Fundevogel

That bird that found Fundevogel, stole him from his mother, and left him in the top of a tree, has been much in my mind since I mentioned it in my last posting.

Birds are apt symbols for ideas, because they are quick, have good eyesight, travel far, can be beautiful yet bad, sound good, disappear quickly, soar into the heavens or fall to earth. I usually take them in dreams as well as mythology and fairy tales to stand for ideas.

The Grimms' Fundevogel makes immediate, profound and liberating sense to me if I take the symbols in the story the same way as I would take them in my dreams. But when I read the story from the points of view of, say, Bettelheim or Tatar, it does nothing for me at all. Bettleheim feels like psychoanalysis and Tatar feels like ambition. I see the big-beaked bird before my eyes that stole Fundevogel in the first place! I know that most reviewers differ from me on this, but the point of the story is, isn't it, that we have to respect and to integrate what we feel with our thought? It seems to me that unless we take such stories the same way we take our own dreams, we mutilate them.

Fundevogel, in the Grimms' story of that name represents to me the part of us that is more intellectual than earthy. He was taken to the top of a tree, the tree being seen as branching knowledge that goes quite high up in the air, far from its roots. A bird with a sharp beak took him by force or stealth away from mother earth, in the way that can happen under certain circumstances. The forester hears the cry of pain, brings Fundevogel back down to earth, as we might expect from someone who is in touch with nature and the woods of the unconscious. Fundevogel then integrates with the child of the forester, the two vowing three times to be friends with each other forever:

“Lina said to Fundevogel, 'Do not forsake me, and I will never forsake you.' And Fundevogel answered, 'I will never forsake you as long as I live.'”

It sounds like the alchemical marriage doesn't it? - the integration of the earthy and intellectual parts of our full selves. There follow three adventures of Lina and Fundevogel in which they are seen as the rosebud on the rosebush, the chandelier in the church, and the duck in the pond. These images are obviously, plainly, about such integration. And the story ends with the sentence: “Then the children went home together as happy as possible, and if they are not dead yet, then they are still alive.”

A note: I am very pleased to find that my blogs have a substantial readership in Germany, more than any other country except the USA, and I wonder if one or two of my German readers could kindly recommend to me a German-language edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen Der Brüder Grimm. I can see that the stories are best read in German and I have this vision that one of my German readers has a favorite edition, perhaps with illustrations, that he or she warmly remembers from of old. If so, please leave me a recommendation in the comments box below or send me an email at valdemarparadise@gmail.com. Thank you -