The Master left out one early change in the Grimm version of Schneewittchen; in the first edition, Snow White’s father has only one wife.
The two things the Grimms edited out first were incestuous fathers and infanticidal mothers. Most of the “evil stepmother” stories were “evil mother” stories in the originals. And one of the major reasons they had such a down on their daughters was that the dads were, um, thinking of migrating to a more recent model…
JRB
I love reading/reading about the old versions of popular tales. Cinderella’s stepsisters cutting off their heels and toes, etc. So bloody and dark and fascinating.
If you think German folklore tales are dark and grim, they look like the Care Bears meet My Little Pony compared to Russian folk tales. To give you a sense of how dark, the description of the witch Baba Yaga so strongly matches the Hindu death goddess Kali that it’s speculated they were inherited from the same Indo-European tradition.
I do just add that Cecil writes a column with limited space, not a book-length analysis. When dealing with a massive topic like this, he has to pick and choose what goes into the column. He decided to focus on the violence (and related sex) rather than on the more subtle changes such as mother to step-mother or birds to fairy-god-momma.
Great article. I literally LOL a couple of times, and not just because of the source material but the dead-pan writing style too.
Me, too. When life for many in Western Europe met the Hobbesian standard of “nasty, brutish and short,” their fairy tales reflected that.
Really? That would nullify much analysis of these stories, for example this book, which claims that the “evil stepmother” is a common element of stories throughout the world.
Clearly in the original version of “Rapunzel” it was not a witch but her own father who kept her locked in a tower. To a nobleman, an attractive daughter is a valuable bargaining chip that he’d want to keep locked away from any young lothario who would deflower her.
As for “Hansel and Gretel”, I’m less interested in the child abandonment theme than the witch in the gingerbread house theme. I’m speculating that this derives from a time when there were still remnants of paganism, in the form of old women living in isolated cottages. The gingerbread house evolved from the idea the these women would lure kids in with sweets or curiosities in exchange for a little company or a chance to impart some of her pagan knowledge to the young generation. Naturally Christian authorities would want to scare kids away from people like that. It may be, however, that the story was based on reports of actual cannibalism by women who themselves were starving in these circumstances. In which case she would already have eaten out all the drywall and shingles and started in on the roof.
Is this a serious suggestion? Folktales are, in general, entertaining pieces of fiction that were understood as such by the tellers of tales. Peasants certainly believed in witches, but they didn’t believe that they lived in gingerbread houses any more than they believed in talking ducks (see the end of Hansel & Gretel). Consequently, you should take the idea of witches luring children to their dwellings about as seriously as you take enormous talking ducks who ferry children across rivers.
Contemporary popular culture has developed the notion from pop pyschology that folktales are Heavily Imbued with Meaning (capitals for cheesy emphasis), and that they represent either the far-off past or else deep inner truths or, preferably, both. The former, at least, involves a number of assumptions that are demonstrably false.
Premise: Folktales retain a memory of the distant past.
Problem: Folktales change over time, as has been amply demonstrated within individual narrators’ repertoires, specific cultures, and for earth as a whole. This is not to say that motifs and broad outlines aren’t preserved, just that you cannot take a single text and project it onto the past. ESPECIALLY not the Grimms’ versions or the more literary productions of Basile, Perrault, and their ilk.
Premise: Folktales represent a debased pre-Christian mythology.
Problem: Though myths and folktales can partake of common characters and themes, the world of the Indo-European folktale doesn’t really match what is known of Indo-European mythology. The Grimms did their best to find the lost Germanic mythology and their results were mixed at best.
Premise: Folktales contain wisdom or morals.
Problem: A lot of folktales contain characters who lie, cheat, and steal, and yet are rewarded. Others have upright heroes and heroines who are rewarded for their kindness and goodness. It’s a mixed bag.
Oh, and as for the mother / stepmother thing, we know that the Grimms’ tales had ‘mother’ in the early editions where it is ‘stepmother’ in the later editions, but the stepmother-as-antagonist is comparatively common worldwide as well.
What did the folk versions have?
Both.
The motif index has a whole section entitled “cruel relatives.” “Cruel mother” is motif S12. “Cruel stepmother” is motif S31. Both show up in traditional recordings of tale type 511 & 706, for instance. The former is called “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes,” and the latter “The Maiden without Hands.” These are just the first two that came up; I’m willing to bet a little digging would turn up more. “Hansel and Gretel” (type 327, “The Children and the Ogre,” or more acurately its subtype 327A) has no mention of step-parents in the summary, but to get a sense of the general pattern you’d have to check the over 500 versions collected and see if one or the other predominates, and if so, whether the culture or even specific family dynamics of the tale-teller (if that’s recorded) had an effect.
I’m interested in reading the versions of the stories in the Pentameron. It looks like the most commonly available translation is the one by Richard Burton. Now, I’m dubious about the accuracy of his translation. Can anyone comment on his faithfulness to the original, or a better translation that’s available?
I have not read it, but both the people involved and the reviews suggest that this one would be good. It’s new out this year. In case the link doesn’t work, the ISBN is 0814328660.
There are a lot of evil stepmothers in fairytales from other cultures, true. I haven’t read the book in question but in one of my literature classes we did discuss the transitioning of mothers to stepmothers as fairytales became prettied up for modern times. The older tales, which portray mothers as monsters, were never intended for children anyway; later writers like Perrault had the fairytales altered to serve as cautionary tales for young men and women of the French nobility. Writers that came even later, like Lang, modified the stories further for actual children.
The idea that fairytales as we know them now are some kind of psychological indicator of a social consciousness shared by all cultures was made popular by Bruno Bettelheim, but has been discredited for the most part because Bettelheim never took into account the fact that modern versions of fairytales have been severely altered from their “original” state, and that such alterations say more about the editors than human consciousness in general.
Sorry for being out of topic, but it had to be said :
I had a Saw IV ad showing on my screen while reading this column…
(Emphasis mine)
They weren’t kids’ books, even in the Grimms Brothers’ time. These tales were originally meant for adults. Eventually (I think in the Victorian era), they migrated into the nursery after being bowdlerized. Disney and the recent “think of the children!” craze have eviscerated them even more. In more modern times, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit has been toned down so as not to upset the kiddies.
And eventually I’ll dig up a cite for all this, if necessary.
I doubt that the Brothers saw it that way. Besides the title “Children’s and Household Fairy Tales” there are references that seem to indicate that they considered children at least part of their audience, if not the “natural” audience for the tales.
(My own shitty translation, I hope the general idea is still recognizable)
Note the date: 1819. The first edition was 1812-4.
Sure, but the story in question appears in the later editions. While this story was changed for the second edition, everything that was mentioned is still there. Unfortunately I don’t have the first edition and I don’t know the original published text. From the notes on this tale it seems that this version is already more family-friendly than some of the sources.
Of course they made changes but second (and later) edition Grimm isn’t Disney either. Although they deliberately made the stories slightly more child-safe I would like to see a cite that either the first edition or the oral versions were really intended for a different audience.