Strong Fairy Tale Heroines #11: FUNDEVOGEL

FUNDEVOGEL, or BIRD-FOUNDLING

This sweet story is one of the Grimms’ ‘Children’s and Household Tales’. translated by Margaret Hunt in 1884. The Grimms note that it comes “from the district of Schwalm in Hesse. It is also told that the cook was the wicked wife of the forester, and the question and answer are differently given: for instance, ‘You should have gathered the rose and the bush would have followed you.”’ Like 'The Mastermaid', this tale is is Aarne–Thompson type 313A, 'the girl helps the hero flee' - which I reckon ought to be renamed 'the heroine rescues the boy'!

It’s a simple but satisfying tale: Lina, who has magical skills, is the boy’s foster sister and he her adopted brother. The pair are only children, but the tenderly repeated refrain, ‘Never leave me and I will never leave you’ suggests they may marry later on, as happens in another of the Grimms’ tales, ‘Sweetheart Roland’, to which it is related. This type of tale is very different from those darker stories in which sisters endure hardship and suffering for the sake of their brothers. 

The extorted promise with which the wicked cook binds little Lina is a standard feature, as is the wickedness of the cook in the first place (fairy tales are built of standard features - we accept them as we accept the construction of a sonnet), but in this story the bond between the children proves stronger than the promise. (Since the usual fate of children who get boiled in cooking pots in fairy tales is to be served up to their fathers as stew, this may well have been the original intention of the wicked cook, or stepmother.) 

There was once a forester who went into the forest to hunt, and as he entered it he heard a sound of screaming, as if a little child were there. He followed the sound and it led him to a high tree, and at the top of this tree a little child was sitting – for a bird of prey had seen it, flown down and snatched it away, and dropped it into the tree. 

                The forester climbed up and brought the child down. He thought, “I’ll take him home, and he shall grow up with our Lina.” So he took it home and the two children grew up together, and they named the boy who was found in the tree Fundevogel, since a bird had carried him away. And Fundevogel and Lina loved each other dearly.

                Now the forester employed an old woman to cook for him. One evening she took two pails and kept going back and forth to the brook, fetching more and more water. Lina saw this and asked, “Old Sanna, why are you fetching so much water?”

                “If you will never repeat it to anyone, I will tell you.” So Lina said no, she would never repeat it to anyone, and then the cook said, “Tomorrow morning when the forester is out hunting I will heat the water, and when it is boiling, I will throw Fundevogel in, and boil him to death.”

                Early next morning the forester got up and went out hunting while the children were still in bed. Then Lina said to Fundevogel, “If you will never leave me, I will never leave you.” Fundevogel said, “Never will I leave you – not now, nor ever!” Then said Lina, “Then I will tell you. Last night old Sanna carried so many buckets of water into the house that I asked her why she was doing it, and she said that she would tell me, if I promised not to tell anyone, so I promised, and she said that early in the morning when father was out hunting, she would boil the water in the big kettle and throw you in. So let us get up quickly, dress, and go away together.”

                So the children dressed themselves quickly and went away. When the water in the kettle was boiling, the cook went to the bedroom to find Fundevogel, but both the children were gone. The cook was now terribly alarmed. “What shall I say now when the forester comes back?” she said to herself. “The children must be caught and brought back home,” and she sent three servants running after them.

                When the children looked back from the edge of the forest and saw the three servants running after them, Lina said to Fundevogel, “Never leave me and I will never leave you.” Fundevogel said, “Neither now, nor ever will I leave you.” Lina said, “Then you shall  become a rose tree and I the rose upon it.”

                When the servants came to the forest, there was nothing to be seen but a rose tree with one rose on it; the children were nowhere. “Nothing to be done here,” said they, and returned to the old cook and told her they had seen nothing but a rose tree with a single rose. 

                How the cook scolded! “You simpletons! You should have cut the rose bush in half and broken the rose off and brought it to me: go and do it at once!” 

                Off went the servants for a second time, but again the children saw them coming. Lina said, “Fundevogel, never leave me and I will never leave you.” “Neither now, nor ever,” said Fundevogel, and Lina said, “Now you shall become a church, and I’ll be the chandelier in it.”

                So when the three servants came, nothing was to be seen but a church with a fine chandelier hanging inside it. “What can we do here?” they said to each other. “We will have to go home.” So they went home, and told the cook they had seen nothing but a church with a chandelier in it. “Fools!” scolded the cook. “You should have knocked the church to pieces and pulled down the chandelier and brought it back with you.” And now the old cook herself set off with the three servants in pursuit of the children.

                When the children looked back this time and saw the old cook waddling after them, Lina said, “Fundevogel, never leave me and I will never leave you.” And Fundevogel said, “Neither now, nor ever!” Then said Lina, “You shall be a fishpond and I will be the duck on it.”

                Well, the old cook caught up with them, and she saw the pond, and lay down beside it so that she could drink it all dry. But the duck swam smartly up to her. It seized her head in its beak and pulled her into the water, and there the old witch was drowned. Then the children were heartily delighted and went home together, and if they have not died they are living there still. 

More on fairy tales and folklore in "Seven Miles of Steel Thistles" available at these links: here and here.


     

Picture credits: 

Fundevogel - the child in the tree - by Mercer Mayer

Fundevogel: The cook goes back and forth to the well: Arthur Rackham
Fundevogel -  The children see the three servants - Artist unknown

Fairytale Reflections: DER BÄRENHÄUTER/THE BEARSKIN

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

A combination of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Cinderella’’, with an equal part of “The Cat-Skin’’ and a good dose of Job, “The Bearskin” (Der Bärenhäuter in the original German) is a tale of one man testing his endurance against the Devil’s. Some versions of the story, such as the one told in the Philippines, don’t necessarily pronounce a winner in this contest. But the original Grimm’s fable makes it abundantly clear: the Devil triumphs again. At times the story has been known as “The Devil, a Bearskin” (Der Teufel ein Bärenhäuter) as if to reinforce this idea. The Bearskin, a starving young man who makes his deal with the Devil so he might survive, undergoes a transformation, but he is no Cinderella, and no friendly and misunderstood Beast either. But this story, I have come to understand, still has had its own impact on the culture, or at least on mass entertainment.

In traditional tellings of “The Bearskin,” a soldier without a war to fight has no food, money, or shelter, and no prospects of finding any; his brothers have rejected him. He appears to be close to suicide when a cloven-hoofed creature in a green jacket reveals himself, and offers a way out. The green jacket will produce all the money he needs if the soldier does not say the Lord’s Prayer; if he does not wash, cut his hair, or clip his nails—if he becomes a monster by sleeping, eating, and living in a bearskin the Devil has just harvested from a bear that threatened to kill the both of them, moments earlier. If the soldier can live as the Bearskin for seven years, he’ll be returned to his natural state again.  

 Without any options, the soldier says yes. He wanders about the country, paying poor people to pray for him; and his transformation from man to monster is gradual. Eventually, though, he is forced to retreat to a room at an inn because his appearance is so appalling. While at the inn, he hears a man in great distress, and discovers the man has lost his fortune. He offers to help the man by giving him money; to thank him, the man promises Bearskin one of his three daughters in marriage. The two older daughters refuse Bearskin, but the youngest agrees because Bearskin has helped her father. Bearskin breaks a ring in two, gives half to this daughter, and keeps the other half. Then he leaves to complete his odyssey.  

After serving his seven years, the Bearskin summons the Devil and demands that he be cleaned up; in some versions, he forces the Devil to say the Lord’s Prayer. He then returns to the inn to retrieve his bride but is mistaken for a more desirable colonel; the two older daughters vie for his attentions. But by presenting his half of the ring, he reveals himself to the youngest daughter and declares: “I am your betrothed bridegroom, whom you saw as Bearskin. Through God's grace I have regained my human form and have become clean again." When the older sisters see the two embracing, they are overcome with rage and anger. One sister hangs herself; the other drowns herself in a well.

The Devil arrives at the home of the new bride and groom that evening. "You see, I now have two souls for the one of yours,’’ he says, referring to the two sisters’ suicides. And so the tale ends. Maybe.

 I was raised in the 1960s in the United States, so what I knew from fairy tales came in the form of Disney movies, books, and costumes. “The Bearskin” was not suitable for such purposes. Perhaps there was no way for Disney to tidy up its message. I did not encounter “The Bearskin” until graduate school, when I was studying German as part of my English degree. “Der Bärenhäuter” was one of the short selections in our textbook. This is appropriate, since fairy tales are one way we pass language and all its shadings onto our children, and yet at the same time, I was too old, and possibly too cynical, to buy into its message.  

  

Because the story appeared in a language instruction book, it emphasized the vocabulary we were studying at that time, so my recollection of the story is filled with the many irregular verbs that must have described how uncomfortable the bearskin was for the soldier. I also remember the young man who leases his soul to the Devil not as a soldier but as a profligate who wakes up after a bender to find himself in dire straits, and this is truly his motivating factor. I was so certain that this was the case that I complained to the professor about the Bearskin’s supposed conversion. He was paying people to pray for him, I argued. He didn’t make any essential changes in his own thought or nature. The instructor laughed, as he would many more times with me, because he served as an advisor on other translation projects I worked on, and to which I added far more errors than I ever did with “The Bearskin.”

German is a language I have studied for many years, and both my memory and my initial understanding of “The Bearskin” are tied up in that experience. My grandfather and uncle, with whom I briefly lived while in high school, both spoke German, and the language was their go-to code when they were deciding how to discipline me for some adolescent infraction. I thought if I could learn it, I could figure out what they were saying. I still have no idea what they were planning. That also seems appropriate, considering the Job-like tests they put me through, although they were only Job-like because of my limited perspective.  

  

Now that I have given myself permission to think about the story in English, I can see how ingeniously it was put together, for the Devil and the soldier reverse roles toward the end of the story, when Bearskin demands penance from the Devil. But crime does not pay in fairy tales; it doesn’t pay for Rumplestiltskin, for example, and the new family created in the process of the Bearskin’s rebirth cannot live happily ever after without some sacrifice. This back-and-forth seems to be a reflection of the language that bore this story, with its flexible syntax, but only to a point: the action, or the verb, always has the same position in a sentence. And the Devil always wins. 

Bruno Bettlelheim, in his introduction to The Uses of Enchantment, argues that religious motifs and morals have always been a part of fairy tales; Jack Zipes, in his introduction to Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, blames conservative religious forces for sanitizing fairy tales as early as the 17^th century.  Nevertheless, the warnings of “The Bearskin” are unmistakably grounded in Christianity, given its plot, and it lends a theological interpretation to tales such as “Cinderella.’’ In light of “The Bearskin,’’ Cinderella’s makeover at the hands of the Fairy Godmother is as joyous as an Easter resurrection. Together with “The Cat-Skin,’’ these fairy tales demonstrate the gamut of the possibilities in the rebirthing process: from poor to rich; from rich to poor; maddeningly temporary or rewardingly permanent.  (The story bears, for lack of a better word, other striking similarities to “The Cat-Skin;’’ the retreat into an animal identity for the protagonist, and the contrivance of jewelry, hidden in food or drink, to reverse that identity back to a worthy human one again.)

I am particularly impressed by the religious nature of this tale, given my early education within the wallet of Walt Disney, who did not care to muddy his profit margin with tenants of charity and self-sacrifice. Yet at the same time, “The Bearskin” is deterministic, or fatalistic, in its faith that the Devil can work his way around the most valiant of men. There is no God in this text, or at least not an explicit God who extends a visible and helping hand to one of his flock. The only assistance he has, he finds from other imperfect humans like himself. Man is on his own here. The soldier saves himself, which some might argue makes “The Bearskin” fulfill an essential function of a fairy tale: showing the powerless or marginalized a path to power, or at least one out of the peril they thought they could not escape. 

I have my daughter, a voracious consumer of science fiction and urban fantasy books, television, and movies, to thank for explaining the story’s discomfiting end.   When someone is rescued from Hell, she said, that person has to be replaced by another soul, to maintain the balance between worlds. So of course the Devil, after losing possession of the soldier’s soul, would attempt to replace it—if not improve on his investment.         

For close to two decades I have been turning “The Bearskin” over in my mind, so much so that I have made it the centerpiece of the next modern fairy tale I hope to write. So perhaps this tale is not quite finished, after all. 

Jane Rosenberg LaForge lives and writes in New York City. She is the author of "An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir'' (Jaded Ibis Press 2014); three chapbooks of poetry, and one full-length poetry collection, "With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women" (The Aldrich Press 2012). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous online and print journals, such as THRUSH, Fruita Pulp and The Linnet's Wings; and she has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. More information is available at jane-rosenberg-laforge.com.



Picture credits:

Bearskin - Arthur Rackham
Bearskin - Louis Rhead
Bearskin - John Gruelle

THE BREMEN TOWN MUSICIANS

by Leslie Wilson

When my novel Last Train from Kummersdorf  was published, my brother read it and then said to me: ‘It’s not at all a realistic novel, is it?’ And indeed, it isn’t, though I’m not sure how many people have noticed.

It is a novel very much in the German tradition: and at first glance it is close to other German novels and short stories about the Second World War and ‘Die Flucht’ – which means ‘The Flight’, meaning the escape from the advancing Russian army. Most of these are realist. But as I wrote it I knew I was in the German romantic/gothic tradition, like Storm’s Schimmelreiter (The Rider on the White Horse), or Gotthelf’s The Black Spider. Less unequivocally so, perhaps, than Grass’s Tin Drum. (A novel which made it hard, at first, to write Kummersdorf, because Grass seemed to have said it all so brilliantly.) But then I began to see that I had things to say that hadn’t already been said, and dared to go forward.

That tradition is deeply rooted in folklore, and so am I. Like Susan Price, I spent years and years of my childhood reading folktales from all over the world. But it was when I was doing my degree in German that I read the whole way through the three-volume 1900 jubilee edition of Grimm that I was lucky enough to be given in childhood – and, like Susan Price, found my mind going clicketty-clack, categorising the stories, seeing that certain basic plots came up over and over again, with variations – and once a motif from the Nibelungenlied, the medieval Lay of the Nibelungs, in The Two Brothers: the sword put between a man masquerading as his twin brother and his sister-in-law when they have to sleep together. Siegfried puts a sword between himself and Brünhilde when he beds her in the guise of his brother-in-law-to be, Gunther. Maybe the Nibelungenlied draws from popular folklore, maybe the folk story has picked up part of the epic. In any case, it was deeply important to me to read the collection then, one of those things that one knows one has to do, even if one doesn’t know why. What it taught me is what others have said before me: there are only a limited amount of plots. The other realisation was also important: that stories are interdependent and feed each other. When – many years later - I started to write Kummersdorf, I quickly realised the influence, in my story, of The Bremen Town Musicians. 

 

The Brothers Grimm were undoubtedly motivated by a desire to establish an authentic ‘German’ voice; a project rooted in the dubious one of German unification by force, rather than through the liberal impulse of revolution. That hope was dashed in 1948. As for the ‘authentic German voice’, that was a stupid idea. Folktales are international; carried along trade routes, they flit from country to country. Some of the Grimm stories came from Perrault. Maybe nursemaids picked them up in the houses of the francophile German aristocracy and middle class, and took them back into their own humble homes to tell to their own children. At that point other motifs infiltrated them, which is why Aschenputtel is different from Cendrillon. The other thing that the Grimm brothers did was to edit the stories – but I am quite certain that they still retain much of the authentic vernacular voice. 

I think the value of myth and fairy stories is that they mitigate the dreadful things that happen to human beings. Stories of heroes, of magical rescues, of the world turned upside down, give us courage to face a harsh world. The savagery of the revenge sometimes taken expresses people’s deep inner anger; an anger too often bitten back in a world where injustice and callous exploitation were – and still are - rife.  The Bremen Town Musicians is about old animals, worked-out, threatened with various brutal ends because they’re no use to their masters any longer. They find a robbers’ house in the forest and frighten the robbers away from it and their booty simply by making their various noises – music, according to them – so then they are able to live at their ease for the rest of their lives. I think the story reflects the reality of the lives of story-telling grandparents, who were similarly regarded as useless – except to keep the children quiet. It’s a story about Grey Power. Or just about the powerless who manage – just for once – to turn the tables. And, significantly, when the robber comes back to see if the band can repossess their house, the voice that finally terrorises him is that of the cockerel who he interprets as a judge’s voice, calling out: ‘Bring the rogue to me!’

Last Train from Kummersdorf is about civilians, and civilians who end up facing the incoming army. As a child, I always noticed the value that’s placed in wartime on soldiers’ lives over those of civilians. I resented it, because from an early age I’d heard from my mother just what defeat means. When the soldiers are dead, it’s the old people, the youngsters and children who are in the front line. Many of the Russian soldiers entering Germany in 1945 behaved the way conquering soldiers have always done. They behaved that way even in the Slav countries they came to first, so it wasn’t, as many people have said, just a revenge-taking for the dreadful things the German soldiers had done in Russia. Members of the Red Army raped, tortured, murdered and looted, with Stalin’s blessing. The innocent suffered along with the guilty. ‘Deutsche Frau ist deutsche Frau,’ a Russian soldier said when it was pointed out to him that the woman he was about to rape was Jewish. ‘German woman is German woman.’ My mother got away from a Russian by the skin of her teeth, ran away into the forest and the mountains and almost died there. That, along with the expulsion of many of her family from their homes in Silesia, is the ‘core narrative’ I was working with.

If you sleep rough, it very quickly starts to do things to your perception of reality: dossers and refugees live a different kind of reality from ours, in our houses, where we can shut the door on danger. I think when you’re in constant danger of your life, then some fundamental, mythic perceptions probably kick in. My mother, wandering the mountains in April, was living out a fundamental folkloric story of pursuit, only it was Russian soldiers, rather than enraged witches, she was escaping from. Hanno and Effi, in Kummersdorf,  are trying to escape from the Russians too, but they have a Quest, too: to get to the West, where the boy Hanno’s mother is, and where the girl Effi is firmly convinced she’ll find her father. The teenagers pick up other people, rag-tag refugees; it was at that point that I said to myself: ‘This story is like The Bremen Town Musicians!’

 

But my refugees don’t find the baddies in a house: the baddies are on the run, too, and the kids pick some of them up and have to schlepp them along willy-nilly; the old crazy doctor who’s murdered disabled children in the ‘euthanasia’ programme; the rabid Nazi police officer who nurses a strange hatred for the boy Hanno. But there’s someone else: the little man Sperling (which means sparrow) with his dog Cornelius and his magic cart which he makes over to the kids after a Russian air attack kills him. When the kids play a game with the railway tickets in the cart, when Effi teases the adults with the fantasy they’ve cooked up – when suddenly the other refugees start believing the alluring fantasy of a train that can carry them out of danger – this is story taking people over, altering their perceptions of reality. And the train itself, when it half-magically appears, becomes a location where the truth comes out about the refugees’ pasts. Though it’s no means of escape for them, so the story doesn’t end there.

My novel, like so many fairy-tales, and especially the Musicians, takes place in the German ‘Wald’, the forest, the location where so many German folk tales play off. I knew the German forest from an early age, though not the Brandenburg forest of the novel. My grandfather had a house on the eastern shore of the Rhine. My brother and I used to go off into the Wald­ and explore it, but it felt dangerous; full of wild boar for one thing, who might attack us in the breeding season. Once, when I was a baby, my mother was on her own in the house at night – my grandparents had gone out together – and she heard a snuffling and thumping against the door, a huge animal apparently trying to break in. She was terrified. In the morning, there was blood on the grass outside, and the adults realised it must have been a wounded boar. It wasn’t really a danger to us, of course, but the story of that inchoate menace in the night coming out of the Wald  stayed with me. When the stags were rutting, the clash of their antlers echoed and filled the valley in front of the house; they were almost as loud as thunderclaps.

The road from Opa’s house led to a little clearing in the woods where a flame flickered, day and night. I was told that a child had been lost out there once, and its desperate mother promised the Virgin Mary that if her child was found, she’d set a flame there to burn to help other travellers who might be lost. The flame marked the place where the child was safely found. I don’t know if it’s still there. I can picture it now, at a place where two paths met, in a part of the forest planted with conifers; the dusty path scattered with needle-mess and resinous cones, and the dimness among the trees. Mirkwood. The forest went on and on, it seemed enormous. I knew the witches and wolves and robbers were in there; you only had to go far enough. And so it became part of my psyche and so I had to write about it.

Leslie Wilson grew up bilingual, the daughter of a German mother and an English father, and some of the events in her first YA book, ‘Last Train from Kummersdorf’ stem from her mother’s traumatic wartime experiences, from which, in part, her writing derives its emotional truth.  Shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, the novel is set in 1945. On the run from the advancing Russian army, two young people, Effi and Hanno, become companions on the road, teaming up to defend and help each other from the many dangers they meet along the way. 

Leslie is additionally the author of two novels for adults: 'Malefice', a novel of the English witchhunt, published in 1991, and 'The Mountain of Immoderate Desires', which won the Southern Arts Prize in 1997.  Her most recent young adult novel, 'Saving Rafael' (2009) was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Lancashire and the Southern Schools book awards. ‘Saving Rafael’ opens grimly in ‘Uckermark Girls’ Concentration Camp, Spring 1944’, where the heroine, Jenny, has been sent. She herself is not Jewish, but she’s in love with her long-term best friend Rafael, who is – and the book heartbreakingly and nail-bitingly describes her and her family’s increasingly desperate and forlorn attempt to protect their old friends and neighbours. I asked Leslie if she could see any fairytale motifs in this book too, and she answered that maybe it is a bit like the stories of girls who undergo hideous sufferings to save their enchanted lovers or husbands – like ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’. 

Illustrations:

The Bremen Town Musicians: black and white illustration from book of Grimm's fairytales in Leslie Wilson's possession.  Watercolour illustration by Ruth Koser-Michaels, from 'Marchen der Bruder Grimm' 1937, Droemer Knaur, in Katherine Langrish's possession.

[The translation of the German gothic script in the illustration is: "into the room, so that the windowpanes rattled.  The robbers leapt up at the ghastly racket, and were convinced that a ghost was coming in: terrified, they ran out of the house into the forest.  Now the four companions sat down at the table, helped themselves to what was left of the feast, and ate as if they were getting ready for a four weeks fast. When the four musicians had finished, the extinguished the light..."]