I kept going back and forth between which topic to talk about this week.
My first thought was DRAGONS as we had our first dragon story in the Grimm collection. But it was the first, so I have nothing else to compare it to yet.
And given that Easter is next weekend, I decided on death and RESURRECTION in fairy tales.
Now, this was not a topic I especially expected to read about in Grimm, other than Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. In those stories, the characters weren’t actually dead, but in some kind of magical stasis. I want to say, starting with Faithful John, we’ve had several stories of dead characters come back to life.
*Spoilers*
In one of this week’s stories, The Two Brothers, a rather shocking beheading takes place when the huntsman hero, having slain the dragon, is betrayed. An ambitious marshal cuts off our hero’s head while he is sleeping.
Later, a magic root is retrieved to restore his head. Tossing in some humor, his head is put on backwards. When discovered, is CHOPPED OFF AGAIN, and then put back on the correct way and healed again. (What!?!)
For some reason—maybe I’m getting used to chopped up body parts—this scene was not disturbing to me. (And later in the story this same huntsman gets jealous and chops off his innocent brother’s head…and then restores him to life with the magic root.)
So, what does all this mean? What is with the cutting off of heads only to magically put them back on again? Seems to me that modern readers might wonder about this—the intricacies of the spinal cord? The arteries? How does this work? What about all the blood loss? Etc.
An attempt at a quick Google search sent me down the path of nowhere.
Seems everyone wants to talk about how gross these bits are, but not why they are in the stories.
So, let’s compare to the ultimate resurrection, that of Jesus, and see if there are parallels.
What is the resurrection of Jesus Christ all about?
-victory over death
-final sacrifice for sin
-ultimate power
-new life
-innocence killed and then restored
Hmm. Any parallels here?
Victory over death. Innocent life restored.
I’m going to have to think about this some more and come back to this post. (It’s been a busy week, and I suspect this is a weighty topic that needs more attention than I’ve been able to give it. Maybe I should have stuck with dragons!)
Note: I asked an innocent bystander for his opinion on the particular symbolism in the story, and he suggested that maybe the marshal just wanted to make sure the huntsman wouldn’t come after him for stealing the princess away. Fair enough.
As far as how I see this week’s method of death and resurrection, my concern is that acts such as the chopping off of heads and restoring with a root would pull the modern reader out of the fictional dream. May I suggest that we find other means of mortally wounding our characters, ones that can be reversed more easily. Like poison. And then we can keep the root, because that would totally make sense.
