The Three Languages

The Three Languages (German: Die drei Sprachen; KHM 33 in the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen; ATU 671 “The Three Languages”) is one of the most quietly subversive of all Grimm tales — a short, almost disarming Swiss-Alpine narrative in which a count’s “stupid” son, dismissed by his father as a hopeless dunce, learns three apparently useless languages (the speech of dogs, of birds and of frogs), is sent off to die in the forest, and is at the last raised through these very gifts to the throne of Saint Peter in Rome. The tale was added to the Grimm collection in the second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, published by the Realschulbuchhandlung in Berlin in 1819, where it took its now-canonical place at number 33 in volume one. It was first translated into English by Edgar Taylor in his 1826 German Popular Stories, Vol. II, retranslated more faithfully by Margaret Hunt in her two-volume Grimm’s Household Tales (London: George Bell, 1884), and given its standard modern English voice in Ralph Manheim‘s 1977 Pantheon translation.

Origins and Canonical Attribution

“Die drei Sprachen” did not appear in the foundational 1812 first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen; it was one of the new tales the Grimms added in 1819 from material they had been gathering throughout the intervening decade. The Grimms’ own 1822 Anmerkungen (the third volume of “notes,” reprinted in expanded form in 1856) gives an unusually precise attribution for the source: “Aus dem Oberwallis” — from the Upper Valais in southern Switzerland — communicated to the brothers by Hans Truffer of Visp, a Swiss informant whose oral retelling of the tale in the local Walliserdeutsch dialect was sent to Cassel through the agency of mutual friends. Heinz Rölleke’s standard scholarly edition (Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Vollständige Ausgabe, Reclam 1980) and Hans-Jörg Uther’s authoritative Handbuch zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (de Gruyter, Berlin 2008, pp. 81–83) confirm the Truffer attribution, place the date of communication in the late 1810s, and trace the wider Alpine and Mediterranean parallels through which the Grimms believed the tale had reached Switzerland. The Grimms’ own note explicitly compares the story to a fragment in Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century Italian Lo cunto de li cunti, to a Sicilian variant they had read in Laura Gonzenbach, and to a much older Latin parallel they had encountered in the medieval Gesta Romanorum — pointing already, in 1822, to the international diffusion of the type that Aarne and Thompson would later number 671. The 1819 first printing carried the title-page Kinder- und Hausmärchen, gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm. Zweite vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage, in two octavo volumes with the green-and-cream paper wrappers characteristic of the Berlin edition.

The Tale

An aged count once lived in Switzerland whose only son, the heir to all his lands and to a name that had stood high in the cantons for three hundred years, was — in the father’s own bitter phrase — einfältig, simple, and could learn nothing at all. The count tried tutors at home; he tried priests; he tried the chaplain of the nearest town; and at last, growing desperate, he said: “Hark you, my son, try as I will I can get nothing into your head. You must go away from here. I will place you in the care of a celebrated master, and we shall see what he can do with you.” The youth was sent into a strange town and remained there a whole year with this first master. When the year was up he came home again, and his father, who had been counting the days, met him at the gate and asked: “Now, my son, what have you learnt?” The boy bowed politely, his face shining with quiet pride, and answered, “Father, I have learnt what the dogs say when they bark.” The count crossed himself. “Lord have mercy on us!” he cried. “Is that all you have learnt? I will send you into another town, to another master.”

Three Years, Three Useless Languages

The youth was taken to a second town and stayed a year there as well. When he came back the father again asked: “My son, what have you learnt?” And he answered, “Father, I have learnt what the birds say.” Then the father fell into a rage. “Oh, you lost man,” he cried, “you have spent the precious time and learnt nothing! Are you not ashamed to appear before my eyes? I will send you to a third master, but if you learn nothing useful this time, I will no longer be your father.” So the youth went to the third master and remained another whole year, and when he came home and his father asked once more, “My son, what have you learnt?” he answered, “Dear father, this year I have learnt what the frogs croak.” At that the father fell into the most furious anger he had ever known. He sprang up, called his servants thither, and said: “This man is no longer my son. I drive him out of the house, and I command you to take him into the deep forest and there put him to death.”

The servants led the boy out into the forest, but when they came to the appointed glade their hearts failed them: they could not bring themselves to kill so quiet and gentle a young man. They let him go, and to bring back proof to the count they cut out the eyes and tongue of a young deer they shot among the alder-trees, and carried these home in a little leather pouch as evidence that the count’s command had been obeyed. So the count’s son walked on alone into the forest with nothing but the clothes he stood up in, the language of dogs and birds and frogs in his head, and the cold afternoon light slanting between the pines. Toward evening, when his feet were sore, he came at last to a great fortified castle on a rock above a deep valley, and asked the warden at the gate for one night’s shelter. “You may have shelter,” said the lord of the castle, with a strange look in his eye, “but I warn you that down in the cellar of this house live wild dogs, fierce as hell-hounds, who must be fed at midnight with a Christian man each night, or they will tear the whole castle down. We have lost our peace and our sleep on account of them. If you will go down and lie among them, I will not stand in your way; but no man has come up alive.”

The Castle of the Hell-Hounds

“Let me try,” said the youth, with the bright simplicity that had so enraged his father, “for I have no fear of dogs. Only give me food to take with me.” So at midnight he was let down through an iron trap into the dark stone cellar, with bread and a flask of wine in his hand. The dogs — great gaunt grey beasts with red eyes — rose up in a half-circle around him, but they did not bark, they did not bite. They sat in the stone-cold cellar and they spoke. They told the count’s son, in their growling speech, that they were under an enchantment laid on the castle a hundred years before; that they were the unhappy keepers of a great treasure of red gold that lay buried beneath a flagstone of the cellar floor; and that they could not be released until that gold should be lifted out of the earth and given over into the keeping of an honest man. The youth listened gravely, fed them his bread, gave them his wine, and slept among them as peacefully as a child among his hounds. In the morning he went up to the lord of the castle and said: “I have been told the secret. There is a treasure under the cellar, and the dogs are its captives. Lift it out, and they will leave you in peace.” It was done as he said. The flagstone was lifted, the treasure of red gold was carried up into the daylight, and from that hour the dogs were heard no more in the cellar; their enchantment was broken and their unhappy souls were released. The lord of the castle, in his joy, would have made the youth his heir; but the count’s son thanked him gently, said he wished to see more of the world, and walked on the next morning along the high road to Rome.

The Birds Above the High Road

The road to Rome was long, and the count’s son took it cheerfully, listening as he went to the small hard chatter of the sparrows in the hedgerows, the gossip of the magpies on the dovecote-roofs, the wisdom of the rooks in the sheep-pastures and the prophetic mutter of the blackbirds in the alder-thickets. He walked through villages and over passes, ate when he was hungry and slept when he was tired, and as he came near the gates of the great city of Rome he heard, suddenly, a strange and remarkable conversation in the air above his head. Three white doves were circling in the spring sky, and they were speaking together of the death of the old Pope and of the conclave that was at that moment gathering in the Lateran palace to elect the new one. “Whoever is meant to be Pope,” said the first dove, “two doves shall settle on his shoulders as he stands among the candidates.” “Whoever is meant to be Pope,” said the second, “shall hear the voice of the Holy Spirit in the speech of birds.” “And he is on this very road,” said the third, “this very afternoon.”

The count’s son, who had heard every word, walked on quietly along the dusty pilgrim-road and came into the city by the gate of San Giovanni at the very hour when, by the custom of the time, the body of the cardinals had assembled inside the basilica to seek a sign from heaven for the choice of a successor to Saint Peter. As the candles were being lit and the bells were being rung he stepped through the high bronze door, knelt at the back of the church among the pilgrims and the road-stained poor, and bent his head in the dust to pray. At that very instant the two white doves of his vision came in through the high open window of the apse and settled, one on each of his shoulders, in the sight of every cardinal there assembled. The cardinals fell silent; they crossed themselves; the older among them remembered an old prophecy in the books of the saints; and they raised the count’s son up out of the dust of the floor with their own jewelled hands, set him in the marble chair of Saint Peter, and there, in the speech of the doves and to his own utter astonishment, he was elected Pope.

The Pope of Rome

And he was a good Pope — just and gentle, slow to wrath and quick to mercy, a man who heard the voice of birds in the morning and the chant of dogs in the courtyards and the croaking of the frogs in the basilica fountain at evening, and who took counsel from all of them for the governance of his great church. When at last the news of his elevation reached the old count in his Swiss castle in the high mountains, the father bowed his white head into his hands and wept; for he understood, at the end of his life, that the gifts of God are very different from the gifts of the world, and that the apparently useless wisdom of dogs and birds and frogs had been, all along, the seed of a kingdom of heaven on earth. Some say the count travelled all the way to Rome to ask his son’s blessing, and that the Pope received him kindly at the high altar; some say he died in his own bed before he could reach the city. But all the chroniclers of the Wallis tradition agree that the simple boy who had been driven from his father’s house with the language of dogs and birds and frogs in his head ended his days in honour as a wise and gentle bishop of Rome — and that, in the cellar of a certain castle on a rock above a deep valley in Switzerland, the bones of the hell-hounds lie quiet beneath the lifted flagstone, and the red gold has been honestly spent on the poor of the parish.

Moral

Was die Welt für dumm hält, das macht Gott zu seinem Werkzeug. (“What the world holds for foolish, God makes into His instrument.”) The Grimms gloss the moral of Die drei Sprachen as: the gifts that the world calls useless are precisely the gifts by which God works His quiet revolutions in the affairs of men; and a father who measures his son by the standard of worldly cleverness will, in the end, miss the angel sleeping under his own roof. The boy’s three “useless” languages are not nonsense but a humble obedience to the natural creation; the count’s furious rage is not paternal love but worldly pride; and the throne of Saint Peter is not a reward but the visible sign of a hidden inheritance the boy has carried with him from the very first lesson.

Why It Has Lasted

“The Three Languages” survives so vividly into our own century because it is one of the most concentrated and morally radical of the entire Grimm corpus — a tale in which the despised, the slow, the apparently stupid, are the chosen vessels of divine providence. The story belongs to a family of European narratives, sometimes called the despised hero or dummling cycle, in which the youngest or simplest of three sons triumphs over his sharper brothers; but “Die drei Sprachen” sharpens that pattern almost to the point of paradox by sending its hero not merely to the kingdom of an earthly princess but to the highest spiritual office in Latin Christendom. Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Indiana University Press, 1955–1958) catalogues the central machinery as B215 (Animal languages) and M312.0.4.1 (Prophecy: hero will become Pope — sign by descending dove), motifs whose distribution across central and southern Europe Hans-Jörg Uther maps in detail in The Types of International Folktales (FF Communications no. 284, Helsinki 2004). Joseph Jacobs in his 1894 More English Fairy Tales, Andrew Lang in The Green Fairy Book (1892), and Padraic Colum in his 1923 The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said all chose to retell the tale precisely because of its haunting reversal of worldly hierarchies. Maria Tatar (The Annotated Brothers Grimm, Norton 2002) writes that “The Three Languages” is “one of the few Grimm tales in which a kind of unforced, almost Franciscan tenderness toward the natural creation becomes the engine of the plot.”

The Manuscript Tradition and the 1819 Recension

“Die drei Sprachen” was added to the canon during the eight-year window between the 1812 first edition and the 1819 second edition, a period in which the Grimms supplemented their original Hessian core with a wider net of Westphalian, Lower Saxon, Alsatian and — in this case — Swiss-Alpine material. Heinz Rölleke’s Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm (Cologny-Geneva 1975) demonstrates that the 1810 manuscript known as the Ölenberg Manuscript — the so-called Brentano-manuscript that Wilhelm sent to Clemens Brentano and which is now preserved at the abbey of Notre-Dame d’Ölenberg in Alsace — does not contain the tale; it entered the corpus only with the Truffer letter. Rölleke’s later Brüder Grimm: Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Ausgabe letzter Hand (Reclam 1980) traces the textual changes between the 1819 first printing and the seventh and final edition of 1857 (the Ausgabe letzter Hand revised by Wilhelm in his last decade); the differences in the case of “Die drei Sprachen” are very small — the 1857 text smooths some Walliserdeutsch dialect forms, regularises the count’s three speeches of disappointment into the formal Grimm parallelism that English readers know best, and tightens the closing passage about the doves on the shoulders. The text most readers know in English is Margaret Hunt’s 1884 translation of the 1857 edition.

Translations and English Reception

Edgar Taylor’s German Popular Stories, Vol. II (London: James Robins, 1826, illustrated with George Cruikshank’s tiny etched plates) was the first English translation of the Grimms to include “Die drei Sprachen,” under the simplified title “The Three Languages.” Taylor’s text follows the 1819 German closely but smooths the explicit ecclesiastical reference: in some early English renditions the new pontiff is described only as a “great prelate” rather than as the Pope of Rome — a softening that reflects the cautious Protestant publishing climate of early-nineteenth-century London. Margaret Hunt‘s two-volume Grimm’s Household Tales (London: George Bell, 1884, with John Ruskin’s introduction) restored the explicit references to Saint Peter and the Holy Spirit, and gave the tale its scholarly English text. Andrew Lang did not include “The Three Languages” in his coloured Fairy Books but discussed it at length in his preface to The Yellow Fairy Book (1894) as an example of the “moralising religious strain” in late Grimm material. Wanda Gaág‘s beautifully hand-lettered 1936 retelling for Coward-McCann, Ralph Manheim‘s authoritative 1977 Pantheon translation, and David Luke‘s 1982 Penguin Classics edition each gave the tale a fresh and faithful voice; Maria Tatar‘s 2002 Annotated Brothers Grimm reprints Margaret Hunt’s English text and provides the most useful set of side-notes for a modern reader on the dove-and-Pope motif and its medieval iconography.

Tale-Type and Comparative Folklore

The Aarne-Thompson-Uther catalogue classifies “Die drei Sprachen” as ATU 671 “The Three Languages” — sometimes also numbered ATU 517 “The Boy Who Learnt the Speech of Birds and Beasts” in the older Aarne-Thompson scheme. Hans-Jörg Uther (The Types of International Folktales, FF Communications no. 284, 2004) records around two hundred and forty oral versions of this combined type across Switzerland, southern Germany, the Tyrol, Italy, Sicily, Greece, France and the western Slavic lands. The earliest literary witness in Europe is generally taken to be the brief Latin parallel in the Gesta Romanorum (c. 1300, exemplum 175 in the standard Oesterley edition of 1872), in which a despised son who has learnt the speech of birds rises to a great ecclesiastical office; the closest Italian cousin is Giambattista Basile‘s “Lo polece” (Lo cunto de li cunti, day 1, story 5), in which a king’s son acquires animal language and rises to high estate. Laura Gonzenbach‘s 1870 Sicilianische Märchen (Engelmann, Leipzig) gives the most beautiful southern European parallel, “Von dem Sohne, der die Sprache der Tiere verstand” (no. 32), which the Grimms had read in manuscript before the 1819 second edition. The principal motif-numbers from Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature for the present tale are: B215 (Animal languages), B143.1 (Bird gives prophecy), D1815.2 (Magic knowledge of language of animals), K2110.1 (Calumniated wife: the false token of death), M312.0.4.1 (Prophecy: hero will become Pope), N455 (Overheard conversation of birds), and L161 (Lowly hero marries princess / rises to high office).

Symbolism and Reading

Folklorists from Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment, Knopf 1976) to Maria Tatar (The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Princeton 1987) and Jack Zipes (The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, Routledge 1988, second ed. 2002) have read “Die drei Sprachen” as the Grimms’ clearest narrative defence of natürliche Weisheit, the unschooled wisdom of the natural creation, against the worldly cleverness of the schools. The boy’s three years of “useless” study are in fact a gradual descent into humility: the dog speaks of loyalty, the bird speaks of song, the frog speaks of the marsh and the rain — and together they form a kind of Franciscan curriculum in the love of all created things. Bettelheim notes that the dove on the boy’s shoulder at the moment of his elevation is not a magical reward but the natural visible sign of a wisdom he has been carrying inside him from the start; the dove is itself the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit was already speaking through the smallest sparrow on the count’s gatepost in the very first scene of the story. Marina Warner (From the Beast to the Blonde, Chatto & Windus 1994) reads the tale as a quietly subversive Grimm-period sermon on patriarchal authority: the count, who would have his son a sharp and cunning courtier, is rebuked at the end by the very God in whose name he had wielded his anger. The animal-language motif (Tiersprache) reaches back to the Greek tradition of Melampus and Tiresias, into the Hebrew tradition of the wisdom of King Solomon, and through the medieval Latin Physiologus and the German Franciscan predigtmärchen into the upper-Alpine peasant imagination from which Hans Truffer drew it for the Grimms in the late 1810s. Marie-Louise von Franz (Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1972) reads the dog, the bird and the frog as a perfect Jungian triad of the instinctual, the spiritual and the chthonic: three layers of the unconscious that, together, make up the integrated psyche, and that, taken together, constitute the boy’s true initiation into adulthood. It is no accident that the throne of Saint Peter, in this Swiss-Alpine telling, is not a reward of conquest but a recognition of integration — the visible sign of an inner kingdom that has been quietly assembling itself, dog by bird by frog, across the three years of the count’s furious despair.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the original German title of "The Three Languages" and what KHM number does it carry?

The original German title is "Die drei Sprachen," literally "The Three Languages." It is KHM 33 in the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmaerchen and was added to the canon in the 1819 second edition published by the Realschulbuchhandlung in Berlin. It does not appear in the foundational 1812 first edition. Edgar Taylor was the first to translate it into English in his 1826 German Popular Stories Vol. II, and Margaret Hunt restored its scholarly text in her 1884 Grimm's Household Tales.

Who told the Grimms "Die drei Sprachen" and where does the tale come from geographically?

The Grimms' own 1822 Anmerkungen volume identifies the source as "Aus dem Oberwallis" (from the Upper Valais in southern Switzerland) and names Hans Truffer of Visp as the principal informant. Heinz Roelleke and Hans-Joerg Uther confirm the Truffer attribution and place the date of communication in the late 1810s. "Die drei Sprachen" is one of only a handful of explicitly Swiss-Alpine tales in the entire Grimm corpus and reflects a Walliserdeutsch oral tradition rather than the Hessian-Westphalian core that supplied most of the 1812 first edition.

What is the ATU classification of "The Three Languages"?

"Die drei Sprachen" is classified as ATU 671 "The Three Languages" in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther catalogue, sometimes also numbered ATU 517 "The Boy Who Learnt the Speech of Birds and Beasts" in the older Aarne-Thompson scheme. Hans-Joerg Uther's 2004 The Types of International Folktales (FF Communications no. 284) records around 240 oral versions across Switzerland, southern Germany, the Tyrol, Italy, Sicily, Greece, France and the western Slavic lands. The earliest literary witness is the brief Latin parallel in the Gesta Romanorum (c. 1300, exemplum 175 in the Oesterley edition of 1872).

What is the moral of "The Three Languages"?

The Grimms gloss the moral as: the gifts that the world calls useless are precisely the gifts by which God works His quiet revolutions in the affairs of men, and a father who measures his son by the standard of worldly cleverness will, in the end, miss the angel sleeping under his own roof. The boy's three useless languages (the speech of dogs, of birds and of frogs) are not nonsense but a humble obedience to the natural creation, and the throne of Saint Peter is not a reward but the visible sign of a hidden inheritance the boy has carried with him from the very first lesson. The original German blockquote moral is: "Was die Welt fuer dumm haelt, das macht Gott zu seinem Werkzeug" (What the world holds for foolish, God makes into His instrument).

Why do the doves settle on the boy's shoulders to elect him Pope, and what is the iconographic source of that image?

The descending dove on the shoulder of the chosen Pope is one of the oldest visual signs in Latin Christendom for divine election: the dove represents the Holy Spirit (cf. Luke 3:22 and the iconography of Pentecost), and the medieval tradition of papal election by visible heavenly sign reaches back at least as far as the legend of Pope Gregory the Great, on whose shoulder a dove was said to whisper the words he wrote. The Gesta Romanorum exemplum 175 already uses the dove sign; Maria Tatar (The Annotated Brothers Grimm, Norton 2002) traces the Grimm version of the motif through the medieval German Franciscan Predigtmaerchen. In "Die drei Sprachen" the dove is doubly significant: it is both the visible sign of divine election and a literal speaker in the boy's three languages, since he can hear the words of the doves in the air above the road.