Gory, today. The Brothers Grimm printed it in Low German in 1812 as KHM 47, Von dem Machandelboom, and they did not get it from a peasant: the text reached them from the painter Philipp Otto Runge. It is one of the coldest things they ever put on paper.
Under the juniper tree, in winter, a woman peels an apple and cuts her finger. Blood falls on the snow, and she wishes for a child as white as snow and as red as blood. She gets her wish. When the baby comes, “her joy was so great that she died.” Buried under the juniper, as she asked.
The father grieves, then marries again. The second wife has a daughter, Marleen. The stepson stands between the daughter and the property, and the story says the arithmetic out loud, the way only fairy tales dare. One afternoon she takes him to a chest of apples. “The chest had a very heavy lid and a large iron lock.” He bends to reach in, and crash, down goes the lid, and off goes his head.
What follows is worse than most people remember. She ties the head back on with a handkerchief and props the body in a chair with an apple. She sends Marleen to it; told to box his ear for not answering, the girl does, and the head rolls off. Then, while her daughter weeps, the wife cuts the boy apart and cooks him into a dish the old translations call by several names, a soup, a stew, a pudding. The father eats it, asks for more, and throws the bones under the table.
Marleen wraps the bones in her best silk handkerchief and buries them under the juniper. The branches clap, a mist, a fire, and a bird comes out of it, singing:
“My mother killed her little son;
My father grieved when I was gone;
My sister loved me best of all;
She laid her kerchief over me,
And took my bones that they might lie
Underneath the juniper-tree
Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!”(Margaret Hunt’s translation, 1884)
The bird flies to town and trades the song for gifts, one listener at a time: a gold chain from the goldsmith, red shoes from the shoemaker, a millstone from the miller. It comes home, lays the chain round the father’s neck and the shoes on Marleen’s feet. The millstone it drops on the stepmother from above, and that is the end of her.
Then fire again, and the boy walks out of it alive, and the family sits down to lunch; the tale says they lived happily ever after, and by then it has earned the right to mean it.
Two centuries later the trick still works. The worst truth a house can hold is put in a bird’s mouth, because that is the only place it fits. Birds get the last word. They usually do.
Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, KHM 47 (Low German; first edition 1812; text via Philipp Otto Runge)
English quotations: Margaret Hunt translation (1884)
Tale type ATU 720; the English cousin is “The Rose-Tree”