If The Lord of the Rings was the novel that made me say "where has this book been all my life?", Ronald Murphy's The Owl, the Raven and the Dove: the Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales is the non-fiction book that also made me say "where has the book been all my life?"
The birds of the title refer to three story traditions-- the classical myths, Germanic folk tale and legend, and the Christian sacred story. Fr. Murphy broke new ground with this study, investigating first hand Wilhelm Grimm's personal copy of the Greek New Testament.
The idea that the Grimm brothers merely collected traditional tales and published them has long ago been debunked. Fr. Murphy demonstrates just what sort of spin they put on them...braiding together three different strands to create something new, creating magical stories with a religious underpinning similar to the works of C.S. Lewis and George MacDonaold. Fr. Murphy's book pays particular attention to some of the best-known of the tales such as Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White.
I sent Fr. Murphy a copy of my poetry chapbook, which contains this poem about Snow White. He was kind enough to write back to me and remark "I was so happy to see from your poem that I was not the only one who caught the nature of the Prince."
be sure to read the actual Grimm's version of the tale, not some bowdlerized version. One important detail appears when the dwarfs have placed Snow White in her glass casket on the mountaintop:
"And birds came too, and wept for Snow-white; first an owl, then a raven, and last a dove."
Fr. Murphy writes:
"As Snow White opens her eyes, lifts the lid of the casket and sits upright, she says, "Oh God, where am I?" The answer which Wilhelm worot is Christ's, the answer hoped for for millennia, "the king's son says, 'You are with me,'" and he tells her that he loves her more than anything in the world and immediately invites her to follow him into the eternal world of the Father . "Come with me to my father's castle, you will be my wife." The story comes to a mystical Trinitarian ending as the good soul, led by the Spirit in the owl, the raven and the dove, is brought to a meeting with the Son, who conducts the person in love beyond death to his Father's house."
