The Clever Daughters: Relativity Of Wit

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Clever Daughters: Relativity of Wit
The folktale “The Clever Farmer’s Daughter” (KHM 94) is about a clever daughter and how she outwits the king in many different ways. In “The Clever Farmer’s Daughter”, the daughter/queen’s common sense is only perceived as cleverness and amplified by the other dimwitted characters of the story.
The father, a poor farmer without a farm, holds the common value in literature of honor before reason, which has been the demise of many characters that have come before and after him. The farmer asks the king for a piece of land and the king gives it to him for nothing. When the farmer finds a mortar of pure gold on this new land he wants to give it to the king out of gratitude for receiving his land. A mortar without …show more content…

A farmer with horses has a foal that runs away. Another farmer has two oxen, which the foal lies with after running away. The farmer with the oxen claims his oxen gave birth to the foal. The king settles the dispute by claiming that the foal should remain wherever it lies, thus ignoring the basic fact that two oxen cannot give birth to a foal. Given that the farmer’s daughter is “from a farmer’s family and [is] compassionate” (Grimm 320), the lifestyle of farming is common knowledge to her and she is helpful to the farmer with the horses. However, knowing that two oxen cannot give birth to a foal is also common sense and not something that only a farmer would know. The farmer with the oxen, however, showed a bit of cunning because he takes advantage of the foal’s appearance to get the foal for free. This situation is one of common sense, not of …show more content…

This can be seen as cleverness, for the daughter knew that if she took the husband as hers she would still have everything that was his and thus lose nothing, but there is no evidence in the text to support this greed. In fact, the text can argue against this given that the queen’s deeds are selfless. For example, she solves the “riddle” to help her father with becoming queen only as a bonus and she helps the farmer who lost his foal for nothing in return. When she takes her husband as her parting gift, she treats him with affection and it is the king, not her, who takes them back to the

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