The Fisherman and His Wife: A Brothers Grimm Tale

This is among the most uncompromising of all the Grimms’ fairy-tales — a small terrible parable of greed told in the salt-cracked Low German of the Pomeranian coast, in which a poor fisherman and his wife are offered, by an enchanted flounder, the chance to ascend the entire ladder of human ambition; and do; and are returned, in the last paragraph, to the place where they began. The Brothers Grimm published it in the very first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812) under the title Vom Fischer und seiner Frau (“Of the Fisherman and his Wife”), at position KHM 19. The tale is type ATU 555 “The Fisherman and His Wife” in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index — a tale-type whose international cousins include the Russian Skazka o rybake i rybke (Pushkin’s 1833 verse retelling), the Hungarian Az aranyhal, and the Estonian Kuldkala; in every case, a fisherman releases an enchanted fish, the fish offers wishes, and a spouse’s increasing demands eventually break the bargain.

The Grimms’ source for this version was the Hamburg romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810), who took it down in his native Pomeranian Low German in 1806 and sent the manuscript to Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano for inclusion in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Arnim passed the manuscript on to the Grimms in 1809. Runge’s text — with its stinging refrain “Mantje, Mantje, Timpe Te, / Buttje, Buttje, in der See, / mine Fru, de Ilsebill, / will nich so as ik wol will” (“Manny manny timpie tee, / flounder, flounder, in the sea, / my wife, the Ilsebill, / wills not what I would will”) — has been preserved in every German edition of the KHM since 1812. The fish in question is the Pleuronectes platessa, the European plaice, a flatfish of the cold coastal waters of the North Sea and the Baltic, whose pale belly and dark brown spotted top side gave the original storytellers, at the very beginning of the tale, an animal that anyone in the Hanseatic ports would recognise — and whose strange flat shape, dark above and pale below, made him a plausible candidate for an enchanted prince.

This is the story.

The Hovel by the Sea and the Speaking Flounder

There was once a fisherman who lived with his wife in a tiny tumble-down hovel — a Pisspott, the original calls it, in the Pomeranian way — close to the sea. The fisherman went out every day with his rod and his line, and he fished, and he fished. One day, sitting on the beach with his line in the green water, watching the line sink and sink into the sea, he felt the rod jerk in his hand and, drawing it up, he found at the end of his hook a great glossy flounder, a flatfish with a black spotted back and a pale white belly, gasping on the sand at his feet. And the flounder, before the fisherman could touch it, opened its mouth and spoke. “Listen, fisherman,” said the flounder, “let me live. I am no real flounder. I am an enchanted prince. What good will it do you to kill me? I should not taste good. Put me back into the water and let me swim.” The fisherman, who was a kind man and not at all the sort to argue with a fish that talked, said, “You need not have used so many words about it. I would have let any flounder swim away that could speak.” And he laid the great flat fish back upon the wet sand, and the flounder shot away into the deep green water, leaving a long trail of blood behind him, and the fisherman stood up and went home to his hovel and to his wife.

The wife, whose name in the story is Ilsebill, asked her husband what he had caught. The fisherman told her about the flounder, and how he had spoken, and how he had been let go. And Ilsebill, who in the long line of fairy-tale wives that come down to us through every European tradition is the precise patron saint of unsatisfied married life, looked at her husband across their cracked supper-bowl and said, “Did you not wish for anything from him first? Look at this hovel we live in — this stinking Pisspott — and we might at least have asked him for a small cottage. Go back to him. Tell him we want a cottage. He will give it to us.” And the fisherman, although he did not see why a flounder should owe them a cottage, did as he was told, because the man who has lived a long time with the woman who is sure of these things eventually goes back to the sea. He stood at the edge of the green water and called out the words she had told him to call out, and the words have been preserved in every edition of the Grimms ever since, in the Pomeranian rhythm in which Runge first recorded them on the Hamburg coast: Mantje, Mantje, Timpe Te, Buttje, Buttje, in der See, mine Fru, de Ilsebill, will nich so as ik wol will.

The Cottage, the Stone Castle, and the King’s Throne

The flounder rose. He listened to the fisherman, who, embarrassed, asked for a cottage. The flounder said, “Go home. She has it already.” And when the fisherman came back from the beach, he found the hovel gone and in its place a small clean cottage with a porch and a bench at the door and a kitchen-garden at the back full of cabbages and beans, and Ilsebill was sitting on the bench in the evening light. “Look,” she said. “Is this not pleasant? Now we shall live well.” And for two weeks they did live well, and Ilsebill kept the kitchen-garden, and the fisherman went out and caught herring as he had always caught herring, and the cottage smelled of woodsmoke and cabbage soup. But at the end of the second week Ilsebill set down her knitting and said, “Husband, the cottage is so small. We can hardly turn around in it. The flounder might have given us a bigger house. Go down and ask him for a stone castle.”

The fisherman did not want to go. The sea, when he reached it, was no longer green. It was grey now, and a swell was building. But he stood on the wet sand and called out the rhyme. The flounder rose, and listened, and said, “Go home. She has it already.” When the fisherman came up from the beach he found, where the cottage had been, a great stone castle with marble pillars in the courtyard and tapestries on every wall and a banquet laid out on a long table for twenty, and Ilsebill in a velvet gown sitting on a carved chair eating partridge with silver knives. “Look,” said Ilsebill. “Is this not better?” And it was, for a week. By the end of that week Ilsebill had decided that what she really wanted was to be king of all the country. The fisherman protested. The fisherman pointed out that one was not in the way of becoming king simply by asking. The fisherman said, also, that he did not like to ask the flounder a third time. But Ilsebill said, very simply, “Go.” And he went.

The sea, this time, was a deep dark blue with a black foam on the waves and a wind blowing in from the open water. The fisherman stood on the wet sand and called out the rhyme, and the flounder rose, and listened, and said, “Go home. She is king already.” When he came back up the path he found the stone castle gone and in its place a vast palace with golden gates and silk banners and an army of guards in plumed helmets, and Ilsebill, in a crown and ermine and crimson, sitting on a throne of marble and gold at the far end of an audience-hall lined with ministers. “Look,” said Ilsebill. “I am king.” The fisherman said it was very fine. He hoped, this time, she might be content. Ilsebill, in the way of the kind of wife who has been raised in the Grimm imagination, was not.

The Emperor and the Pope

The next day Ilsebill said she wished to be Emperor. The fisherman, who by now was begging her, said this was not possible — that there was already an Emperor of the country, and one could not become Emperor simply by asking. Ilsebill said, “Go.” And he went. The sea now was the colour of bruises. The waves had begun to slap against the rocks. The fisherman stood on the wet sand in a fine cold rain and called out the rhyme, and the flounder rose with a sigh that the fisherman could not be sure was the flounder’s or the sea’s, and said, “Go home. She is Emperor already.” And when the fisherman came back up the path he found the palace gone and in its place the imperial palace of all the country, vaster than anything he had imagined, with thirty marble pillars in the great hall and Ilsebill enthroned in the high tin-and-gold crown of the Holy Roman Emperor, with kings and dukes kneeling before her in a long sloping line that ran the whole length of the audience-hall. “Look,” said Ilsebill. “I am Emperor.” The fisherman said it was a great honour. He turned to leave. Ilsebill called him back.

“Husband,” she said, “now I want to be Pope.” The fisherman did not even argue this time. He understood that the thing was bigger than him. He walked down to the sea — which was now black, with a sky over it the colour of slate, and great waves breaking on the rocks below the palace — and he stood in the rain and called out the rhyme. The flounder rose, very dark in the dark water, and said, “Go home. She is Pope already.” And when the fisherman went back up the marble road, he found the imperial palace gone, and in its place the great basilica of all Christendom, with cardinals in red, and bishops with mitres, and bells ringing across the city, and Ilsebill on the high throne in the white robes of the Pope, with the silver triple-crown on her head and the silver cross in her hand, and all of Europe at her feet. “Look,” said Ilsebill. “I am Pope. I cannot rise higher.” The fisherman, who had been outside in the rain and had seen what was happening to the sea, said quietly that he hoped this would do, and went to lie down. He had been walking up and down the beach for too many days. He was very, very tired.

The Wish for the Sun and Moon, and the Hovel Returned

That night Ilsebill could not sleep. She lay in her papal bed in the great basilica and watched the moon rise over the cloister, and watched the sun rise over the cloister, and she said to her husband, who was just coming through the door from his long day, “Husband. I want to be like God. I want to make the sun and moon rise when I tell them to rise.” The fisherman said no. He said it was the one thing he would not ask for. He said the flounder would not give it. Ilsebill said, “Go.” And the fisherman, with the slow obedience of a man who has now been walking up and down a beach for too many days, went down to the sea. The sea was no longer water. It was a black wall to the sky, with a wind howling out of it, and the waves were breaking far inland, and the rain was driving in along the coast in long grey sheets. The fisherman stood on the wet sand and called out the rhyme one last time. The flounder rose. The flounder did not say “Go home. She has it already.” The flounder said only, “Go home. She is sitting in her old hovel again.” And the sea broke in over the basilica behind him.

The fisherman came up the path and found, where the basilica and the palaces and the castle and the cottage had stood, the small tumble-down hovel by the sea — the Pisspott — with the door hanging on one hinge and the smoke coming out of the broken chimney as it had on the first morning. Ilsebill was sitting inside on the broken stool. She did not speak. He did not speak. They sat opposite each other in their hovel, the way they had sat in their hovel before any of it had happened, and the German tradition records, with the small grim economy that is the special property of the Grimms, that they are sitting there to this day.

The Moral

The Grimms, who heard the tale from Runge in the Pomeranian dialect of the North Sea coast, recorded the moral in the closing line that German children have been quoting for two hundred years:

“Da sitzen sie noch heute auf den heutigen Tag.”
“There they are sitting to this very day.”

The Sanskrit Hitopadeśa preserves the same warning in another shape: लोभश्चेद् अगुणेन किं (“if greed be present, what need of any other vice?”). The Tao Te Ching states it most economically of all (chapter 46): 禍莫大於不知足 (“there is no calamity greater than not knowing when one has enough”). Pushkin’s 1833 verse retelling of the same tale, Сказка о рыбаке и рыбке, closes with the old fisherman returning to the same broken hut to find his wife sitting before the same broken trough — the Russian image of the empty razbitое корыто, “broken trough,” has entered the language as the proverb for ambition’s natural end.

Why This Story Has Lasted

The story has lasted because it gets, with terrible economy, at a fact about the human mind that hardly any other folk-tale touches: that the mechanism of dissatisfaction is independent of the conditions that produced it. Ilsebill is unhappy in the hovel. The flounder gives her a cottage; she is unhappy in the cottage. The flounder gives her a stone castle; she is unhappy in the castle. The flounder gives her a kingdom; she is unhappy as queen. Each time the conditions of her life are improved, the gap between what she has and what she wants stays exactly the same width — because the gap is not a function of the conditions; it is a function of her. The fable is not, as it is sometimes summarised, a story about a woman who wants too much. It is a story about a woman who wants more, and would still want more if the universe itself were given to her, and who, exactly because that wanting is bottomless, ends in the only place such a wanting can end, which is back at the broken stool in the broken hovel where the wanting started.

The Grimms knew, and Runge knew before them, that this is a parable that becomes more true the older the listener gets. Children hear it as a story about a foolish wife. Young adults hear it as a story about ambition. Middle-aged readers, if they have lived long enough to have got some of what they wanted in their twenties, recognise it as a story about themselves. The fisherman is the part of every adult life that simply wants, in the end, to lie down. Ilsebill is the part that has always already moved on to the next thing. The flounder is the world, which is, at any given moment, willing to grant a great deal more than we could ever consume — and which is also, at any given moment, gathering the wave that will carry the basilica out to sea. The story is a small clear bell against the sleepless side of the human soul, and it has lasted, in the end, because every adult who has ever lain awake at three in the morning calculating, very precisely, the next house, the next promotion, the next kingdom, knows already where Ilsebill ended up: in the place she had started, in the broken hovel, with the rain coming through the chimney, and her husband across the table not saying anything because there is nothing left to say.