling shouted from where he was: «No more hay! No more hay!»

The housekeeper heard a voice in the cowshed with nobody in it, and ran for the priest, and the priest decided the cow was possessed and had her killed, and the stomach was thrown out on the dunghill with Thumbling still inside it.

He had just begun to work himself loose when a wolf came by and swallowed the whole stomach in one piece.

Now Thumbling had had time to think, and he had a better idea. «Wolf,» he said, «I know a larder with sausage and bacon and bread, and I can tell you the way in.» And he described his own father's house down to the loose board on the pantry window.

The wolf went in that night and ate until he could not get back out through the gap he had come in by. Then Thumbling began to shout, inside the wolf, in the pantry, in the middle of the night, at the very top of his voice.

His father came with an axe and his mother came with a scythe, and Thumbling called out «I'm in here — mind where you strike!» and his father struck once, carefully, and it was over. They got him out, and he was filthy and thin and perfectly well. «I have been all round the country,» he said, «and now I should like something to eat.»

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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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Thumbling

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