Katana VentraIP

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

"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.

This article is about the poem by Goethe. For other uses, see Sorcerer's Apprentice.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

"Der Zauberlehrling"

ATU 325 (The Sorcerer's Apprentice; The Magician and his Pupil) and ATU 325* (The Apprentice and the Ghosts)

Germany

"Der Zauberlehrling" (1797), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Story[edit]

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.

German culture[edit]

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.

The sorcerer is, instead, an Egyptian mystic – a of Isis called Pancrates.

priest

Eucrates is not an apprentice, but a companion who on Pancrates casting his spell.

eavesdrops

Although a broom is listed as one of the items that can be animated by the spell, Eucrates actually uses a . (Pancrates also sometimes used the bar of a door.)

pestle

Sorcerer's Apprentice syndrome

""

Sweet Porridge

""

The Master and his Pupil

Abbate, Carolyn (1991). "What the sorcerer said". Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 30–60.  9781400843831.

ISBN

(2012). "Magic and Metamorphosis". Tales of Magic, Tales in Print: On the Genealogy of Fairy Tales and the Brothers Grimm. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 108–135. doi:10.2307/j.ctv6p4w6.9. ISBN 978-0-7190-83792. JSTOR j.ctv6p4w6.9.

Blécourt, Willem de

Ogden, Daniel (2004). "The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Pancrates and his powers in context (Lucian, "Philopseudes" 33–36)". . 47: 101–126. JSTOR 24595381.

Acta Classica

Troshkova, A (2019). . Indo-European Linguistics and Classical Philology. XXIII: 1022–1037. doi:10.30842/ielcp230690152376.

"The tale type 'The Magician and His Pupil' in East Slavic and West Slavic traditions (based on Russian and Lusatian ATU 325 fairy tales)"

(2015). "The Master-Slave Dialectic in 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' ". Storytelling, Self, Society. 11 (1): 17–27. doi:10.13110/storselfsoci.11.1.0017.

Zipes, Jack

, ed. (2017). The Sorcerer's Apprentice: An Anthology of Magical Tales. Illustrated by Natalie Frank. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-8563-3.

Zipes, Jack

Media related to Der Zauberlehrling at Wikimedia Commons

from Project Gutenberg

Volume 3 of Fowler's translations of Lucian

by Katrin Gygax

Modern English translation from 2013

(first part) and second part

The Sorcerer's Apprentice from Fantasia