The Juniper Tree

All this for an apple?

So far, I've looked at standard fairy tales. Most people know those stories, and those versions of them. Today, I want to take us down a less well-traveled road. Around the Victorian era, someone decided that fairy tales should be for children, so they cleaned up what they could, and completely erased others. Like this story. The Juniper Tree has murder, cannibalism, and some more murder. Not exactly something you want the nanny reading to your children before they go to bed. The link to the version I'm talking about is here.

Let's begin with the women in this story. In the most obvious aspect, you have the stepmother as the villain. She kills her stepson and makes her daughter think that she had killed the boy instead. Then they hide the body in a stew. Which the father eats all of. Crafty, but in a gross way. She's defeated when her sins come home to roost, literally, and the bird drops a millstone on her head. In a way she set up her own demise, but I doubt she was thinking her stepson would come back as a magic bird after he'd been eaten.

On the other hand, we have the boy's mother. I know she died after the first few paragraphs, but she still plays a role in this story. She clearly loved the juniper tree quite a bit, even eating the berries, which might have been a terrible idea, since it's possible those berries were poisonous. That might explain why the mother died. Whatever her cause of death, it's very important that she was buried beneath the juniper tree. That's the reason the tree was able to change the little boy's bones into a magical bird. It's because, as much as this woman loved the juniper tree, she loved her son even more. This story can be seen as two women's wills battling because they are the ones who set these events in motion. In the end, the mother's love wins out over the stepmother's greed and insecurity.

However, let's not discount the boy entirely. It was through his mother's love that he came back, but his actions after that were his own. Once he is a bird, he learns the lesson that everyone who wants to make a living in the arts has learned: never sing for free if you can charge for it. He charges pretty high prices too, a gold chain, red shoes, and a millstone. He also plays his cards well, dispensing gifts to his father and stepsister, and death from above to his murderous stepmother. Once he is revenged, he turns back into a little boy and the family happily goes inside. I guess someone else had to clean up the mess under the millstone.

I suppose the moral of this story is not to murder anyone, because they might come back to kill you.