How Six Made Their Way in the World

"How Six Made Their Way in the World" (German: Sechse kommen durch die ganze Welt, KHM 71) is a fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm, who collected it from the storyteller Dorothea Viehmann.^[1]

Plot

The servant who is able to shoot with extreme precision. East-German stamp from 1977.

The servant who wears his hat on one ear to prevent him from turning everything freezing cold. East-German stamp from 1977

The super strong servant carries all the king's wealth off.

A soldier is released from duty, receiving only three coins as a fee. He vows that the king will one day hand over all his treasures. While travel, the soldiers meets people who agree to serve him: a strong man who pulled six trees from the ground with his bare hands, a keen-eyed hunter who can aim at a fly on a twig a mile away, a man who can blow air hard enough to makes seven windmills turn, a man who runs so fast that he removed one leg to slow him down, and a man who wears his hat over one ear. He explains that whenever he puts his hat straight extremely harsh winter weather is created.

The soldier and his servants go to town where the king has organized a running competition. The contestant who manages to get a specific crock several miles away in the distance and bring it back before the deadline would marry the king's daughter. The extremely fast runner puts on his second leg, runs away, retrieves the crock, but decides to take a short nap, using a horse's skull as a pillow to prevent him from dozing too long, but nevertheless falls fast asleep. The soldier, concerned about the time elapsed, asks the hunter to look. The hunter spots the runner sleeping and shoots the skull from under his head to wake him. The runner dashes off to the finish line, just before the deadline.

The king and princess are displeased with this outcome and hold a second contest, in which the king attempts to boil the soldier and his servants to death by heating the iron floors of a prison cell. The servant with the hat on one ear straightens his hat, making the room freezing cold. The king, baffled that the soldier and the servants survived, tells the soldier that he may either marry his daughter or take as much gold as one man can carry. The soldier brings his first servant, the strong one, to carry off all the king's wealth in a huge bag, and they leave. The king angrily sends soldiers on horseback after them, but the man with the powerful breath power blows all the soldiers away. One sergeant-major is kept alive and sent back to tell the king what happened. Upon hearing the events the monarch decides to leave the soldier and his servants alone to live rich and happy for the rest of their lives.

Backgrounds

The story is very similar to other European folk tales and fairy tales about a man with very talented servants, such as The Six Servants, Long, Broad and Sharpsight, The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, How the Hermit Helped to Win the King's Daughter, The Clever Little Tailor and one of the stories in Baron Munchhausen.

References

1. Zipes, Jack (2014), Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms' Folk and Fairy Tales, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 136–7