Comments on: 8 Fairy Tales And Their Not-So-Happy Endings

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:31:54 +0000

unfortunatly…or fortunatley I suppose ring around the rosies isn’t actualyy abbout the plague. It actually dates from a couple hundred years before it…Im not 100% but I think its actually just as innocent as it sounds…I think there is an episode of QI that mentions it if you wanna look it up.

By: Justine

Justine — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:24:21 +0000

There is a simple reason of why these stories are not appropriate for children. Back in the good old victorian days, nobody thought it was important that children read, so there were no books written for children. Rich people started teaching their children how to read, so the first childrens books weren’t really geared for children, nobody knew what children wanted to read so the twisted stories that were gruesome and jam packed with incest were all they had to offer. Not only that, but thats kind-of how things were back then, only with some whimsy and imagination smeared in.

By: penguincookies

penguincookies — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:22:33 +0000

There are some ‘modernized’ versions of some of these tales that hold true to the originals.

Once on this Island is a musical very ‘little mermaid-esk’. Though in the musical, she save ‘the prince’ and she is brought home as his mistress. He gets married and throws herself into the sea, but a goddess(I can’t remember which) turns her into a tree. The book it is based on, has our ‘little mermaid’ being trampled to death by the villagers when her prince comes to the village to throw out money in celebration of his wedding.

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen is the story of a women trying to figure out why her grandmother believes herself to be ’sleeping beauty’. Turns out it’s all about concentration camps and the holocaust.

And with Into the Woods, The wolf has a number in which he ‘politely’ seduces Red into taking her time so he can ‘get to grandma first’. And LRRH has a number after she is ’saved’ about how the wolf got her excited and scared – “But he drew me close And he swallowed me down,Down a dark slimy path
Where lie secrets that I never want to know…” & “And take extra care with strangers,Even flowers have their dangers.And though scary is exciting,
Nice is different than good.”
Needless to say, we played to the fact that it was her sexual awakening. Sondheim did stick true to the rest of the fairytales. The cinderella sisters cut off toes and a heel, the birds pecked their eyes out. Rapunzel gave birth to twins and was thrown out of the tower wandering the desert, her prince lost his eyes to the thorns when he decided to make another visit. They found each other in the end, & her tears gave him sight, but when he saw her and the kids he ran. Lots of happily ‘almost’ afters, and ‘what-ifs’ to ponder about.

I’m upto my eyeballs in 1001 arabian nights. ‘The Three apples’ and ‘Ali with the Large member’. Gotta love them!

By: Noelle

Noelle — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:28:54 +0000

Um… people. I don’t know why you keep thinking about folk tales as being “written” for children or adults. With very few exceptions (eg, HC Andersen, Sleeping Beauty), most folk tales started out as oral stories. They were told to groups of mixed ages as entertainment among an illiterate (or preliterate) populace– hence the term “folk tales”. Though many had a moral or other lesson, that was incidental to their entertainment value.
Further, I think people are both underestimating and overestimating the Grimm brothers influence on these stories. The Grimm brothers did not write the stories; they merely collected the oral tales and wrote them down. However, in writing them down, they did change the character of them, as they were influenced by three factors. First, a written story has a totally different set of conventions from an oral tale; this becomes very clear when you read a literal transcription of a folk tale (as recorded by an anthropologist, perhaps), or even in comparing Shakespeare to Beowulf. The structure is entirely different. Secondly, the Grimms were collecting these stories in the midst of the Romantic era, in which ideas about national character were being formed and seriously considered. This impacted not only which stories they wrote down, but most likely also how they wrote them. In collecting these stories, the Grimm brothers were concerned with capturing what they felt was the folklore of the German people. Finally, because the Grimms were male, they wrote the stories from a male perspective. We’ll probably never really know what the original oral stories were like, but as they were likely told by women, female perspectives would have been more common (think more prominent female characters). Again, it’s likely that many stories were never written down because they didn’t fit the middle/upper class male perspective of what the world was like.
My final point: don’t forget that Europeans are not the only people to have had folk tales. Every human culture has them, and in trying to determine the raison d’etre for folk tales, one should find explanations that explain their existence in all societies, not just the ones we’re familiar with.

By: Christina

Christina — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:55:48 +0000

Maybe the moral is to not envy someone based on their looks, because that leads to you wanting to ruin their life (even though the poor girl was missing her hands) and forgetting that everyone goes through their own personal trials. Umm, also maybe not to lie and change personal messages because then the fate you want to bestow on someone undeserving will come back to haunt (burn) you and well, I think that’s it. Do not envy, do not lie and do not covet thy sister!

By: Angela

Angela — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:49:12 +0000

Great articles and great comments!!

@Marvan and he also bought a beautiful house for his parents that had a faulty furnace and killed his mother with carbon monoxide. Moral: Even wealthy and inspirational people have sorrow in their lives.

I was raised on the original versions of the stories from as far back as I can remember. It actually worked out great because in highschool they paired the German 1 class (that I was in) with the German 4AP class due to budget cuts. Most of the AP tests were based on Grimm’s fairie tails so I ended up helping most of the advanced students with their translations. My favorite was always Mother Hole because the good daughter in it is plain until a year of hard work for a witch rewards her with beauty and riches. As a plain child it’s really nice for the heroine to be clever and hard working and not just get the prince because she’s gorgeous!

On the subject of fairie tales and children here’s an anectodal story: I recently had my 10 year high school reunion. Of the people I hung out with in high school some of us had parents who said that their spouse was the only person they ever loved, virgins on their wedding nigh, no drugs, etc (though one girl later found out that her mother ran away and joined a biker gang at 16) and some of us had parents who told us in all the gory details all of their hippy glory days. To the MAN (in this group) everyone who’s parents had told us the gory details had avoided drugs and waited until commited relationships to start having sex and all one ones who were told ‘true love etc’ started sleeping around (after all I love him so he must be the one) and most of them expiremented with drugs and underage drinking. We knew better.

By: lsmith

lsmith — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:11:06 +0000

The Princes and the Frog will be coming out soon. I wonder if the princess will throw the frog against the wall at the end like the original Grimm story

By: als

als — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 01:25:55 +0000

i have also heard an alternate ending to Rumpelstiltskin where instead of ripping himself apart, he explodes like a nuclear bomb, killing everyone in the kingdom.

By: Jei

Jei — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:25:15 +0000

As a child who grew up on these tales, I can tell you that although they seem brutal, children really do protect themselves, in a way. Much like swearing, it is not the real meaning of the violence so much as the chance to let off steam. When I was young, I thought of the punishments in fairytales much like I thought of the magic in fairytales, it was part of the literary spectacle, nothing that could or should happen in real life. I read these stories when I was around seven or eight, and most of my friends were much more violent than I was at that age. Still, most children do go through a violent stage in their play. This often was an allegory or a parody in a way of black-and-white morality, where the villain would have to be punished harshly, as they would never change in their thirst for chaos or power. Characters in children’s games usually change from static to dynamic over time. I’m not saying it is the best thing to expose a child to, for perhaps it is not, but a child can come up with enough violence on their own.
I might have been a particularly insensitive kid, but not being allowed to watch gore flicks or really any horror beyond suspense, I still wasn’t insomuch frightened as intrigued by the goings on in my big book of Grimm(the collected works; Juniper Tree and all).

My mother, she killed me
My father, he ate me
My sister Marlene, made sure to see,
my bones were tied as neat as could be
and laid beneath the Juniper Tree.
Tweet tweet! What a lovely bird I am!

By: LeeAnnJones

LeeAnnJones — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:10:58 +0000

if you love these tales of truth and horror you would fall in love with the Nightmares & Fairy tales collection there graphic novels that have hidden truth in them i fell in love with them after reading my 1st book 1140 Rue Royale. (this is actually a street in New Orleans) this is one of thee worst historical events ever to happen. its about a family and there obsession of torturing slaves.