Clever Elsie

A man had a daughter called Clever Elsie. When she grew up he said they should marry her off. “Yes,” said the mother, “if only someone would come who would have her.” At last a man named Hans wooed her from far away, but he insisted she must be really smart. “She has plenty of good sense,” said the father. “She can see the wind coming up the street and hear the flies coughing,” said the mother. “Well,” said Hans, “if she is not really smart, I will not have her.”

At dinner the mother sent Elsie to the cellar for beer. Elsie took the pitcher and tapped its lid as she went so time would not drag. Below, she set a chair under the beer barrel so she could sit while it ran, and looked up. Above her, a pickaxe had been left stuck in the ceiling by the masons who built the cellar. She began to weep aloud: if she married Hans, and they had a child, and the child grew and was sent one day to draw beer, the pickaxe might fall and kill that child. She sat crying over this imagined doom as if it had already happened.

When she stayed long, the maid went down to see what was wrong, heard the tale of the child and the pickaxe, and sat down to weep with her. Then the serving-boy went, then the mother, then the father—each hearing the same future sorrow, each sitting down to cry until the cellar was full of sobs. At last Hans went down and found them all weeping in a row. When Elsie explained her fear, he said, “Come, more understanding than that is not needed for my household,” and married her soon after.

After they had lived together a while, Hans said, “Wife, I will go out to work and earn money; you go into the field and cut the corn so we can have bread through the year.” “Yes, dear Hans, I will do that.” When Hans had gone, she cooked herself some broth to take along and carried it out to the field. Standing among the ripe corn she said to herself, “What shall I do first? Shall I cut, or shall I eat? Eat first!” So she drank the broth until she was quite full and comfortable, then thought she would begin to cut—but her eyes grew heavy, sleep took her, and she lay down among the sheaves.

Hans came home from work, and Elsie did not come with the corn. He went looking across the field and found her asleep among the sheaves, the broth-pot empty beside her. He hurried home, fetched a fowler’s net hung with little bells, and draped it around her carefully while she slept. Then he ran home ahead of her, shut the house door, and sat by the window to watch.

At last Elsie woke, and when she stood up the bells jingled. That frightened her; she wondered whether she was really Clever Elsie. “Am I it, or am I not?” She did not know and went frightened to the door of her house, but it was shut. She knocked at the window: “Hans, is Elsie within?” “Yes,” answered Hans, “she is within.” Then she was terrified: “Ah, heavens! Then it is not I,” and went to another door. When people heard the jingling they would not open, and she could get in nowhere. So she ran out of the village in her net of bells, and from that hour no one in those parts has seen her since.

About this story

“Clever Elsie” is number 34 in Margaret Hunt’s translation of the Grimms (“Die kluge Else”). The text here follows Project Gutenberg’s Grimms’ Fairy Tales (#2591), whose preparer bases it on the English versions of Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes, and in this tale the wording is close to Hunt’s.

The “clever” in the title is ironic: Elsie spends her cleverness worrying about things that have not happened. The ending, where she no longer knows who she is and wanders away, is kept as it is; the source states no separate moral, but Hans’s deception and the village’s closed doors leave Elsie isolated.

Read the original: Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg #2591)

Best for older readers with an adult — includes fear of a child’s death, a husband’s humiliating deception, confusion about identity and abandonment.

Reading the story closely

The cellar scene begins with an actual hazard—the pickaxe—then imagines a long chain of future events. Everyone joins the fear without removing its immediate cause. The later scene is different: Elsie’s distress is intensified by Hans’s deliberate false answer and the refusal of others to let her in.

Divide the cellar episode into what exists now and what is imagined later. Suggest an action that addresses the present hazard. Then rewrite Hans’s answer truthfully and supportively. Treating both episodes as jokes about worrying too much hides the difference between unhelpful speculation and someone actively making another person feel unsafe.

Questions to ask

• Why did everyone in the family start crying about the pickaxe instead of simply moving it?
• Hans calls Elsie clever. Do you think she was? Why or why not?
• Have you ever worried about something that never happened? What helped you stop worrying?

Related stories

• Frederick and Catherine — another Grimm wife whose well-meant mistakes pile up one after another
• Clever Hans — a Grimm hero who follows advice so literally that everything goes wrong
• Hans in Luck — a Grimm simpleton who sees every bad bargain as a piece of good luck