Seven in One Blow!

Among many things, 2012 marks the bicentenary of the first publication of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, better known in English as Grimms' Fairy Tales. An initial reaction may be "are they that young?", as a good number of the tales have become so firmly rooted in collective Western culture that you'd think they'd have been published even earlier. In fact, if you were to ask anybody in Western society to list a couple of fairy tales, I'd be surprised if there weren't any recorded by Grimm in at least some variant.

One of two terrible giants awakens, unsure as to who has been throwing stones at him.

The subject of this post, The Brave Little Tailor, is one of Grimms' better known tales, despite having experienced decreasing popularity in the English-speaking world (as with many great fairy tales, alas!). It probably helped in some way that it inspired a 1938 Mickey Mouse cartoon of the same name, which easily ranks amongst the best of the Disney shorts. The tale concerns a young tailor who kills seven pesky flies and goes crying: "Seven in one blow!" Being mistaken for a great killer of giants, the tailor must use his wits to stop himself falling victim to a string of giants and other dangerous beings.