There’s a story in The Mabinogion
about a girl who is changed into an owl. The magicians Gwydion and Math ap
Mathonwy create her out of flowers for Lleu Llaw Gyffes whose mother has cursed
him never to have a human wife. They take ‘the flowers of the oak, and the
flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they
conjured the fairest and most beautiful maiden that anyone had ever seen. And
they baptised her in the way that they did at that time, and named her
Blodeuedd.’
Deed done, curse
circumvented: Blodeuedd is presented to Lleu. Nobody has asked her what she wants, however, and one day when
Lleu is away she meets the handsome young man Gronw Pebr. The two fall in love and
plot to murder Lleu so that they can be together. At the moment of his death
however, Lleu is transformed into an eagle. Math restores him to his human
shape, and Gwydion pursues Blodeuedd and transforms her into an owl:
‘[Y]ou
will never dare show your face in daylight for fear of all the birds. And all
the birds will be hostile towards you. … You shall not lose your name, however,
but shall always be called Blodeuwedd.’ Blodeuwedd
is ‘owl’ in today’s language. And for that reason the birds hate the owl:
and the owl is still called Blodeuwedd.
Commenting on the tale,
Sioned Davies explains that the name ‘changes from Blodeuedd (‘flowers’) to Blodeuwedd
(‘flower-face’) to reflect the image of the bird.’
The white face of the barn owl does in fact look like two huge white daisies crushed
together.
Blodeuedd is a girl
made from flowers and turned into an owl. In the Grimms’ fairy tale Jorinda and Joringel
a girl is turned into a bird by an owl-woman – and released by the touch of a
flower. Here’s what happens: In the middle of a dark forest an ancient castle is
inhabited by an old woman who turns into a cat or a night-owl by day, assuming
her own form only when evening comes. She lures wild birds and beasts to her,
and kills and eats them. Further:
If anyone came within one hundred paces of the
castle he was obliged to stand still and could not stir from the spot until she
bade him be free. But whenever an innocent maiden came within this circle, she
changed her into a bird and shut her up in a wickerwork cage, and carried the
cage into a room in the castle. She had about seven thousand cages of rare
birds in the castle.
A betrothed
young couple, Jorinda and Joringel, walk into the forest in order to be alone
together. Though Joringel warns his sweetheart that they must take care not to stray
close to the castle, everything should be wonderful in this glowing sunset wood
– ‘It was a beautiful evening. The sun
shone brightly between the trunks of the trees into the dark green of the
forest, and the turtledoves sang mournfully upon the beech trees.’ But for
some reason the young lovers feel sorrowful – ‘as sad as though they were about
to die.’ In this strange mood,
[T]hey looked around them,
and were quite at a loss, for they did not know which way they should go home.
The sun was still half above the mountain and half under.
Joringel
looked through the bushes, and saw the old walls of the castle close at hand. He
was horror-stricken and filled with deadly fear. Jorinda was singing:
“My
little bird with the necklace red
Sings
sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
He sings
that the little dove must soon be dead.
Sings
sorrow, sor– jug, jug, jug.”
The sun has set, Jorinda has been changed into a nightingale, and ‘a screech
owl with glowing eyes flew three times round about her, and three times cried
‘to-whoo, to-whoo, to-whoo!’’ Unable to speak or move, Joringel sees the owl
fly into a thicket and emerge as a crooked old woman ‘with large red eyes’ who
catches the nightingale and takes it away.
Later that evening the
enchantress returns later and releases Joringel with the cryptic words, ‘Greet
you, Zachiel. If the moon shines on the cage, Zachiel, let him loose at once.’ (Zachiel
is probably the angel Zakiel mentioned along with Michael, Gabriel and other angels in
a spell for ‘binding the tongue’ in the Syriac ‘Book of Protection’, a
compendium of charms and incantations dating in manuscript form from the early
1800s though probably much older.) The old woman refuses to release Jorinda and
tells Joringel he will never see his sweetheart again. Joringel goes sadly away,
but while working as a shepherd in a nearby village he dreams of a blood-red
flower containing a dew-drop as big as a pearl, with which he can open the
doors of the castle and the cage. After a nine-day search he finds the flower, returns
to the castle and sets Jorinda and all the other maidens free.
The Grimm brothers took
this tale almost verbatim from the deeply Romantic semi-fictional autobiography
of Johann Heinrich Jung, 'The Life of
Heinrich Stilling', published in 1777. Writing throughout in the third person, Jung
tells how one day, out in the forest gathering firewood, the eleven-year-old
Heinrich asks his Aunt Marie for a story. ‘“Tell me, aunt, once more,” said
Heinrich, “the tale of Joringel and Jorinde.”’ His aunt is happy to oblige and
when she has finished, Heinrich sits ‘as if petrified – his eyes fixed and his
mouth half-open. “Aunt!” said he, at length, “it is enough to make one afraid
in the night!” “Yes,” said she, “I do not tell these tales at night, otherwise
I should be afraid myself.”’
It’s lovely to have
this account of the story actually being told, and to see its effect on child
and storyteller. It is placed in this context however, because of what happens
next. Having ventured deeper into the woods, Heinrich’s grandfather comes back
to tell how he saw a bright light between the trees, “just as when the sun
rises in the morning.” Led by the light, he has seen a vision of the brilliant
castles and gardens of heaven, and meets his daughter Dora, Heinrich’s dead mother,
who tells him he will soon join her in “our eternal habitation.” Thus, the dark
forest, failing sunset, ancient castle and evil enchantress of the fairy tale
are deliberately contrasted with the brilliant sunrise, shining castles and
angelic beings of heaven.
This then is a literary
version of a traditional tale, and since the rest of the autobiography is full
of poetical and mystical references to doves, nightingales, morning and evening
sun, rings, dewdrops and death, I would guess that the moody music of the
opening few paragraphs – the sorrowful lovers, setting sun and mourning doves –
is Johann Heinrich Jung’s own. Does this make the story less authentic? I don’t
see it that way. Tellers of traditional tales have always enriched, altered and
embellished them as they see fit, and a story written down will always be
different from the same tale told aloud.
What does the story
mean? Why are the lovers so sad? Is it because they know they’ll grow old and
die, because evening is here and the day nearly over, because their young love
may not last and the sun is already half beneath the mountain? Are they afraid of mortality, the grave – symbolised
by the grim stone walls of the castle whose shadow immobilises them, and the
old owl-woman whose voice is a lament?
Or is the owl-woman
associated with Athena of classical mythology, goddess of wisdom, whose emblem
was the owl? Discussing the tale with me, the author Susan Price thought this
might be so, writing:
My
impression is a little different. For one, the old woman is associated with the
owl, which associates her with Athena. She's also a huntress, who seems to
prize and cage (or guard) unmarried girls, which associates her with Artemis.
Both these goddesses had their darker, Death sides.
The youngsters are lost in a wood - wode
within this wood. The forest has long been associated with the dangers and
traps of life, some of them sexual – but mostly, I think, to do with 'losing
one's way' or losing one's self. There's also a tradition of the girl about to
be married mourning her single life: her happy life at home with her parents.
She's about to launch into adult life, with all its responsibility and cares.
The owl-woman snatches her away
from all this and fastens her securely in a cage – but doesn't otherwise
mistreat her. The old woman also frees the young man without harming him and
tells him that if he does the right thing, he can free the girl.
I think the old woman is a kind of marriage counsellor!
This is a thought-provoking comment and a good example of the ways in
which fairy tales can be differently interpreted.
Flowers and owls… owls and flowers… a blood-red flower with a
pearl-sized drop of dew at its heart.
To modern eyes the sexual imagery is clear: betrothed young maidens cannot
remain maidens for ever. But what is the owl doing in this tale? What does
it symbolise? Wisdom, or death? The ‘wise owl’ entered northern European
folklore rather late, via classical education. To ordinary folk it was
primarily known as a bird of death. In The
Mabinogion the owl is a hated outcast, a bird of ill omen rather than of
wisdom, and this is supported by Chaucer’s ‘The oule ek, that of deth the bode
bringeth’ [‘the owl too, that brings tidings of death’], Shakespeare’s ‘Whilst
the scritch-owle, scritching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe, In
remembrance of a shrowd’, and Gilbert White’s ‘From this screaming probably
arose the common people’s imaginary species of screech-owl, which they
superstitiously think attends the windows of dying persons’. Even John Ruskin
felt uneasy about owls: ‘Whatever wise people may say of them, I at least have
found the owl’s cry always prophetic of mischief to me.’
Moreover, in a variant of the tale noted by the brothers Grimm, it is a crow
the old woman turns herself into – another bird associated with death.
In Alan Garner’s 1967
novel The Owl Service, which is based
on the story of Blodeuedd, the destructive force of the ancient legend is
stored in a set of patterned dinner plates hidden in the attic of an old Welsh
house. The stylised pattern can be perceived two different ways, as owls or as
flowers, and the plates act as a kind of battery or repository of power, with
owls as the negative and flowers as the positive poles. In terms of Garner’s
book, this alternating current means not only that the emotional pattern of the
legend keeps repeating down the centuries, but that his teenage characters
switch between positive and negative constructions of the self.
In Jorinda and Joringel, the constrictive power of age is represented
by an owl, the liberating power of youth by a flower. Years ago in my early
twenties I was walking through London with a friend. We were laughing and chattering,
and a middle-aged woman passing by leaned over and said to us in a low voice but
with extraordinary venom, ‘One day you’ll be like me.’ As a memento mori it was quite something and we
both shivered, but we agreed later that we never would be like her. We would
never, ever be that bitter.
That brush with mortality has
stayed with me, however, and I have to recognise at least the existence of those
dark emotions – envy of youth, anger at old age, fear of death: ‘When [the old
woman] saw Joringel coming she was angry, very angry, and scolded, and spat
poison and gall at him, but she could not come within two paces of him.’ In the
end the old woman is powerless against the vigour and sexual potency of youth. Fairy
tales are emotional amplifiers. We look into them as if into old, dimly-silvered
mirrors, and see ourselves and the world around us oddly changed. Analysing a
fairy tale can be a deeply interesting intellectual exercise, but that is not
what the tale itself is for. It exists like music, to work
directly on our feelings. Jorinda and
Joringel is short and there’s hardly any plot, but it is intense. It takes
the dark emotions and transmutes them, leaving us to remember the beauty of the
forest, the sadness of the lovers and the strange little song Jorinda sings.
Like age looking
wistfully back on a time of flowers.
This
essay with many others is published in my book ‘Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairy
Tales’, available in print or as an e-book from Amazon. (Click this link.)
Footnotes
Picture credit:
'She turned herself into a cat or a screech-owl': Jorinda and Joringel, by Arthur Rackham/
