A gallows stands beside the high road, and a stranger points to it with a grim joke. "there is the tree where seven men have married the ropemaker's daughter", he tells the boy who cannot learn to shudder — seven hanged corpses swinging from a single rope, wedded all at once to the same bride. The bride is the noose; the marriage is the drop. Our one served witness for this address is the fourth of the Grimm's Household Tales (collected 1812–1857; this translation 1884), the story of the youth who went forth to learn what fear was — the fearless simpleton who sits beneath the gallows all night, feels pity for the frozen dead, and cuts them down to warm them at his fire, only to hang them up again when their rags catch alight.

The motif filed here is stark: several men married to one woman, and the woman a figure of death. The tale gives the image no ceremony and no elaboration — it is a wayfarer's dark pleasantry, spent in a breath and never returned to. What the phrase carries is the folk grammar of hanging: the rope as a bride who takes many husbands, the shared death that makes brothers of strangers. The boy hears it, camps beneath the tree, and learns nothing of fear from the seven — they "did not open their mouths", and their old rags simply burn.

Only this German witness is wired to served text today; the Jewish authority (Neuman) that Thompson filed beside it waits unread. A single quip inside a longer wonder-tale carries the whole weight of the motif. When does a mass execution become, in the mouths of the living, a wedding — and what comfort or contempt hides in calling the gallows a bride?