Cannibalism of European fairy tales

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Modern European fairy tales, known to most from books and Disney cartoons, had very unsightly originals. Famine, plague and other signs of the Dark Ages in the territory of modern France, Germany, Belgium and Holland served as the basis for the classic fairy tales popular today.

Little Red Riding Hood

In the original, Little Red Riding Hood did not wear a hat at all, but a chaperon - a cape with a hood. At Perrault's, she walked around in a chaperone. But in the German version of the Brothers Grimm, the girl was wearing a hat, which stuck with us. The first record of this tale, made in Tyrol, dates from the 14th century. It was distributed throughout Europe, and in the original it was told with the most interesting details, which Perrault and the Grimms somehow forgot to mention.

The girl in the red raincoat really chatted with the wolf on the way to her grandmother. And when she came to the house, there the cunning animal had already managed not only to kill the grandmother, but also to cook. The wolf in the grandmother's cap and dress was cooking, the guest was invited to the table, and together they began to cheerfully eat the grandmother, who had delicious fatty meat. True, the grandmother's cat tried to warn the girl about the undesirability of cannibalism. She spun around and sang a song:

The girl chews her grandmother, Grandmother gnaws her bones.

But the wolf, with a well-aimed blow from a wooden shoe, immediately kills the insolent cat, to which the Red Cloak reacts very serenely. The girl strips naked, jumps into bed with her grandmother and begins to ask her difficult questions:

- Grandma, why do you have such broad shoulders?

- Grandma, why are you so long legs?

- Grandma, why is there so much fur on your chest?

The wolf honestly replies to this that it is more convenient for him to hug his dear granddaughter, catch up and warm. And when it comes to big teeth, the wolf breaks down and rips open his sweet friend's neck. Apparently, his grandmother did not really get it at dinner.

And yes, the end. No woodcutters.

Hansel and Gretta

The ancient story about children lost in the forest found new life at the very beginning of the XIV century, during the Great Famine of 1315-1317. Three years of monstrous crop failures caused by prolonged frost took away about 25 percent of the population of Northern Europe. Cannibalism flourished in towns and villages. And it was here that Jeannot and Margot (or Hansel and Gretel in the German version) appeared.

There are many versions of the plot, but the most popular was that the father and mother, dying of hunger, decided to eat their children. The children, hearing their parents sharpen their knives, rushed into the forest - to wait there until Mom and Dad die of hunger. On the way, the boy threw stones so as not to get lost. After spending some time in the forest, the children also began to languish with hunger and quietly crept back to the house. There they heard the conversation of their parents, who had gotten a little bread somewhere and were now grieving that there was bread for gravy, but the naughty meat dish eluded them. The children stole a piece of bread and went back into the thicket. But now the boy marked the path with crumbs, which were immediately pecked by the birds, also mad with hunger. Having finished their bread, the children decided to die - and then they went out to the house made of bread! And the windows were even lined with wheat cakes! Then everything follows the already familiar track. But in the end, the children happily return home, carrying with them not only sacks of fresh bread, but also a well-fried witch. So parents no longer need to eat their children. Everyone is happy, everyone is hugging. Over time, the tale has changed. Hunger as the main character still remains, but now parents simply get rid of extra mouths, taking their children to the forest. The house turns into a gingerbread house, because nowadays you can't lure little listeners with bread to the witch, and the fried witch remains in the oven, without getting on the family table.

Snow White

In the Aarne-Thompson system of classification of fairy tales, Snow White is numbered 709. This is one of the famous narratives of the folk storyteller Dorothea Wiemann, recorded by the Grimms and pretty much softened by them, although Disney fans will not feel comfortable with the Grimm version.

Well, first of all, Snow White, the queen's stepdaughter, was also going to be eaten - as without this in a fairy tale? The stepmother demanded from the servant that he, having strangled the annoying girl, bring her lungs and liver into the royal kitchen, which were served on the same day at a cheerful dinner party in the castle (the giblets turned out to be deer, for the girl had bribed the servant with her beauty and youth). Snow White is captured by seven mountain spirits, who also like her beauty - so much so that they decide to keep the girl with them. After Snow White's death from a poisoned apple, the coffin with her body is displayed on the mountain, and there he is seen by the prince who is passing by.

Further, the Grimms, with some hesitation, write that the prince wished to take the dead girl to him, because she looked as if she were alive and was very beautiful. Let's not think badly about the prince - maybe he, unlike the Sleeping Beauty's beloved (see below), was just going to honestly and nobly exhibit her in the local history museum. But while he is bargaining with the gnomes for the right to ransom the body, his servants drop the coffin, the dead girl falls, a piece of apple flies out of the girl's mouth - and everyone is alive and happy. Well, except for my stepmother. Because they put red-hot iron shoes on the queen's feet and made her dance on a burning brazier until she died.

sleeping Beauty

Yeah. Of course, he kissed her … No, in the ancient versions of this super popular plot, the first records of which date back to the XII-XIII centuries, everything happened differently. And half a century before Perrault, in the 30s of the 17th century, the plot was recorded in more detail by the Italian Count Giambattista Basile, another collector of folk tales.

First, the king was married. Secondly, having found a girl sleeping in an abandoned castle in the forest, he didn’t confine himself to a kiss. After that, the rapist hastily left, and the girl, without getting out of the coma, in due time was resolved by twins - a boy and a girl. Children crawled over the sleeping mother, sucked milk and somehow survived. And then the boy, who had lost his mother's breast, began to suck on his mother's finger from hunger and sucked the cursed splinter stuck there. The beauty woke up, found the children, contemplated and prepared for starvation in an empty castle. But the king passing by just remembered that last year he had spent a very good time in these thickets, and decided to repeat the event. Finding the children, he behaved like a decent person: he began to visit and deliver food. But then his wife intervened. She killed the children, fed their fathers with meat, and she wanted to burn the Sleeping Beauty at the stake. But then it all ended well. The queen was greedy and ordered to steal the gold-embroidered dress from the girl. The king, having admired the young naked beauty tied to a pole, decided that it would be more fun to send his old wife to the fire. And the children, it turns out, were saved by the cook.

Rapunzel

And here, in general, everything is extremely innocent. Consider the only difference between the Disney story and the original version recorded by the Grimms, that Rapunzel did not run away with the prince anywhere. Yes, he climbed into the tower on her scythe, but not at all with the aim of getting married. And Rapunzel also did not rush to the pampas. She went to freedom very quickly when the witch noticed that the beauty's corset had ceased to converge at the waist. In German villages, where many young ladies worked as servants in wealthy houses, this plot was not so fabulous. The witch cut Rapunzel's hair, and the prince was left without eyes by the witch as punishment. But at the end of the tale, everything grows back, when the prince, blindly wandering through the forest, stumbled upon his twin children, who were looking for food for the hungry and unhappy Rapunzel.

Cinderella

Charles Perrault worked on the plot of the fairy tale "Cinderella" especially diligently, carefully cleaning out all gloom and all heavy mysticism from it. This is how fairies, princes of Mirliflora, crystal shoes, pumpkin carriages and other beauty appeared. But the brothers Grimm wrote down a version of the folk storyteller Dorothea Wiemann, which was much closer to the folk version of this tale.

In the popular version, Cinderella runs to ask for dresses for balls on the grave of the mother, who gets up from the coffin to dress up her daughter (the Grimms, on reflection, nevertheless replaced the zombie mother with a white bird that flew up to the grave with bundles in her teeth). After the balls, the girl escapes from the prince, who wants not so much to marry as to reproduce immediately. The girl climbs the pear, then the dovecote. The prince cuts all these hills with an ax, but Cinderella somehow manages to hide. At the third ball, the prince simply glues a nimble beauty to the stairs, filling that with resin. But Cinderella jumps out of her golden shoes and, all covered in resin, is again carried away, saving her honor.

Then the prince, completely mad with passion, decides to lure the young lady with a promise to marry. While Cinderella ponders whether it is possible to believe his words, even if announced to the whole kingdom, the prince begins to ply with shoes. The older sister cuts off her toes to fit into the shoes, but she limps badly in them and loses on the way. The younger sister cuts off her entire heel and walks quite smoothly, but the white doves reveal deception to the prince and his retinue. While the sisters are bandaging the bloody stumps, Cinderella appears and, shaking the blood out of her shoes, puts them on.

Everyone is delighted, the prince and Cinderella are going to get married, and the white doves peck out her sisters' eyes because they forced Cinderella to clean the house and did not let her go to the ball. And now the sisters, blind and almost legless, crawl around the city and beg for alms, delighting the heart of Cinderella, who lives with a handsome prince in a cozy palace.

Three Bears

Now we perceive the story about Mashenka, who visited three bears to try their beds and bowls, as something primordially ours. And here we are fundamentally wrong. It is "Three Bears" that is not even an international wandering plot - it is a purely Scottish tale that has entered English folklore as well.

It was made Russian by Leo Tolstoy. He translated this tale after reading it performed by Robert Southey (Southey's tale was published in 1837). In the original, folklore version, the bears were their eternal foxes, and he either had to run away from the bears as fast as they could, or they still managed to pull the skin off him, on which the smallest bear later liked to warm his paws, sitting in front of the fireplace. Robert Southey turned the main character into a little old woman. The fate of the old woman remained hazy. This is how the ending of Southey's tale sounds:

“The old woman jumped out of the window, and either she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the forest and got lost there, or she got out of the forest safely, but was captured by the constable and sent to the reformatory as a vagabond, I cannot say. But the three bears never saw her again."

And our Lev Nikolaevich did not want to know any old women and made a heroine a little girl who had safely escaped from the horrors of the bear forest.