The Seven Ravens: Difference between revisions

The Seven Ravens is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm.^[1]

It is tale number 25, and Aarne-Thompson type 451, the brothers who were turned into birds. Georgios A Megas collected another, Greek variant in Folktales of Greece.^[2] Other variants of the Aarne-Thompson type include The Six Swans, The Twelve Wild Ducks, Udea and her Seven Brothers, The Wild Swans, The Twelve Brothers , and The Magic Swan Geese. ^[3]

An animated feature film based on the story was released in 1937 (see The Seven Ravens).

A peasant had seven sons and no daughter until finally a daughter was born, but she was sickly. He sent his sons to fetch water for her -- in the German version, to be baptized; in the Greek, from a healing spring -- but in their haste, they dropped the jug in the well. When they did not return, their father thought they had left it off to play and cursed them. Unexpectedly, it turned them into ravens, as he said.

When the sister was grown, she set out in search of her brothers. She attempts to get help first from the sun, then the moon, then the morning star, and the star does help her, giving her a chicken bone (in the German) or a bat's foot (in the Greek) and tell her she will need it to save her brothers. She finds the Glass Mountain where they are. In the Greek version, she opens it with the bat's foot; in the German, she has lost the bone, and chops off a finger to use as a key. She gets into the mountain, where a dwarf tells her that her brothers will return. She takes some of their food and drink and leaves in the last cup a ring from home.

When her brothers return, she hides, and they turn into human form and ask who has been at their food. The last one finds the ring, and hopes it is their sister, in which case they are saved. She emerges, and they return home.

This tale, like The Twelve Brothers, The Six Swans, and Brother and Sister, features a woman rescuing her brothers. In the era and region in which it was collected, many men were drafted by kings for soldiers, to be sent as mercenaries. As a consequence, many men made their daughter their heirs; however, they also exerted more control over them and their marriages as a consequence. The stories have been interpreted as a wish by women for the return of their brothers, freeing them from this control.^[4] However, the issues of when the stories were collected are unclear, and stories of this type have been found in many other cultures, where this issue can not have inspired them.^[5]

Some folklorists connect this tale to the more general practice of ultimogeniture, in which the youngest child would inherit.^[6]

In the original oral version, there were three, not seven ravens; one study of German folk tales found that of 31 variants collected after the publication of Grimms' Fairy Tales, only two followed the Grimms in having seven ravens.^[7]

Black Feather by K. Tempest Bradford (published in the Interfictions anthology, 2007) references commonalities between The Six Swans, The Seven Ravens, and The Twelve Brothers while building a new narrative for the sister character found in all three versions.

• The Raven