The Wonderful Musician

http://bjtanke.com/grimms/wonder.htm

The Tale:

There was once an excellent musician who one day decided he was lonely and set off into the woods to find a companion. He comes across a wolf, a fox and a hare, all of which admire the wonderful music he plays. Each animal asks the musician to teach them how to play and swear to do exactly what the fiddler says. The fiddler promptly tricks them all into trapping themselves. The wolf puts his foot in a crack in a tree trunk, and the musician wedges a stone so that he can't escape. The fox hands his paws willingly to the fiddler, who ties him up between two hazel branches and leaves him dangling. The hare lets him tie a piece of rope around her neck, and then does as she is bid and jumps around a tree until she is all tangled up and unable to move. The fiddler leaves each and every one of them, bidding them to wait until he returns.

"Unnamed"
Aaron Taft
( I love the darkness in this one)

The fiddler continues on his journey until he 

finds a (human) woodcutter, who also greatly admires his music, and follows the musician in order to hear more music. “The musician behaved very civilly to him and played him no tricks”. However, in the meantime, the wolf managed to free himself. As he follows the musician in order to “run after that rascally musician and tear him to pieces”, he finds the fox and the hare and frees them as well. They catch up to the musician, but the woodcutter sees them and stands in front of the musician, ax raised. The animals understand the warning and run, frightened, back into the woods.

"Then the musician played the woodcutter one of his best tunes for his pains, and went on with his journey.”

Discussion Points:

I think the best way to tackle this particular tale is through a list of questions, so here goes:

1. Why did the musician accept the woodcutter as his companion but not the animals? Is it because the woodcutter was human like himself, and the animals were, well, animals? Or does it have something to do with the fact that the animals all wished to know how to play the music themselves, while the woodcutter was content merely to listen to it?

"The Wonderful Musician"
Danny Huynh
(I think this artist as the same opinion of the musician as I do)

2. Was the musician just in the way he treated the animals? By adding the hare to the list of otherwise dangerous and tricky animals, the tale tells us that the musician wasn't acting out of physical self defense, because he treats the harmless hare the same way he treats the potentially harmful wolf and fox. But if we go by the second possible answer to the first question, perhaps he was trying to defend his trade secrets, which he was scared the animals might try to take from him. Though in this case, couldn't he have just told the animals he wasn't willing to teach them instead of tricking them as he did?

3. Are you satisfied with the ending? I know I’m not. I am disappointed that the musician got to walk away from the tale without some sort of punishment for his deceitfulness. Instead, the animals are frightened away, even though all they wanted to do was learn. I feel like they were treated as the bad guys in this tale, even though I can not see what they did wrong. The musician, who actually seems like a pretty bad guy and not very wonderful at all, is treated like everything he did was right.

4. What about that last line (quoted from my copy of the fairy tale)? Did the musician let the woodcutter stay with him, or did he continue on without him? Did he decide he was better off with no companion at all, did he go off to find another, or did he stick with the one he had found? It's unclear.

"The Wonderful Musician"
http://theseconddarkness.deviantart.com/

5. So, what's the moral? Could it possibly be; 'if you're talented enough, you will have people willing to do anything for you and you can treat them how you like'? Somehow I doubt it. I would hope it's closer to; 'just because someone's really talented, it doesn't make them a nice person', but I don't think that's quite what the tale had in mind either. It's more possibly; 'when you like something, it is better to admire it from afar instead of trying to own it yourself', the first option being what the woodcutter did and the second what the animals did. I would also take from it the lesson of not trusting people too blindly, or taking a one-sided oath, like the animals did. What do you think?