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The Elves and the Shoemaker

The Elves and the Shoemaker, or conversely The Shoemaker and the Elves, (German Der Schuhmacher und die Heinzelmännchen) is an often copied and remade story about a poor shoemaker who receives help from Heinzelmännchen (more correctly brownies, but translated as elves by the first translator). Image File history File links Wikisource-logo. ... The original Wikisource logo. ... Shoemaking is a traditional career/craft, mostly superseded by industrial manufacture of footwear. ... Heinzelmännchen The Heinzelmännchen is a race of fictive creatures appearing in Grimms tale Der Schuhmacher und die Heinzelmännchen. ... A signature Cox Brownie A brownie, brounie/Urisk (Lowland Scots) or ùruisg/brùnaidh (Scottish Gaelic) is a legendary kind of elf popular in folklore around Scotland and England (especially the north). ... A small forest elf (älva) rescuing an egg, from Solägget (1932), by Elsa Beskow An elf is a mythical creature of Germanic mythology/paganism which still survives in northern European folklore. ...

It was one story retold by the Brothers Grimm and included in their collection of folk tales. Wilhelm (left) and Jacob Grimm (right) from an 1855 painting by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann The Brothers Grimm (Brüder Grimm, in their own words, not Gebrüder - for there were five surviving brothers, among them Ludwig Emil Grimm, the painter) were Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hessian professors who were best... Folklore is the ethnographic concept of the tales, legends, or superstitions current among a particular ethnic population, a part of the oral history of a particular culture. ...

The theme is a well-known one throughout European folklore. There are many warning stories about what should happen if the recipient of faerie help should offer clothes to his or her benefactor. Piskies and faeries alike consider clothing to be a form of bondage, and see any kind offers or new clothes as a way to enslave the faerie.