The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily
A ferryman is woken at midnight by two will-o'-the-wisps who pay in gold he cannot accept. So begins the strangest tale Goethe ever wrote — the snake who becomes a bridge, the lily whose touch kills, and the riddle: what is more refreshing than light?
Read it now
The whole tale — all 136 paragraphs. Goethe's 1829 text, a word-by-word gloss with pronunciation, fluent English, and a dictionary that breaks every German compound into its parts.
❦ Read the Green SnakeA taste of the format. Open the reader above to read all of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily word by word.
About this book
Why read it
In 1795, at the end of a cycle of refugee stories, Goethe set down the strangest thing he ever wrote: a fairy tale in which a river must be crossed, a temple lies buried, and everyone — ferryman, snake, wisps, giant — has one power and one price. He never explained it. Read it word by word and you will understand why nobody has stopped trying.
The lore
The tale answers Schiller's letters on freedom and beauty in images instead of arguments: wisdom, appearance and force sit as three kings in the dark, and the fourth, their alloy, collapses when they are told apart. The snake's sacrifice builds the bridge; the kingdom arrives when everyone gives what they have. 'Love does not rule, it forms — and that is more' is the tale's last word, and maybe Goethe's.
Core vocabulary
The words that carry the book. Learn these and most of the text opens up; each links, in the reader, to its full entry. Counts are how often the word appears.
- sein to be169×
- haben to have88×
- werden become69×
- schön beautiful59×
- Alte the old one54×
- können can50×
- sagen say49×
- Schlange snake46×
- Lilie lily44×
- groß great42×
- Hand hand38×
- sehen to see37×
- König king37×
- alt old33×
- scheinen seem33×
- Fluss river31×
- Mann man28×
- Licht light27×
- wollen to want26×
- Irrlicht will-o’-the-wisp25×
- Lampe lamp25×
- Jüngling youth24×
- gehen go21×
- Auge eye21×
- Tempel temple21×
- rufen to cry20×
- nehmen take20×
- versetzen reply20×
- anfangen begin20×
- Korb basket20×
- lassen let19×
- fragen ask19×
- stehen stand19×
- Augenblick moment18×
- klein little17×
- wissen know17×
- müssen must17×
- drey three17×
- tragen to bear16×
- ausrufen cry out16×
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