Most people know the Grimm tales through the gentle versions told in nurseries. The Juniper Tree is one of the ones that did not survive that treatment, and it is one of the darkest tales in the collection.
The Horror
The tale is Grimm number 47 (KHM 47). It appeared in the first edition of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812, in Low German, under the title Von dem Machandelboom, and it is also known in English as The Almond Tree. The Grimms’ own appendix to that edition says the text came from the painter Philipp Otto Runge. The old assumption that they simply wrote down an oral tale from peasants is disputed by modern critics. A somewhat different version had been printed by Johann Gustav Büsching a few months earlier in the same year.
The story runs as follows. A childless woman cuts her finger beneath a tree in winter and wishes for a child as white as snow and as red as blood. She has a son and dies in childbirth, and her husband remarries. The new wife has a daughter, Marlinchen, and kills her stepson with the lid of a chest. She cooks him into a stew and serves it to his father, who eats it. Marlinchen gathers the bones and buries them under the juniper tree. A bird rises from the tree and sings of the murder. Townspeople give it gifts for its song, and it drops a millstone on the stepmother. The boy is restored.
This is a folk tale, not a record of a real crime, and no real person, place or date is attached to it. The scholar Maria Tatar has linked the stepmother’s motive to competition over inheritance.
The Modern Relic
The relic is the text itself. The tale belongs to a recognised international type, catalogued as ATU 720 and formerly titled “My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me”, so versions of it were told well beyond the Grimms’ collection.
J. R. R. Tolkien cited the tale as an example of censorship, because many later versions left out the stew. Critics have discussed its themes of cannibalism, child abuse, rebirth and religious symbolism. It has since been adapted several times, including as a 1985 opera by Philip Glass and Robert Moran, as Bjork’s 1990 Icelandic film The Juniper Tree, and as Ava Reid’s 2022 novel Juniper and Thorn.
