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The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship

A version of the story can be found here (a version of the story is also in Grimms Fairy Tales): https://www.worldoftales.com/.../Russian_Folktale_22.html...

The story starts out with the Tsar requesting a flying ship. This image puzzled me a great deal. However, I think it is something like the Tsar asking or looking for a kingdom, a vessel to hold his identity. A ship is generally feminine, and a flying ship is something like a very high version of the feminine.

Only a fool can construct such a ship, as the story shows. The reason is that such a kingdom must be able to contain the lowest and the highest.

The fool shows hospitality to the lowest person, and it seems that the old man was an angel, who in response revealed how to obtain a flying ship. The impossible task can only be accomplished with heavenly insight. Thus we have the fool, who is the lowest, reaching up to the highest.

The ship appears while the Fool was asleep, and in this respect is like the Elves and the Shoemaker: there is an implicit side to the making of the ship. That is, it is something to do with the flying ship requiring its appearance to be hidden.

If we are to think of a national body, it is mysterious in the way it comes together. Too much politicking, too much explanation does not build the body the way community ties do. The sleep of the fool seems to point towards this implicit, 'grassroots' and more mysterious side of how a body comes together. He merely gets the ball rolling by striking the tree with an axe.

The Fool is instructed to gather everyone he meets, and he meets those who represent the strength of the people. The ship has a lot of body by the end of the trip, being able to eat and drink insatiably, cover the whole world in a single step, move mountains, hear things on the other side of the world etc.

The story then focuses on a higher thing (the king) despising a lower thing (the ship of fools). The Tsar is too proud to accept the body he has been offered. He doesn't think his identity is worthy of it, and sets out to get rid of it by proposing a series of impossible tasks. The ship of fools accomplishes them all, until finally the Tsar sends out an army, which is then defeated by the army raised from the woodbearer's load. More particularly, we can see this as the Tsar subjecting the mystery of the flying ship, the feminine, to rationality, in an attempt to explain it (thanks to Lisa Parrott for this insight).

The story speaks to the problem when an identity asks too much, when the hierarchy overreaches. It is in this situation that the fool becomes king. In this, there are hints of Pharaoh and the Hebrews, and David and Saul.

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