Grimm's Household Tales

There were once a little brother and a little sister who loved each other with all their hearts. Their own mother was dead, however, and they had a stepmother who was not kind to them and secretly did everything she could to hurt them. It so happened that the two were playing with other children in a meadow in front of the house, and there was a pond in the meadow that came up to one side of the house. The children ran around it, caught each other, and played a counting-out game.

“Eneke Beneke, let me live,
And I will give you my bird.
The little bird will seek some straw,
The straw I’ll give to the cow to eat.
The pretty cow will give me milk,
The milk I’ll take to the baker.
The baker will bake a cake,
The cake I’ll give to the cat.
The cat will catch some mice for that,
The mice I’ll hang up in the smoke,
And then you’ll see the snow.”

They stood in a circle while they played this, and the one on whom the word “snow” fell had to run away, and all the others ran after him and caught him. As they were running around so merrily, the stepmother watched them from the window and grew angry. And since she understood the arts of witchcraft, she bewitched them both and changed the little brother into a fish and the little sister into a lamb. Then the fish swam here and there about the pond and was very sad, and the lambkin walked up and down the meadow and was miserable and could not eat or touch a single blade of grass. A long time passed this way, and then strangers came as visitors to the castle. The wicked stepmother thought, “This is a good opportunity,” and she called the cook and said to him, “Go and fetch the lamb from the meadow and kill it; we have nothing else for the visitors.” Then the cook went and got the lamb, took it into the kitchen, and tied its feet, and the lamb bore all this patiently. When he had drawn out his knife and was sharpening it on the doorstep to kill the lamb, he noticed a little fish swimming back and forth in the water in front of the kitchen drain, looking up at him. This was the brother, for when the fish saw the cook take the lamb away, it followed them and swam along the pond to the house. Then the lamb called down to it:

“Ah, brother, in the pond so deep,
How sad my poor heart is!
Even now the cook is sharpening his knife
To take away my tender life.”

The little fish answered:

“Ah, little sister, up on high,
How sad my poor heart is
While I lie in this pond.”

When the cook heard that the lambkin could speak and was saying such sad words to the fish down below, he was terrified and thought that this could be no ordinary lamb but must be bewitched by the wicked woman in the house. Then he said, “Rest easy; I will not kill you,” and he took another sheep and prepared it for the guests, and he brought the lambkin to a good peasant woman, to whom he told all that he had seen and heard.

The peasant woman, however, was the very woman who had been the little sister’s foster mother, and she suspected at once who the lamb was and went with it to a wise woman. Then the wise woman pronounced a blessing over the lambkin and the little fish, by means of which they regained their human forms, and after this she took them both into a little hut in a great forest, where they lived alone but were contented and happy.