Fairy Tale Flip – Ep 2: The Singing Bone, a Story of Vengeance

Speaker 1:
 0:00Hi and welcome to Fairy Tale Flip. I am Donna Fields and this is Vanessa Y Rogers from Fabrica Folklore Podcast. Wonderful and we decided to team up. I have a podcast as well, called Doorways to Learning. It’s about education, and Vanessa was actually honored to be on her podcast a while ago. She’s crazy about fairy tales. I am crazy about fairy tales, so we wanted to share our thinking about them and see what you think about our opinions and our comments about fairy tales, because I think they’re really important. Vanessa, what do you think about fairy tales?
Speaker 2:
 0:36Yeah, absolutely. I think that there’s so much more to fairy tales than people assume on the surface level. I think there’s a lot of hidden meaning that people don’t garner, especially because it was written so long ago. A lot of times those cultural nuances are kind of lost to modern times. But when we dive into them and learn more about them, I think there’s so much more depth and history in them.
Speaker 1:
 1:02I completely agree with you, and there’s one other important point for me is because they’re so prevalent in society, and in all societies, we need to be really careful about how much we are imbibing about the messages in the fairy tales and mostly the archetypes. So what I like to do is break down the story so that we can enjoy it. I always thought that when I started studying it, I would stop enjoying them. I like them more than I used to, but, especially if we have children, I think it’s really important to get them to be a little more conscious about what they’re reading and the extremes in fairy tales. So what do you think about that, vanessa? What do you think about what we’re going to do today?
Speaker 2:
 1:42I’m really excited and I’m excited about the story that you chose the singing bone. It was a really interesting story and I had a lot of questions for you.
Speaker 1:
 1:54Excellent. I have questions for you too, so let’s get into it. A quick summary. We are going to put in the show notes a link. Vanessa is going to be reading it to her children and that’s going to be so exciting because she has her sing song away about reading stories. There is also another video that someone has uploaded on YouTube and we’ll make that available too, but just as a quick summary. The singing bone. It’s about a boar that was ravaging a whole kingdom and the king decided that enough of his people had been killed by it, so he wanted to find someone to kill the boar and bring peace to the land. Two boys decided to go in the forest and kill the boar. The young son killed the boar. The older son took credit for it, killed his brother, married the king’s daughter and the singing bone is from the younger brother’s actual skeleton and the bone spoke after the poor boy died, and that’s the singing bone. He told the story of the fact that his older brother killed him.
Speaker 2:
 3:00Yeah, true vengeance story in a way.
Speaker 1:
 3:05The younger brother was avenged. The younger brother was avenged. Finally, yes, so should we get into it and decide what we think has value and what we think maybe needs to be looked at more carefully?
Speaker 2:
 3:17Yeah, my first response in just starting the story was how little the princess has to say in any of her life. The king in the start of the story offers the hand of his daughter, the princess, to anyone who will kill this boar, and she’s not even named although I guess no one is named in the story as well. But I know that for lots and lots of history women have had zero agency in their life and it was just a glaring example of that in this story.
Speaker 1:
 3:57Yeah, I love that because it’s in the first line and so often in fairy tales, whether we realize it or not, the queen is usually not named. The queen is usually either dead before the story begins or dies from the first lines, and, as you say, the princess is just an object. She’s objectified, and I think that’s really important for especially girls to recognize, and boys too, because boys need to learn that a lot of the things they’re learning are not appropriate, and so it’s just as important for them to realize that in fairy tales girls often don’t have agency, and for girls to realize they have the right to not be sold by their father just because the prince comes along and kills a dragon.
Speaker 2:
 4:44Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:
 4:46So what’s the next thing that really caught your eye?
Speaker 2:
 4:49So I have noticed a pattern in fairy tales that generally there’s three brothers and a lot of stories and the third brother is always the kind brother that gets taken advantage of by his older brothers, but he generally is the one who perseveres. I was surprised that this one only had two brothers and I was curious if other versions had three really great question.
Speaker 1:
 5:15So let’s talk about versions. So the thing about versions is that, depending on what, let’s say century the story was written, it fills a need for society. It tells something about society. It says something about the people who are either making money or not making money, and how wealth and power are distributed. So fairy tales have a lot of that undercurrent of societal norms and societal values, and that’s also very important to recognize. So when we’re talking about versions, in this case, the story that you’re going to read to your kids and the story that’s on the YouTube is by the Grimm’s, the Grimm’s brothers, and often the Grimm’s brothers tales are very gruesome, very, very, very specific, and in this case we don’t have a lot of blood and gore. We do have a bore that’s killed, but that’s about it. The original version, apparently, is back in the Greek myths, and that’s really important, because a bore in the Greek myth has a lot of significance and in this case, a bore symbolizes divine retribution and the challenges we have to face, so I love that you brought up the version and the bore is very significant, so I’d like to talk about that a little more. But what do you get out of the fact that it comes from Greek myths originally?
Speaker 2:
 6:42That is really interesting. So has the story changed quite a bit from the Greek mythology?
Speaker 1:
 6:49It’s changed a lot because in the Greek mythology it was most of the heroes and it was most of the gods that went after the bore. The whole thing started when one king forgot or he decided not to honor one of the gods Artemis and Artemis took revenge, and so revenge really is a part of the thread that goes through both versions and Artemis sent down a bore. I mean, it was a fantastically evil and effective bore that was killing everything, and all the gods and the heroes and I’m saying heroes, not heroines went after the bore, and it was Atalanta, a woman, who actually killed the bore, and that went against all of society, even in Greek times. So it’s really you were talking about three and the versions. In this case it surprised me too there are only two sons and there was only one daughter. So that is unusual in fairy tales, but they’re used the same way.
Speaker 2:
 7:49Do you remember the Atalanta? Is she a goddess?
Speaker 1:
 7:55Atalanta, she is. I can’t remember if she’s a goddess, but she was. I think she’s the goddess of hunt, of the hunt.
Speaker 2:
 8:01I have put that up. Oh, that would definitely make sense.
Speaker 1:
 8:05It would make sense.
Speaker 2:
 8:08Yeah, was bore hunting a big thing in Greek society.
Speaker 1:
 8:12Bore hunting was a big thing. It comes up a lot in Greek mythology, but this was very specific. Artemis sent the bore down to ravage the whole town because he was just really upset that King didn’t honor him. But yeah, I mean, you’ve read a lot of fairy tales and usually it’s the bore that kills someone, unfortunately, in a hunt.
Speaker 2:
 8:33I’m curious because you know it was in Greek society and then it’s also in Germany. I wonder if you know boars caused a lot of grief in general, in general society, if this was something that was commonly, a common problem that had to be dealt with.
Speaker 1:
 8:56Yeah, I mean, listen, I’m in Spain and this is 2023 and we have boars here. Yeah, they’re called habali. Oh, and are they? Are they big? Here where I live, they’re not so big, but they can do a lot of harm because they have a big horn and that’s what they used to defend themselves. And if you were impaled on that horn, it’s for animals, for other animals, dogs, for instance that’s it For humans. In the stories, they didn’t have penicillin a lot of these stories. So, yes, they died and boars were a big problem, because they hide in the bushes and what they do is they’re not looking to, they’re not looking to kill you, they’re looking. They just want to defend themselves, but they will come out of nowhere. I’ve been here a boar and had no idea it was there until it started moving around and I got out of there.
Speaker 2:
 9:44Yeah, it’s smart, they are not to be trifled with.
Speaker 1:
 9:49No, no, no, no. So, yeah, it’s a great question and in this case, so they gave it this whole symbolism and it really is about, if you are faced with a boar, you might have done something to get some gods angry with you, because it’s about divine inter excuse me divine retribution.
Speaker 2:
 10:10And so if you are to kill a boar, for instance, what does that say about the hunter?
Speaker 1:
 10:19Oh, that’s really. Listen, vanessa, you probably know this. I’m a vegan, so I’m not crazy about anyone killing anything. What is if the boar kills the hunter, you’re saying, or if the hunter kills the boar?
Speaker 2:
 10:30No. What does it say about the hunter? Does it say that he is divine if he is the hunter of a boar, Because the boar itself is a symbol of divine retribution? But if the hunter is successful in his hunt of the boar, does that symbolism then reflect upon the hunter?
Speaker 1:
 10:51That’s a really great question, I would say, and this is not something I’ve read I would say that the hunter killing the boar in later versions we’re talking about the Greek version, and then we have the Grimm’s version and later on one of the boar turns into a dragon and the hunter, or the knight, kills the dragon. So what do we say about a knight killing the dragon? We think he’s a hero because he saved the city, he saved the kingdom, he saved the pueblo. I don’t. I think that’s something we need to really look at. Do we want to bring up our children thinking that killing something doing without it making it disappear makes us noble? I would say no. When I put it that way, what do you think?
Speaker 2:
 11:35I’m thinking in terms of a dragon and I’m thinking, you know, in all those stories where a dragon is, you know, destroying people’s lands. What other options are there if the dragon, if you can’t communicate with the dragon, it requires a lot of out-of-the-box thinking rather than just to murder the creature. I understand your thought process, but what are the other options that they might consider in the fantastical world of dragons?
Speaker 1:
 12:16Yeah, I love that and that’s exactly what we need to ask ourselves. I don’t have the answer, and even if I did, I don’t need to answer it. The whole question here is aren’t there other options than just killing something? Are there other options that making something disappear? We would all love to make problems disappear. The monster, the dragon, the boar is a problem, but by killing it we haven’t grown ourselves. If we can find another way to deal with that challenge, with that distraction, with that, you know, something that’s really uncomfortable, then I think that we are more noble because we are trying to find a connection. And remember a dragon is simply a symbol. The boar is a symbol. What it is is something you don’t want around. But can’t we address this in another way than just eliminating it, killing it?
Speaker 2:
 13:10And that’s interesting that you brought it up, because when I was reading over, I was rereading the story last night and the first thought that came to my mind was how big are boards? Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in real life. I’ve seen them on television shows and I don’t really know. I don’t have like a true comparison of their size. It said they can be up to 300 pounds. I have no idea if that’s what they decide, that they are in Germany or in Greece, but I came across this NPR story that was in 2020, of this boar in like a wooded area where there was a nude beach and there was this viral video that went all over the world because this man was bathing nude and his laptop got stolen by a local boar and he ran into the forest naked after this boar who was trying to just like. I don’t know what the boar was trying to do with his laptop, anyways, but this boar has become famous and they weren’t sure what to do because the boar and her children had become dependent upon humans for their food and so they had become dependent on all of the tourists that were in the area and they were concerned that, once the tourist season ended, that they would not be able to forge for their own food because they hadn’t learned those skills, and so their biggest concern was that they were going to start going into townships and cause havoc. And so there was this huge debate about whether or not the boar should be killed or not. I don’t know that there was a. I don’t know the conclusion there must have been one, but it didn’t say in the story but that we’re still dealing with the same question in today’s time. How do we handle these situations? We just murder, or are there other ways to work around these issues?
Speaker 1:
 15:17Yeah, and I’m going to say something that might rile other people up with all the money we spend on weapons, we need to be spending that money on finding other solutions, more pacifistic solutions. You know that’s what wars are about. And if we can get back to the story, this is exactly what the fairy tales do. The king decides that he wants the boar gone because it’s killing people, and he probably had pressure I’m not sure that he really cared at all, because the boar is not going to get into the castle but he, instead of doing it himself, he looks for someone else to do it, and he finds the poor man’s sons. So what the fairy tale also is doing is depreciating the value of people who don’t have money. We’re saying I have a lot of money and I have power. I’m not going to put myself in danger, so I’ll put you in danger. And this is the same thing presidents and dictators do. They have their soldiers go in for them. You know, I seriously question that. So but, that’s what we learned from fairy tales. The fairy tales are very extreme. We have archetypes and we have good people and bad people and there’s nothing in between. And although that’s really nice and easy about reading a fairy story, that’s why we fairy tales story, that’s why we like them it’s not reality and it’s again something we need to consider.
Speaker 2:
 16:31Now, what about the brothers? Why do you think that this is a common archetype for the brother, the elder brother to be the unkind one and the younger brother to be the smarter and the more generous kindhearted?
Speaker 1:
 16:46I think it’s simply about extremes, and there are a lot of extremes in the story we have. Like you said, the elder brother is the evil one and the younger one is the innocent one In this case he’s not so intelligent but he’s innocent and pure heart, it says. And a lot of extremes here. The king said go in separately in the forest. So it’s again, it’s creating this dichotomy in a societal way that we’re supposed to think, ah, the good one is over here and the bad one is over here, but they go in on the east and the west, and this is also something that goes into our minds, whether we realize it or not. The west is where usually, in Greek mythology at least, that’s where people go to, you know, off to the Hades, you know deaths, and the east is when the sun comes up, and it was where this is where Christian methodology or mythology, excuse me, christian mythology, comes in and this is where Christ was supposed to have come, when the sun comes up.
Speaker 2:
 17:46And again.
Speaker 1:
 17:48We have all these extremes here. When you’re reading it, are you aware of that? As much as you study fairy tales, are you aware of a lot of these dichotomies?
Speaker 2:
 18:00Sometimes, but not always A lot of times, the first reading through is just grasping at what the story is about and then the second read through. There might be some of those elements, but I don’t. Was there a sunset and a sunrise in this story particularly?
Speaker 1:
 18:18No, but I did look up the symbolism of east and west because they’d call my attention to it and it’s symbolism, not so much there was a sunrise and sunset. Although the younger brother kills the boar, he comes in the east, which is about purification and light. He kills the boar and then goes west for some reason, and the west, and on the west, is where his elder brother is, and west, symbolizing death, indeed that’s where the younger brother dies, and so there really is a lot of information in these seemingly innocent use of words east and west.
Speaker 2:
 18:56It’s very powerful actually. I was quite surprised at the older brother murdering the younger brother and I a lot of times in these stories with multiple brothers you know they foiled up the younger brother. They, you know, steal from them, but generally they don’t murder. So I was a little bit taken aback that it would. He would go to that extreme. Do you feel like you see that more, or is this a rare occasion?
Speaker 1:
 19:31Yeah, I would think it’s less rare in modern versions and I you know that I was looked for different stories for us to talk about in this first podcast and I was disturbed that the brother killed his younger brother, and it isn’t usual. They’re usually not very hospitable and they’re usually pretty hateful to each other, but kill no. And I think this story is a lot about extremes and it’s not about negotiation and it’s not shades. It’s about extremes, and as much as I like the story, I love breaking it down so that people realize that we don’t need to live like that. It’s a fairy tale and we need to use it as an example of what not to do. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 2:
 20:19Yeah, I mean. My question to you is going to be do you feel like you’re going to be a good writer? I think the people of the time who you know, grimm’s brothers, were the ones who were collecting all these stories from all of these places. I wonder what their sense was. Did they read? Did they see those extremes when they were, you know, telling these stories? Do you feel like it might have been a story of? I’m curious what they got out of it.
Speaker 1:
 20:55Yeah, I think that’s a really important question and I would love to I really need to reread the times when the Grand Brothers were collecting these stories. But it was a dark time and people didn’t have as many recourses as we have now and there were a lot of absolutes. You didn’t have the medicine we did now and so if you got sick you might probably died. If you didn’t have money, you didn’t have a lot of recourses and unless you were very clever, you were either thrown into the abyss or you died. There were a lot of extremes and, as I’m saying, if you read all the Grimm’s Brothers collections of fairy tales, they are not very fun, mm-mm, they’re upsetting. No, they’re very depressing, they’re gruesome, they’re gruesome, and there was a lot more of that behavior then. I can’t say we’re much better humans now, but I think that maybe there is a recognition of more shades of what we can do and without a lot of money, can still survive somehow Mm-mm. But at that time they weren’t able to.
Speaker 2:
 22:04A lot of the stories in the Grimm fairy tale books have happy endings, with someone getting a pot full of gold and no longer having to suffer in poverty. But this one I mean the brother, the younger brother is avenged, but no one is alive, except for the princess who is not named and no one cares about.
Speaker 1:
 22:33That’s right, and now has no other possibilities because she has already been married and she can’t get married again. Yeah, yeah and right. Because the older brother is killed. He’s thrown into the water in a sack and killed too. But the younger brother is avenged. As he said, he’s still dead, but his bones sing and I love the idea of the singing bone and the bone is about that’s the core of ourselves and it sings, and I think it’s really important to look in the symbolism of singing. And in ancient cultures it was really the vibration of singing was a healing, was a healing from physical, emotional and mental and spiritual levels. And so we have a story that has an underlying spirituality, even though the rest of it is pretty upsetting. In the end we have some sort of spiritual calming. I don’t know, did you get that at all?
Speaker 2:
 23:28No, I didn’t pick up on that at all, but maybe I didn’t see the singing as spiritual, I was just kind of caught up on a bone that sings and did it make some a horn? Yeah, he put it on the horn, he put it on the horn and then it sang.
Speaker 1:
 23:47Yes, yeah. And another interesting thing, vanessa, we need to say, since we’re getting into the societal implications of it the shepherd found the singing bone, poor shepherd with a sheep. He finds the bone, finds that it was speaking and said, oh, I need to show this to the king. And so the immediate thinking is I need to show to someone who has money and power, I need to validate this. It can only be validated through giving it to someone of money and power. And again, it’s very important to realize that that is a message we’re getting and we can either accept it without thinking about it or recognize it.
Speaker 2:
 24:28And I do think that a singing bone is a much more fun way of saying that bones talk right, how the bones are laid out and where their location is and all the things that a detective might get from a crime scene. It’s kind of symbolic of how obviously bones don’t generally sing in real life, but it might sing to someone who is skilled at seeing how a dead body is laid out. So I think that also is an interesting way of exploring the singing bones.
Speaker 1:
 25:13Yeah, I love that. So what you’re saying is it might not literally sing, but if someone understands, you know, yes, stands bones laid out in the ground, they’re going to be able to put together a whole theory of what happened.
Speaker 2:
 25:27Right, but it’s much more fun to say the bones are singing.
Speaker 1:
 25:30Yeah, kind of like both ways realism and fairy tales.
Speaker 2:
 25:34Yeah, because surely back in the day people were closer attuned to seeing death and seeing which death is intentional and what is not. I don’t know if being pushed over a bridge would automatically be seen as intentional, but probably it didn’t happen very frequently without a pusher.
Speaker 1:
 26:04Right, but the brother clubbed him over the head and he fell over. And then he fell over Right, right. He was very intentional, yes, and I thought that was very important. He was going over a bridge which is from one reality to another literally bridging realities and before he could get to the other reality, which would have meant he would show the board to the king and marry the daughter he was in the head and said no, you’re not going any further. That was powerful, and I’d like to go back to the fact that the daughter had absolutely no choice. Really wrong, yeah.
Speaker 2:
 26:42Yeah, I really wanted to know what happened to the princess, but she wasn’t thought about.
Speaker 1:
 26:49No again she was objectified and nobody really worries about her, so it’s something boys and girls need to think about. Yeah, ok, I’m going to ask you one question. I was going to give you a whole variety of stories and I finally said, vanessa, I saw this one and I keep coming back to it, no matter how many other stories I read. And you said, oh, that’s wonderful. Why did you decide that you wanted to start with this one?
Speaker 2:
 27:15Well, I found it interesting. I liked that I only had two brothers rather than three. I like the idea of inanimate objects singing and telling stories, because I think that there is a lot of storytelling in things that don’t necessarily look like they might tell a story. But like I said before, you know a detective can get a story from just looking at a crime scene because they are skilled at looking at those things. And then I also was really struck at the princess and I think that that is sad, but it is in almost every single story that we come across, especially in the Graham fairy tales. I think maybe fairy tales and other places might have a little bit more agency, but in general women in most places in the world you know, were controlled by men. There were there are few exceptions that we might look at in other episodes. Maybe we can find some non-European fairy tales that look at females in society and how they were treated, if any better. But and a lot of our history. That is where the women, the role of women, is, and you were talking about war earlier and how we always rushed into war, and that’s primarily because men have been in charge. I think that when a group of women are in a room. It’s one of the last, the last resort.
Speaker 1:
 28:59Yeah, resort, I think it’s really important. You said and I love the idea we’re going to choose something from another culture. They’re going to be different versions, but let’s choose something from another culture next time. And I’d love people to be aware of the versions they’re watching now, because we haven’t talked about Walt Disney at all. But in the Walt Disney versions there’s a lot of visuals of the princess, but the dialogue, the women talking I’ve read studies on this they talk 10% of the time that the, that the prince and the other males in the movies talk, not in the newer version, not in the newer movies, all the versions. Yes, we need to look at that.
Speaker 2:
 29:38Yeah, there’s definitely been a shift in how people watch shows and movies and they they are more aware of it, especially after. What is that test? The fetch, what is it called? Where you can watch a movie or a TV show and it has to cast whether women have a conversation about anything except for a man. What is that test called? There’s like three little steps. You’re not familiar with it.
Speaker 1:
 30:05No, I’m not. I wish I were. Can you look it up and we’ll talk about it next?
Speaker 2:
 30:09time. Yeah, we’ll do that, I am. I’ll look it up because it’s a really interesting way of looking at film and movies. And now people make a stronger effort to make sure that women have a conversation that does not revolve around a man.
Speaker 1:
 30:30Interesting we have, we’ve got to do that, we’ve got to do that. So then I have something, and if is there anything else about the story that you would like to talk about, because what I love is to end by asking our listeners a question, and that was going to go ahead.
Speaker 2:
 30:46Well, I was going to say I think it’s interesting that you know, I think that in Greek society I don’t know Greek society super well but I I in high school I did do a paper on women in Greek society and they seem to have more agency, at least from the little research that I did 20 plus years ago and it I liked in the story that there was more women. At least the woman who was the huntress ended up being the hero, and I think it’s interesting that it changed entirely to the European viewpoint and I and I think that that definitely says something about the different cultures that they were in.
Speaker 1:
 31:35Yeah, I completely agree. The Greek goddesses are very, very well known and very powerful, although Zeus is the ultimate king.
Speaker 2:
 31:45So, and a well known woman either.
Speaker 1:
 31:47And a well known woman. Very well said. Very well said, All right.
Speaker 2:
 31:51What’s your question for the audience?
Speaker 1:
 31:54I would love the listeners to read the story. Either you’re the version you’re going to read or the one we have in YouTube, or we can actually put in the show notes the link to. I’ll upload the story itself, the Grimm’s version, and is let us know if there’s something that they’re wondering about in the story that we haven’t talked about, because there really are. It’s a very short story and yet there’s so much in it and I just love for them to propose theories about it and questions. How does that sound?
Speaker 2:
 32:23Yeah, absolutely I would like. I’d love to hear feedback from other people what they got out of it.
Speaker 1:
 32:30Okay, this has been so much fun, Vanessa, so much fun.
Speaker 2:
 32:34I agree absolutely. I love dissecting all these fairy tales.
Speaker 1:
 32:38So we’ll do it more. We’ll pick another story in next month. We’ll do another fairy tale flip. Thank you so much, Vanessa. This is so much fun with talking it out with you.
Speaker 2:
 32:47Thank you have a great month. We say Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.