The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was by The Brothers Grimm

Number of pages: 27
Audiobook length: 0:19:23
EBook series:
Collection: Sinkronigo learner
Age Group: Youth literature
Read aloud type: Word-by-word
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eBook description:

"The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was" or "The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. The Grimms' first edition contained a much shorter version, "Good Bowling and Card Playing". A father has two boys. The elder one is hard-working and the younger one is not. A sexton offers to teach the boy the creeps, so he takes the boy and gives him the task of ringing the church bell. The sexton dresses in white to scare the boy while he's ringing the bell, but things don't go as planned and the boy tosses him down the stairs instead. Horrified, the sexton's wife complains about how the boy broke her husband's leg, so the boy's father kicks him out of their village. The boy walks along muttering about how he wants to get the creeps so he can see what all the fuss is about. There's a haunted castle nearby with a ton of treasures, but people keep dying when they try to spend three nights there. Whoever succeeds will wed the king's daughter, who's the most beautiful maiden in the land. The boy accepts the challenge and asks for a fire, a lathe, and a carpenter's bench to take in with him. Freaky things show up—demonic cats, a bed that runs around with him on it, dismembered but animated corpses, a malevolent old man—but the boy either beats them up or ignores them altogether. He's accomplished his feat. He gets the riches and the maiden. When he's still complaining about not knowing what the creeps are, she pours a bucket of cold water full of minnows on him so he can finally get the creeps. The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859), were born in the German state of Hesse. They were universally known for the collection of over two hundred folk tales they made from oral sources and published in two volumes of 'Nursery and Household Tales' in 1812 and 1814. Although their intention was to preserve such material as part of German cultural and literary history, and their collection was first published with scholarly notes and no illustration, the tales soon came into the possession of young readers. This was in part due to Edgar Taylor, who made the first English translation of part of the tales in 1823. (Summary from Wikipedia and Shmoop, adapted by Sinkronigo)