“roselil and Her Mother”: an Archetypal Interpretation of a Danish Folk Song

with a young lad on its back. In his right hand, each rider held a long spear that he raised just before attempting to catch a ring suspended over his head with its tip. I was only a child visiting my cousins in the countryside, but I remember the event vividly, and later on I would realize that I was witnessing an ancient tradition upheld through generations since the early Middle Ages. The one rider who could catch the ring would proudly give it to the girl in town he fancied. This was a symbolic gesture, as the ring symbolizes the unbreakable wholeness of a relationship between two people. What I did not understand at the time was that there were archetypal patterns to human existence, templates of how we are to live our lives, offering insight into what happens at certain times and what needs to happen at other times. Thus, when I started studying to become an Archetypal Pattern Analyst, I began by reading four works by Marie-Louise von Franz, The Cat, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, and The Feminine in Fairy Tales.1 Those books inspired me to look at old Danish folk songs in a new perspective. In this paper, I propose to explore the Danish folk song tradition through the lens of deep cultural and archetypal patterns; in other words, as though the songs were fairy tales. In this study, I will focus upon “Roselil and Her Mother,” a folk song which immediately came to mind, as this was a song of great popularity in Denmark.