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4. SPREADING MVTHS ABOUT IRON JOHN When I first heard the title of Robert Bly's book about men, Iron John, I made several quick associations1: man of steel, superman, invincible force, solid, but flying through the air faster than a speeding bullet. Explosive. The savior. Reliable . Law and order. John, not Jack. Formality. The Christian John. Stiff. Cold. Inhibited. Not Johnnie. Not Jock. John the Baptist. John the Apostle. Onward Christian soldiers . Blood and iron. Bismarck. Germany. War. Never could John be wild. Perhaps Johnny. Perhaps Jack. There was definitely something noble and heroic about the name Iron John, like the kings, dubbed with names signifying their outstanding traits: Richard the Lion-Hearted, Louis the Sun King, Frederick the Great. Iron John was clearly a book about proud strong men, about great men, sovereign stoic studs. On the contrary. My associations were wrong. Iron John, I discovered, was not about old legendary heroes but about the new meek men of today who desperately need to get in touch with that inner iron stuff from which mythical Iron Johns are made. More precisely, Bly's book is about American soft men, whom he wants to train and run through a rigorous initiatory path in eight stages that he gleans from a German fairy tale, Der Eisenhans or Iron Hans, published by Wilhelm Grimm in 1850. The adventures in this tale are SPREADING MYTHS ABOUT IRON JOHN 97 Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde, 1922. thus paradigmatic metaphors and provide a healing process for American men, whose relations to their fathers have deteriorated because of the demands of industrialization, and who have been led astray by the women's movement. Confused about their identity, American men must learn the true meaning of what it is to be wild, to overcome their malaise and complete their journeys of male self-realization. Bly makes an important distinction between savage and wild so that readers will not be confused about what today 's confused males need, but before I discuss this distinction and the problems that I have with his mythopoetic diagnosis of the sufferings of contemporary American men, let me briefly recount the plot of Iron Hans so that we can grasp why Bly has focused on this particular tale to expound his psycho-philosophical notions about wildness and maleness. Wilhelm Grimm's version, Iron Hans, features a king Project MUSE (2024-04-20 03:28 GMT) 98 FAIR\" TALE AS MVTH whose forest is inhabited by some mysterious creature who kills all who enter it. For many years nobody ventures into the forest until a stranger arrives and disenchants the forest by capturing a wild man, who had been dwelling in a deep pool. This man was brown as rusty iron, and his hair hung over his face down to his knees. The king has the wild man placed in an iron cage in the castle courtyard, gives the key to the cage to the queen, and forbids anyone to open it under the penalty of death. However, one day the king's eightyear -old son loses his golden ball, and it bounces into the cage. So, the wild man tells him that the only way he can regain his ball is by stealing the key from under his mother's pillow and opening the cage. When the boy finally frees the wild man, he is so terrified of his father's wrath that he asks the wild man to take him along. The wild man carries the boy to a golden spring in the forest and tells him that he must not allow anything to fall into it or else the water will become polluted. However, the boy's finger, which had gotten stuck while he was freeing the wild man, begins to hurt, and he dips it into the spring. The finger turns to gold, as does his hair after the wild man gives him two more chances. Therefore, the boy must leave the forest. But the wild man reveals his name to the boy and tells him that whenever he needs something he is to return to the forest and cry out "Iron Hans." The prince covers his golden hair with a little cap and eventually obtains a job as a gardener's helper at another king's castle. One day, while working in the garden, he takes off his cap, and the king's daughter notices his golden hair from her window. She invites him to her room and rewards...

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