Hello, I'm Richard Nicholas Nimz, prospector of the written word. Now we move on to something I know everyone's heard of: Grimm's Fairy Tales. I'm rather excited to be talking about this, and not just because of my fine Prussian roots*. As I've said before, I have a great love of fantasy, which is part of why I love the Disney movies so much. Thus, the two linguists' collection of fairy tales from all over Germany and France that inspired several of their films would naturally interest me. And thus I talk about them now.
*Pomeranian. Yes, like the dog.
Grimm, J., Grimm, W., & Scharl, J. (ill.). (1972). The complete Grimm's fairy tales. New York: Pantheon.
Summary: There are 210 individual stories in this collection. To catalog them all with even a sentence would take the rest of this blog. Suffice it to say that kind-hearted fools are rewarded for their kindness and people who fail to do what they're told are punished. Also, odds are if you're read one, some of the others will seem similar to you.
Thoughts: By now, I think everyone knows that the original Grimm's Fairy Tales were darker, gorier, and lewder than the versions kids experience. The fact is, these stories were originally aimed at adults. However, because people were often reading them to their children, the Brothers Grimm decided to alter the stories to be more appropriate, more Christianized and less demonizing to mothers. The altered versions still have some undesirable content in them, though. Cinderella is the toe-chopping version seen in Into the Woods, The Jew in the Thorns is antisemitic, and unless you or your kids really love gore, avoid The Juniper Tree like the plague. In addition, these stories can get rather strange. A favorite passage of mine from The Bird, the Mouse, and the Sausage should illustrate this nicely:
"Not far off, however, [the bird] met a dog on the road who had fallen upon the poor sausage as lawful booty, and had seized and swallowed it. The bird charged the dog with an act of bare-faced robbery, but words were useless, for the dog said he had found forged letters on the sausage, on which account its life was forfeited to him."
Yes, that is from a story where a bird, a mouse, and a sausage live under one roof. And it isn't a comedy. Unless you find all of them dying funny because they should've stuck to their assigned chores, in which case the rest of this book should make perfect sense to you.
That being said, there are still a bunch of stories that both make sense and are G/PG-rated unaltered. Some of them include: King Thrushbeard, How Six Men Got on in the World, Godfather Death, The Fisherman and his Wife, The Elves (including the story of the Elves and the Shoemaker), The Six Swans, Little Briar-Rose (a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty), Maid Maleen, and The Golden Key. As a whole, though, if you're going to read these to kids, you'll probably want to read through each of these and tailor them to fit.
The main message of many of these stories, as I mentioned earlier, seems to be "do what's right and do what you're told or there'll be Hell to pay". Even within those parameters, there's Hell to pay, but things turn out well enough in the end. Regarding modern sensibilities, there's little in the tales that outright contradicts them (see The Jew in the Thorns and The Good Bargain for examples) except for the gender roles of the time. Professor Seth Lerer points out that in most of these stories, women and girls are often swept around by the tides of the story, whereas men and boys take the bull by the horns (2008). I concur with his point, but I also want to make a point of Doug Walker's Nostalgia Critic to soften it a bit. There are several stories where a female protagonist takes an active role in the story, such as Hansel and Gretel, the Hare's Bride, and the end of Little Red-Cap (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hood). However, even where the heroine is passive, such as in Cinderella, she is displaying patience and fortitude, which are good virtues for anyone to have (Walt Disney supposedly identified with her most of all the characters in his films) (2013). There's even a story that has men go through this: The Three Apprentices (warning, they deal with the devil, but it's not quite what you think).
Obviously, these stories were collected from many different places, but something I find interesting is that several of them resemble stories from further afield than just Germany and France and the like. The Water Nixie resembles a story about the Russian hag Baba Yaga. The Spirit in the Bottle is similar to a story from the Thousand and One Nights. Even stranger, The Wedding of Mrs. Fox features a fox with nine tails, a spirit from East Asia. In today's multicultural world, finding out what also exists where can be quite intriguing.
Granted, these stories are incredibly short and underdeveloped, but even that can be fun. As a writer myself, I love sparing a moment to think about what some of these stories would look like as films. With the fantasy boom currently going on, these are good seeds for a deeper analysis and exploration of the story for writers to practice their craft on. Even just enjoyed on their own, these are good stories, imaginative, although a reflection of a slightly alien and more gore-happy culture.
Lerer, S. (2008). Children's literature: A reader's history from Aesop to Harry Potter. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Walker, D. (2013, Mar. 26). Nostalgia Critic editorial: What's with all the princess hate? [video file]. Retrieved from: http://channelawesome.com/nostalgia-critic-editorial-whats-with-the-princess-hate/
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