Dear Fellow scholars of German folklore

[Mauve Shirt]

You exist, right, 'cause I need your thoughts.
What is your favorite, in your opinion the most epic Grimm’s Fairy Tale about the devil?
No movie or vidya game interpretations. It’s gotta be published in one of the several volumes of Kinder und Hausmärchen I’m afraid, I can’t branch out in folklore or everything falls apart.

[Yora]

From my memories of the classic fairy tales, the devil doesn't show up at all. There might be some among the more obscure ones. and there's definitely a lot of folk tales with the devil as a character, but I don't think he's in any of the Grimm collection.

Edit: Doing a quick round of research, there is one story called "The devil with the three golden hairs". However, getting the three hairs is one of those typical impossible tasks (which you have a lot in Grimm's tales. And Heracles) the hero is given and he doesn't actually have to face the devil. Since he gets help from the devil's grandmother.
There's also a scientific book with the title "The Devil is dead: The German fairytale before and after the Brothers Grimm". No clue what's in that book, but seems like they deliberately kept him out.

[Closet_Skeleton]

Most of them are actually French

There's a few figures in Kinder- und Hausmärchen that might be the Devil in disguise or are stand ins for the kind of stuff the Devil does in other stories.

The Devil is in the title of several stories in Volume II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_and_his_Grandmother
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peasant_and_the_Devil
The Devil's Sooty Brother
The Lord's Animals and the Devil's

I've never read any of the volumes all the way through so can't be of much help.

Fairy tales tend to be the opposite of Epic and ones about the Devil, who is usually an easily tricked idiot, tend to be even less awesome.

[Mauve Shirt]

I think of all the options Bluebeard is the cruelest and certainly most well-known evil guy that I could pretend is the Devil.
Bearskin/The Devil's Sooty Brother are two of my faves, but as you say they're not epic.
I'm writing a reimagining of the GFT in which the tales are bound together by the need to take down the devil, but though I have enough plot devices throughout the tales explaining why the devil is evil, I don't have a lot of epicness on which to base a proper climactic scene.

[Yora]

Germanic fairy tales generally don't do epic stuff. It's all very low scale, short term. Even if you have the devil do show up in a story, he's generally a very minor player. Like a single witch, or a mean pixie. Or a small dragon, at the most. The only power the devil has in late Germanic folklore is to give people stupid ideas. If you can resist his taunts and dares with which he tries to get you to do something foolish, he has almost no way to do any harm.
Which probably is why god lets him do his thing without interference. He's a minor nuisance who is only a threat to people who lack integrity and strength of character.

[Closet_Skeleton]

Maybe you should ditch the 'devil' idea with a witch or something. There are a lot more witches. Or a fairy who sometimes appears as a witch or the devil.

That or the evil trinity of linguistics, jacobin liberalism and german nationalism.

Isn't the correct ending for a series of fairy tales for all the minor unimportant characters the protagonist helped to show up and each do something incredibly contrived? Or is that more of a Russian thing?


I think of all the options Bluebeard is the cruelest and certainly most well-known evil guy that I could pretend is the Devil.

Bluebeard is French and was dropped from later editions of Kinder- und Hausmärchen for that reason.

Maybe you should use Perrault instead?

There's an Italian version/equivalent of Bluebeard where he is the devil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Devil_Married_Three_Sisters, which has a German version also in Hausmärchen that swaps the devil out for an evil wizard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitcher's_Bird