The golden bird

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The golden bird is a fairy tale ( ATU 550). It is in the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm at position 57 (KHM 57). Up to the 2nd edition the title was Vom goldennen Vogel . The fairy tale probably comes from Christoph Wilhelm Günther's collection of children's fairy tales from 1787 (No. 26 The Faithful Fox ).

content

Illustration by George Cruikshank , 1876

In the king's garden there is a tree bearing golden apples. When the king realizes that an apple is missing, his three sons have to watch in turn. Only the youngest does not fall asleep. He sees a golden bird take an apple and shoots a feather off it. The feather is so precious that the king wants the bird and sends his sons in turn to catch it. On the way everyone meets a fox who asks not to be shot. Only the youngest is gracious. In return, the fox advises him not to go to the good, but to the bad inn in the village. The young man follows the advice without looking to his brothers who are enjoying themselves. The fox shows him the way past the sleeping soldier into the castle, in whose last chamber the golden bird sits. But when, contrary to the advice of the fox, he takes the bird out of the wooden cage and instead puts it in the golden one, the bird utters a scream. The youth is seized by the soldiers and is supposed to die, unless he fetches the golden horse from the king of the castle, which is at another castle. The fox shows him the way. But this time, too, the youth does not follow the advice of the fox. He exchanges the wooden and leather saddle for a gold one. Then the neighing of the horse gives him away. Now he has to bring the king's daughter from the golden castle to avoid death. On the advice of the fox, he intercepts her on the way to the bathhouse. But he cannot refuse to say goodbye to her parents. So everyone wakes up and he is arrested again. This time he has to remove the mountain that is blocking the view of the king in front of the castle. The fox does this job for him as well and lets him bring back his other treasures after the king's daughter. The fox asks the youth to shoot him dead in return for his help and to cut off his paws. He doesn't do that. Nevertheless, the fox gives him one last piece of advice: he shouldn't buy gallows meat and not sit by the edge of a well. Nevertheless, in a village the youth releases his criminal brothers from the gallows. They, however, plunge their younger brother into a well. After the fox has pulled him out, he goes to his father's castle disguised as a beggar, where the happy king's daughter recognizes him. They are married, the brothers are executed. When later the fox gets his wish fulfilled, he turns into the brother of the king's daughter, because he was enchanted. Now everyone lives happily together.

Grimm's note

Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde , 1909

The fairy tale comes from Hesse (by an old woman in the Marburg Elisabeth Hospital; from the 2nd edition combined with Dorothea Viehmann ), but is told in a similar way in Paderborn ( von Haxthausen family ): The sick or blind king can only be heard by the whistling of the phoenix being cured, the number of tasks to be given by the sons then varies. In one version the fox disappears last after being shot. The well can also be a quarry. They compare falling into the well with Joseph , the liberation from it with Aristomenes (after Pausanias ), Sindbad from 1001 Nights and Gog and Magog (after Montevilla ). You still make a lot of literature comparisons, u. a. la petite grenouille verte in Cabinet des fées , vol. 31, Slavonic "Hexe Corva" in Vogl no. 1, "Troldhelene" in Molbech no. 72, Wallachian in Schott no. 26, from the Bukowina von Staufe in Wolf's magazine "2 , 389 ". The beginning also occurs as a Dummlingsmärchen (corresponds to KHM 64a The white dove , influenced 2nd edition of The golden bird ): Every year the ripe pears disappear from the king's tree. The brothers wake up one year after the other, but fall asleep the last night until it's the turn of the stupid. He follows a white dove up a mountain into a rock and redeems a gray man and a king's daughter.

origin

Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde , 1909

The fairy tale is very similar to The Faithful Fox in Christoph Wilhelm Günther's anonymously published collection of children's fairy tales from 1787, of which the Brothers Grimm owned a rare copy. Older literary role models: Roman van Walewein ; a sermon temple by Johannes Gobi . In their preface to Volume 2, 1815, the Brothers Grimm believed the bird to be identical to the one that brought the golden hair of the king's daughter to King Mark in Tristan and Isolde . Many variants show a smooth transition to AaTh / ATU 551 (in Grimm's Das Wasser des Lebens ). Possible forerunners are Penninc's Arthurian novel De Walewein (13th century), Johannes Gobi's sermon temple num. 538 in Scala coeli and Straparolas Piacevoli notti 3.2. In eavesdropping on the beautiful on the way to the bathroom, Walter Scherf sees a possible echo of Aladin and the magic lamp.

Edition comparison

Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde , 1909

The king sends the gardener's sons up to the 2nd edition, who does not want to let the youngest go because he loves him. In front of the stable, the servants spin gold saddles in their hands. From the 3rd edition, the apples on the tree are counted, and only here is the formulation of the “best” that the youngest should be missing. He now conducts short dialogues with the fox: "Be quiet, little fox, I do you no harm" - "You should not regret it". The bird in the gold cage makes “a piercing cry”. The princess is now called the king's daughter of the golden castle (cf. KHM 6 The Faithful John ). The king says, “your life is forfeited”, but “cannot see beyond” the mountain. The king's son "gave up all hope" (like a well-known quote from Dante's Divine Comedy ). In the forest with the well it is "cool and lovely" (before: "funny and lovely"), the sun is hot. In the 7th edition, the eldest forgets "all good teachings", the second lives "only for his desires", which suggests a threefold division of the sons as spirit, soul, body.

interpretation

Illustration by Robert Anning Bell , 1912

When the youngest son moves away, the father says: “It is in vain, he will find the golden bird even less than his brothers, and if an accident happens to him, he will not know what to do; he lacks the best. ” “ The best, ” the fox later calls the king's daughter. The idea of ​​a noble core repeats itself, which has to be freed from its apparently magnificent shell: the bad instead of the good inn, the wooden instead of the golden cage, the wooden and leather instead of the golden saddle, the execution of the bad brothers. In this respect, there is an increase in the dualism between good and bad, which is central in many fairy tales. Redemption succeeds when the king's son puts on the beggar's clothes and destroys the animal body of the fox. The bird, the horse and the castle of the princess are golden, the cage, saddle and fox are more reddish. The bird is therefore the phoenix , which in alchemy also hatches as a golden bird from a red shell. The tree in the Father's garden with the golden apples is the tree of life . The fox can appear as a sage or guide of the soul in narratives from different cultures.

Eugen Drewermann interprets the bird, horse and maiden in the bathroom as the moon , which with the stars on the world tree is repeatedly stolen and covered by the world mountain. But the original natural mythological symbolism is meant psychologically, the king is a rational, successful person. At some point, often really only at night, he feels the externality of his life, which, in view of his authority, seems like an outrageous theft. At the latest in autumn of life it becomes apparent that the apples of maturity and love, which one thought they deserved by virtue of their performance and position, were stolen from somewhere. With the same superficiality, he now wants to make up for what has been missed in the pub, which only decompensates the previous attitude. Time and again, the fairy tale irritates the apparently common sense. Even the fact that the gold pen should surpass all gold apples and everything in value makes no sense if one proceeds from gold in the literal sense of the word. The prince deserves no expensive inn, the gold bird no gold cage, the horse no beautiful saddle. This even applies to emotions of compassion: the virgin must not see the parents, the brothers have to hang, the good fox must even be dismembered. Every human being has a speaking animal as an expression of our inherent phylogenetic wisdom, which one "only" needs to follow - that requires obedience and humility ( Heb 5,8  EU ). The soul really contains treasures worth gold, but as it were in earthen vessels ( 2 Cor 4,7  EU ), and whenever you want to display them in the "gold cage", ie the saddle becomes more important than the horse, you are stuck again. Only an internal act of violence gives passion its goal ( Mt 11.12  EU ). It is about the incarnation of the psyche, of the fox, whose voice we like to suppress as long as we are haughty and cling to the omnipotence of the mind, evidently we have to learn step by step from mistakes: “Hidden from the wise and the clever, the little ones but clearly ”( Mt 11.25  EU ).

Comparisons

watch TV

There are vague echoes from the animated series Tao Tao, episode 38, The Golden Bird .

literature

  • Grimm, Brothers: Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. Pp. 321-328. Düsseldorf and Zurich, 19th edition 1999. (Artemis & Winkler Verlag; Patmos Verlag; ISBN 3-538-06943-3 )
  • Grimm, Brothers: Children's and Household Tales. Last hand edition with the original notes by the Brothers Grimm. With an appendix of all fairy tales and certificates of origin, not published in all editions, published by Heinz Rölleke. Volume 3: Original Notes, Guarantees of Origin, Afterword. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition, Stuttgart 1994. pp. 110–112, p. 467. (Reclam-Verlag; ISBN 3-15-003193-1 )
  • Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbook to the children's and house fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. de Gruyter, Berlin 2008. ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 , pp. 140-143.

Web links

Wikisource: The Golden Bird  - Sources and full texts
Commons : The Golden Bird  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Lothar Bluhm: The story of the two hikers (KHM 107). Possibilities and limits of the Grimm philology . In: Helga Bleckwenn (Ed.): Fairy tale characters in the literature of the North and Baltic Sea region . Baltmannsweiler 2011, ISBN 978-3-8340-0898-5 , p. 20.
  2. Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbook on the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm. de Gruyter, Berlin 2008. ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 , pp. 140-141.
  3. ^ Willem de Blécourt: Bird, Horse and King's Daughter. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales. Volume 14, De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-040244-5 , pp. 283-289.
  4. Walter Scherf: The fairy tale dictionary. Volume 1. CH Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-39911-8 , pp. 510-514.
  5. Eugen Drewermann: Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let your hair down. Grimm's fairy tales interpreted in terms of depth psychology. dtv, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-423-35056-3 , pp. 69-105.
  6. https://www.fernsehserien.de/tao-tao/haben/der-goldene-vogel-2555