The Juniper Tree (fairy tale)

"The Juniper Tree" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. In some editions the story is called The Almond Tree. The text in the Grimm collection is in Low German.

It was believed until the early 1970s that the Brothers Grimm re-adapted various oral recountings and fables heard from local peasants and townspeople in order to write their well-known fairy tales. However, various critics including Vanessa Joosen argue that this assumption is false, based on an overwhelming amount of disputing evidence. Literary critic Walter Scherf, argued that the Grimm brothers were inspired by the painter Philipp Otto Runge's original adaptation of The Juniper Tree, originally written as The Almond Tree.

The story contains themes of child abuse, murder, cannibalism and significant connotations of religion and is one of the Brothers Grimm's darker and more mature fairy tales.

The Juniper Tree is tale number 47 and Aarne–Thompson type 720: "my mother slew me, my father ate me". Another such tale is the English The Rose-Tree, although it reverses the sexes from The Juniper Tree; The Juniper Tree follows the more common pattern of having the dead child be the boy.

The story begins with a wealthy and pious man with his beautiful wife who pray to God everyday to grant them a child. One winter, while peeling an apple with a knife under the juniper tree in their courtyard, the wife cuts herself and drops of blood fall onto the snow. This leads her to wish for a child as white as snow and as red as blood. Seven months later, the wife becomes sick from eating the juniper berries and asks her husband to bury her beneath the juniper tree if she dies. A month later, she gives birth to a baby boy and dies of happiness. The husband buries his wife beneath the juniper tree as a promise and remarries a woman who has a daughter of her own named Marlinchen (Marjory is some versions) from a previous marriage.

The wife cherishes Marlinchen but cruelly despises and abuses the boy since she wishes that her daughter would inherit her stepfather's wealth instead of her stepson. One afternoon, Marlinchen asks for an apple from a chest and her mother gracefully offers one to her. The stepson also asks for an apple after returning from school. Reaching down the chest to grab an apple, the stepmother slams the lid of the chest onto his neck, decapitating him. The stepmother proceeds to bandage his head to the rest of his body with a handkerchief and props his body onto a chair. Marlinchen notices how eerily silent and pale her stepbrother is when he "refuses" to give her another apple and under the instructions of her stepmother, she boxes his head in response, causing his head to fall off. Marlinchen cries throughout the day as the stepmother dismembers her stepson's body and cooks him into a stew for dinner. The stepmother tries to deceive her husband that his son "went to his uncle's house for a vacation" and feeds him the stew that night. Marlinchen gathers the bones from the dinner and buries it beneath the juniper tree with a handkerchief.

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