The Boy Who Did Not Fear

A father had two sons. When he asked the youngest what he would like to learn to

support himself he said he would like to learn to shudder. A sexton told the father that he could

teach the boy. He sent the boy at midnight to ring the church bell. The man dressed as a ghost to

scare him. The boy, unafraid, pushes him down the stairs, breaking his leg. His horrified father

throws him out of the house, and the boy sets out to learn how to shudder. One man advises him

to stay the night beneath a gallows, where seven hanged men were still hanging. When the

hanging bodies shake in the wind, he thinks they must be cold, so he cuts them down. He sets the

gallows on fire and burns the bodies.

An innkeeper tells him he knows how he can learn to shudder. There is a haunted castle

nearby. If he stays in it three nights, he will learn how to shudder and win the king’s daughter

and all the rich treasure of the castle, but many men have tried and never come out again. The

boy goes to the king, who tells him he may bring three things that are not living into the castle.

He asks for fire, a turning lathe, and a cutting board with a knife.

The first night, he hears a complaint about how cold they are from a corner and tells them

they are fools not to warm themselves. Two black cats bound out. They propose a card game,

and he tricks them into being trapped in the cutting board. Black cats and black dogs emerge

everywhere until he kills them with the knife. He sleeps by the fire until morning.

The second night, the bottom half of a man falls down the chimney. He shouts that

another half is needed. It comes down and reunites. Other men follow and bring human skulls

and dead men’s legs to play with him. The boy uses the lathe to make the skulls better balls and

plays with them until midnight when they vanish.

 On the third night, six men bring in a coffin. The boy tries to warm the body. When he

succeeds, it rouses and threatens to strangle him, so the boy closes the coffin on him again. An

old man comes after and brings him to the basement, and shows him that he can knock an anvil

into the ground. The boy splits an anvil, trapping the old man’s beard in it, and beats him with an

iron rod. For mercy, the old man shows him all the treasure of the castle. The next morning, the

king tells him that he can marry his daughter, and the boy agrees, even though he has not learned

how to shudder. His complaints about this annoy his wife. She sends for a bucketful of stream

water and throws it over him while he is sleeping. He wakes up, shuddering, and exclaims that

now he knows what it is to shudder but not to fear.

This was the hardest fairy tale to read because of its complex plot and storyline. There are

many things in the house that try to scare the boy but he ends up overcoming them. Fear in this

story is conveyed through physical response. Our main character is known as the fool for not

being able to find anything that he is good at. He pushes a local sexton down the church bell

tower, burns several dead hangmen to get them warm, and fights against various evil spirits

during his three-day stay in the haunted castle. In the end, his survival against the evil spirits

wins the princess and her riches. Despite his fortune, he is disappointed because he still does not

know how to shudder. His wife, fed up with his complaining, throws a bucket of cold water on

him in his sleep, and at last, he learns the secret.

In the beginning, the boy is an outcast because he does not fear. He is compared to his

smart and hard-working older brother. His lack of common sense gets him kicked out of his

house and left wandering through the land. I think it’s an overall commentary on how a lack of

fear is a great asset to greatness. He does not overcome fear, he simply does not understand it.

The cleverness that the boy displayed in the haunted castle is actually a lack of knowing what to
be afraid of. His bravery and quick thinking are covering up his ignorance. He is beyond

comprehending what makes things scary and when he encounters things that are normally

horrifying, he is not phased. When some evil ghost cats try to talk him into a card game, he

readily agrees until the sight of their nails puts him off. The sexton tries to scare him by standing

at a distance dressed like a ghost in the dark. The boy called out to him three times before

pushing him down the stairs and shrugs off the encounter by going to bed. The boy did not seem

to care about figuring out who it was or seeing if he was ok from the floor. This fairy tale is a

dark comedy that has a complex character that gets lucky through his general ignorance.