{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 108/1908-12-26_02/p010","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"The next morning the king went out and followed the little golden bird until they came to a horse that was very weak and ill and that said: “A witch has shot an arrow into my body!” The king pulled out the arrow and at that moment the weak animal was changed into a wonderfully swift horse. The king mounted it, the golden bird flew on in front, and the rosemary branch waved ahead of the king on his magic horse. At last they reached a castle made of glass. Long before they reached it, they heard a buzzing and a buzzing and a buzzing, and when the king entered with the branch of rosemary and the little golden bird, he saw another king standing there, fashioned entirely of glass, and in the stomach of the glass king was an enormous bluebottle fly; it was this bluebottle fly that made the buzzing, and it was trying to work its way out. The king asked the glass king what it all meant. “Well,” said the latter, “just look towards the sofa: there sits my queen in a pink silk gown, and the secret of it all you will soon discover. The web that has been spun around the queen has just been torn away by a thornbird and will soon be quite torn off her. Then there will come a wicked spider to spin a new web around the queen, and while I am bewitched here in a glass body, my wife will be enmeshed by the spider's web. We have already been imprisoned like this for several hundred years and must remain here until we are released.” Presently the wicked spider appeared and spun her web around the queen, but while the spider was at work the magic horse stepped up and wanted to kill the spider. He was just about to put his hoof on her, when the buzzing bluebottle fly, which had worked its way out, came to the help of the spider, but the magic horse killed them both. Then instantly the glass king was turned into a quite human king. The thornbird was changed into a charming waiting-maid, the queen was freed from the cobweb, and the glass king related how it had all come about:","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"The Poetry and Meaning of Fairy Tales","date":"1908-12-26","location":null,"word_count":380,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/108/1908-12-26_02/p010","alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"no_original_to_compare","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"identified_edition":"eLib","translator":"Hanna van Maltitz Regarding Higher Worlds","publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA108/English/eLib/"},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/108/1908-12-26_02/p010"}]}