Why The Sea is Salt

English Folk Tales: The Morals behind Them

By Madison Nef

English folk tales- classic and entertaining stories that many children enjoy while growing up. While they are meant for small children for fun, there are good underlying morals that teach you… even as you revisit them when you’re older. Today, I revisited the story Why the Sea is Salt. Below, I give a brief summary of the story and tell what morals I think are shown throughout it.

Why the Sea is Salt

This story is about two brothers- one poor, and one rich. On Christmas, the poor man has nothing for his family and so he visits his richer brother to ask him if he has anything to spare for the holidays. The rich brother, having given his brother plenty beforehand, angrily gives him two loaves of bread and some bacon and candles, telling him that he is to never come back after doing so.

Firstly, I am having trouble seeing who is in the wrong. On one hand, they ARE family and on holidays, I wouldn’t mind helping my family. On the other, if the poor brother had been asking of much from his richer brother previously while making no attempts to find work for himself, I’d be pretty pissed off too- regardless of it being a holiday. This is not noted in the story, so it is hard to tell. It could be a lack of competence on the poor brother’s side or heartlessness in the richer brother. This is not clarified in the story, and while it SEEMS like a minor detail; it creates a large plot hole.

After getting these things from his brother, the poor brother begins to head home. On the way, he meets a man as poor as himself stumbling down the road, and the man asks the poor brother if he can spare anything. While the poor brother knows he has little for himself, he is generous and kind and gives the man a candle and a loaf of bread. He is about to split the bacon between them as well when the old man stops him and tells him of a hill in which people live. The hill-people have a magic mill that can grind out ANYTHING except bacon- and that the poor brother should bargain with them, trading the bacon for the magic mill. The old man then tells him to return, and he will tell him how to work the mill.

Okay, so the poor brother was generous and in turn, the old man told him how to get something to improve his life. This STILL doesn’t matter if the brother was a lazy pig to begin with- if he was lazy, he shouldn’t get anything for his troubles, regardless of if he was generous and kind-hearted. Also- I bring to question why the old man didn’t keep the bacon himself and then go get the mill himself, if he was in as bad a position as the brother. Yes, he was kind to the old man… but that’s no reason to suddenly give up the one secret you know of that could possibly turn your life around. It makes no sense.

Well, the poor brother goes and bargains with the hill-people for the mill… they don’t initially give it up to him, but eventually want the bacon enough where they give him the mill. The poor brother brings it back to the old man, who teaches him to work it. Without even thanking the old man or giving him ANYTHING for his troubles, the poor brother returns home to his wife where they live lavishly for some time.

Now, soon, the rich brother began to notice how suddenly his poor brother had become rich. The brother became jealous, and bargained with his brother for the magic mill. Before giving his brother the mill, the poor brother ground out enough food and drink to last he and his wife for some time, and then sold his brother the mill for 300 pieces of gold. The brother, so anxious to get the mill home, forgot to ask his brother how to use it.

More foolishness. If I had something as awesome as that mill, I’d hold on to it for dear life and definitely not let someone who had told me to NEVER COME NEAR THEM AGAIN just a week previous buy it from me. That’s just stupid. If they aren’t your friend when you are in a bad position, they won’t be your friend in a good position either. They are still very much so your enemy. I give the poor brother points for generosity, once again… but not as many as he loses for stupidity and lack of logic.

Well, the rich brother commanded the mill to grind out heron and broth… but once the mill started, the brother didn’t know how to stop it (having not bothered to learn). The broth nearly drowned him and drove him out of his house, and flooded nearly the whole town before the brother brought the mill back to his poor brother to have him stop it. The brother stopped the mill, but the rich brother no longer wanted the mill after seeing the trouble it could cause. He left the poor brother be and left to repair his house, which had been rightfully destroyed by the broth and fish.

So we’ve established that the rich brother is a greedy scumbag who wants nothing to do with his family unless they have something HE wants or a talent that he needs, and that the poor brother, while kind and generous, is a tremendous IDIOT when it comes to trading. He is possibly lazy as well, but this is left untold by the story. Since it is stated that the rich brother had been giving him things for a long while previous to when the story starts, I am going to assume that the poor brother was indeed lazy.

The poor brother kept the mill for some time after that, building himself a house over the sea made of gold that the mill ground out. He and his wife lived quite comfortably for a bit. Time went on, and a salt merchant heard of the magic mill from across the sea. He went to see the poor brother, asking him if the magic mill could grind out salt. The poor brother, who was by this time quite proud of his mill, showed the merchant that the mill could indeed grind out salt along with a great many other things. The salt merchant waited until the poor brother wasn’t looking, and then he stole off with the magic mill.

Once on his ship, the salt merchant commanded the mill to start grinding salt and to do it quickly and well. However, the salt merchant had made the same blunder as the rich brother had and had not learned to use the mill properly… and the salt soon weighed down the merchant’s ship and it sank. The mill lies at the bottom of the ocean to this day, grinding away… and that is why the sea is salt.

It’s a good story, but you have to be a bit older than 5 or 6 to understand the morals it teaches. While there are many underlying morals that are much smaller, the glaring moral that is being taught is that greed leads nowhere and that stealing is wrong. This is shown in the greed of the salt merchant and of the rich brother… both were so greedy that they didn’t even bother to learn how to use the device they were using to fuel their greed and that led to disaster for both. Even if they HAD known how to use the mill properly, it still wouldn’t have been right… treating someone poorly when they are poor and then trying to fake being nice to them when they are rich is crappy enough to do without greed tagging along with it.

The story also teaches that kindness and generosity are important- whether you are lazy or not, poor or rich. This lesson is taught through the example of the poor brother sharing his family’s meal with the old man on Christmas… without expecting anything to come out of it. If you are going to be generous, do it from the kindness of your heart- NOT because you expect a reward or anything but a good feeling for you and the person to come out of it.

~The End~

Maddie