Der Hase und der Igel

The Hare and the Hedgehog

Free to watch. Each part below is the same story to read, with the tools to learn from it.

The storyteller says this tale sounds like a lie, but it must be true, his grandfather always said. On a sunny Sunday morning in autumn, while the buckwheat blooms and people go to church, the hedgehog stands at his door singing and decides to look at his turnips while his wife washes and dresses the children. By the sloe bush he meets the hare, a proud gentleman who does not return his greeting and mocks his crooked legs. The offended hedgehog bets he can beat the hare in a race; the stake is a gold coin and a bottle of brandy. First he goes home for breakfast and tells his wife to come with him; she thinks he has lost his mind, but she must follow. On the long field he places her at the bottom of one furrow and tells her to call 'I'm already here!' when the hare arrives. The race starts at the top; the hare runs off like a storm, while the hedgehog takes three steps and crouches in his furrow. At the bottom the wife calls out, and the hare, who cannot tell her from her husband, runs back; at the top the hedgehog calls the same. The hare runs seventy-three more times, and on the seventy-fourth he falls dead in the middle of the field. The hedgehog takes the gold coin and the brandy, calls his wife out of the furrow, and they go home happily. Since then no hare has raced a hedgehog on the Buxtehude heath. The lesson: no one, however grand, should mock a humble man, even a hedgehog; and whoever marries should take a wife of his own kind, who looks just like him.

Retold from Kinder- und Haus-Märchen, Band 2, 7. Auflage (Ausgabe letzter Hand, 1857), KHM 187 by Brüder Grimm (public domain).