I read an English translation of The Golden Bird as recorded by The Brothers Grimm (you can read it here) and found it fascinating. You need to read that text before you read this analysis. Here is what I understood.
Old parables present multiple choices as different people of the same gender. In The Golden Bird there are three brothers and those brothers represent the choice in the story. The story tells us which brother to be, how to be that brother, and why to be that brother.
The first brother attacks the fox and ignores the fox’s advice. As a result, he pursues pleasure in the nice inn and achieves nothing. Eventually, he becomes a robber. He temporarily acquires the golden bird, golden horse, and beautiful princess. But he is found out and finally loses everything.
The second brother doesn’t attack the fox and appears to listen to it. However, he succumbs to the peer pressure of the first brother and ends with the same fate.
The third brother listens to the fox and is kind to it. As a result, the fox carries him to the village with two inns. There the third brother ignores everything. He blindly follows the fox’s advice. At this point the third brother becomes the main character in the story.
The story now presents us with four situations where the fox tells the third brother what to do, the brother goes into the situation intending to do what the fox instructed, and the brother does something else instead with terrible consequences. One time the third brother ignores the fox due to aesthetics (“droll thing to bring away such a fine bird in this shabby cage”), one time due to a sense of fairness (the horse deserves a better saddle), one time due to compassion (the princess is crying), and one time due to family (his brothers plight). There is only one character in the story at this point and we have left the other two brothers behind. The story is not presenting a choice here-it is simply a description of the situations in which the third brother is unable to follow the directions of the fox.
It seems that the third brother is in a terrible position due to ignoring the fox, but the fox tells him to sleep and solves his problems. The fox directs the third brother to gain the beautiful princess, golden horse and golden bird. The third brother is actually stealing these items, but I don’t think that is important.
As a side note, gold in this story represents desire. And there is a bit of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here. First you want the apple (food? wisdom?), then you will want the bird (wealth?), then the horse (strength? power?), then the princess (love? procreation?). Each king wants the next, but the third brother can have them all by heeding the fox.
The third brother heeds the fox once more and becomes the king. At this point we can safely say that he has everything he could desire.
This story wants us to listen to the fox. The fox will bring us everything we desire and will help us avoid bad outcomes. The fox represents our intellect and logic. When we listen to it we can achieve everything we desire. When we do not listen we pursue what gives us pleasure or follow others and that leads down a dark road. But there are some situations where we will not listen to the fox and this story gives us some tools to understand when we will and when we will not.
As another side note the fox tells the third brother to go to sleep when he is faced with an impossible task When he wakes the task is complete. This means we should sleep on a problem if it feels impossible and our logic and intellect will work as we sleep.
Everything seems very tidy with this interpretation until the end of the story when the fox asks the third brother to kill him and cut off his head and feet. When the third brother does so the fox turns into the princess’s brother who had been “lost a great many many years”. In this case, cutting off the head and feet of the fox can be taken to mean “removing all identifying elements.” Maybe this means the body of our intellect comes from others? Let me know what you think!
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