The author of Folk-Lore and Legends: German is unknown, as are the other seven books in the series. Published by W.W. Gibbings in 1892, Folk-Lore and Legends: German features some of the finest German folk tales and stories for children. This was the first book in the series, and editor Charles John Tibbits said the tales from German folklore were “invested with a charming simplicity of thought which cannot but excite admiration.” The other stories he claimed had a wild, weird nature. All of the stories had a moral use, conveying the “sure punishment of vice and the reward of virtue,” and this is a characteristic indicative of most, if not, all of the German folk tales and fairy tales, including the work of the Brothers Grimm, prominent authors of German folklore.
Peter Klaus, a goatherd of Sittendorf, who tended herds on the Kyffhauser mountain, used to let them rest of an evening in a spot surrounded by an old wall, where he always counted them to see if they were all right. For some days he noticed that one of his finest goats, as they came…
About the middle of the sixteenth century, when Zündorf was no larger than it is at present, there lived at the end of the village, hard by the church, one of that useful class of women termed midwives. She was an honest, industrious creature, and what with ushering the new-born into life, and then assisting…
In the portal of the Church of the Apostles, near the new market in Cologne, hung a picture, the portraits of a certain Frau Richmodis von Aducht and her two children, of whom the following singular story is related. The picture was covered with a curtain which she worked with her own hands. Her husband,…
It once happened that was walking through a forest, when he heard a voice calling to him by name. He looked around, and at length discovered that it proceeded from a fir-tree, in the trunk of which there was a spirit enclosed by a small stopper, sealed with three crosses. The spirit begged of Paracelsus…
There was once a poor man who had twelve children, and he was obliged to labour day and night that he might earn food for them. When at length, as it so happened, a thirteenth came into the world, the poor man did not know how to help himself, so he ran out into the…