There are dozens of ways to define the fairy tale—just ask a folklorist. But perhaps the quickest way to get to the heart of what fairy tales really are is to think of them as stories of transformation. Sometimes, these transformations are social and political: Cinder girls become princesses and paupers become kings. But often, these transformations are visceral and literal:
Disobedient girls are transformed by witches into fire; beasts and frogs become princes; cats turn into queens. In fairy tales, nothing is ever entirely fixed and everything is possible.
An especially fertile subset of these fairy tales of physical transformation are the tales of magical birds. Birds feature heavily in fairy tales in general—they famously help guide Hansel and Gretel through the forest and tattle on Cinderella’s treacherous stepsisters.
There’s a rich tradition of bird transformation that runs through fairy tales, from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans” to the traditional Japanese story “The Crane Wife.” Here are some of our favorites from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s fairy-tale collection:
“The Singing Springing Lark” This one is a variation of “Beauty and the Beast” with strong similarities to “East of the Sun, West of the Moon.” The Beauty character happily marries the Beast, who is a handsome prince by night and a lion by day. After years of marriage, “a ray from a burning light” accidentally falls upon the Beast, and he is transformed into a dove for seven years. When Beauty finds him in his new shape, he tells her (through his little bird beak), “For seven years I must fly about into the world.
Every seven steps I will let fall a drop of red blood and a white feather. These will show you the way, and if you follow this trail you can redeem me.” She follows him and has many adventures, including getting advice from both the sun and the moon. The tale ends when she rescues her husband from the house of a sorcerer on the back of a griffin, and then they go back to living happily ever after.
“The Juniper Tree” If you don’t already know this one, buckle up, because it’s pretty macabre. “The Juniper Tree” is a male Snow White story (seriously, it starts with a woman wishing “If only I had a child as red as blood and as white as snow”) in which the Snow White figure, a young boy, is murdered by his stepmother. The stepmother then cooks the boy into a pie, which she feeds to his father in a stew. The boy’s little sister, Marlene, is horrified, and she gathers up his bones and lays them beneath the juniper tree in their courtyard. And then this happens: “Then the juniper tree began to move.
The branches moved apart, then moved together again, just as if someone were rejoicing and clapping his hands. At the same time a mist seemed to rise from the tree, and in the center of this mist it burned like a fire, and a beautiful bird flew out of the fire singing magnificently, and it flew high into the air, and when it was gone, the juniper tree was just as it had been before, and the cloth with the bones was no longer there.” The bird then proceeds to fly around the town, singing out the story of what happened to him (“My mother, she killed me; My father, he ate me”) and dropping precious items down upon his father and sister.
Finally, the bird drops a millstone on the stepmother, killing her, bursts into smoke and flames, and then transforms back into a human boy, whereupon he, his sister, and father sit down to dinner. (Note: This is why fairy tales are not for children.)
is why fairy tales are not for children.)
“Jorinde and Joringel” This tale, a story about two lovers overcoming adversity, actually features two bird transformations—or a couple thousand, depending on how you count! Jorinde and Joringel wander into the territory of a witch with an usual hobby: “If any youth came within a hundred paces of the castle, he was obliged to stand still and could not stir from the spot till she set him free, but if a pretty girl came within this boundary, the old enchantress changed her into a bird and shut her up in a wicker cage, which she put in one of the rooms in the castle. She had quite 7,000 of such cages in the castle with very rare birds in them.” While in the form of an owl herself, the witch promptly transforms Jorinde into a nightingale when she wanders too close to the castle.
Joringel must then scour the earth for a magical red flower with a pearl at its
center that will transform her back into his beloved. When he finally comes back with the flower, he must find which of the thousands of transformed birds is Jorinde, and it is only when the witch tries to sneak away with a specific cage that he is able to find the right nightingale. Once Jorinde is transformed back into herself, she and Joringel live happily ever after.
We’re truly only scratching the surface of fairy-tale transformation, but the next time you pick up a fairy-tale collection, keep an eye out for the birds—they’re often the harbingers of the greatest magic!
