[CW: repeated danger of being eaten/swallowed, on-page animal slaughter, and body horror played for slapstick — a character trapped inside meat, sausage, and a smoked pudding, narrowly dodging a butcher’s knife throughout. Darkly comic rather than gruesome, but a lot of “almost died, several different ways” for one short tale.]
Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index type 700: Tom Thumb
Hello friends, and welcome to “Young Man In Fairytale Leaves Home to Travel the World and Be an Asshole: 1/12 Scale Edition!”
Seriously, y’all, we have been here so many times before. It’s pretty much standard operating procedure at this point. But we’re here to talk about all the Grimm stories, right? So let’s get into it.
The story starts into things pretty quick, telling us that a tailor had a thumb-sized son (grown-man’s thumb, I assume?) and this son is named… Thumbling. Yes, Thumbling. It’s so on the nose that I just can’t. Anyway, the tailor’s tiny son, who seems to be mostly fully grown, tells his father that he wants to venture out and see the world, as one does. And what was his father’s response?
“Fine with me, my son,” said the old man, and he took a darning needle and put a lump of sealing wax on it in the light. “Now you’ll also have a dagger to take with you on your way.”
So Thumbling (y’all, I can’t) takes his little “dagger” and sets off on his journey. His first job is with a master tailor, which, weird but also he’s qualified I guess? Unfortunately, the master tailor’s wife isn’t a good cook, at least according to our intrepid hero…
‘Mistress,’ Thumbling said to the master’s wife, ‘if you don’t give us better food, I’ll take some chalk tomorrow and write ‘Too many potatoes, too little meat!’ on the house door, and then I shall leave.’
Thumbling wants more meat and less potatoes (leave it alone) but the tailor’s wife doesn’t appreciate this and begins chasing him around, attempting various forms of violence. Thumbling taunts her before finally taking his leave of the situation.
He then stumbles into a merry band of forest robbers who are planning to rob the king. Teeny-tiny Thumbling is the perfect size to enact such a plan and they talk him into it. I mean, honestly, they don’t really have to do much convincing. Just no hesitation at all.
When they saw the little tailor, they thought he could be of great help to them. So they spoke to Thumbling and said that he was a good and able fellow and that he should come along with them to the treasure chamber, crawl inside, and throw the money outside to them. Well, Thumbling agreed.
As expected, Thumbling easily gets inside the chamber, where he wreaks havoc on the treasury, the guards, and the king. Eventually, he manages to toss all of the coins out the window, rides a coin out the window himself to safety, and gives all of the coins to the robbers, except for one single coin, because he can’t carry anything heavier. It’s precious and adorable and I hate him.
Next he finds himself working at an inn, but, once again, he’s just going out of his way to piss people off. In this case, it’s the maids. He just can’t stop spying on them and then ratting them out. One of them gets so angry that she chases him to a field, mows him up with the hay, he gets fed to a cow, and then stays in the cows stomach until the cow is butchered at which point he finds himself mixed up in meat that’s being turned into sausage and he hangs out in the sausage until he’s finally released when the sausage is sliced open, at which point he runs away.
Immediately after Thumbling starts up with his wandering, he gets snapped up by a fox. The fox only agrees to let him go if he can get his father to give him all their hens.
So Thumbling swore that he’d do this, and the fox carried him to his home and was given all the hens in the chicken yard. Meanwhile, the little tailor brought his father the one coin that he had earned from all his wanderings.
So yea, Thumbling wanders around, causes absolute chaos, almost gets what he deserves, and then his dad sacrifices all of his poultry to save his son, because fathers love their sons.
Ok, so this is one of those where the analysis is both easy and really hard because it feels like there is no greater purpose. We’ve seen this in a number of Grimm stories over the years. One or more young sons ventures out to see the world with very little in the way of equipment or gear, they perform various weird duties, probably commit a number of chaotic shenanigans, and then go home to live their lives. There’s never any real punishment or consequences for their actions and very often, they’re actually rewarded.
Now, according to D.L. Ashliman, this isn’t always the case, at least for the tiny men. Ashliman states that, while “thumb-sized” characters are often found in stories around the world, they aren’t usually as fortunate as the Grimm’s Thumbling and many are often “killed by a spider or the like.” I’m going to guess that this level of boldness and sheer “I’m gonna mess it all up” behavior is only rewarded in western stories, but I can’t say that with any proof so I’ll just leave it out there as speculation.
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