In the German fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife, an old man one day catches a strange fish: a talking flounder. It turns out that an enchanted prince is trapped inside this fish and that it can therefore grant any wish. The man’s wife, Ilsebill, is delighted and wishes for increasingly excessive things. She turns their miserable hut into a castle, but that is not enough; eventually she wants to become the pope and, finally, God. This enrages the elements; the sea turns dark and she is transformed back into her original impoverished state. The moral of the story: don’t wish for anything you’re not entitled to.
Several variations of this classic fairytale motif are known. Sometimes, the wishes are not so much excessive or offensive to the divine order of the world, but simply clumsy or contradictory, such as in Charles Perrault’s The Ridiculous Wishes. Or, as in WW Jacobs’ 1902 horror story The Monkey’s Paw, their wishes unintentionally harm someone who is actually much closer to them than the object of their desire.
