February 26th is National Tell a Fairy Tale Day. The real question is going to be whether you tell a bowdlerized fairy tale undone by generations of sanitation, or the real version. The one with the blood.
It’s well-known amongst children and adults that fairy tales – the traditional, mostly European folk stories passed down orally since time immemorial – were originally meant to scare the dickens out of children. Walt Disney and other entertainers have notoriously repurposed numerous fairy tales to be light, sweet, often musical entertainments for kids, but only a small amount of research reveals that the origins of most of said fairy tales lie in death, darkness, and violence. The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and other ancient unknown authors were writers of horror stories. Children weren’t meant to be comforted by fairy tales. They were meant to be scared straight.
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While Disney currently dominates the masses’ conception of most popular fairy tales, there are resourceful seekers who have found their origins and discovered just how unsettling many of these tales truly are. And that’s just the popular ones. There are also innumerable fairy tales, fables, and miniature kid’s morality plays that remain largely obscure primarily for their evil, blood, and horror.
On Tell a Fairy Tale Day, Crave will look at a few of your favorite fairy tales, and remind you of where they started.
The Little Mermaid
Disney
The Little Mermaid was originally published in 1837 in Denmark by Hans Christian Andersen. Like in a well-known 1989 Disney version, the tale is about a young female mermaid, 15 years of age, who swims to the surface for the first time, and who falls in love with a human man. The mermaid then makes a deal with an undersea witch to make her human in exchange for her voice. We all know this part. The details you may not know: Gaining human legs is a wrenching and painful experience for the mermaid, and having them makes her feel like she was sliced open by a sword. Also, when she walks around, it hurts terribly, as if she’s being stabbed. Also, there’s more at stake. If the mermaid cannot make the human man fall in love with her, she will no longer have a soul, and, after a time, dissolve into sea foam.
There was also a last-ditch effort on the part of the young mermaid’s sisters to save her in the original version. They sold their lovely hair to the sea witch in exchange for a dagger. If the mute mermaid can stab her true love, and smear his blood on her legs, then she will transform back into a speaking mermaid. Eventually she cannot, however, and dissolves. No soul, no body, no identity, no happiness. What a bleak tale.
Beauty and the Beast
Disney
The original version of Beauty and the Beast (French: La Belle et la Bête) was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and first published in 1790. The original version was quickly redacted, however, and the most commonly-known version is the one we still tell today. In the original, however, we’re given the beast’s backstory: He lost his father at an early age, and his mother became a warrior queen who fought battles to defend the kingdom. The beast was left in the care of an evil fairy woman who tried to boink him when he got old enough. When he rebuffed her, he was turned into the beast. Also, in the original, Beauty (or Belle, if you prefer) was an adopted daughter of the central traveling merchant, and whose true parentage tied into the fairy world. The evil fairy that created the beast was also trying to have an affair with Beauty’s fairy father. There are many more characters and much more magic in the original. It’s like a season of Dark Shadows.
Cinderella
Disney
The true origins of the Cinderella story are lost to time, and some versions stretch back as far as AD 860, so it’s hard to pin down the “original.” One of the most accepted European versions of the story is well-known to audiences today thanks to the Brothers Grimm, who published Aschenputtel (literally, “ash fool”) in the mid-1800s. But even that version is commonly redacted. When the glass slipper doesn’t fit on the feet of the ugly stepsisters, for instance, they try severing parts of their own feet. When they start to bleed out, their story is given away. To add more injury to injury, the stepsisters, at Cinderella’s wedding, were beset by birds who plucked out their eyeballs. Seems a little mean to me, but kids gotta learn their lessons, right?
Little Red Riding Hood
Warner Bros.
Although originally published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, the actual origins of this folk tale remain obscure. Over the various versions of Little Red Riding Hood, we find a copious amount of rather monstrous violence and no small amount of brimming sexuality. Depending on which version you know, the wolf eats the grandmother, and wishes to eat – and in some cases sexually assault – young Red Riding Hood. Red arrives, strips nude, and gets in bed with grandma. In some versions, Red is rescued when a hunter cuts the wolf open and stuff him with rocks, causing him to die. Also, Perrault, to cut down on the ambiguity, wrote the moral explicitly.
“From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, And it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!”
Hansel and Gretel
Paramount
Also originally published by The Brothers Grimm, Hansel & Gretel gave this author nightmares as a child. For one, the tale begins with a destitute family who, to survive, intentionally abandons their children in the woods. This was, as I understand, a frighteningly common practice in agrarian times, and the woods of Germany are likely haunted with the souls of thousands of abandoned children. Another detail that is unsettling: Hansel, while being kept captive in a cage, offers a bone to the evil witch instead of his finger. She thinks that he is not fat enough (she can’t see too well) and continues to overfeed him. We all know how the kids murdered the witch and fled, but the epilogue is the most disturbing part. With money they stole from the dead with Hansel and Gretel return home to find that their mother had died. Her death allowed them to stay happily with their father. So, no matter what, someone had to die so that the family could remain together.
Why is it better that the mother died? Whom do you think told these stories to the kiddies? Could it be Grandma? The crone? The one who has a reason to resent mama? I think so.
Top Image: Disney
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
