“What,” cried the peasant, quite angry, “since you are determined to know better than I, count it yourselves,” and threw all the money into the water to them. He stood still and wanted to wait until they were done and had brought him his own again, but the frogs maintained their opinion and cried continually, “aik, aik, aik, aik,” and besides that, did not throw the money out again. He still waited a long while until evening came and he was forced to go home. Then he abused the frogs and cried, “You water-splashers, you thick-eads, you google-eyes, you have great mouths and can screech till you hurt one’s ears, but you cannot count seven talers! Do you think I’m going to stand here till you get done?” And with that he went away, but the frogs still cried, “aik, aik, aik, aik,” after him till he went home quite angry.
~Brothers Grimm
In my previous post for Project Grimm (Faithful John), I discussed the potential mistake I made by starting this project. Based on my notes, I had originally planned on discussing The Good Bargain from the perspective of the Peasant being a villain and no one being a good guy. This is pretty easy to run with because the Peasant constantly blames everyone else for his failures, ignorance helps him stumble through countless obstacles, and those around him are punished for his foolishness. At the root of this piece is a dude who is not very bright, believes animals can talk (gives them his food and money), insults a king, gets tricked into giving a two people his reward (which isn’t a reward, but rather 250 lashings, gets the king to laugh, and then gets some real gold. He is a bubbling boob who ends up earning a treasure through sheer stupidity. 1/7 not recommended. [Click “Read More” for more of my rant]
So let’s get into the dirty here. In this story, the peasant can be taken as the good guy because he has a kind heart. While not bright, and even though he causes pain to the soldier and jew (this character isn’t described as anything else in the piece), he never really lies – until the end when he says the jew is trying to steal his coat even though it is the jew’s coat. Until that last moment, the peasant has stuck to exactly what he said, thus he could be considered a good guy. At the end, it is possible he realized he was being tricked and turned the tables on the con artist. Yet, this was a character who had been beaten.
So, when he receives the treasure, feeling no remorse, the peasant is like: “Yeah you guys got the part of the reward I promised” – he had no idea it was going to be a punishment, so when he does get a reward, he basically flips them the bird and enjoys his good luck. Until this point, he has not misrepresented anything. As such, can he be blamed for not giving them a treasure he never promised them (they got the treasure they were promised, but the king is the one who changed it from treasure to punishment). This theory of the peasant being true to his word and hoping others will be is derived from his early monologues. Our faithful idiot believes that the frogs and dogs are asking him for things. Based on those monologues/conversations with animals, he provides the creatures with his hard earned meat and money. I think the good guy moral here is if you help others, even if they try to take advantage of you, you will be fine and everything will work out in the end.
Now, if we look at it from the other side of the fence, the villain’s moral would be: don’t try and take from the ignorant/stupid.
If the goal here is to make people better by not taking advantage of others, 250 lashings would definitely make you avoid taking advantage of others. If the two who wanted the reward had not tried to get a piece of the pie, they never would have been punished. So I guess the real moral is don’t take advantage of the less fortunate for it may back fire on you?
I don’t know, this one was hard to unpack because a dude was talking to animals. But if that was on purpose to show his idiocy and set him up as someone who gets taken advantage of, then the moral is definitely don’t take advantage of others. Except for at the end… when he lies… that throws my whole theory out the window.