For my preparation of next week’s class, I did not read the right/ the assigned tale. Nevertheless, as I found it highly interesting, I thought that I could write my discovery blog and share my findings:

This reading focuses on Fortunio. Fortunio was adopted as an orphan by a loving family, who could not have children on their own. Due to his secret power, he has wished for a sibling, so that his mother got pregnant. Years later, in a fight, Fortunio’s brother Valentino tells Fortunio that he is not the legitimate son of their parents. In his sorrow, Fortunio decides to leave his home, when his mother comes up to him and curses him to be swallowed up by sirens if he ever went on an adventure on the sea. Fortunio ignores his mother’s curse and travels to the west, where he encounters a dispute between a wolf, an ant and an eagle, that were discussing over eating a deer. Fortunio helps them dividing the food properly and they gift him the power to turn into each of the animals whenever he needs to and they part ways. On his adventure, he sees the Princess Doralice of Polonia, who is now promised to a bad looking man called Saracen that won Doralice as a bride. In the following days, he uses his power to transform into the different animals to get to know Doralice better. Doralice and Fortunio thus fall in love with each other and they marry. After they have married, Fortunio decides to travel the sea, where he gets caught by a siren’s song and gets swallowed by the sea, just as he his mother predicted it. After two years of her husband being gone, Doralice and their son decide to look for him to get him out from the siren. Doralice manages to free her husband from the siren’s hostage, when he suddenly uses his power again to turn into an eagle to escape to the ship. Back home, he lastly turns into a wolf to devour his mother and brother. (cf. Penguin, pgs. 89-100).

Reading this tale especially caught my interest, because it made me aware of the deep connection humans and the natural environment have that we now lost. Besides of the fact that the “dangerous” siren caught Fortunio and held him into hostage (and that he was too greedy to accept that he has everything he has ever dreamed of and did not want to stop), I found it even more interesting to see how deeply connected humans and animals can be. Fortunio never, not even a second, thought about the danger of approaching dangerous animals such as a wolf or an eagle. By helping them and approaching them with curiosity, he got to be a part of their world and could understand better, how both humans and animals can coexist together without harming one another. He even cares about a smaller animal such as the ant to get a fair share of the food. It is, as if Fortunio was able to recognize everybody’s existence in this world. Through respect, they become part of one world and there is no us-vs-them society. When I thought about that a little bit more, I got aware that we humans have lost the mutual respect to our nature. If we were a little bit more respectful towards our environment, we would be able to all live in peace together. Instead, humanity’s greed causes severe effects on our natural surroundings. Deforestation which causes the loss of the natural habitats of animals or anthropological natural disasters were only a few of the examples that directly came to my mind. We should all be a little bit like Fortunio and appreciate our coexistence with other living beings on this world.