For this assignment I’ve chosen to retell the Brothers Grimm story of the Dog and the Sparrow. It follows the titular bird, who befriends an abused dog. He brings him food and keeps watch when he sleeps. Tragedy strikes when the dog gets run over by a carriage, despite the sparrows’ attempts to stop it. The bird then takes his anger out on the carter, tricking him into killing his horses and destroying his carriage and load. He makes every bird nearby ravage his house for seeds, and he lets him destroy all his belongings in a blind rage. The climactic turning point happens when the man captures the sparrow and decides to swallow him. The sparrow resists and breaks loose, taunting him through his teeth. The carter’s wife, in a last ditch attempt, takes a swipe at the bird with a meat hook. She kills her husband on the spot, and the sparrow flies away.
In my retelling however, I want to focus more on the sparrow itself. The story cuts off after the man dies, but for the bird to wreak such havoc in his grief, I’m sure that when the man fell down lifeless he still did not feel satisfied. I want to omit the dog at all from my diorama to highlight that all the destruction and pain the sparrow has caused, including the death and misery of innocents (horses or the carter’s wife), did nothing to replace the bird’s beloved friend. I want the sparrow to be highlighted among the violence he has enacted, showing that in his pursuit of retribution, he embodied tenfold the qualities of the dog’s killer. He flew away, defiled and unsatisfied, now forced to grieve without an enemy to distract from his loss.
