do you see an owl?

The source book for loads of Disney weirdness

Do you see an owl in the book cover above? I am at the point where I am seeing owls everywhere, and I fully realize that my frenetic obsessive examination is causing this, owls emerging out of the ether.

Grimm's Fairy Tales was first published in 1812 by the German Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm. These stories include Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella and Snow White.

I saw a small low resolution image of the book (left), and to me it was clearly a stylized owl. It is so obvious in the tiny jPeg that I have to wonder if the artist from way-back-when was trying to create an owl for the cover. This tiny image was posted so small that you could just barely make out the title. I noted the little icon in a Secret Sun blog post from 2012, where Christopher Knowles points out the similarities of his own script idea and the 2011 movie Hanna. Both are an updated version of Snow White. The blog post is linked HERE.

Also, I noticed this foggy owl image on the Secret Sun just moments after sending an email to a researcher in Germany, the source of these stories. After that I had the thought "I wonder if there is a new post on Secret Sun?" When I clicked on it, I realized it had been posted less than two minutes earlier.

In the 1812 edition of the book there is an exceedingly strange story simply titled The Owl. It's short and worth reading (available as a PDF file HERE). Basically, a honed owl is portrayed as a terrible monster, striking paralyzing fear even to the bravest men in the town. A simplistic example of the owl as something horrible in folklore.

excerpt from The Owl

By some mischance one of the great owls, called horned owls, had come from the neighboring woods into the barn of one of the townsfolk in the night-time...

In the morning when the manservant went into the barn to fetch some straw, he was so mightily alarmed at the sight of the owl sitting there in a corner, that he ran away and announced to his master that a monster, the like of which he had never set eyes on in his life, and which could devour a man without the slightest difficulty, was sitting in the barn, rolling its eyes about in its head.

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beautiful design by Talwin Morris

Text added January 4th 2015

I just got a helpful message from a reader (C.M. Mayo) who pointed out that there is also an old edition of Little Women with the same cover. To me, this means that the cover for the Grimm's book was just some template used by some long ago publisher and NOT any kind of owl reference related to the story within the book.

This Art Neuvo cover was created by book designer Talwin Morris for a series known as Blackie Books out of Glasgow Scotland.

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