I was reading my daughter a book of fairy tales today. It had a fairy tale called The Musicians of Bremen that I had never heard before. I was quite excited to get to read a new (to me) fairy tale. This meant that while I was reading it to my daughter and asking her questions about the characters/events I didn’t know how the story was going to turn out. I talked with her about the animals making the snap judgement that the people in the house were robbers without any proof. Then when the animals went inside and started to eat the food in the house we talked about how going into someone’s house and eating their food wouldn’t be an ok thing to do. I was seeing that as a similarity to Goldilocks and was expecting that the animals would learn a lesson about needing to be invited into someone’s home. At that point, I was predicting that the ending would be that the men in the house were actually the owners and that the animals had wrongly scared them away and eaten their food. So I was surprised that the ending was simply the animals decide to live happily in the house. Guess I should have read it first before asking guided questions along the way because my daughter was just confused as to why the animals got to take over the house. Maybe the version in our book was just oversimplified and missing some key points. Anyone more familiar with this fairy tale: What is supposed to be the overall take-away of The Musicians of Bremen?
by SweetTeaMama4Life
3 Comments
So this is a classic Grimms fairytale, so famous that there’s a statue in Bremen to the animals. Your mistake might’ve been the assumption that the old Grimm fairytales are written to have simple moral lessons. While the Disney versions certainly get rewritten that way, there’s a lot of strangeness and darkness in the old fairytales.
The main thing, would you figured out, is the people in the house are in fact robbers. So the animal successfully drive the robbers away and then live happily ever after, having run away from a life of abuse. There’s a lot of different versions of the story, including the animals finally arriving in Bremen and being congratulated for driving off the robbers, the animals returning to their master with all of the robbers’ goods and living happily ever after with him etc.
You can always talk to your daughter about the fact that every once in a while, if you think someone might be robbing a house, they might actually be robbing the house? I don’t know where else to go with that. Maybe enjoying the story with her without drawing a moral lesson from every single thing? It’s really nice that you’re reading with her!
If nothing else, talking about the fact that,
after you finish reading something, you can go back and rethink your assumptions,
isn’t the worst introduction to reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Musicians_of_Bremen
I’m only familiar with the Muppet version from the 1970’s… which is awesome, btw https://archive.org/details/tales-from-muppetland-the-muppet-musicians-of-bremen-1972-laserdisc-rip