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"The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was" or "The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It is tale number 4 in the collection. It was also included by Andrew Lang in ''The Blue Fairy Book'' (1889). The Grimms' first, 1812 edition contained a much shorter version, "Good Bowling and Card Playing". It is classified as its own Aarne-Thompson index type 326 of a male protagonist's unsuccessful attempts to learn fear, which eventually leads to his awareness of mortality. This tale type did not appear in any early literary collection.〔Stith Thompson, ''The Folktale'', p. 105, University of California Press, Berkeley Los Angeles London, 1977.〕 ==Synopsis== A father had two sons. The younger, when asked by his father what he would like to learn to support himself, said he would like to learn to shudder. A sexton told the father that he could teach the boy. After teaching him to ring the church bell, he sent him one midnight to ring it and came after him, dressed as a ghost. The boy demanded an explanation. When the sexton did not answer, the boy, unafraid, pushed him down the stairs, breaking his leg. His horrified father turned him out of house, so the boy set out to learn how to shudder. He complained whenever he could, "If only I could shudder!" One man advised him to stay the night beneath the gallows, where seven hanged men were still hanging. He did so, and set a fire for the night. When the hanged bodies shook in the wind, he thought they must be cold. He cut them down and sat them close to his fire, but they did not stir even when their clothing caught on fire. The boy, annoyed at their carelessness, hung them back up in the gallows. After the incident at the gallows, he began traveling with a waggoner. When one night they arrived at an inn, the inn-keeper told him that if he wanted to know how to shudder, he should visit the haunted castle nearby. If he could manage to stay there for three nights in a row, he could learn how to shudder, as well as win the king's daughter and all of the rich treasures of the castle. Many men had tried, but none had succeeded. The boy accepted the challenge and went to the king. The king agreed, and told him that he may bring with him three non-living things into the castle. The boy asked for a fire, a lathe, and a cutting board with a knife. The first night, as the boy sat in his room, two voices from the corner of the room moaned into the night, complaining about the cold. The boy, unafraid, claimed that the owners of the voices were stupid not to warm themselves with the fire. Suddenly, two black cats jumped out of the corner and, seeing the calm boy, proposed a card game. The boy tricked the cats and trapped them with the cutting board and knife. Black cats and dogs emerged from every patch of darkness in the room, and the boy fought and killed each of them with his knife. Then, from the darkness, a bed appeared. He lay down on it, preparing for sleep, but it began walking all over the castle. Still unafraid, the boy urged it to go faster. The bed turned upside down on him, but the boy, unfazed, just tossed the bed aside and slept next to the fire until morning. As the boy settled in for his second night in the castle, half of a man fell down the chimney. The boy, again unafraid, shouted up the chimney that the other half was needed. The other half, hearing the boy, fell from the chimney and reunited with the rest. More men followed with human skulls and dead men's legs with which to play nine-pins. The amused boy shaped the skulls into better balls with his lathe and joined the men until midnight, when they vanished into thin air. On his third and final night in the castle, the boy heard a strange noise. Six men entered his room, carrying a coffin. The boy, unafraid but distraught, believed the body to be his own dead cousin. As he tried to warm the body, it came back to life, and, confusedly, threatened to strangle him. The boy, angry at his ingratitude, closed the coffin on top of the man again. An old man hearing the noise came to see the boy. He visited with him, bragging that he could knock an anvil straight to the ground. The old man brought him to the basement and, while showing the boy his trick, the boy split the anvil and trapped the old man's beard in it, and then proceeded to beat the man with an iron rod. The man, desperate for mercy, showed the boy all of the treasures in the castle. The following morning, the king told the boy that he could win his lovely daughter. The boy agreed, though upset that he had still not learned how to shudder. After their wedding, the boy's continuing complaints annoyed his wife to no end. Reaching her wits' end, she sent for a bucketful of stream water, complete with gudgeons. She tossed the freezing water onto her husband while he was asleep. As he awoke, shuddering, he exclaimed that while he had finally learned to shudder, he still did not know what true fear was. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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