Lesser-Known Fairytales from the Brothers Grimm Include “The Mouse, The Bird & The Sausage”

At Mental Floss, five Brothers Grimm fairytales that have (for fairly obvious reasons) been relegated to the JV team of literary history. Here’s one:

1. THE MOUSE, THE BIRD, AND THE SAUSAGE

A mouse, a bird and a sausage set up house together and for awhile, and things were going well: The bird’s job was to fly into the forest every day and bring back wood; the mouse carried the water, lit the fires, and set the table; the sausage did the cooking, making sure their meals were properly flavored by rolling around in them (of course).

But one day, the bird’s friends in the forest started making fun of him, calling him a poor sap and claiming that he did all the hard work while the others got to stay home and relax. He came home that day and demanded that they try a more equitable system of chores, and they drew lots to determine who did what.

Well, the sausage was tasked with gathering wood, but was gobbled up by a dog when entered the forest. The mouse was tasked with making the meal, but when she slid through the vegetables like the sausage used to, she got stuck and died. And the bird was supposed to gather the water and light the fires, but somehow he managed to set the house on fire, and then, while trying to draw up a bucket of water from the well to put it out, get tangled in the bucket and pulled into the well himself, where he drowned.

There’s another sausage fairytale at that link, about a blood sausage that tries to kill a liver sausage at what sounds like an anthropomorphic swingers’ party gone wrong. If you ever get curious about the 200+ stories in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, there’s of course a Wikipedia listing of every single one.