Feathered Shapes

Feather cloaks of the north

In Norse myth a bird's shape could be worn like a coat. The word for it was fjadrhamr, feather-skin, built on the same hamr, or outward shape, that a shape-strong person could change. The goddess Freyja owned a cloak of falcon feathers, and she lent it more than once. When Thor's hammer was stolen, Loki borrowed it to fly to the giants and find where it was hidden. In another tale he wore it to rescue Idunn, keeper of the apples of youth, whom a giant had carried off. He changed her into a nut, held her in his claws, and flew for home. The giant followed in the shape of an eagle, and the gods lit a fire of wood shavings at the walls of their stronghold. The eagle could not stop in time, and his feathers caught fire.

Odin took the eagle's shape for the most famous flight of all. He had slipped into a mountain in the form of a snake and won three draughts of the mead of poetry from the giant's daughter who guarded it. Then he fled as an eagle with the mead in his mouth, while the giant pursued him, also as an eagle. At the walls the gods set out vessels, and Odin spat the mead into them. A little was lost along the way, and that, the old tellers said, is the share that goes to bad poets. Odin, it was said, could also lie still as if asleep while his spirit went abroad as a bird, the idea told on the page of the bear and the berserker.

The crow of battle

Irish tradition knows a group of war goddesses, and their favored shape is the crow. One of them, Badb, has a name that means crow, and she was pictured as the hooded crow that gathers over a battlefield. The greatest of them is the Morrigan, whose name is usually explained as "great queen" or "phantom queen." In the long Irish epic of the cattle raid, she warns the great brown bull in the shape of a bird, and she comes against the young hero Cu Chulainn at a ford as an eel, a she-wolf and a heifer, one after another.

In the best-known telling of his death, Cu Chulainn, mortally wounded, binds himself to a standing stone so that he may die on his feet, and his enemies dare not come near until a crow settles on his shoulder. The bird is usually taken to be the goddess. The image is a grave one, but the crow in it is not cruel. She is the sign that a life is over.

The woman made of flowers

The fourth branch of the Welsh Mabinogi, a collection of medieval tales, tells of Lleu, a young lord whose mother had sworn that he would never have a wife of any race now on earth. Two magicians made him one from the flowers of oak, broom and meadowsweet, and named her Blodeuwedd, flower-face. She came to love another man, and together they plotted Lleu's death, learning by a trick the strange conditions under which alone he could be killed.

When the spear struck, Lleu did not die. He gave a terrible cry and flew up as an eagle and was lost, until one of the magicians found him in an oak, sang him down with verses, and restored him. Blodeuwedd's punishment was a shape of her own. She was turned into an owl, never to show her face to the daylight, and all other birds would harry her wherever they found her. The tale ends by noting that the owl is still called blodeuwedd. A woman made to suit a man's need, who wanted a life of her own, has drawn much sympathy from modern readers.

Sirens and harpies

The Sirens of Greek myth are now pictured as mermaids, but they began as birds. Homer's Odyssey says only that they sit in a meadow singing, among the bones of men, and that Odysseus had his crew stop their ears with wax while he listened, bound to the mast. The painters of early Greek vases gave them the bodies of birds and the heads of women, and so they remained for centuries, even carved on gravestones as mourners. Ovid explains the wings: the Sirens had been companions of Persephone, and when she was carried off to the underworld they asked for wings to search for her over the sea. Only in the early Middle Ages did they begin to be given fish tails, and in several European languages the word for siren now simply means mermaid.

The harpies, whose name means "snatchers," were at first the swift winds themselves, lovely-haired and fast as birds. Later poets made them foul: hungry bird-women with hooked claws who snatched and spoiled the food of a blind king until the winged sons of the north wind drove them away.

Bird-maidens of the Slavic lands

The best-known bird-maidens of Russian folk art are a pair, Sirin and Alkonost. Sirin's name comes from the Greek Siren; Alkonost's is usually traced to the halcyon, the kingfisher of Greek legend, which was said to calm the winter sea while it nested. Both came into Russia through learned books, and from there into popular prints, carved window frames and painted chests. In later popular belief they became birds of paradise, often paired as birds of sorrow and of joy.

Russian fairy tales also have bird lovers. In one, a girl asks her father to bring her a feather of the bright falcon Finist, and the falcon comes to her window at night and becomes a young man. Her jealous sisters set knives in the window frame, he is wounded and flies away, and she must wear out iron shoes to find him again. A strikingly similar story was told in a Breton lay of the twelfth century, from the same collection as Bisclavret: a hawk flies through the window of a lady shut in a tower, becomes a knight, and is wounded by spikes her jealous husband has set there.

The tengu of Japan

In the mountains of Japan live the tengu. Their name comes from a Chinese phrase meaning "heavenly dog," but in Japan they took the form of birds of prey. The early tengu were pictured much like kites, and medieval tales are wary of them: they lead monks astray with illusions, carry people off, and appear in false shapes, as priests or wandering ascetics. Proud and deceitful clergy were said to be reborn among them.

Over time their image changed. The crow tengu kept a beak and wings, while the great tengu became a red-faced, long-nosed figure in the dress of a mountain ascetic, carrying a fan of feathers. Legend says a tengu of a sacred mountain near Kyoto taught swordsmanship to a boy who grew up to be one of the great heroes of Japanese history. Tengu are honored as protectors at a number of mountain temples and shrines today, and they are best met there with the courtesy owed to any guardian.

Brothers in feathers

A family of European folktales turns on a sister and her bird-brothers. In a German tale gathered in the nineteenth century, six brothers are changed into swans by their stepmother. Their sister can free them only by sewing six shirts from small wild flowers and keeping silent for six years. She marries a king, and her silence lets a cruel mother-in-law accuse her of killing her own babies. On the day she is to be burned, with the last shirt nearly done, the six swans fly down. She throws the shirts over them and they stand up as men, except the youngest, whose shirt lacks a sleeve, and who keeps a swan's wing in place of an arm.

In a related tale, seven brothers become ravens through their father's careless curse, and their little sister walks to the sun, the moon and the stars to find them, and at last opens the glass mountain where they live with a key made from her own little finger. The Irish children of Lir, swans for nine hundred years, are told of on the page of selkies and swan maidens, and the story shelf has its own swan tale in The Swan Children.

These are stories about loyalty that costs something. The sister's voice, her comfort and even her own body are the price of her brothers' return, and the missing sleeve is a reminder that rescue is rarely perfect.

Why feathers

Across these stories the bird's shape stands for what a bird can do and a person cannot. It crosses great distances in a moment, as Odin's eagle and Freyja's falcon do. It carries messages between worlds, as the crow does between the living and the dead. It escapes, and it is hard to hold, which is why the swan maidens and the crane wife must have their feathers hidden or their secret kept if they are to stay. And because so many peoples have pictured the soul as a bird, a feathered shape is often a shape of grief.

Some people today identify as birds in a lasting, inward way, as described on the page of bird theriotypes. That is a matter of identity, not of feather cloaks, and nobody grows wings. But the old wish behind these myths, to be lighter than the body allows, is one many readers will recognize.