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Paper short abstract

In the Maiden who Seek her Brothers tales, the brothers live as birds in a far-off, uninhabited land, preserved from death in a liminal state, until their sister's sacrifice releases them. Once released, they witness an execution, unrelated to their crimes, that balances life and death in the text.

Paper long abstract

A couple has many sons and then finally a daughter. The sons are sent to their death or abandoned, but instead transform into birds. Years later their sister comes to find them and makes a sacrifice, transforming them back. This tale type, ATU 451: The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers, appears three times in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, from multiple female sources and another variant predates them in the 1801 Fairy Tales by an anonymous woman writer. The brothers’ transition into animals, represents a temporary liminal state in between life and death, which protects them, but also will result in death if they remain too long. They flee to the farthest reaches of the forest, or, in one case, to a glass mountain beyond the sun, the moon, and the stars. In this both the animal transformation and the position in an uninhabited land act as a way for the brothers to temporarily escape their death. Their sister, however, must make bodily sacrifices of her own, the loss of her voice or her finger, in order to transform them and bring them back to humanity and to human-inhabited lands. Finally, three of these four tales ends with a brutal execution of the sister's mother-in-law. Though the execution is for a crime unrelated to the brothers, there is a relationship between this death and the death that the brothers escaped, indicating a need for balance in life and death in this environment.