The Message of the Raven: through death to new beginning.

[ejiky]

Сражаться за словолимит с английским языком это довольно затягивающее занятие! Кто кого побеждает пока еще не ясно, но я потихоньку превращаюсь в спартанку. Меньше слов, еще меньше! Все лишнее- в пропасть!

Эссе по сказкам братьев Гримм, вариант два:

In many fairy tales there is a motive of people cursed into animals. It’s symbolise the ritual death as the way to new social level (like reaching an adulthood).
The image of a raven give the most clear message of this event.
In myth the ravens was thought as a mediator animal between life and death or as the ghosts of murdered persons. Turning into the raven can be read as going from living world to the dead. Also ravens were messengers for gods and prophets that can predict death. (4)

In “The twelve brothers” princes were meant to be killed, but their death was substituted with living in the woods “in the deepest darkest place”. (2)
In “The Raven” princess was turned into the raven and too “flew into a dark wood”.(1) She also can predict the failure of a first trial: "I know quite well I shall not be set free of thee." (1)
The forest represents the land of death. Its a dark place “of the dangers with which young people must contend if they are to become adults”. (3) The symbolism of the forest is tightly connected with the raven.

To end the ritual participants need to go through trials. They usually have a substitute person for them. It requires restrictions from all manifestations of the life - taking the food or from speaking and laughing and just “being dumb for seven years”(2). By keeping this taboo person could temporarily go to the land of dead and bring bewitched people back. Which mean breaking the raven’s course and completing the ritual.
Both tales ends with the marriage that symbolized beginning of a new life.

Even in the modern life people still need to go through “trials” to level up themselves - exams, tests, works tryouts. So we all still going “into a dark wood” to gain our new beginnings.

(1)The raven from Grimm's House Tales, Lucy Crane translation, Project Gutenberg
(2) The twelve brothers from Grimm's House Tales, Lucy Crane translation, Project Gutenberg
(3) www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbol...
(4) Cultural depictions of ravens en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_ra...

Вариант три - в комментах.