The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  Carrying a big sack of salt, man and dog—Ring holding onto the tail of the dog—laboriously climbed the steep mountain and with difficulty arrived at the top. They found a cave, and looking through the opening, they discerned four giants sleeping around a fire, over which boiled a pot of groats. Swiftly they dumped the salt into the pot. When the giants awoke, they fell greedily on their meal, but after a few mouthfuls the giant-mother, who was terrible to look at, roared with thirst and begged her daughter to fetch water. The daughter agreed only on condition that she should have the shining gold. After a furious scene, the giant-mother relinquished it to her. When the daughter did not return, the old woman sent her son, who first wangled from her the golden clothes and then was drowned in the same manner. The ruse also worked with the husband, who took with him the golden chessboard, the only difference being that the old man rose again as a ghost and had to be finally beaten down. The prince and Snati-Snati then faced the terrible witch-giantess and, as Snati-Snati pointed out, no weapon could penetrate her; she could only be killed with the cooked groats and a red-hot iron. When the witch saw the dog in the entrance to the cave, she croaked, “Oh, it is you and Prince Ring who have killed my family!” They joined in a desperate struggle, and she was brought to her death. After burning the corpses, Ring and Snati-Snati returned with the treasures, and Prince Ring became engaged to the king’s daughter.

  On the evening before the marriage the dog begged to exchange places with Ring, with the result that he slept in Ring’s bed and Ring slept on the floor. During the night, Rauder, intent on murdering Ring, stealthily entered the room with a drawn sword and approached the bed, but as he raised his arm, Snati-Snati leaped up and bit off his right hand. In the morning, before the king, Rauder accused Ring of having wantonly attacked him. Then Ring produced the severed hand still gripping the sword, and the king thereupon had his minister hanged.

  Ring married the princess, and on the wedding night Snati-Snati was allowed to lie at the foot of the bed. In the night he regained his true form, that of a king’s son also named Ring. His stepmother had changed him into a dog, and he could only be redeemed by sleeping at the foot of the bed of a king’s son. The hind with the golden ring, the woman on the beach, and the formidable witch-giantess were in reality different guises of his stepmother, who wished at any price to prevent his redemption.

  This tale opens with the image of a prince hunting. Many fairy tales—more than half, in fact—have to do with members of a royal family; in the others, the heroes are ordinary people such as poor peasants, millers, deserters, and so on. But in our story the main figure represents a future king; that is, a still unconscious element which is capable of becoming a new collective dominant and which will make possible a deeper understanding of the Self.

  The prince chases a deer that has a golden ring between its horns. The Greek parallel to this is the Kerynitic hind with golden antlers, sacred to Artemis, which Hercules pursued for a year but was not allowed to kill.30 In one version of the myth, he finally finds her in the Hesperides under the apple trees, which bestow eternal youth. Artemis, the famous huntress, is often transformed into a deer; in other words, the hunter and the hunted are secretly identical.

  The hind frequently shows the way or finds the most advantageous point for the crossing of a river. On the other hand, she sometimes lures the hero to disaster or even to death by leading him over a precipice or into the sea or a swamp. She can also nurture an orphan or an abandoned child. The stag often carries a ring or a precious cross between his horns, or he may have golden horns. (By depicting a hind with horns our fairy tale indicates that the deer is feminine—an anima motif—and at the same time assigns horns to her as a masculine trait, thereby implying that this is a hermaphroditic being which unites the elements of the anima and the shadow.) A medieval tradition tells that when the stag feels old, he first eats a snake and then swallows enough water to drown it; at the same time, however, the snake poisons him, and the stag must shed his antlers to rid himself of the poison. Once the poison is gone, he may grow new horns. “Therefore,” a Father of the Church declares, “the stag knows the secret of self-renewal; he sheds his antlers, and thus should we learn to shed our pride.” The shedding of the antlers is probably the natural basis of all of the mythological transformation attributes of the deer. In medieval medicine, the bone in the heart of the deer was thought to be beneficial for heart trouble.

  To sum up, the deer symbolizes an unconscious factor which shows the way that leads to a crucial event, either toward rejuvenation (that is, a change in the personality or in the beloved) or into the Beyond (i.e., the Hesperides)—or even to death. Furthermore, the deer is a bearer of light and of mandala symbols (the circle and the cross). Like Mercurius or Hermes, the deer seems to be a typical psychopomp—a guide into the unconscious. Functioning as a bridge to the deeper regions of the psyche, it is a content of the unconscious which attracts consciousness and leads it to new knowledge and new discoveries. As the instinctive wisdom that resides in man’s nature, the deer exerts a strong fascination and represents that unknown psychic factor which endows all images with meaning. Its death aspect arises when consciousness has a negative attitude toward it; such an attitude forces the unconscious into a destructive role.

  In our tale the deer bears a ring on its horns, and the king’s son is called Ring, thereby revealing that the stag carries an essential component of the prince’s own nature—namely, his undomesticated, instinctive side. Together they are the complementary sides of that psychic entity of which the prince is the anthropomorphic aspect. At first he is an aimless hunter, having not yet discovered his individual forms of realization. Incomplete, he represents merely the possibility of becoming conscious, and therefore he has to find his own opposite in the same way that the stag in the allegory swallows and integrates its opposite in the form of the snake (in some versions, a toad). It is therefore understandable that the deer possesses the secret of the prince’s renewal and completion—the golden ring, which is a symbol of wholeness.

  The prince goes hunting in the woods—that is, in the unconscious realm—and gets lost in a fog, so that vision is dim and all boundaries are wrapped in mist. Losing his comrades means isolation and the loneliness typical of the journey into the unconscious. The center of interest has shifted from the outer world to the inner, but the inner world is still completely unintelligible. At this stage, the unconscious seems senseless and bewildering.

  The deer leads the prince to a beach where an evil woman sits hunched over a barrel. The object of fascination, the ring, has apparently been cast into the barrel by the hind. The ring is a symbol of the Self, especially as a factor that creates relatedness; it means the completion of the inner essential being, and this is what the prince is seeking. Pursuing the golden ring and led by the attraction of the deer, the prince falls into the hands of a witch, who, as we learn later, is Snati-Snati’s stepmother. In masculine psychology the stepmother is a symbol of the unconscious in its destructive role—of its disturbing and devouring character.

  He plunges into the cask after the ring. The stepmother swiftly shuts the cask and rolls it into the sea, a seeming misfortune which turns out to be fortunate because he is thrown onto an island where he finds Snati-Snati, his magic double and helpful companion. Thus the stepmother has an equivocal character: with one hand she destroys and with the other she leads to fulfillment. Being the frightful mother, she represents a natural resistance that blocks the development of higher consciousness, a resistance that calls forth the hero’s best qualities. In other words, by persecuting him, she helps him. As the king’s second wife, the stepmother is, in a way, a false wife, and since she belongs to the old system that the king represents, she must stand for the dull, leaden unconsciousness which accompanies ancestral social institutions and which works against the tendency to develop a new state of consciousness. This stubbornly negative unconsciousness has the shadow of the prince in thrall.

  When the
hero is set adrift in the cask, the cask is the vessel that sustains him upon the waters, and in this aspect it is motherly and protective; moreover, it allows the water currents to bear him to the intended place. Looked at negatively, however, it denotes a regression into the womb and is a prison that isolates him. In this image the confusion and feeling of being lost and unable to find a way out suggested by the motif of the fog are intensified. On the plane of psychological reality this can be interpreted as a state of possession by an archetype—in this case, a state of possession by the mother. One can say that Prince Ring is now under the spell of a negative mother-image which seeks to cut him off from life and to swallow him.

  The cask corresponds to the whale in the story of Jonah, and the prince’s traveling in it is a typical night-sea journey; it is, in other words, a state of transition in which the hero is enclosed in the mother-image as in a vessel. But the cask not only imprisons the hero; it also prevents him from being drowned. This can be compared to a neurosis, which tends to isolate the individual and in that way to protect him. The condition of neurotic loneliness is positive when it protects the growth of a new possibility of life. It can be a stage of incubation which aims at the inner completion of a more real and more definitely shaped conscious personality. This is the meaning of the cask for Prince Ring.

  Like the cask, the island is another symbol of isolation. It is generally a magic realm inhabited by otherworldly figures, and on this island there are giants. Islands often harbor projections of the unconscious psychic sphere; for instance, there are islands of the dead, and in The Odyssey the imprisoning nymph Calypso, the “veiled one,” and the sorceress Circe both live on islands, and in a way both are goddesses of death. In our story the island is not the hero’s goal but another stage in the transition. In the sea of the unconscious the island represents a split-off portion of the conscious psyche (as we know, beneath the sea, islands are usually connected with the mainland), and here the island represents an autonomous complex, quite apart from the ego, with a kind of intelligence of its own. Magnetic and evasive, it is a little island of consciousness, and its effect can be subtle and insidious.

  Undeveloped people frequently have incongruous and quite separate complexes that almost jostle one another: for instance, incompatible Christian and pagan concepts which are not recognized as being mutually contradictory. The complex builds up its own field of “consciousness” apart from the original field, where the old viewpoint still prevails, and it is as if each is an independent island of consciousness with its own harbors and traffic.

  On this island dwell giants. Giants are characterized only by their size and have a close relation to natural phenomena; in folk belief, for example, thunder is thought to be giants bowling or to be the resounding blows of storm-giants hammering; erratic stone formations are composed of stones tossed by giants in play, and fog appears when the giantesses hang up their washing. There are different families of giants: storm-giants, earth-giants, and so on. Mythologically, giants often appear as the “older people” in creation, a race that has died out: “There were giants in the earth in those days” (Gen. 6:4). In some cosmogonies they are featured as the forerunners of human beings who did not make the grade; for instance, in the Edda, Sutr, the giant, is portrayed with a sword which separates the opposite poles, fire and ice, and the Edda goes on to tell of the creation of the giant Ymir from the mixture of these opposites. (Then Ymir was butchered, and dwarfs emerged as worms from his entrails.) The Greek giants are the Titans who rebelled against Zeus and were slain by his lightning. In the Orphic tradition men issued from the smoke of their burned flesh. Or the giants became drunk with hubris and were therefore destroyed by the gods; and then men inherited their earth. Giants, therefore, are a supernatural race, older and only half human. They represent emotional factors of crude force, factors which have not yet emerged into the realm of human consciousness. Giants possess enormous strength and are renowned for their stupidity. They are easy to deceive and a prey to their own affects, and therefore helpless for all their might. The powerful emotional impulses they stand for are still rooted in archetypal subsoil, and when one falls victim to such boundless impulses, one is wild, overpowered, beside oneself, berserk—and one is as stupid as a giant; one may display gigantic strength and afterward collapse. In happier circumstances, one may be inspired and transported, as in the stories of saints who were helped by giants to build a church in a single night. This would be the positive harnessing of such untamed, half-conscious emotions; then, in a white heat, man can accomplish a great task.

  On the island lives a married giant couple. At the beginning of the tale, the prince’s parents were not mentioned; that is, the image of the parents was missing—an unusual lacuna in a fairy tale—and therefore the giants are probably the energic equivalent, an archaic form of the parents. Since the king and queen are not present and the giants take over their role, there is no longer a ruling principle in consciousness, and it has therefore regressed into its archaic form. There is always a dominating force of some sort, and if the ruling and guiding principle wavers, then there is a throwback to earlier ways. For instance, in Switzerland the ideal of freedom was revered as a mystical bride—the ideal of social coherence without constraint—and whenever there is a threat from without, this ideal is quickened again. But in peaceful times it slips from people’s grasp and they revive instead the idea of political associations. A similar state of affairs prevails now in the world at large, where giants—uncontrolled collective, emotional forces—lord it over the earth. Society is unconsciously led by primitive and archaic principles.

  In the kitchen of the giant couple, Ring finds the dog called Snati-Snati, who is the complementary other side of the hero. Historically, the kitchen was the center of the house and was therefore the place of the house cults. The house gods were placed on the kitchen stove and in prehistoric times the dead were buried under the hearth. As the place where food is chemically transformed, the kitchen is analogous to the stomach. It is the center of emotion in its searing and consuming aspect and in its illuminating and warming function, both of which show that the light of wisdom only comes out of the fire of passion. When the dog is in the kitchen, this means that he represents a complex whose activity reveals itself especially in the emotional sphere.

  Snati-Snati is guarded by the giants both as a sort of secret and as a sort of son. The forbidden room with its frightful secret is a widespread motif. In such a room something uncanny and formidable is usually kept, and this again represents a complex which is completely repressed and closed off—something incompatible with the attitude of consciousness. Because of this one is reluctant to approach the forbidden room, but at the same time one is fascinated and wants to enter it.

  Often the figure in the forbidden room gets into a rage when someone enters; that is, the complex also opposes the opening of the door. The incompatibility sets up a resistance on both sides against being made conscious, with the result that they repel each other like two particles of the same electricity. It can therefore be said that the repression is an energic process supported from both sides. (Many psychological phenomena are best explained by assuming that psychical life has characteristics analogous to events in physics. Jung examines this analogy in detail in his essays “On the Nature of Dreams” and “On Psychic Energy.”31

  In our tale the dog responds at once to Ring’s approach. He is neither a monster nor a god but stands in a good relation to man except for the fact that he is unnaturally far away from the hero. That the giants do not object to Ring’s taking away the dog—that is, his easy assimilation of the contents represented by the dog—shows that there is no resistance on the part of the unconscious, and this—the fact that there is no great tension between human consciousness and the world of the instincts—gives a rough idea of the date of this tale; namely, soon after the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity, between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

  The hero and the dog
travel to the mainland to the palace of a king, and Snati-Snati tells the prince to ask for a room in the palace for the winter. Here the king, his daughter, and the perfidious Rauder (or Raut) dwell. It should be noted that this king, not the real father of Ring, is the father of the anima and that the mother is missing—a lack that connects with the fact that both Ring and the dog are under the influence of a negative mother-image. Moreover, the precious treasures that belong to this king are no longer with him but are hoarded by a baneful giant-mother who lives with her family on a mountain.

  The minister Rauder (often called Rot or Rothut—Red or Red Hat—names that hint at the violence of his emotions) is a figure frequently found in northern fairy tales. (Cf. Grimm’s “Ferdinand the Faithful and Ferdinand the Unfaithful,” wherein the shadow figure advises the king what the hero, his double should do.) This slanderer at the king’s court is a destructive aspect of the hero’s shadow—a disturbing function that sows enmity and discord. Because Prince Ring is too passive and too good, Rauder represents his as yet unassimilated dark emotions and impulses—jealousy, hatred, and murderous passion. But this evil minister has an essential function, for he creates the tasks whereby Ring is able to distinguish himself; he incites the prince to heroic action, and in this way the evil shadow has a positive value and a luciferian lightbringing quality. He is a driving force in the unconscious, which is evil only insofar as its function is not understood and which is effaced as soon as the hero wins the daughter and the kingdom. For the dark shadow to lose its power as soon as the hero triumphs is a typical dénouement. He would be superfluous if the hero were energetic and equal to performing his tasks. Like Mephisto for Faust, Rauder is unwittingly an instrument of growth for Ring.