The Three Languages

"Oil Painted Dove Detail"
Darko Topalski

The Tale

There was once an old count in Switzerland who had one son who was stupid and couldn’t learn anything. The father decides to try his best to educate his son and three times sends him away for an entire year to learn with a celebrated master. After each year the son tells his father what he has learned:

http://freepages.misc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~blinkofamily/

The first year he learned the speech of the dogs.

After the second year he understood the language of birds.

At the end of the third year, he knew what frogs said as well.

His father is very unhappy with the way his son wasted his education and immediately declares that he is no longer his son and proceeds to order the village people to take the boy to the woods and kill him. The villagers take pity on the boy and cut out the eyes and the tongue of a deer to bring back to the count as proof that his son was dead.

The poor boy wanders around until he finds a fortress where he begs to spend the night. They offer him to spend the night in an old tower which was infested with wild dogs who terrorized the whole town and even devoured a man once. The youth merely asks for some food to give the dogs and goes to the tower without fear and the dogs do not harm him. The next morning, he informed the lord of the fortress that the dogs had told him (in their own language, which he speaks) that they are bewitched to watch over a treasure in the old tower. They also tell the boy how to break the enchantment and find the treasure. The lord promises to adopt the boy as his own if he breaks the curse and retrieves the treasure, which the boy obviously does.

"Frog Swamp"
doredor (deviantart)

After some time, the youth decides there is nothing he wishes for more other than to travel to Rome. On the way, he passes through a marsh where he hears frogs croaking. When he hears what they are saying, he becomes very sorrowful and sad (and no, we do not know what it is they said). When he arrives at Rome, he finds the pope has died and the people are desperately searching for a new one. They agree that they will choose someone whom will be distinguished by some “divine and miraculous token”. The young count enters the church and two white doves land on his shoulders. The people immediately see this as a token from above and asked him to be the pope. The youth is unsure whether to accept or not, but the birds whisper in his ears and convince him to agree. “Thus was fulfilled what he had heard from the frogs on his way, which had so affected him, that he was to be his Holiness the Pope.” He was anointed and consecrated at that very moment and has to immediately sing mass, which he has no idea how to do, but the birds once again aid him by telling him the words.

*Read the original tale here

Discussion Points

I’d rather focus less on the Christian aspects of the tale, seeing as I do not know so much about it so I’d rather not complicate matters. If anyone has any other insights due to more knowledge, feel free to share them in the comments below J

Parenthood- One way to interpret the story is as a tale dealing with parent- child relationships. The boy starts off as the unwanted, stupid son of the count who gets so fed up with his stupidity that he disowns him and refuses to call him his son any longer. So the boy moves from being an unloved son to an orphan. After that, the boy is ‘adopted’ by the lord of the fortress who sees his worth after he breaks the enchantment and brings back the treasure. So the boy becomes a loved son. Then, the boy proceeds to become the pope, the figure who is considered the holy father of the Roman Catholic Church and its worshippers. So the boy goes through a very interesting development: from hated son to orphan to loved son to father of many. He is hated because of a trait from birth- his stupidity. His father throws him out due to his actions- his failure to fix his stupidity by learning. He gets adopted once again also due to his actions, and even more so, thanks to his special skills and personal interests (assuming that if he learned animal speech for three years when he wasn’t supposed to, it is something that interests him). After he is accepted and loved thanks to these skills, he can then use those same skills to take a step forward- and become a father. It’s also interesting to note that the boy was horrified at first by the idea of being a father and it takes much convincing before he accepts the responsibilities. Perhaps he is too traumatized by the way his father didn’t accept him as his son and therefore wants nothing to do with parenting of any sort (including the spiritual kind, forgetting for a moment the pope’s place of power). It is only after the birds, using the very same speech due to which his father kicked him out but the also thanks to which the lord adopted him, he was able to overcome the traumas involved in parenting and accept the role.

"The Great Ballet"
Pierre Leduc

The order of the languages: I think this is the first fairy tale I have come across in which we are given three details in a different order from the one they appear in later on in the tale. The boy first learns the speech of the dogs, then of the birds and finally of the frogs. Basing off what usually happens in fairy tales, I would assume that the knowledge of each language would be relevant in that order- first he would meet the dogs, then the birds and after that the frogs. But this is not the case: the meeting and the information gleaned from the frogs comes before the birds’ aid.

The only answer I can think of (while giving credit to the storyteller that they did not simply make a mistake) is that he learns the speeches in the order that would be most useful to him. The frogs are definitely the least useful creatures- we don’t even know what they said until later on in the story. The only question is, if this theory is true, why are the dogs considered more helpful than the doves? After all, the doves help him become the pope- what could be more important than that?

I think the answer is that the dogs did something much more important than give the boy the power of the pope. They were the first to accept him after his father kicked him out (by wagging their tails when he came to them) and helping him win his new father’s love and in a way restoring his confidence in himself and his ability to be accepted.

So, what do you think? Am I making a mistake in trying to take the moral of the story away from Christianity in a story that is obviously Christian? Or is there room for a universal idea to hide under the cloak of a specific culture? 

*I couldn't find a single tale-related image so I did the best I could.