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In many Grimm’s tales there is a motive of people cursed into animals. Often it would be done by relatives. Could this be read as a symbol of a death?

In “The Raven” princess was turned into the raven by her mother and “she flew into the dark wood”. (1) In “The twelve brothers” princes were meant to be killed by the father, but their death was substituted with living in the woods “in the deepest darkest place”. (2) Still they meet their fate after their reunion with a sister when she broke enchanted flowers and brothers turns into ravens.

In folklore the forest means 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 tightly connected with the image of a raven. In myth the ravens was thought as a mediator animal between life and death or as the ghosts of murdered persons. (4) Turning into the raven can be read as going from living world to the dead.

Both stories are telling that to change back the raven would need another person to take trials. These usually are given by old woman who live in the depths of the woods and represent the goddess of the life and death. The transformation to human means going back from the dead to living world.

These trials requires restrictions from taking food or from speaking and laughing and to “being dumb for seven years”(2) - all things that manifest the life. By keeping this taboo person could temporarily go to the land of dead and bring others back with them. In tales that would mean breaking the raven’s course.

Both tales ends with the marriage that also symbolised beginning of a new life.

(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...