Resurrecting Birds

The subject of my last post led me to anthropolgist Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence's 1997 book Hunting the Wren: Transformation of Bird to Symbol. In that book, which sadly is out of print, Lawrence does an outstanding job of tracing as much of the history of the wren hunt as can be reconstructed, and of exploring the dense symbolic networks surrounding it. She examines various latter-day interpretations of the practice in relation to totemism, the dying-and-resurrecting god motif, Christian iconography, and so on.

One of the most interesting aspects of the wren hunt is the suggestion that the "king of all birds" must be not only killed and paraded about but actually cooked and sacramentally eaten. (Some of the songs associated with the hunt make humorous declarations about the vast amount of food provided by the body of the tiny bird.) Although Lawrence doesn't discuss the Grimm Brothers' tale of "The Juniper Tree," which I briefly alluded to in my last post, this passage about the ritual cooking of the wren in a pot or pan immediately brought it to mind:

[...] the wren is destroyed and dismembered but will be miraculously reborn. Through immersion in the cauldron the bird is resurrected, and with it those who partake of the ceremonial feast will be themselves renewed and reborn.

For those unfamiliar with "The Juniper Tree," it concerns a little boy who is murdered by his stepmother, dismembered, and cooked into a stew that is fed to his unknowing father. The boy's half-sister, who has witnessed the dismemberment, gathers up the bones and sets them beneath the titular tree, out of which a brilliantly-plumed bird magically resurrects. The bird then sings a beautiful song, which it will only repeat if given a gift. After collecting a gold chain, a pair of red shoes, and a millstone, it bestows these gifts in turn on the father, the half-sister, and the stepmother (who is crushed by the stone). Interestingly, a gold chain turns up in one verse of one version of the wren song:

God bless the mistress of this house,
A golden chain around her neck,
And if she's sick or if she's sore
The Lord have mercy on her soul

Here it's the mistress, not the father, who receives the chain, but that wouldn't suit the narrative of "The Juniper Tree," since the mistress will receive a fatal punishment instead of a reward.

Another interesting case of the resurrection of a bird by eating it turns up in Peter Blegvad's song "Chicken," which describes how a man and a woman go for a walk carrying a chicken "in a gunnysack." After the man ("Frank") mysteriously disappears, the woman eats the chicken, gathers up the bones (accidentally overlooking one "finger bone"), and throws them down a well.

She calls "Come back, Frank, and find your wife."
When the sack hits the water it comes to life

The woman takes the handle and she turns the crank
Up comes the bucket and there sits Frank
He says "There's only one thing I don't understand."
He says "Where's the little finger of my left hand?"

In a live performance of the song ( St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn Heights, NY, March 14, 1992) Blegvad introduced it by reading from Sigmund Freud's discussion of the case of "Little Arpad," a young boy who was bitten on the penis by a chicken and thereafter developed an obsession with the bird. Blegvad did not, however, mention that (according to Peter Gay) Arpad reportedly also said "One should put my mother into a pot and cook her, then there would be a preserved mother and I could eat her."