The transformation of the boy into a bird in The Juniper Tree is a very different scenario than those that appear in other bird/human transformations. In other stories, like The Seven Ravens, The Twelve Brothers, and The Six Swans, the brothers are changed into birds by some accident or curse. Then, the sister must perform difficult tasks in order to save the brothers and transform them back into humans.
In The Juniper Tree, though, the boy is not turned into a bird until he is dead and his bones are buried. Then, he goes around singing to acquire what he needs to reward the father and sister and kill the stepmother. Once this is accomplished, he can return to his human form. The fact that he still retains his “human ability” to speak and goes around singing a song about what happened shows that he is still more human than animal. This makes it seem like the bird is merely representative of his ghost. And once he is transformed into a human again, life continues happily as if nothing had happened.
Although he transforms into an animal, he still has more human characteristics than animal characteristics. Then, of course when the cause of his destruction is also destroyed, he comes back to life. While this is not logical or realistic (not that it should be), it just goes to show that he was always a human, but had to transform into something else (i.e. a bird because a ghost just wouldn’t have fit the fairy tale image) because he had died.
Katie, since you brought up the movie, I'd like to take this chance to apply some of the theories that have been posted to the movie... The majority of our blogging group tended to believe that the boy was transformed from bird to human because of the completion of his revenge cycle or the destruction of the thing that destroyed him - essentially the boy can only regain human form if the stepmother dies.
ReplyDeleteIn the movie, the stepmother escapes, so can the boy ever become human again? It doesn't seem possible unless he hunts down the stepmother. And the feeling at the end of the movie is that becoming a bird is still a resurrection from the dead. The final shot of his "sister", or whatever you'd call her, sitting under the tree on which the boy as a bird is resting ends the movie with the sense that, although not happy, everything is ok.
The movie, in my opinion, then, is more about the idea of "mother" than about transformation. The mother gives him a charm, the stepmother is jealous of the mother, the "sister" sees her mother, consoling and guiding her.