Iron John

by Jacob Grimm, Margaret Hunt (Translator)

Something frightening and unexplainable happens in the near forest. The king keeps sending his huntsmen there and they keep on not coming back. Some creature is apparently killing them. Years later a brave young man and his dog decide to see for themselves. They enter the magical forest and shortly after the dog is dragged under the water by a giant arm. On the next day they empty the lake and they find a man with iron-like skin. He was therefore called Iron John. Iron John was so scary and dangerous that they locked him in a cage. Nobody was allowed to open the cage because a death penalty would follow. Many years passed and one disobedient young prince decided to let Iron John out. We bet you cannot guess what followed. So just read "Iron John" to find out. Children and adults alike, immerse yourselves into Grimm's world of folktales and legends! Come, discover the little-known tales and treasured classics in this collection of 210 fairy tales.

Genres: Short Stories

15 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 26, 2020

About the author

German philologist and folklorist Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm in 1822 formulated Grimm's Law, the basis for much of modern comparative linguistics. With his brother Wilhelm Karl Grimm (1786-1859), he collected Germanic folk tales and published them as Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812-1815).

Indo-European stop consonants, represented in Germanic, underwent the regular changes that Grimm's Law describes; this law essentially states that Indo-European p shifted to Germanic f, t shifted to th, and k shifted to h. Indo-European b shifted to Germanic p, d shifted to t, and g shifted to k. Indo-European bh shifted to Germanic b, dh shifted to d, and gh shifted to g.

This jurist and mythologist also authored the monumental German Dictionary and his Deutsche Mythologie .

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[April Helms · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a weird one, rather meandering. A king's hunting men and their dogs go missing in the woods. A travelers comes to town and offers to solve the mystery. He does- and captures a wild man named Iron John. Then you never hear about that traveler. Instead, the story pivots to the king's son and Iron John, who winds up helping the prince as he ventures into the world.

[Nolan]

Really just read it to have context for Bly's exegesis. I think Grimms' motifs are lost on me here.