The Girl Without Hands

The Handless Girl (Gordon Brown, illustrator, Fairy Tales from Grimm, print, England, 1894. Black and white drawing of a woman with no hands in a long dress, with a bundle of belongings resting on her back. She standing looks off the left towards trees.

In ‘The Girl without Hands’ collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, a careless father thinks he is promising the devil an apple tree but accidentally promises his daughter instead. When the Devil comes to claim the girl, he find she is so free of sin that he cannot take her. The Devil threatens to take the father unless he cuts off his daughter's hands, so the father does so. But the daughter is so morally pure that when she weeps on her stumps, it keeps them clean and the Devil still cannot take her. 

The girl leaves her father's home and with the help of an angel, manages to get fruit from a royal garden to eat. The second time she does this, she meets the King and they marry. As a gift, the king has a pair of silver hands made for his wife. 

The couple are expecting a child when the king must leave for battle. When the baby is born, a message is sent to him with the good news. However, the Devil swaps the note so it instead says that the baby is a changeling. 

Receiving this note, the King says that they shall keep and care for the baby all the same, but the Devil swaps this message so that it orders his wife and child to be expelled from the castle. The King's mother helps her daughter-in-law and the child escape. The angel leads her to a remote cottage in the woods and also restores her real hands to her. 

When the King returns from war he realises the trick played on them and searches for his wife and child. He stumbles across the remote cottage but at first does not recognise his wife, for her hands have been restored. Only when she shows him the silver pair which she no longer has a use for does he believe her, then they return home to live happily ever after.

Many of the early illustrations of this tale depict the maiden's hands concealed behind her back because it was thought too gruesome to show children.

The Girl Without Hands by Philipp Grot Johann (1892).

Sources:
Girl Without Hands by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1812).
Disability, Deformity and Disease in the Grimms' Fairy Tales by Ann Schmiesing (2014).