Deutsche Sagen


Deutsche Sagen is a publication by the Brothers Grimm, appearing in two volumes in 1816 and 1818. The collection includes 579 short summaries of German folk tales and legends.
Deutsche Sagen followed the 1812 publication of Kinder- und Hausmärchen. It never gained the wide popular appeal and influence of the latter, although it did influence the scholarly study of folk narrative.
The first volume contains 362 short tales, provided in short summary with a source. The source is in some cases "oral", with the region where it was collected, in other cases with a reference to the tale's previous publication The tales of the first volume tend to blend common concerns of the poor and working classes with magical realism including the attainment of wealth and status, and includes references to Frau Holle, the Wild Hunt, ghostly apparitions, and magic, the devil, dwarves, giants, kobolds, nixes, etc. Less than a dozen folk tales contain the German word for witch or witchcraft but there are many mentions of the devil and one tale also mentions an old woman that was a magician or sorceress.
The second volume focusses on historical legends, including numerous translations from Latin sources pertaining to Germanic antiquity, beginning with Tacitus, spanning both medieval legend
and early modern folkloristic records, blurring the lines between oral folk tradition and literary tradition.
Numbers 505-514 group a number of Swiss entries, including Radbot von Habsburg, Rudolf von Strättlingen, Idda von Toggenburg, Auswanderung der Schweizer, Der Bund im Rütli and Wilhelm Tell.
A number of the stories record medieval antisemitic beliefs held by Germanic-speaking peoples. For example, The Jews' Stone, The Girl Who Was Killed by Jews, and Pfefferkorn the Jew at Halle, among others.
The original collection is available free online and has also been translated into English by Donald Ward.