Week 10- #GRIMMread2019

http://shonnaslayton.com/grimm-read-2019-challenge/

    This week's stories are "Thumbling", "The Wedding of Mrs. Fox", "The Elves and the Shoemaker", and "The Robber Bridegroom". The one that really piques my interest is "The Robber Bridegroom". It's a haunting and gruesome tale, and what I find most intriguing about it is the theme of women's intuition. Everytime the girl follows her intuition, it leads her to safety, but when she ignores her intuition, even reluctantly, she is drawn into danger. By all appearances, the girl's fiance seems to be a decent man, but from the beginning, she senses something is wrong with him. He sends chills down her spine. She avoids him as much as possible, but she is pressured by him and her family to ignore her intuition, and she reluctantly goes to visit her fiance's house in the forest. This should send off some red flags even with the parents because what kind of man would have his fiance follow a trail of ashes to his house in the forest? She follows her intuition to distrust the ashes and she brings along peas and lentils to drop on the trail. When she arrives, the bird in the cage confirms her intuition by warning her that her fiance and his buddies are murderers. Instead of running away, she ventures further into the house. Perhaps, curiosity is stronger than her intuition at this point, and she feels the need to discover for herself what kind of man her fiance is. It's also probable that her motive is simply to get proof because that is the only way she can see to get out of her engagement. There is an old woman in the basement who tells her that her fiance and his friends are not only murderers, but cannibals as well. She hatches an escape plan and hides the girl behind a hogshead. The girl gets her proof when the murdering thieves come home with another girl. They give her three glasses of wine: white, red, and yellow, which cause her heart to burst, strangely enough, and one of them chops off her finger because he can't pull the ring off of it. It flies down to the basement, and into the girl's bosom. The old woman convinces the men to wait until the morning to look for it because hey, the ring isn't going anywhere. They escape, and the girl finds her way home by the peas which have grown over the path (the ashes have been blown away). She tells her dad about everything, but they still hold the ceremony. At the ceremony, she tells her story in front of all the guests, but she keeps insisting that it was only a strange dream she had. (I particularly like this scene. I can just picture how squirmy her fiance is getting, and I loved seeing the girl finally having the the upper hand). Then she pulls out the finger (Yep. She kept that finger in her bosom the entire time), and shows it to everyone. He and his buddies are then captured, and executed.