The best photograph in this collection shows a dandyish hare with his arm around a hedgehog carrying a bottle of brandy. Joseph Albert (1825–1886) shot them at the 1862 Carnival masquerade ball of the Jung-München artists’ association, where Munich’s art scene and the Bavarian Court costumed themselves in folklore. The figures look timeless. They were nearly brand new.

  • The fable “Der Hase und der Igel” entered Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the 1843 fifth edition — less than twenty years before the ball
  • It was first transcribed in the Hannoversche Volksblatt after being told to editor Wilhelm Schröder near Bexhövede in Lower Saxony around 1840
  • Ludwig Bechstein adapted it in his 1853 Deutsches Märchenbuch
  • Costume roles are documented: the hare and hedgehog worn by the sculptor Hermann Oehlmann and an unknown person, Puss in Boots by Heinrich Lang, a further group by Heinrich, Eduard and Clara Lang
  • Guests included the Bavarian Court and the future “fairy tale king” Ludwig II
  • The ball’s festival newspaper lists a golden goose beside Puss in Boots — implying at least one more animal photograph, apparently lost

The tale itself is a knowing inversion of Aesop’s tortoise and hare, some two millennia older. Aesop rewarded perseverance; this version rewards the con. The hedgehog, mocked for his stubby crooked legs, challenges the hare to a race through turnip and cabbage fields and stations his identical wife at the far end. She pops up to claim victory. When the suspicious hare insists on racing back, the husband pops up instead. The hare runs himself to death. The Low German catchphrase is “Ick bün all hier!” — “I’m already here!”

Carnival’s license for inversion — of class, gender, and here species — made a ballroom an apt place to stage the moral about never mocking the little guy. The Brothers Grimm’s own closing lesson was apparently too strange to render in fur and leather: whoever marries should take a wife who looks just as he does, so “whosoever is a hedgehog let him see to it that his wife is a hedgehog also.”

That gap is the interesting part. A Lower Saxon folk tale told aloud around 1840 becomes a costume for royalty within two decades, photographed by one of the era’s best portraitists, and survives as an image from an album at the Münchner Stadtmuseum. The canon arrives faster than we assume — and gets dressed up almost immediately.