Dat Mäken von Brakel
The Maid of Brakel
Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
Translated by Margaret Hunt*
A girl from Brakel once went to St. Anne’s Chapel at the foot of the Hinnenberg, and as she wanted to have a husband, and thought there was no one else in the chapel, she sang,
“Oh, holy Saint Anne!
Help me soon to a man.
Thou know’st him right well,
By Suttmer gate does he dwell,
His hair it is golden,
Thou know’st him right well.”
The clerk, however, was standing behind the altar and heard that, so he cried in a very gruff voice, “Thou shalt not have him! Thou shalt not have him!”
The maiden thought that the child Mary who stood by her mother Anne had called out that to her, and was angry, and cried, “Fiddle de dee, conceited thing, hold your tongue, and let your mother speak!”
*This tale has been taken from the 1884 translation by Margaret Hunt, of the ‘definitive’ 1857 edition of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen:
Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm
By Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
Translated by Margaret Hunt.
This translation contains all the 200 tales in the final edition, and is faithful to the original German. This work is in the public domain.
