In this German folktale (also known as The Magic Porridge Pot), a kind old woman gives a magic pot to a poor girl looking for something to eat in a forest. When someone says special words, the pot cooks sweet porridge. The only problem for the girl, her mother and the village they live in is that you need to say special words to make the pot stop cooking. This is a popular teaching story for 3-5 year-olds, made more so because the poem that inspired it was also the source for a famous Disney film segment.
Our source for the story was Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm, translated by British writer Margaret Hunt. The book, which was first published in 1884, contains all 200 Grimm folktales plus 10 legends. This is tale No. 103.
Original Text / PDF (245 words)
General Comments
An earlier source was almost certainly The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a 1797 poem by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This in turn inspired a short piece of orchestral music by French composer Paul Dukas, which has since become very famous thanks to a segment of the same name in the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia.
One of the interesting things about folktales is that their history can often be traced back over hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. In the introduction to the Fantasia segment, the orchestra conductor says that the story upon which the music is based goes back almost 2,000 years. The oldest known variation of the of story is said to be The Egyptian Miracle Worker, found in Philopseudes (Lover of Lies) written by Lucian around AD 150. This appears to be the source of the Goethe poem and could well be the source of many other ‘Sweet Porridge’ themed folktales.
If you are interested, you can watch and listen to Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice below. This is the original version. It was the third and most famous segment of the 1940 Fantasia movie, and the only segment from the original film to also feature in the sequel, Fantasia 2000. Watch and enjoy!