The Turnip

Two brothers had both served as soldiers. One grew wealthy; the other stayed poor. Hoping for a better life, the poor one hung up his red coat, took to gardening, dug the soil carefully, and planted turnips.

Among the crop one plant outgrew the rest. It swelled without stopping until people might have called it the prince of turnips—never matched before or since. In the end it filled a whole cart; two oxen strained to pull it. The gardener puzzled over blessing or burden. Selling it would pay no more than an ordinary root; the small ones tasted better anyway. At last he decided to haul it to court as a gift of respect.

He hitched the oxen and presented the monster vegetable to the king. “I have seen oddities,” said the king, “but never this. Was it rare seed or sheer luck? You must be fortune’s favourite.”

“Not I,” said the gardener. “I am only a soldier who could not earn enough, so I turned to the soil. My brother is rich—your majesty and the whole country know him—yet poverty makes the rest of the world forget me.”

Pity moved the king. “You need not stay poor,” he said; “I will raise you above your brother.” Gold, fields, and herds followed until the gardener’s wealth left the rich brother’s far behind.

News of a turnip’s reward stung the wealthy sibling with envy. He meant to play the game more cleverly. He stacked gold and splendid horses as a present, certain the return gift would dwarf whatever a vegetable had bought.

The king accepted the offering kindly and remarked that he could think of no rarer repayment than the giant turnip itself. Home went the rich brother with the cart and the root, fury boiling. Spite turned to a darker plan: he would remove his brother for good.

He hired ruffians, posted them in ambush, then invited the gardener to share a hidden treasure. Trusting and unsuspecting, the gardener walked into the trap. The hired men seized him and prepared to hang him from a tree.

Hoofbeats startled them. In haste they stuffed him into a sack, hauled him up by a rope, and fled. Inside the sack he worked until he could poke his head through a hole.

A cheerful student rode past, singing. From the branches came a greeting.

“Who calls?” asked the rider, seeing no one.

“Look up,” said the gardener. “I sit in the sack of wisdom. In a short while I have learned marvels; school learning is empty beside this seat. Soon I shall know all a mind can hold—the stars’ motions, the winds’ laws, the count of sands, cures for the sick, the powers of herbs and stones. Sit here once and you would feel what knowledge can do.”

Amazed, the student begged to climb in, if only briefly. The gardener pretended reluctance. “Wait an hour while I finish a few secrets,” he said, “then you may have a turn—for a kind reward.” The wait felt endless; the student pleaded to rise at once. Yielding at last, the gardener told him to lower the sack by the cord. Down it came; free again, the gardener watched the eager scholar try to scramble in feet first. “Not that way,” he said—and pushed him in headfirst, knotted the sack, and swung him high. “Comfortable? Feel wisdom arriving? Stay until you are wiser than before.”

He rode off on the student’s horse and left the seeker of knowledge dangling until someone else should cut him down.

Where this story comes from

“The Turnip” comes from the Brothers Grimm and is German, not Indian. Margaret Hunt’s 1884 translation lists it as number 146, Die Rübe; the text followed here is the Gutenberg English taken from Taylor and Edwardes.

The plot joins two episodes of mistaken value: a king values a giant vegetable above expensive gifts, while a student mistakes captivity for a shortcut to knowledge. The same gardener moves from receiving generosity to exploiting another person’s trust.

The attempted hanging fails, but the gardener’s escape leaves an innocent student trapped in the same sack. The story does not show the student’s rescue.

Read the original: Grimms’ Fairy Tales, tr. Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes (Project Gutenberg #2591, The Turnip)

Best for older readers with an adult — includes attempted hanging and a student left bound and suspended from a tree.

Reading the story closely

The turnip is worth little as food but much as a singular gift. Gold and horses fail to guarantee a greater reward because the king does not follow the rich brother’s expected exchange rate. The sack repeats that mismatch: the student assigns immense value to an object that is really a danger.

Follow the turnip, gifts, sack and horse, writing who benefits at each transfer. Does being the first victim make the gardener’s later treatment of the student fair? The last person tricked is not the murderous brother, so the ending complicates a simple story of deserved reversal.

Talk about it

• Why did the poor brother give his giant turnip to the king?
• The rich brother tried to buy the king’s favour with gold and horses. Why did his plan go so wrong?
• How did the gardener talk his way out of the sack? Was it fair to leave the student hanging there?

Related stories

• The Little Peasant — a poor Grimm man who tricks greedy neighbours with a barrel
• The Fisherman and His Wife — a Grimm wife whose greed for more and more ends badly
• Hans in Luck — a Grimm traveller who keeps swapping what he has for something else