The Lambkin and the Little Fish

Once there were a little brother and a little sister who loved each other with all their hearts. Their own mother had died, and they had a stepmother who was not kind to them. She secretly did everything she could to hurt them.

One day, the children were playing with other children in a meadow in front of the house. There was a pond in the meadow that reached to one side of the house. The children ran around it, chased each other, and played a counting-out game.

“Eneke Beneke, let me live, / And I to thee my bird will give. / The little bird, it straw shall seek, / The straw I’ll give to the cow to eat. / The pretty cow shall give me milk, / The milk I’ll to the baker take. / The baker he shall bake a cake, / The cake I’ll give unto the cat. / The cat shall 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, and the one to whom the word “snow” fell had to run away, and all the others ran after him and caught him. As they were running about so merrily, the stepmother watched them from the window and grew angry.

Since she understood the arts of witchcraft, she bewitched them both and turned the little brother into a fish and the little sister into a lamb. Then the fish swam back and forth in the pond, feeling very sad, and the lambkin walked up and down the meadow, feeling miserable, unable to eat a single blade of grass.

A long time passed, and then strangers came to visit the castle. The wicked stepmother thought, “This is a good opportunity,” and called the cook. She said to him, “Go and fetch the lamb from the meadow and kill it.

We have nothing else for the visitors.” So the cook went, got the lamb, and took it into the kitchen. He tied its feet, and the lamb bore it all 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 sink, looking up at him.

This was the brother, because 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 is my poor heart! / Even now the cook he whets his knife / To take away my tender life.”

The little fish answered,

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

When the cook heard that the lambkin could speak and said such sad words to the fish below, he was terrified and thought this could be no ordinary lamb, but must be bewitched by the wicked woman in the house. So he said, “Don’t worry, I will not kill you.” He took another sheep and prepared it for the guests, and brought the lambkin to a good peasant woman. He told her everything he had seen and heard.

The peasant was actually the woman who had been the little sister’s foster mother, and she immediately suspected who the lamb was. She went with it to a wise woman. Then the wise woman pronounced a blessing over the lambkin and the little fish, and through that blessing they regained their human forms. Afterward, she took them both into a little hut in a great forest, where they lived alone, but were contented and happy.