“The Devoted Friend” is a fairytale that operates as a story within a story. In the frame story, a Linnet, a Duck, and a Water-rat gather around a pond. The Water-rat declares of knowing “nothing in the world that is either nobler or rarer than a devoted friendship.” When asked what this kind of friendship consists of, the Water-rat explains that it involves his friends being wholeheartedly devoted to him. The Linnet asks what the Water-rat would do for his friends in return, but the Water-rat doesn’t understand what the Linnet is talking about. Thus, the Linnet decides to tell a story on the subject of friendship.
The interior story, told by the Linnet, depicts the relationship between a poor, innocent peasant named Hans and a rich tradesman named the Miller. At the beginning of the story, the reader learns that the Miller claims to be Hans’s devoted friend, and continually visits and takes flowers from Hans’s garden. When winter descends, the Miller does not visit Hans, choosing to sit in the comfort of his home with his wife and son while Hans suffers greatly and sells various personal possessions for bread.
When spring comes, the Miller visits Hans again and begins to exploit Hans in various ways. Although the Miller claims that he will very generously give Hans his wheelbarrow, he admits that the wheelbarrow is extremely damaged, and the reader never actually sees this wheelbarrow pass into Hans’s hands. When Hans exclaims that he has a single piece of wood he could use to repair said wheelbarrow, the Miller selfishly takes the wood for himself, declaring that it was just the thing he’s been needing to patch his roof.
Later, the Miller convinces Hans to carry a sack flour to the market, mend his barn-roof, and drive his sheep to the mountain. All the while, the Miller espouses beautiful, wise-sounding things about the nature of friendship and generosity. During this period of working for the Miller, Hans is prevented from tending his garden. Hans simply consoles himself with “the reflection that the Miller was his best friend,” and continues to work away for the Miller.
One night, the Miller’s son falls off a ladder and hurts himself. The Miller asks Hans to fetch the doctor, despite a storm that rages outside, and refuses to give Hans his lantern. Hans successfully fetches the doctor, but on the way back, loses his way on the moor and drowns in a hole. Hans’s body is found the next day. At Hans’s funeral, the Miller serves as chief mourner and shows no remorse for his actions, and instead laments that there is not one to take his broken wheelbarrow.
Back in the frame story, the Water-rat is upset that the Linnet does not tell what became of the Miller. The Linnet responds that it is evident the Water-rat did not understand the moral of the story, and the Water-rat, appalled that the story had a moral at all, huffily returns his hole. Both the Duck and the narrator affirm that telling a story with a moral is “dangerous.”
