A Tale Dark and Grimm

Gretel leaves the Lebenwald and travels to a village on the outskirts of the Schwarzwald (“Wood of Darkness”). A widow takes Gretel in, and Gretel stays for weeks until she’s just another member of the village. She takes a liking to a young man with blood-red lips whom all the children seem to love. Whenever something in the village breaks, the man wraps a special piece of twine around the broken parts, and when he unwinds it, the break is fixed.

One night, the people play a game at the tavern, and Gretel surprises the young man, making him lose. It’s all in good fun, and the man twirls Gretel through the air, laughing. His smile and glittering eyes make Gretel fall in love. The narrator says any readers who dismiss this as false child’s love “don’t remember what it is like to be a child at all” (90).

Gretel spends as much time around the young man as possible. One day, she tries to pluck an apple, but it’s too high. The man lifts her up to pick the fruit and then throws her into the air. The two laugh until Gretel hits her head on a branch. The man sucks the blood from the cut and wraps his twine around her head, healing the wound and taking the pain away. He invites her to his house in the Schwarzwald, and though the widow warns her not to go, Gretel does. The man leaves a trail of ashes for her to follow, and Gretel drops lentils along the path in case it rains and the ash is wiped away.

The path leads through an increasingly darkening forest to a rotting house in a clearing. Cages hang from the eaves, and birds in the cages call out: “Go home, little girl, go home; to a murderer’s house you’ve come” (98). Despite the warnings, Gretel enters the house, where she finds an old woman who claims to be the young man’s mother. She tells Gretel the young man steals the souls of young girls and imprisons them before chopping up the girls’ bodies. She hides Gretel as the young man drags a girl into the room.

As the woman said, he pulls out the girl’s soul, in the shape of a dove, and imprisons it in a cage before hacking her into pieces that he tosses into a boiling cauldron. He is unable to cut a ruby-encrusted ring off the girl’s finger, and unknowingly throws the finger into Gretel’s lap. Gretel runs back to the village, following the path of lentil plants that have sprouted from the lentils she dropped. Back at the widow’s house, she blames herself for everything that’s befallen her and Hansel since they ran away from their parents.

The three ravens from Chapter 1 arrive and tell Gretel the entire story of her parents and Johannes, leaving Gretel feeling the desire to take all her sadness and “hurl it at those who had caused it in the first place” (108). At a celebration the following night, Gretel tells the villagers about her journey to the young man’s home, framing it as a dream she had. Overcome, the young man reveals himself as a warlock, and the villagers knock him out before cooking him in a vat of poisonous snakes. Gretel retrieves the man’s magical twine. As he dies, the doves at his house are freed from their cages to turn back into girls.

At the manor of the duke who led the hunting party in Chapter 4, hunters cut away the beastly head and hide of their quarry, only to find Hansel’s human body beneath, still alive. A lord and lady take Hansel home, and Hansel vows to find Gretel and make things right as soon as he regains his strength.

The lord who took Hansel in has a gambling problem. One night, he loses game after game of cards against the devil. Desperate to keep his gambling a secret from his wife, the lord asks how to win back his money, to which the devil says he may do so if he wages “whatever stood before the fire in his library that night” (124). The man agrees and loses. When he returns home, he finds Hansel seated in front of the fire, which means Hansel must go to the gates of Hell in three days.

The next day, Johannes comes across Hansel crying in the woods, but doesn’t reveal who he is. Johannes offers to guide Hansel to the gates of hell and explains that the devil won’t be able to exert power over him if Hansel collects three of his golden hairs. On their way to the gates, they come across two villages—one with a dried-up fountain of wine and another with a fruitless tree—as well as a ferryman stuck in his boat, all of which say only the devil knows why they suffer such hardships. Hansel vows to find out and bring them answers if he ever escapes hell. At the gates, Hansel enters hell, and Johannes sits down to wait, wondering “how long eternity was” (132).

Hell is full of sinners being dunked over and over into pits of fire. One is the handsome young man who stole girls’ souls and another is the baker woman who tried to cook Hansel and Gretel. Demons escort Hansel to his own fire pit, and he jumps in before they can dunk him. The pain is the worst he’s ever felt, but he doesn’t scream, realizing that the pain and guilt of what he did to Gretel is worse than this. Unsure why he isn’t screaming, the demons bring him to the devil’s house, which has furniture made of human flesh and hair. Hansel hides in a closet and listens to the devil having dinner with his grandmother. Afterward, devil and grandmother curl up on the rug in the living room and fall asleep, the grandmother stroking the devil’s hair.

Taking the devil’s glasses so he won’t be able to see, Hansel locks the devil’s grandmother in the attic and disguises himself as her. Without his glasses, the devil can’t tell the difference. That night, Hansel strokes the devil’s hair, plucking three hairs and learning the truth of the two villages and ferryman: The devil stopped up the wine fountain with a frog; a mouse is eating the tree’s roots and killing it; and the ferryman only has to give his paddle to someone else to leave his boat. The devil’s grandmother screams from the attic. When the devil goes to see what the noise is, Hansel runs for hell’s gates. Outside, he and Johannes run with the devil right behind them. They take the ferry across the river, telling the ferryman how to free himself. When the ferryman rows back to pick up the devil, he rows slowly until the impatient devil takes the paddle, trapping himself in the boat.

Hansel and Johannes continue toward the villages, but Johannes collapses, too weak to go on. He tells Hansel the story of Hansel’s parents and how he risked his life to save theirs. With his last breaths, Johannes explains a dragon has overtaken one of the citizens in the kingdom of Grimm and that Hansel and Gretel must destroy it. When Hansel asks why them, Johannes replies, “[B]ecause there is a time when a kingdom needs its children.” (155) Then he dies.