Krishna
Please relax! I am not going to list all Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Instead, I want to discuss my overall impressions of the tales and the debate about the authors’ life and the contextual interpretations of the fairy tales, which I think is even more interesting than the tales themselves.
First, some general comments about the tales:
The first surprise is how repetitive these stories are! In almost all, the King has three sons (or daughters) and sometimes three sons and a daughter as a variation. The sons normally want to go on ‘adventure’. If the person is poor and old, it is invariably a miller or a farmer and he has three sons. Another variation is that they have no children and get a thumb sized son always called Thumbling. They always rescue/ befriend three animals which help them. They always face three riddles to solve.
It is also amazing how many Snow Whites there are in the stories. Apart from the more famous Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the stories seem to be brimming with them, always caused by a queen sewing near an open window in the winter and a couple of drops of her blood fall on the snow and she muses how nice it would be to have a girl white as snow with lips red as blood. For the several questions in your mind – Why is a queen sewing the king’s clothes herself? Why is she doing it near an open window in winter? Where is the fire to give warmth? – you have no answer. Just take it at face value.
The last thing that strikes you is how very unusual and ordinary all the stories are. If it were not repeated in multiple media – including but not exclusive to Disney – stories like Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel will not stand out. Briar Rose (renamed Sleeping Beauty by Disney while they did not rename others!) is another example. How many people know about The Frederick and Catherine? (There is a reason for it. This is one of the most pointless tales you could find)
OK, enough about musings. What is more interesting than the stories is the background on the authors and speculations about hidden meanings. Let us see these now.
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm collected all the folktales they knew. They were born in 1785 & 1786 in Germany, of course. The father Philipp was a successful lawyer and the family was Calvanist, deeply religious. The family was thrust into penury when the father suddenly died.
It is also fascinating that the tales were meant for adults initially. And people were scandalized and criticized it as being too frank on sex and violence. So much so that the Grimms started bowdlerizing it themselves!
Hans Christian Anderson was a contemporary and a rival, from Denmark, However, Anderson invented all his stories but the Grimms, as described before collected them all – they were not their original stories.
The stories they collected – and other fairy tales like Cinderella – in some aspects have some slight resemblance to their life itself. After their father’s death, they descended from a comfortable life with no worries about money into dire poverty. The Grimm brothers were educated by relatives but their achievements were looked upon with scorn. They started studying law but switched to philology and literature under the influence of their professors in the University. Both brothers worked as librarians and both became university professors later. Initially the tales did not sell well but over time, became best sellers. Though in the preface of the first collection first edition the brothers claim that all the stories are of Germanic origin and oral tradition, later scholars have found that they got some stories from other sources and are of doubtless foreign origins.
Also, originally meant for adults, the stories had a lot of sex and violence, which ‘had to be pruned’ in later editions when this became popular with kids and parents started complaining. (After repeated erotic encounters with the prince ‘Rapunzel finds that clothes are getting tighter’ and this was expunged later – as one example).
!A lot of authors (Jack Zipes among them) have tried to see inner meanings in the tales. In one version, the tales propagate traditional male female roles; men are active vigorous and aim high – quests, acquisition of money and fame. Women are docile, submissive and are happy to be at home, subservient to men. In clothing them as fairy tales, it is automatically presented as a universal value, stripping it of the political and morality issues and children are automatically indoctrinated to accept the values, including that fact that a woman needs a valiant male to protect her and make her happy. Being a communist sympathizer, he cloaks the argument in bourgeoise language but the message is very similar.
Another author (Barthes) says that fairy tales are meant to make what in reality is political and ideological appear to be natural, true and universal. He alleges that the Rumpelstiltskin tale of the miller’s daughter spinning straw into gold is an allegory of poor women being forced to work in factories (the spinning mills had just them come into use). The fairy tale kings and queens with their arbitrary power, according to him, represent the father and mother, who have absolute authority on the child. The frequent use of evil stepmothers is a consequence of high mortality of mothers in childbirth, necessitating the man to marry again. He even says that the evil stepmother is the personification of the cruel, angry and domineering portions of the real mother where as the good mother was the good side of the same mother! Dragons, giants and demons play into normal anxieties of children of the nature of ‘a monster under my bed’.
Talk about analyzing folk tales looking for deeper meanings and allegories.
But that theory is supported by the fact that the Grimms changed mothers to stepmothers in later editions of the two most well known stories ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and ‘Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs’!
According to them even Sleeping Beauty is a tale of sexual maturity. The sleeping beauty’s prick on the finger when she is fifteen (producing blood) is an allegory of her menstruation; her sleep is the narcissistic trance of the adolescence. She is protected by the thorny hedge of custom during this ‘sleep’ until awakened to mature sexual love by the prince’s kiss. Go figure!
Fairy Tales are also meant to reconcile to the ‘black and white’ mindset of the young children who read them. (Though it was, as we said, meant originally for adults).
Also some fairy tales have ugly details which were sanitized. In the Handless Maiden, the King falls in love with his daughter and asks her to marry him. She refuses and in anger, he chops off her hands and breasts. (The chopping of the breasts was left out). The hands were chopped off, but to save the king himself from the Evil One – a bowdlerized version if there was one!
In Juniper Tree, the stepmother kills a little boy (the stepson), frames the stepdaughter (his sister) and then cooks and the boy and feeds the father with it! And many of the tales talk about ‘pure’ German folk and concern with ‘foreign’ influences. This seems to indicate a racist strain in the stories. Two of the tales with Jewish characters ‘The Jew Among Thorns’ and ‘The Good Bargain’ are openly anti semitic.
Nazis used it in the propaganda, and even came up with the reading of ‘The Red Riding Hood’ as an allegory of the menace to the German people from the Jewish wolf!
The tales include unbelievably sadistic punishments meted out (to villains of course) : dance in red hot shoes, eyes pecked out by birds, rolled downhill in barrels studded with nails, thrown into vats with either boiling oil or poisonous snakes or both!
Also what is interesting is that in many tales morality or moral teaching is not the goal at all. Evil wins often. Many stories have no preaching and their sole aim is to evoke laughter at the end.
But these tales resist stereotyping, perhaps because they are a collection. There are tales of clever, smart girls who go out and do wonderful things by themselves and even save the hero from folly or troubles. Even Rapunzel wins her lover by making him use her hair as a climbing rope!
6/10
— Krishna