Not So Grimm

One of the great things about having a long-term reading list, perhaps the best thing, is that you know you'll eventually get to those books you’ve been meaning to read for years. I had wanted to read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales (in translation, not original-original) for at least fifty years. Well, they got on my reading list, and this month I finally got to them.

My family had a volume of them when I was growing up. I don’t know what happened to that copy, and I don’t know why I didn’t read them as a teenager. But remembering having that book (it had dark green covers and a black spine) makes me pretty sure it was my dad who told me that I should read them “someday” (maybe that’s why I put it off) and that they were much darker than the versions most people know from kids’ books and Disney movies.

I have to say that they weren’t as dark as I had been led to believe. Yes, Cinderella’s sisters cut off parts of their feet in order to make them fit into the slippers, and, yes, Little Red Cap gets eaten by the wolf. But other tales weren’t any worse than that, and I’m sure I had a children’s version at one time that had both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother being eaten by the wolf (swallowed whole, thankfully!) and rescued by a woodsman with an axe. (I’m almost certain that that’s where I got the notion, still held proudly today, that in the olden days there were men named “woodsmen” who roamed the forests carrying axes and searching for people to help.) And, really, no tale in the book of original versions is any worse than the American kid’s standard version of “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the parents decide it’s better to lead their children to the forest where they will starve or be eaten by wild animals than it would be to share the family’s scant supplies of food with them.

Tests are common in these stories, usually in the form of peculiar tasks required for breaking spells. Think the princess who has to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name. Most of the time, though, the person being tested doesn’t know about it: the prince, for instance, who kisses the “sleeping beauty” to wake her and her family from a hundred-year sleep. Is this a fairy-tale world, or is it just a slightly magical version of our world, where small actions can cause great effects? (See my post on the Mabinogion from last December.)

There are some morals, too; people don’t always just stumble unwittingly into their fortunes according to arbitrary rules. Many of the tales show two proud and selfish brothers (or sisters) receiving punishment or missing opportunities while the third, humble, generous brother gets the treasure or the girl or both. The moral here is obvious: be humble and generous! Several tell about foolish people who see things in a ridiculous way but get rewarded anyway. This time the moral is, Don’t count out the person who sees things contrary to conventional wisdom. God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.

Sorry I waited so long, Dad. But you were right: I loved them.