There’s a lot in this story I like to sit with.
For starters, I wonder if anyone out there can relate to the fisherman father. Actually, no I don’t. I wonder if in this place and time there’s anyone who can’t.
All the fish in all the world are nothing compared to the one thing you don’t even know you have. Yeah, that sits with me, too.
It’s interesting that Lucas decides to be a cooper. Why a cooper? There aren’t too many of those in the old stories. But here are a few things I know about coopers:
* They’re in some ways the neurosurgeons of carpentry. Coopers are not highly but unbelievably skilled.
* Their work involves the four elements: earth and fire help separate air from water.
* The job of a cooper is to seal in spirits.
There’s a lot going on with the dead horse. Horses can be a kind of balanced perspective in the old stories: half-wild, half domesticated, and many of them can talk. What does it mean to find a dead horse in the forest? Going back to coopers again, please do watch part of the video I shared above. As incredibly precise as their work is, they don’t rely too much on mechanical measurement. Everything’s proportional—everything in their work must relate to everything else. And so their knack for balance and proportionality is learned by repetition that becomes intuition.
It’s the bear who wants to call Lucas back, but it’s the fox who acts as messenger. Foxes certainly do have big Hermes energy.
Fox wisdom I believe is well-understood, but look what happens in the inn. Lucas doesn’t just go all Hulkamania on the gamblers and flatten them out with folding chairs—he becomes the ant first. Ant wisdom seems to involve careful positioning and quietly going about one’s work. You don’t bring out the bear until it’s the right time and right place.
The falcon has the best vantage point out of all of them, and can easily fly over its obstacles. Lucas becomes the falcon last.
The three identical sisters are interesting. The king seems to have some sense of the need for a middle way for his kingdom but sacrificed too much of his village’s future to find it. That can certainly be a problem.
When the mermaid returns, we now see clearly that tears and sorrow seem to bring her around. I think it would be a mistake to consider her a simply evil entity. Good luck eliminating the mermaids in your own life—try as you might to avoid them along the coast, they’ll just find you later in the forest. Mermaids are things to be dealt with.
If you’re a fairy tale geek like me, you might hear echoes of The Handless Maiden in the fisherman-and-mermaid scene, or The Lindworm Prince when we get to the cauldrons. I would caution you against waving your hand and saying, “oh yes oh yes, I know that archetype, I know the lesson here.” High school, English lit and Substack posts like this one have lied to you, I’m sorry to say. Stories don’t serve you best by being analyzed, interpreted or diagnosed. Their purpose is not to be written about in some “take” or blue book. It’s a disgrace we consider them mere cultural artifacts, and any teacher who has taught you to read one in search of an Allegorical Answer Key to reveal what each character “symbolizes” hasn’t done you any favors. As I mentioned earlier, no king is just a king. The king is your future potential. The king is the culture. The king is the ego, the pre-frontal cortex, government authority and the spirit of the age. These stories are supposed to resonate in that way. They’re older than us, they’ve had entire cultures as co-authors, and they all have their own bends in the road they’re trying to walk us through.
