The Sorcerer's Apprentice | |
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![]() Illustration from around 1882 by F. Barth | |
Folk tale | |
Name | The Sorcerer's Apprentice |
Also known as | "Der Zauberlehrling" |
Aarne–Thompson grouping | ATU 325 (The Sorcerer's Apprentice; The Magician and his Pupil) and ATU 325* (The Apprentice and the Ghosts) |
Region | Germany |
Published in | "Der Zauberlehrling" (1797), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (German: "Der Zauberlehrling") is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe written in 1797. The poem is a ballad in 14 stanzas.
The poem begins as an old sorcerer departs his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform. Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for him, using magic in which he is not fully trained. The floor is soon awash with water, and the apprentice realizes that he cannot stop the broom because he does not know the magic required to do so.
The apprentice splits the broom in two with an axe, but each piece becomes a whole broom that takes up a pail and continues fetching water, now at twice the speed. At this increased pace, the entire room quickly begins to flood. When all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns and quickly breaks the spell. The poem concludes with the old sorcerer's statement that only a master should invoke powerful spirits.
Goethe's "Der Zauberlehrling" is well known in the German-speaking world. The lines in which the apprentice implores the returning sorcerer to help him with the mess he created have turned into a cliché, especially the line "Die Geister, die ich rief" ("The spirits that I summoned"), a simplified version of one of Goethe's lines "Die ich rief, die Geister, / Werd' ich nun nicht los" - "The spirits that I summoned / I now cannot rid myself of again", which is often used to describe someone who summons help or allies that the individual cannot control, especially in politics.[ citation needed ]
Some versions of the tale differ from Goethe's, and in some versions the sorcerer is angry at the apprentice and in some even expels the apprentice for causing the mess. In other versions, the sorcerer is a bit amused at the apprentice and he simply chides his apprentice about the need to be able to properly control such magic once summoned.[ citation needed ] The sorcerer's anger with the apprentice, which appears in both the Greek Philopseudes and the Dukas score (and its film adaptation Fantasia ), does not appear in Goethe's "Der Zauberlehrling".
Similar themes (such as the power of magic or technology turning against the insufficiently wise person invoking it) are found in many traditions and works of art. Comparative mythologist Patrice Lajoye argues for a parallel between the Brythonic legend of Taliesin and a Russian fairy tale, Le savoir magique, collected by Alexander Afanasyev [1] with both stories being classified as ATU 325. [2] As referenced by Joseph Jacobs in his English Fairy Tales, [3] Joseph Tunison (1849–1916) analysed several apocryphal medieval tales of Roman poet Virgil, including one where Virgil summons and banishes an evil entity. [4] Scholarship acknowledges the popularity of the tale type in Yiddish folklore. [5] [ irrelevant citation ]
Lover of Lies (Ancient Greek : Φιλοψευδής, romanized: Philopseudḗs, lit. 'Lover of lies') is a short frame story by Lucian, written c. AD 150. The narrator, Tychiades, is visiting the house of a sick and elderly friend, Eucrates, where he has an argument about the reality of the supernatural. Eucrates and several other visitors tell various tales, intended to convince him that supernatural phenomena are real. Each story in turn is either rebutted or ridiculed by Tychiades. [6]
Eucrates recounts a tale extremely similar to Goethe's "Zauberlehrling", which had supposedly happened to him in his youth. It is, indeed, the oldest known variation of this tale type. [7] There are several differences:
In 1897, Paul Dukas wrote a symphonic tone poem based on the story from Goethe's poem. This piece was popularized by its use as one of eight animated shorts based on Western classical music in the 1940 Walt Disney animated film Fantasia . [8] In the piece, which retains the title "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", Mickey Mouse plays the apprentice, and the story follows Goethe's original closely, except that the sorcerer (Yen Sid, which is Disney spelled backwards [9] ) is stern and angry with his apprentice after he saves him. Fantasia popularized Goethe's story to a worldwide audience. The segment proved so popular that it was repeated, in its original form, in the sequel Fantasia 2000 . Four of the animated brooms have a brief cameo appearance in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit , working at cleaning a film studio while a human supervisor plays a saxophone version of Dukas' composition.
17th-century French author Eustace le Noble wrote a literary variant of this type of tale with L'apprenti magicien. [10]
Other literary adaptations of the tale include several fiction and nonfiction books, such as the novel The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1910) by Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Christopher Bulis's novel The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1995) based on the TV series Doctor Who . Nonfiction books with this title include The Sorcerer's Apprentice: A Journey Through Africa (1948) by Elspeth Huxley, and the travel book Sorcerer's Apprentice (1998) by Tahir Shah.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels alluded to Goethe's poem in The Communist Manifesto (1848), comparing modern bourgeois society to "the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." [11]
This section needs additional citations for verification .(April 2020) |
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is a 1962 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents featuring Brandon deWilde as mentally-troubled youth Hugo, coveting the magic wand of a kindly magician.
The poem's story is alluded to in several episodes of the fairy-tale drama Once Upon a Time , especially in "The Apprentice" (2014). A variation of the Dukas piece also plays in certain scenes. The apprentice himself is a recurring character, while the sorcerer is shown to be Merlin.
"Top Secret Apprentice", a segment of the Tiny Toon Adventures episode broadcast in 1991, is a modern version of the story, with Buster Bunny messing around with Bugs Bunny's cartoon scenery machine and getting into trouble.
The 2010 film The Sorcerer's Apprentice features a scene based on the Fantasia conception of Goethe's poem. The Fantasia variant also appears in the video game series, Kingdom Hearts , with the sorcerer Yen Sid serving as an adviser to the heroes, teaching Mickey, Sora, and Riku the Keyblade skills needed to guard the universe from his former friend Xehanort's plan. A world based on the Fantasia version also appears throughout the series, serving as Yen Sid's home.
The Magic: The Gathering playing card Sorcerer's Broom from Throne of Eldraine references the story and the replicating nature of the broom. [12]
A broom is a cleaning tool consisting of usually stiff fibers attached to, and roughly parallel to, a cylindrical handle, the broomstick. It is thus a variety of brush with a long handle. It is commonly used in combination with a dustpan.
Fantasia is a 1940 American animated musical anthology film produced by Walt Disney Productions, with story direction by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer and production supervision by Walt Disney and Ben Sharpsteen. It consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Music critic and composer Deems Taylor acts as the film's Master of Ceremonies who introduces each segment in live action.
Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, having abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions. His best-known work is the orchestral piece The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the fame of which has eclipsed that of his other surviving works, largely due to its usage in the 1940 Disney film Fantasia. Among these are the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, his Symphony in C and Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, the Variations, Interlude and Finale on a Theme by Rameau, and a ballet, La Péri.
Lucian of Samosata was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer who is best known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with which he frequently ridiculed superstition, religious practices, and belief in the paranormal. Although his native language was probably Syriac, all of his extant works are written entirely in ancient Greek.
Fantasia 2000 is a 1999 American animated musical anthology film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Produced by Roy E. Disney and Donald W. Ernst, it is the sequel to Disney's 1940 animated feature film Fantasia. Like its predecessor, Fantasia 2000 consists of animated segments set to pieces of classical music. Segments are introduced by celebrities including Steve Martin, Itzhak Perlman, Quincy Jones, Bette Midler, James Earl Jones, Penn & Teller, James Levine, and Angela Lansbury in live action scenes directed by Don Hahn.
Hanns Heinz Ewers was a German actor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled on himself. The best known of these is Alraune (1911).
Sorcerer's Apprentice syndrome (SAS) is a network protocol flaw in the original versions of TFTP. It was named after Goethe's 1797 poem "Der Zauberlehrling", because the details of its operation closely resemble the disaster that befalls the sorcerer's apprentice: the problem resulted in an ever-growing replication of every packet in the transfer.
"The Twelve Dancing Princesses" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1815. It is of Aarne-Thompson type 306.
The following is a list of the major publications of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). 142 volumes comprise the entirety of his literary output, ranging from the poetical to the philosophical, including 50 volumes of correspondence.
The Sorcerer's Hat was a structure and the thematic icon of Disney's Hollywood Studios, the third of four theme parks built at the Walt Disney World Resort in Bay Lake, Florida, from 2001 to 2015. The structure was inspired by The Sorcerer's Apprentice segment in Walt Disney's 1940 animated film, Fantasia. Mickey Mouse's gloved hand and ears underneath the hat are visible emerging from the ground. With its opening on September 28, 2001, it replaced the Earffel Tower as the park's icon in marketing material. It was used as a venue for pin trading and sales, and also served as a backdrop to many special events and shows. High School Musical Live culminated several dances from several Disney Channel shows that performed several times daily in front of the hat. Disney characters made meet-and-greet appearances around the hat throughout the day.
Long, Broad and Sharpsight or Long, Broad, and Quickeye is a Bohemian fairy tale, collected and published by Karel Jaromír Erben in 1865 in Sto prostonarodních pohádek a pověstí slovanských and also by Louis Léger in Contes Populaires Slaves.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a 2010 American action adventure fantasy film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, directed by Jon Turteltaub, and released by Walt Disney Pictures, the team behind the National Treasure franchise. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel with Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, and Monica Bellucci in supporting roles.
Sorcerer's Apprentice may refer to:
"Sweet Porridge", often known in English under the title of "The Magic Porridge Pot", is a folkloric German fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm, as tale number 103 in Grimm's Fairy Tales, in the 19th century. It is Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 565, the magic mill. Other tales of this type include Why the Sea Is Salt and The Water Mother.
Mickey's PhilharMagic is a 4D film attraction found at several Disney theme parks around the world, including Magic Kingdom theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort, Hong Kong Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Park (Paris), and Disney California Adventure. The film was directed by George Scribner, who also directed Disney's 1988 animated film Oliver & Company. Mickey's PhilharMagic is a 12-minute-long show featuring 3D effects, scents, and water, as well as a number of characters from Disney movies. It is shown on the largest purpose-built 3D screen ever made, at 150 feet wide.
Der Zauberlehrling is a novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers, one of numerous works inspired in various ways by Goethe's poem of the same name.
Fairy Tale Police Department is a German animated series, produced by the company Yoram Gross-EM.TV in co-production with EM.TV & Merchandising AG, Victory Media Group, and Talit Communications. It aired on Seven Network at various times. It offers a new perspective on classic fairy tales through the central characters Johnny Legend and Christine Anderson. They are magic police officers who restore balance to society.
Fantasia is an American media franchise owned by The Walt Disney Company that commenced in 1940 with the theatrical release of the film of the same name.
Krabat is a character in Sorbian folklore, also dubbed the "Wendish Faust". First records of him were mentioned in 1839 minutes of the Akademischen Vereins für lausitzische Geschichte und Sprache, but all writings of the association were lost.
The Lover of Lies, also known as The Doubter or Philopseudes, is a frame story written by the Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata. It is written in the Attic dialect of ancient Greek. It is primarily a work of satire making fun of people who believe in the supernatural. The book contains the earliest known version of the story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
The transformations of the lovers at the end of the tale are similar to those found in the many variants of 'The Magician and His Pupil', a tale especially popular in Yiddish folklore.