Grimms' stories no fairy tales
Warning: This column is not a fairy tale for the faint-of-heart.
Rewatching “Tangled” this weekend and noting just a few differences from the Rapunzel of my childhood, I couldn’t help but wonder about the original.
Turns out, it was R-rated. Like most of the original tales made famous by the Brothers Grimm.
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786–1859) were German scholar-authors (and lexicographers) who collected and published folklore. Their two volumes “Children’s and Household Tales” popularized what had mostly been traditional oral tales such as "Cinderella,” "Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood" and so many other classics now published in more than 100 languages and adapted to film.
This, many people know. What few remember is that the sanitized, Disney-rated versions we grew to love aren’t much like the originals.
Face it, life in the centuries which gave rise to those tales was rough, very rough. Violence and cruelty were common, so the stories reflected that.
The stepsisters literally cut off their heels and toes to fit in Cinderella’s thus-bloody slipper. Instead of kissing the frog, the princess hurled him against a wall — splat!
In the 1812 version of “Rapunzel” she gets pregnant after she and the prince spend many days together living in “joy and pleasure.”
And Red Riding Hood was no sweetheart, encouraging the wolf to eat Grandma so she could inherit.
Wonder why Hansel and Gretel wandered the woods alone? Because their desperate parents, with no food to feed them, sent the starving siblings away.
Remember some of the old children’s nursery rhymes with the awful lyrics, such as baby falling when the bough breaks and London Bridge falling down — horrors to a cheery-sounding ditty? They weren’t meant for children. It seems neither were the old “fairy” tales the Grimm brothers researched.
Fairies were supposed to be dark creatures, after all.
Like the political, cultural, and historical symbolism in those nursery rhymes, the 200 tales collected by the Grimm brothers were replete with implied commentary, both incendiary and critical.
Anti-Semitism was another theme in at least three stories.
“The Jew in the Brambles” protagonist happily torments a Jewish man by forcing him to dance in a thicket of thorns while calling him names.
In “The Good Bargain,” a Jewish man is portrayed as a penny-pinching swindler. Perhaps that’s why during the Third Reich, the Nazis tellingly adopted Grimms’ tales for propaganda purposes. They claimed, for example, that Little Red Riding Hood symbolized the German people suffering at the hands of the Jewish wolf, and that Cinderella’s Aryan purity distinguished her from her mongrel stepsister.
That’s obviously overreaching; Cinderella likely had nothing to do with racism, and I’m not advocating tossing her into the mop bucket because some freaks appropriated her story. But as our modern culture seems to be refocusing its lens, it’s interesting to consider how much things change in our perceptions throughout time — so much so that often enough, how we see history isn’t how it really was.
We don’t have to stop telling fairy tales because the originals were meaner. Everything evolves over time — both in comprehension and clarity. Yet understanding how things changed, why, and where they stand now can only happen with that clear lens shining an unsanitized, honest look back to the beginning.
In that way, Grimm’s fairy tales are a lot like American culture. Both rough and evolving, yet still beautiful.
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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Email Sholeh@cdapress.com.