A stone gives way beneath a man's feet and lowers him, slowly, into a lit hall that no daylight reaches. The German witness is the tale of the glass coffin from Grimm's Household Tales (collected 1812–1857; this translation 1884), numbered 163. A lost tailor, carried off on the horns of a great stag, is set down before "a wall of rock"; the stag butts a door open, and "a voice sounded out of the rock" bids him "Enter without fear, no evil shall befall thee". Within a stone hall he is told to step on a stone in the middle of the floor, which "sank slowly down into the depths" — and so he arrives in the world beneath the world.

What that lower hall holds is not the dead but an enchanted country kept small. The hall keeps "two great glass chests" facing each other; in one is "a handsome structure like a castle" with its farm-buildings, shrunk by a magician's art; in the other lies "a maiden of the greatest beauty", and her people are sealed as smoke inside glass bottles. She calls her prison "this underground cave in a glass coffin", "the cave beneath the earth". When the tailor frees her and the spell breaks, the broad stone rises through the ceiling, and in the open air the castle and its households "grew to their natural size" — a whole estate exhaled back out of the ground.

Only this German telling is wired to served narrative here; the shelf's Irish and Breton cards, and the folklorists' comparisons of the journey to the lower world, wait unread beside it. Why does this underworld hold not the dead but a living country, folded away in glass until someone comes down to open it?