Although Wilhelm Hauff claimed his stories were written for adult-child audiences, this dark tale is clearly oriented towards mature readers. A mysterious stranger pays a doctor to remove the head of a dead woman so that it can be interred in her family tomb in a distant land. He complies, but doesn’t check to make sure she is dead before he cuts. You can guess the rest. The doctor loses a hand as punishment, but is richly rewarded by the stranger for the rest of his life. Themes include deception, greed, misjudgement/negligence, choices and consequences, “justice”, guilt, atonement.
The moral of the story is the danger of placing blind trust in someone without checking on the facts yourself. The story also raises an interesting observation about earthly justice. Sometimes fate appears unfair, seemingly rewarding wrongdoers despite their misdeeds.
Spoiler: In the stand-alone story, we learn little about who the mysterious stranger was and why he really wanted the woman’s head. Hauff’s fairytales were told as the inner content of frame stories… this one a tale told by a Greek merchant in a caravan crossing a desert. Coincidentally, the mysterious stranger is a fellow traveler. His identity and motive (revenge) are revealed in the outer story as the journey ends. This segment is included at the end of our story.