An interesting article on Fairy Tales on the net

This was found on http://juleslife.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/fairy-tales-are-actually-scary/ and used with permission.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Fairy Tales Are Actually Scary…
Posted on
October 30, 2008
by juleslife

Found this interesting article….

Fairy tales: Scarier than you think
The original versions of tales like Sleeping Beauty were never meant for children.

By Mary, Quite Contrary

Unless your childhood was devoid of cartoons and storybooks, you should be quite familiar with tales featuring the likes of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. They’re all saccharine sweet and full of happily ever after, which masks the fact that they are based on gruesome, bloody tales that were never meant for children. Sleeping Beauty, for instance gets more than a kiss from her Prince Charming in the original story, written by Giambattista Basile in 1636. Instead, she gets raped and subsequently gives birth to twins.

Fairy tales originated as women’s stories passed down orally as a means of rebelling against oppression, political censorship and the literary establishment at that time. Usually violent and with a moral to boot, they became more palatable when Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm started collecting these tales from German peasants and Charles Perrault started retelling them in neighbouring France. These eventually evolved to become the well-loved stories we know today. Here’s a look at three fairy tales popularised by Disney.

Cinderella – mutilation

Both Perrault and the Grimm Brothers wrote versions of this tale, which differ vastly in plot and characterisation. In the Perrault version, for instance, Cinderella actively sources for transportation to the ball, suggesting that the rat trap might be a good place to find a coachman, instead of standing around looking bewildered as she does in the Disney version. She is also as scheming as her stepsisters, pretending to have been woken from sleep by their return and feigning surprise when they tell her about the mysterious princess at the ball.

All this pales in comparison to the Grimms’ account. In it, as in Perrault’s version, the ball is not a one-off affair but a two-day festival. On her first night out dancing with the prince, Cinderella manages to disappear when the clock strikes 12. On the second, night, however, the prince shows himself to be far from charming and gallant. He orders that the stairs be tarred with pitch. Cinderella’s left slipper gets stuck. Happily, she sustains nary a sprain and sprints off into the night.

The obsessed prince hunts her down, but the evil stepmother insists that her two daughters force their feet into the tiny shoe so either one of them can marry him. To expedite things, one cuts off her toe; the other, her heel which really, is no less than what some women would do for a pair of Louboutins. It doesn’t work and the prince eventually finds and marries Cinderella, who receives her stepsisters’ eyeballs as a wedding present from the birds (the ornithological version of the fairy godmother). An eye for an eye, as they say. Or four.

Snow White – cannibalism

Old Walt cut his animation teeth on this fairy tale, which became the first full-length animated feature to be produced by Disney. One stark difference between this version and the original telling is the Queen’s motive for asking the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back the heart. In the cartoon, all the Queen wants the heart for is proof that Snow White is dead, completely omitting the Queen’s intent to have the heart for dinner. The huntsman, however, doesn’t have the gumption to do it and brings back a pig’s heart for the cook to salt, after which we imagine the queen had a grand time smacking her lips over a good stew.

In some versions, the Queen doesn’t stop at the heart. She must have been on a high-protein diet, because she asks for Snow White’s liver, lungs, intestines and even a bottle of her blood stoppered with a toe. Wonder if she ate the toenail too?

The Little Mermaid – murder and suicide

Of the three cartoons we’ve covered here, The Little Mermaid deviates most from Hans Christian Andersen’s account. In the Disney version, Ariel goes to Ursula the sea witch to trade her voice for a pair of legs so that she can become human and pursue the Prince. Ursula, however, uses Ariel’s voice to bewitch the Prince and nearly succeeds in marrying him before she is overthrown and Ariel struts down the aisle in a poufy dress, keeps her gams and gets her voice back. Joy.

In Andersen’s version, however, the witch warns the mermaid before cutting off her tongue and turning her tail into legs that she will die and turn into sea foam if she fails to hook the prince. The mermaid gets to shore and moves in with the prince who, sadly, treats her like a sister. He soon falls in love with a princess and they get hitched.

Desperate to save the mermaid, her sisters swim to shore sporting 10-dollar haircuts. Their hair has bought time from the witch – if the mermaid kills the prince, she will get her tail back and live another 300 years before she dies and turns to sea foam. If she doesn’t, she will die at sunrise. The mermaid can’t do it, and in a fit of depression, kills herself by jumping off the ship. And you thought Korean celebrity suicides were dramatic.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I replied to this article with this:

This is a good post but it lacks a few details.

Firstly, In the little mermaid, after she throws herself from the ship she if saved by the daughters of the air and is able to buy her soul if she does good deeds, like bringing the rain or a cool breeze on a summers day.

Secondly, Fairy tales evolved out of creations myths and legends, not as the author of this post asserts as a feminist grassroots movement. While it is true that quite a few fairy tale tellers and writers where women there is little to no evidence in the literature or history to support to contention that fairy tales were rebellion against a patriarchal society.

Finally, the scary elements of the fairy tales have to be viewed in the social context in which they were written. These tales were told during times when disease like consumption (TB), leprosy, scurvy and anthrax (the black death) were common, and with little to no understanding of bacteria and viruses these diseases seemed to be killing people seemingly at will. Death was not a state of non-life but a real entity who stalked the land and stole the souls of loved ones. These were scary times in which to live, if the rains did not come then there would be no food to feed the family, the woods still held untold monsters and demons and illness struck without warning or compassion. The governments of the time still used punishments such as hanging drawing and quartering. This involved hanging by the neck until almost dead, being cut down, being tied to a post where your belly was slit open and your entrails allowed to fall out, where they were then burned, the boby would then be cut up into pieces and each piece sent off to different areas where they would be placed on a spike at the entrance to the city and left to rot. They also used drowning, torture, beheadings, strangulation, stoning and other assorted methods of punishment and execution. When viewed in context the fairy tales like where Cinderella receives her sisters eyes as a present (eye gouging was yet another form of punishment although less common at the time of the fairy tales being written) is actually pretty damn tame.

Other than that, it is great article.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Now this is an interesting article not only because it shows my favourite type of Fairy Tales, the unedited original versions, were actually very violent, dark and gothic in nature but it also shows some common misconceptions about fairy tales.

All fairy tales serve a purpose for the society in which they exist. One may well imagine that the story of Hansel and Gretel was used to warn against the dangers of wondering into an unknown forest, or that of Little Red Riding Hood being used to educate children of what we today call stranger danger. Fairy tales offer a mirror to the society in which they exist, showing not only that which we wish to see but also that which we do not. If we look at the fairy tales of today we see that they are very sterile, very saccharine. They communicate none of the pain or suffering that a great many people experience every day. However this is not surprising as we see that most people have become very introspective - concerned for only theirs and their own. Whether this is a function of our newly emerged globalised world where information can be transmitted and accessed in the blink of an eye is not for me to speculate. However we see that many people although having a knowledge of the pain and suffering around them wish to live in a fantasy of this 'world is good and everything is fine'. How many people in larger cities even know their neighbours let alone have a personal connection with them. These people wish to live in a fantasy world that their neighbours are happy and healthy, that there is nothing wrong in the world and all is good.

The same is true of fairy tales from long ago. In times past people could not insulate themselves from those around, each person in a village was required to help sustain a village. Blissful ignorance of your neighbours problems was not a luxury they could afford. Often it was only by the collective efforts of the entire village that everyone could survive. A blacksmith had no time to plough fields to grow grain and a farmer had no time to forge shoes for his horse, so a symbiotic system grew out of necessity. As such when one person experienced illness, legal troubles or was assaulted it was very soon common knowledge. One person’s pain became the village's pain. Bearing this in mind, as well as the fact that at the time church and state were one and the same, to be in trouble with the law often meant that you were destined for the eternal damnation of hell fires, there was a much larger emphasis than today on teaching the socially correct ways to live life.

Many of the original fairy tales that we know today are based on much older oral traditions. These were stories handed down from father to son, mother to daughter designed to instruct and teach. They were dark and gothic, violent and often resulted in fatalities for the protagonists not because they wanted to scare but because they wanted to teach the 'right' way to live. Unlike our current system the penal system of old was very harsh to those who transgressed against the rules of society. In many cultures even minor transgressions could result in floggings, torture or mutilation. Slightly more serious transgressions could result in death via a myriad of ever more gruesome methods. The pressure to teach and instil not only children but all members of society with a healthy respect for the law of the day was paramount.

When it came time for the writers to put pen to paper many found that the stories as they were told were far too violent, gruesome and blood thirsty for 'civilised' society. So they pared back much of the old traditions and presented instead a sanitised version, still with enough violence and gore to titillate the reader but not so much as to make them run for the hills screaming. Over time we have become more insulated from these humble beginnings, if we need something we can just go to the shops. We need not wait for the trees to fruit to eat an apple, nor do we need to raise an animal for meat. With the advancements of medical technology death has become more and more removed from us. We see these stories as dark and scary today not because they are blood thirsty but because we have forgotten from were we have come.

The story begins....

Permit me to introduce myself, my name is Arthur Nonimus. For quite a few years I have been a story teller, following in the footsteps of a tradition thousands of years old. Since before there was writing to record history, since before anyone can remember story tellers have provided the story that have not only entertained but also been used to understand the world. Throughout history the story tellers can be broken into two classes, the religious class and the entertainer class (I count myself to be in latter). The religious class may be considered the shaman and elders who held the knowledge of the gods and knew what should be done and when. They provided the stories and myths that allowed the people to understand the world around them, to worship the gods and keep their favour and to follow the rules of civilised society. The entertainer class on the other hand were everyone else from grandparents telling cautionary tales to the young children of the village through adults discussing what we now call 'Urban Legends', to the travelling barber surgeon who would carry with them their stock and store of myths, legends and tales to be recounted for a small fee. Personally I am more like the barber surgeon than anything, I will tell my stories to anyone who will listen.

Yet when the subject of my tales comes into conversation, fairy tales and legends, many people expect to be bored and listen only out of courtesy. However more often than not people are left sitting enthralled for the half hour of the story and ask for an encore. So why would they be so reluctant to hear the story but then so entertained by it? Certainly the skill of the story teller comes into it, a bad tale told well will entertain and a good tale told badly will bore, but this is only the beginning. Fairy tales as we understand them today are only the latest guise of a medium that has transformed itself thousands of times throughout hundreds of cultures the world over. Yet we fail to realise that this everlasting medium has once again transformed itself into a newer form for our culture. Disney animated movies, Dreamworks and Pixar Animation Studios, Live action movies, theatre productions, TV and internet, computer games, well the list is truly endless. Just as pervasive as any Shakespearian sonnet, fairy tales shape and sculpt our view of the world. Imagine the world without the tales of the brothers Grimm like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Without such tales the cultural references of 'fairy godmother', 'wicked stepmother' and 'white knight' (although the last one could have come from the Arthurian legend, maybe) would not exist. Or imagine if the tales of Jack and the Bean Stalk, Little Red Riding Hood or even Beauty and the Beast did not exist. In fact fairy tales can bridge cultures unlike just about anything else. For example The world’s most famous fairy tale Beauty and the Beast is not just a French fairy tale written for children in the 1700's, variations of the tale can be found across the globe and have even been found as far back as ancient Babylon. These references to fairy tales have found their way into books, films, TV shows, magazines, games and internet articles. From romantic chick flicks that reinvent the classic fairy tales of Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, through horror movies that retell the cautionary tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood to action and adventure flicks that reflect elements of the Soldier and Death and the Corpse Bride, fairy tales have morphed themselves like they have always done to accommodate a new audience.

For thousands of years fairy tales took the guise of legends and myths, used as a tool to instruct as well as entertain. For each new audience the tale would morph slightly, for each new listener the adventure would play out anew. Over time the stories grew different in their characters and locations but their heart, that which made them worth listening to, that which made them true to the audience remained intact. It was only during the revolution of the 16 and 1700's when fairy tales were recorded for the first time did they begin to age. Once captured on paper a tale cannot change, and so as the world progressed they did not, bound in black and white shackles. Soon as the world entered the industrial revolution and the king and country aesthetic that these tales embodied was slowly lost to the city worker, more and more people began to see these tales as irrelevant and even childish. As if they were looking to a time, place and people that no longer existed. Soon these tales became relegated to the domain of children’s literature, for only children have the time to dream of such things. Yet even this did not forestall the indomitable spirit of these tales. Fairy tales continued to evolve, as new writers came along each one would put a new spin on an old tale. As theatre productions were written for the emerging middle class writers often found inspiration in the pages of these books, a spark planted years earlier in youth. As the twentieth century dawned and motion pictures were evolving fairy tales once again provided the raw framework for intricate stories committed to celluloid. As a fledgling company entered the market of full length pictures it opened the door for another medium for fairy tales to live on in, animated pictures. Disney has re-worked many fairy tales, and even given us some new ones, for a more conservative and at the same time liberal audience. Fairy tales have even held their stock and trade in the spoken medium in the form of urban legends. A classic one is of the man who had a fight with a utility company over a bill of $0.00, who finally wrote a check for that amount to the utility only to have the banks systems fail when the check is processed. The utility is then ordered to pay compensation and fix their system.

Fairy tales, far from being the long dead children’s tales we grew up with, are alive and well. It is my intent here to chart the history of fairy tales and to give a window into what this unstoppable medium is doing now and where it is going in the future.

The story has only just begun......