The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  In northern countries the pagan layer of the unconscious is still very much alive, and therefore the trolls are depicted as having their midsummer festival at Christmas. When the curious princess gapes at them from the doorway, they seize her head and replace it with the head of a calf. The trolls themselves often have the tails of cows, according to northern folklore, and we may conclude from the transposition of the heads that the princess is assimilated by the trolls; she literally loses her head and becomes possessed by contents of the collective unconscious; she often appears to be completely silly, gauche, and unable to express herself. This happens because her whole feeling life has fallen under the control of dark powers of the unconscious and events are occurring in her inner world which she cannot bring out.

  Shaggy Top is able to outwit the trolls and redeem her sister from this state because she shares the trolls’ nature to a certain extent. Just as Snati-Snati knew better than Ring how to overcome the giants, so Shaggy Top is more than a match for the trolls.

  After Shaggy Top redeems her sister, the story takes an unexpected turn, and instead of sailing for home they continue their journey into a strange kingdom where there are no women, only a widower king and a prince. Since the first court had several women and a barren king, in the second kingdom we find the elements which make up for what was lacking in the first. The two realms are like two compensatory parts of the psyche; incomplete in themselves, they form a totality when put together. It is natural, therefore, that when the king proposes to marry the princess, Shaggy Top should demand the hand of the prince. The double marriage constitutes what Jung calls a marriage quaternity, a foursquare symbol of the Self.44

  Shaggy Top gets redeemed herself not only by assisting at her sister’s wedding (like Snati-Snati again) but by certain questions she induces the prince to ask. This recalls the Parsival saga in which Parsival at first fails to ask the redeeming question, consciousness being still too juvenile to be aware of what is growing in the unconscious toward the light. Shaggy Top is the strong, dynamic factor in the unconscious which compels consciousness to realize that which strives to be realized. Here we have a beautiful example of unconscious nature itself endeavoring to equip the human being to reach a new, higher level of consciousness. The impulse often has its starting point in the source of the shadow and is gradually and fully humanized.

  The general structure of this fairy tale is interesting in its placing of the quaternary systems. We have two groups of four persons. First the king and queen, their adopted child, and her poor friend, whose relations are not harmonious. The helpful intervention of the beggar-woman brings about the coming of the second pair of girls, Shaggy Top and the fair princess, who replace the former children. The disturbing interference of the trolls indicates that this quaternity is still too artificial and too detached from the deep unconscious. When the princess and Shaggy Top marry the king and the prince, they merge into a new quaternity. This new group seems to be a model representation of the Self, like the group of four persons at the close of “Prince Ring.” Here again, the tale opens with a symbol of the Self and culminates in a symbol of the Self, thus representing eternal processes within this nucleus of the collective psyche.

  THE POWER OF THE ANIMUS

  The animus is perhaps less well known in literature than the anima, but in folklore we find many very impressive representations of this archetype. Fairy tales also present patterns that show how a woman can deal with this inner figure in contrast to the man’s way of dealing with the anima. This is not merely a simple reversal. Every step in becoming conscious of the animus is differently characterized. The following tale is a good example of this.

  King Thrushbeard

  A king has a beautiful daughter who mocks all her suitors and will accept no one. One suitor with a pointed chin she mockingly dubs Thrushbeard, with the result that he is known thereafter as King Thrushbeard. Exasperated, the old king declares that he will give her to the first beggar who comes near the court, and he fulfills his threat by wishing her off on a poor fiddler who appears in court and who attracts the king’s attention with his music. [In a variation, the attraction is a golden spinning-wheel.]

  The princess becomes the fiddler’s wife, but she is incapable of doing housework, and her husband is dissatisfied with her. He makes her cook, then weave baskets and spin, all of which tasks she fails at. Then finally she has to sell pottery at the market. One morning a drunken hussar rides over the vessels, and her husband scolds her for the loss. He tells her that she is good for nothing and sends her to the king’s court nearby to be a kitchen-maid.

  One night she furtively watches the dance at the wedding of the prince at that court. The servants throw morsels of food to her, which she hides in her pockets. When she is seen by the prince, who invites her to dance, she blushes and tries to escape and spills the food. He catches her and reveals that he is King Thrushbeard and that it is he who has been masquerading as her beggar-husband, and also as the hussar, in order to break her pride.45

  The name Thrushbeard has affinities with Bluebeard, but Bluebeard is a murderer and nothing more; he cannot transform his wives or be transformed himself. He embodies the deathlike, ferocious aspects of the animus in his most diabolical form; from him only flight is possible. Animi in this guise are often met with in mythology (for example in “Fitcher’s Bird” and “The Robber Bridegroom”).

  This throws into bold relief an important difference between the anima and the animus. Man in his primitive capacity as hunter and warrior is accustomed to kill, and it as if the animus, being masculine, shares this propensity. Woman, on the other hand, serves life, and the anima entangles a man in life. In tales that feature the anima, her completely deadly aspect does not often appear; rather, she is the archetype of life for the man.

  The animus in his negative form seems to be the opposite. He draws woman away from life and murders life for her. He has to do with ghostlands and the land of death. Indeed, he may appear as the personification of death itself, as in the French tale called “The Wife of Death,” which goes as follows:

  A woman rejects all her suitors but accepts Death when he appears. While he is out on his job, she lives in his castle. Her brother comes to see the gardens of Death and they walk about together. Then the brother rescues the girl, taking her back to life, and she discovers that she has been away for five thousand years.46

  A Gypsy variation with the same title goes like this:

  An unknown traveler arrives at the remote hut of a solitary girl. He receives food and lodging for a few days and falls in love with her. They marry, and she dreams that he is white and cold, that he is the King of the Dead. He is then compelled to leave her and resume his mournful trade. When finally he reveals to her that he is Death, she dies from the shock.47

  The negative animus often gives one the feeling of being separated from life. One feels tortured and unable to go on living. This is the disastrous effect of the animus on a woman. He cuts her off from participation in life.

  In his attempt to sever the woman’s connections with the outside world, the animus may take on the aspect of a father. In “Thrushbeard” there is only a king and his daughter, and the princess’s inaccessibility and refusal of all suitors is evidently related to the fact that she lives alone with her father. Her scornful, mocking, critical attitude toward the suitors is typical of a woman ruled by the animus. Such an attitude tears all relationships to shreds.

  It is ostensibly the arrogance of the daughter that provokes the exasperation of the father, but actually a father frequently binds his daughter to him and puts obstacles in the path of prospective suitors. If we discern this attitude in the background, we recognize the typical ambivalence of parents who hold their children back from life and at the same time have no patience with them for being unable to escape into life. (Mothers are frequently the same way with their sons.) In retaliation, the father complex working in the daughter seeks to wound a powerful father by causing the girl to
take on inferior lovers.

  In another tale, the animus appears first as an old man who later turns into a youth, which is a way of saying that the old man—the father image—is only a temporary aspect of the animus and that behind this mask is a young man.

  A more vivid example of the isolating effect of the animus is to be found in a Siberian tale in which the father actually locks the beautiful daughter in a stone chest. Then a poor youth rescues her and they escape together. In a tale from Turkestan, “The Magic Horse,” the father sells his daughter outright to a Div, an evil spirit, in return for the answer to a riddle.48 In the Balkan tale “The Girl and the Vampire,” a youth who is actually a vampire abducts a girl and puts her into a grave in a cemetery.49 She flees underground into a wood and prays to God for a box that she can hide in. To be hidden, the girl has to suffer being sealed in, in order to protect herself against the animus.

  The threatening action of the animus and the woman’s defensive reaction against it always go hand in glove and bring to mind the double aspect of all animus activity. The animus can either lame one or make one very aggressive. Women either become masculine and assertive or they tend to be absent-minded, as if they are not fully present—perhaps charmingly feminine but as if partly asleep—and the fact is that such women have marvelous journeys with the animus-lover; they enter into a kind of submerged daydreaming with the animus, of which they are not fully aware.

  To return to the Siberian story, a prince discovers the box with the girl inside, frees her, and they marry. The box and the stone chest are representations of the state of being cut off from life, which is endured by the animus-possessed woman. Contrary to this, if one has an aggressive animus and tries to act spontaneously, it is always the animus that does the acting. Some women, however, refuse to be aggressive and difficult, and so they cannot let him out. They cannot see how to handle the animus, and in order to keep him off, they are stiff and conventionally correct and frozen, imprisoned in themselves. This also is a lameness, but it comes from the woman’s reaction toward the animus. In a Norwegian tale, a woman is compelled to wear a wooden coat. Such a cumbersome covering, made of tough living tissue, illustrates the stiffness toward the world and the burden such a defensive armor becomes. The motif of escaping into a trap, as in the episode of the seasidewitch throwing Ring into the cask, is at once an act of bewitchment and protection. Historically, the animus, like the anima, has a pre-Christian form. Thrushbeard (Drosselbart) is a name for Wotan, the same as Rossbart—“Horsebeard.”

  The stalemate in “Thrushbeard” is broken up by the father’s exasperation, which causes him to give his daughter away to a poor man. In parallel tales she is beguiled by the beggar’s beautiful singing, and in a Nordic parallel the beggar enchants her with a golden spinning wheel. In other words, the animus has a fascinating attraction for her.

  The spinning activity has to do with wishful thinking. Wotan is the lord of wishes and the typical spirit of such magic thought. “The wish turns the wheels of thought.” Both the spinning wheel and the act of spinning are proper to Wotan, and in our tale the girl has to spin to support her husband. The animus has thus taken possession of her own properly feminine activity. A danger implicit in the animus preempting a feminine activity is that it leads to a loss of any real thinking on the part of the woman. It brings about a lassitude, so that instead of thinking she lazily spins daydreams and unwinds wishful fantasies, or else she spins plots and intrigues. The king’s daughter in “Thrushbeard” has fallen into such an unconscious activity.

  Another role of the animus is that of the poor servant. His unexpected gallantry in this guise is revealed in a Siberian tale.

  A woman lives alone except for her servant. Her father has died, and the servant becomes unmanageable. However, he consents to kill a bear to make a coat for her. After he accomplishes that, she bids him perform ever harder tasks, and each time he rises to the occasion. It turns out that though he seems poor, he is really wealthy.

  The animus appears to be poor and often never reveals the great treasures of the unconscious which are at his disposal. In the role of a poor man or a beggar, he induces the woman to believe that she herself has nothing. This is the penalty for a prejudice against the unconscious—a lasting poverty in conscious life, resulting in endless criticism and self-criticism.

  After the fiddler marries the princess, he points out to her the wealth of Thrushbeard, and she greatly regrets having refused him. It is typical for an animus-ridden woman to suffer remorse about something she has failed to do. Lamenting over what might have been is a pseudo-feeling of guilt and is completely sterile. One sinks into the despairing feeling of having utterly ruined one’s prospects and having missed life altogether.

  At first the princess is incapable of doing the housework, and this is another symptom of the touch of the animus—listlessness, inertia, and a glassy, staring expression. This may sometimes look like feminine passivity, but a woman in this trancelike state is not receptive; she is drugged by animus-inertia and imprisoned in a stone chest.

  Living in a hovel, the princess must do the house chores and make baskets for money, which humiliates her and increases her feeling of inferiority. As a compensation for high-flown ambitions, the animus often forces a woman into a way of life far below her real capacity. If she is unable to adjust to what does not coincide with her lofty ideals, then she does lowly work in pure despair. This is thinking in extremes: “If I cannot marry a god, then I’ll marry a lousy beggar.” At the same time, a boundless pride persists, nourished by a secret fantasy life in which one dreams passionately of immense fame and glory. Humility and arrogance are intertwined.

  This lowly activity is also a kind of compensation to persuade the woman to become feminine again. The effect of animus pressure can lead a woman to deeper femininity, providing she accepts the fact that she is animus-possessed and does something to bring her animus into reality. If she gives him a field of action—that is, if she takes up some special study or does some masculine work—this can occupy the animus, and at the same time her feeling will be vivified and she will come back to feminine activities. The worst condition comes about when a woman has a powerful animus and does not even live it; then she is straightjacketed by animus opinions, and while she may avoid any sort of work that seems in the least masculine, she is much less feminine.

  Because the princess bungles all her tasks, her husband sends her out to sell earthen pots in the market. Vessels are feminine symbols, and she is driven to sell her femininity at a low price—too cheaply and too collectively. The more animus-possessed a woman is, the more she feels estranged from men and the more painful are her efforts to make a good feeling contact. Although she may compensate by taking the lead in erotic affairs, there can be no genuine love or passion in them. If she really had a good contact with men, she would have no need to be so assertive. She acts out of the vague realization that something is wrong and makes desperate attempts to make up for what has been lost because of her animus-imposed estrangement from men. This is merely walking blindly into a new catastrophe. A new animus attack is bound to follow, and in the story it does: a drunken hussar breaks all her vessels to pieces. This symbolizes a brutal outburst of emotion. The wild, ungovernable animus smashes everything, showing clearly that such an exhibition of her unconscious nature does not work.

  The life with the beggar-husband also brings about the final humiliation, and this occurs when the girl peeps through the door to glimpse the splendor of the court world and Thrushbeard’s wedding party. Peeping through a crack in the door is interpreted in the I Ching as having too narrow and too subjective a standpoint. Hampered by this, one is unable to see what one really has. The inferiority of a woman who thinks she must admire others and nurses secret jealousy toward them means being unable to assess one’s own real worth.

  From hunger, she accepts scraps of food thrown to her by the servants, and then to her intense shame, her greed and inferiority are exposed when
the food falls to the floor. She wants to get life on any terms and assumes that she cannot get it in her own right. A king’s daughter accepting scraps thrown by servants? That is going below one’s scorn. Then she feels ashamed and despises herself, but this humiliation is what is needed, for, as we see in the story, the heroine then realizes that she is after all the daughter of a king. Only then does she learn that Thrushbeard is in fact her husband.

  In this story the animus—as Thrushbeard, as the wild hussar, and as the beggar-husband—assumes three roles that the god Wotan is known to effect. It is said of him that he is the man riding a white horse who leads the wild riders of the night, who sometimes carry their heads in their arms. This legend, which still lingers, comes from the early idea of Wotan as the leader of the dead warriors going to Valhalla. As evil ghosts they still hunt in the woods, and it is death to look at them, death to be swept into their ranks.

  Often Wotan goes about as a beggar, an unknown wanderer in the night, and always his face is partly concealed, for he has only one eye. A stranger enters, says a few words, and leaves—and afterward one realizes that it was Wotan. He calls himself the owner of the land, and psychically this is true: the unknown owner of the land is still the archetypal Wotan.50