Since we began our separate quarantines, my grandchildren and I have spent some hours telling and listening to stories in a virtual setting. Last week, I told them The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, a Russian folktale that begins like a three brothers tale, but gets rid of the two older, cleverer brothers very near the beginning of the story. After that, the tale follows the eponymous Fool as he acquires his flying ship and collects a series of helpers on his way toward his goal of winning the Tsar’s daughter to wife.
When the story ended, Emma, who recently celebrated her tenth birthday, said, “I don’t get it. The fool doesn’t really seem foolish.”
Children are brilliant. You tell them a long, complicated story and they hit at the crux as soon as it ends. My response to Emma’s remark wasn’t great. Socratic-aspiring grandmother that I am, I didn’t want to fill her up with my thoughts about her idea, so I just told her that her question was very insightful and that she should think about it some more. Not to be outdone by her older cousin, five-year-old Magnolia chimed in, “Next time you should tell us the story about Dummling.”
Are everyone’s grandchildren as smart as mine?
Emma and Magnolia got me thinking about the archetype of The Fool, and I hope the thoughts that follow will open a conversation about the character.
Before I told my grandkids The Fool of the World, I showed them The Fool in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck which portrays the character as a young traveler who seems about to step blithely off the edge of a cliff. In the picture, the Fool is looking skyward, and he seems either unaware or unconcerned that his next step will send him hurtling into a dangerous-looking unknown. The card (as long as it turns up right-side-up) is usually interpreted in a reading as lucky and, I think, it’s a good representation of the Fool in folktales.
As his story unfolds, we come to see that the Fool of the World is not, as Emma wisely noted, foolish. He’s different and he approaches life with a kind of innocence. He doesn’t complain when his mother sends him on his quest dressed in rags with a meal of dry bread for his journey. Instead, he sings “because the trees were green and there was a blue sky overhead.” He might represent the poet misunderstood by his community or the Grasshopper to society’s Ants. People don’t understand him, so they think he’s useless. But he has some skill or inner strength that enables him to obtain his goal.
The character can’t, however, simply represent the poet because, as students of folktales know, the archetypes have universal appeal. And everyone, politicians as well as poets, Ants as well as Grasshoppers, should be able to identify with Fool. In reality, we are all at the edge of a precipice and have little power to control where life’s next step will land us. So, what can Fool teach us?
The Dummling story Magnolia referred to is Grimms’ The Three Feathers. In this story, a king sets tasks for his three sons in order to determine which of them deserves to inherit the kingdom. To set them on their way, the king steps outside the castle door and blows three feathers into the air. Two of the feathers fly off in different directions, but the third simply blows straight up and floats back down to the ground. The two clever brothers run off after the feathers that are going somewhere, leaving Dummling standing right where he started, staring down at the feather which landed at his feet.
Then, looking down, he discovers a door. The door has always been there. He and his brothers must have trod countless times upon it as they came and went from the castle, but only now, as he is forced to look down, does Dummling see it. The door leads to an underground chamber, so Dummling must not only closely examine the surface of the familiar, he must enter it, go down deep to find the aspects of his nature that will make him a worthy king.
In the story of The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, God only knows how the Fool acquires the ship which is the Tsar’s bride price for his daughter, but once he is on board, he goes about collecting travelers who end up helping him attain his goal. Because one method of story analysis involves seeing every character as an aspect of the main character, I think these travelers offer some insight into the kinds of strengths we fools may find if we, like Dummling, stop and look deeply inside. The Fool’s traveling companions are: a man who can hear every sound in the world by putting his ear to the ground, a man who can traverse the earth in split seconds, a man who can shoot things that are hundreds of miles away, a man who can eat huge amounts of food, another who can drink huge amounts, and two more men, each with magical objects. The first of these has a bundle of wood that, when scattered, will spring up into armies of soldiers; the second has a bundle of straw that, when spread around, makes hot things cold.
My first thought about these travelers is that, except for the last two, their skills are just exaggerations of things most people can do naturally: hear, walk, see, eat, and drink. The fact that they are magnified may mean that, to use them to our best advantage, we need to consider them more carefully, that is, not take them for granted. Intransigent fools look without seeing, hear without listening, and walk, eat, and drink with no intention.
The objects carried by the sixth and seventh travelers – wood and straw, respectively – are also natural objects, but they’ve been arranged, tied into bundles, through artifice. Bundling makes weak objects stronger; it’s harder to break a bundle than a single stick. Fool needs to collect his strengths and use them together if he is to succeed.
According to Steven Olderr’s dictionary of symbolic meanings, a bundle of wood symbolizes strength and authority. To reveal his true nature and establish that he is not as dim he seems to the general public, Fool has to assert some authority. In Three Feathers, Dummling accomplishes this through the superiority of the objects he brings his father. The Fool of the World conjures armies to the same purpose.
The bundle of straw is more mysterious to me. One straw is a symbol of weakness, but a bundle can be a sign of danger. The bundle of straw, picked up before the flying ship enters the Tsar’s compound, may serve as a warning of things to come. At one point in the story, when the Tsar attempts to kill Fool, his life is saved by the magical straw. Also, straw, though useful for many things, is the inferior part of the stalk, the chaff without the grain. So, the straw could be a warning about the fate of a Fool who doesn’t seek to understand himself. That Fool will remain a fool, a husk devoid of human spirit.
The Fool of the Tarot is poised to fall. I think his attitude reflects neither unawareness nor lack of concern about the future. Like the Fool of the World, he is enjoying the world around him, looking up toward the trees and the sky. In his right hand, he carries his worldly belongings vagabond-style, a bundle wrapped in a cloth hung loosely from a stick. In his left hand, he holds a rose (completeness, beauty, heart). He holds both items carelessly. He may lose them at any moment, but he understands that grasping them won’t change his fate. Fool knows he can’t control where his next step will land, so he looks to the sky and, perhaps, controls the only thing he can – his thoughts.
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