In previous posts, I have written about Rumpelstiltskin and The Peasant and the Devil, both stories from this unit. After reading posts from other people I class however, I have been thinking about another story from the unit, called The Little Lamb and the Little Fish, and I felt compelled to share my thoughts on the story.
The Little Lamb and the Little Fish
In this story, a brother and sister are very close, and love playing in their fields together, especially near the pond. Their mother is dead, and they have a stepmother who is unkind and bitter. She is said to know the ways of witchcraft, and one day turns the girl into a lamb, and the boy into a fish. Both were sad about their transformations, but lived their lives that way for some time.
One day, the stepmother was hosting special guests, and commanded her cook to kill the little lamb as their meal. The cook had captured the girl in her lamb form, and was preparing to kill her while the fish looked on from the gutter. Suddenly, the girl cried out to her brother, the fish. The cook, suspecting that the lamb was a person bewitch by the evil stepmother, cooked another meal instead, and delivered the lamb and fish to the wet nurse. The nurse blessed the animals, returning them to their human form. She then took them to live in a hut in the woods, freed from their stepmother forever.
After reading a classmates' project about a wicked stepmother, I have many frustrations and questions about this story. Where is the children's father?? Why didn't anyone notice that two children had gone missing? When the children were returned to their human form, why wasn't their stepmother brought to justice??
If I were to rewrite this story, I certainly couldn't ignore these plot holes, and would work to better develop a storyline that accounts for my questions.
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