Music to My Ears

I spent more time in the market square today than I should have. I wasted a good bit of it standing with a small crowd listening to the hurdy-gurdy player. I know this is not fine music, but the mind-numbing drone has its hypnotic charm. I left a coin in the musician’s hat. I wonder if Wilhelm would have done the same.

If one only looks at The Bremen Town Musicians, where the animals simply assume they can be musicians with no effort on their part, one might conclude the Grimms thought little of itinerant musicians. If one broadens the scope and considers The Marvelous Minstrel, The Jew in the Thorn Bush, and Hans My Hedgehog, the conclusion might be that… the Grimms thought little of itinerant musicians.

In The Marvelous Minstrel the musician attracts unwanted company when he plays his fiddle. In turn a wolf, a fox, and a rabbit show up, each animal wishing to learn to play the fiddle. The minstrel gets rid of them by agreeing to teach them, if the beasts will do exactly what he asks. In this way he entraps them, heartlessly leaving them to die.

Seeking revenge, the animals escape and pursue the scoundrel, but by then he has befriended a wood cutter, who defends the minstrel from the wronged creatures. The Grimms did not attempt to put a moral on this tale.

Reading The Jew in the Thorn Bush, one would think political correctness was not going to happen for another two hundred years. The musician in this story, who starts out looking like a nice young man, shoots the bird the Jew is admiring, sends the Jew into the thicket to retrieve the bird, then plays his magic fiddle, which forces the Jew to dance in the thorns. Despite this insult and in a turnaround of justice, the Jew is eventually hung. The Grimms apparently thought less of Jews than of itinerant musicians.

Hans My Hedgehog casts its musician in strange style. The hero, who is half man/half hedgehog, sits atop a rooster, playing his bagpipes while tending to his pigs and donkeys in the forest. The beautiful music of the bagpipes is heard by kings who are lost in the forest, and of whom Hans My Hedgehog takes advantage. When our hero finally sheds his beastly form he sheds the bagpipes as well. (The story ends with a nonsense tag, by the way: “My tale is done, and away it has run to little August’s house.”)

The Grimms, of course, did not write these stories, but they did some heavy editing and put their spin—and prejudice—upon them.

The Grimms were Reformed Calvinists. John Calvin considered music to be worldly and limited its role in the church to the unaccompanied singing of the Psalms. In contrast, Martin Luther, who loved music, allowed all sorts of instrumentation as long as it served the greater glory of God. The Lutherans’ propensity to play fast and loose with music in their sanctuary caused their Calvinist neighbors to judge their religious sincerity with suspicion and to view their fellow Protestants as strangers.

The Grimms, having grown up with the notion that music quickly slips into the profane, naturally handled the musicians in the tales in an appropriate manner: at arm’s length.

Walter Crane

Off With Their Heads

In 1266 at Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb of Paris, a pig was tried in a court of law, found guilty, and executed. Arguably, that was the first time an animal appeared as a defendant in a European court, but it was not the last time. Periodically other pigs as well as cattle and horses stood trial for murder or criminal damage.

I have been discussing this anomaly with my cat, albeit a one-sided conversation. While she did not acknowledge the validity of my point, or even condescend to answer a direct question, she was listening. Her stare remained steady.

My point was that human relationships with our fellow animals are fraught with illogic. For example, the very same animal that we routinely butcher and make into bacon, we have also put on trial for murder.

When I read The Bremen Town Musicians it crossed my mind that this might be the only story in the Grimms’ collection where the animals have deceived and gotten the better of humans. An hour or two of paging through the collection proved the opposite. I discovered half a dozen tales where domestic and wild creatures won out over us humans.

Of these half dozen stories I found The Dog and The Sparrow most interesting. A wagoner deliberately runs over and kills an old dog. The dog’s friend and protector, a sparrow, vows revenge, but the wagoner only taunts the bird.

The sparrow pecks out the bungs of the wine barrels, the wagoner’s freight. As the man inspects the damage, the sparrow pecks out the eyes of his horses. The wagoner flails at the sparrow with an axe, repeatedly missing the bird and killing his horses.

Abandoning his wagon, empty barrels, and dead horses, the man walks home to see the sparrow and a thousand of its relatives descending upon and devouring his wheat crop. When the sparrow gets into his house, the wagoner grabs the axe again, chopping up all of his possessions in pursuit of the bird. His wife, also axe in hand, fares worse, accidentally chopping off her husband’s head as the sparrow flies up and away.

In this tale an animal makes a moral judgment on a human, and is his jury and executioner. Surprisingly, I don’t find myself uncomfortable with the story. Justice does prevail. Evil is punished as it should be. However, the wagoner—we—have been judged by a bird!

I tried to explain to my cat that, when we look at the contradictory relationship we hold toward each other, the nonsense is easy to find.

Many humans, with no compunction, eat ham, bacon, veal, and steak, but we involuntarily recoil at the thought of eating our pets. (Other cultures have other reservations about what animals can or cannot be eaten, but the quandary is similar.)

Theologically speaking, animals do not have souls, but there are businesses available that provide the benefit of a proper burial for our nonhuman loved ones.

We call people we don’t like “asses.” Yet it was an ass that carried Jesus into Jerusalem and an ass that brought Mary to Bethlehem. Should we not honor the ass for that burden? And, in fact, almost every creche includes a donkey.

Perhaps, I told my cat, I made too much of this bit of illogic. We humans abound in illogical pursuits. For example, we make up, remember, and pass along fairy tales, which feed no one and bring little monetary profit, yet some of us persist.

My cat jumped to my lap, sniffed and rubbed her nose to mine, then abruptly leapt away. I think she was trying to console me.

Your thoughts?