"The Disneyfication of fairy stories over the past 70-odd years since Uncle Walt released his animated take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has put into most people's minds a primary-coloured world of beautiful people facing dastardly villains and apparently insurmountable obstacles on their path to a life of happiness alongside Mr or Ms (or, more likely, HRH) Right; a world where good always triumphs and there's no better relationship than one built upon the size of a kingdom. A world, largely, for children. But the picture painted by the Grimms was of a vast, dark, world-encompassing forest in which still darker deeds were committed – and went unpunished.
Lopping off heads with axes was de rigueur; the story of The Robber Bridegroom, to cite one particularly bloody example, contained a horrifying passage in which the robbers
"dragged with them another young girl. They were drunk, and paid no heed to her screams and lamentations. They gave her wine to drink, three glasses full, one glass of white wine, one glass of red, and a glass of yellow, and with this her heart burst in twain. Thereupon they tore off her delicate raiment, laid her on a table, cut her beautiful body in pieces and strewed salt thereon."But all this x-rated brutality isn't as out of place as it might at first appear. The folk tales that have, over the years, become sanitised and cutesy, originally started life as stories for grown-ups..."
The paragraphs above are from the "Books Blog" at The Guardian.
One fulltext online version of The Robber Bridegroom is at Project Gutenberg.
Illustration credit to Helen Stratton (1903), via SurLaLune Fairy Tales.
That's the version of fairy-tale you need to read to a child if you don't want them to sleep... ever again.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I was scared out of my wits as a small child by the evil stepmother in Disney's Snow White. I don't think you can really tell what's going to badly upset a particular child.
ReplyDeleteA few years later, I became horse crazy, and my mother read me a series of horse stories, which I loved. At one point she got Steinbeck's "Red Pony" from the library and read that to me. It's all very much kid-friendly "boy and his horse" type stuff, but it ends with a horrible, bloody scene of the horse, a mare, being killed with a hammer to the head when she gets in trouble delivering a foal, and the foal being ripped from her body in order to save it. It upset me terribly, and my mother felt bad that she'd exposed me to it.
These incidents didn't do me any lasting harm, but on the other hand they caused me intense discomfort at the time that I didn't need to experience.
I recently told the real story of Snow White to my (high school) students, and they were shocked/amused at the differences and the violence of it. However, like I explained to them, the trouble is that real life is often horrifying. What better way to prepare people for it than to tell them horrible stories?
ReplyDeleteA case in point is the parents up in arms about "Where the Wild Things Are", saying it's too scary. I agree with Maurice Sendak, who basically condemned those parents to H--l.
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting aspect is the sanitizing of much of the bigotry and racism found in old folk tales.
ReplyDeleteIf you search this Project Gutenberg version of Grimm's Fairytales for The Jew in the Thornbush you won't find it. It has been translated here as "Miser" unlike the "Jew" in the original. You will notice all of the typical antisemitic elements though.