Fairy tales, whether we like it or not, have a hold of our lives and the way we perceive stories. Whether the storytelling is perfect or flawed matters not, but these fairy tales have transcended culture to be passed down from one generation to the next, from one culture to the next. Some of my earliest memories are of Disney cartoons like Cinderella, of reading about Hansel and Gretel, or Snow White.
I still remember the bright colours and hardcovers of these books, the thinness of them, and how my sister and I would read them over and over again to exhaustion, pretending that every new read was our first — a feeling that even as an adult, that I would try to emulate with books and movies. These books are still core to generations ahead. I still see these stories in the shelves of bookshops for children, and I am glad they are as these stories are timeless.
But originally, fairy tales were not really meant for children. They were adult tales with sex and violence quite central to the plot — stories that you would tell over your mates in a bar or barber shops. Perhaps, stories to joke over. They were tales restricted to the elites and those bloody aristocrats, as most novels were for those who held the privileged power of literacy. However, fairy tales in general were making a comeback with the English and German Romantics doing their best to infuse the unsettling quaintness of these very tales into their writing. It gave us some of the richest period of poetry and literature.
Beyond fairies and fairy tales
Th Grimm Fairy Tales are not written by the Grimms themselves, though they can take the credit in collecting, editing and publishing these fairy tales. The Grimms wanted to preserve the oral tradition of storytelling, when the older generation would pass on their stories to the younger, just as you would ultimately inherit the wealth of your elders. Regardless of whether they collected the stories from a single source, middle-class or lower-class, the stories speak for themselves.
At the time of the publication, Germany wasn’t the unified state as we know it, but fragments of thirty-nine states with no cohesive political centre. The fairy tales is an attempt to promote a unified German culture — what better way to engage your audience than through storytelling? Whether it has helped Germany as a nation or not bears little to what it has brought to literature and popular culture: it has inspired storytellers to create their own and these stories, whether we realise it or not, are deeply engrained in our own narrative veins.
Yet, we need to take in mind that the Grimms are academicians, thus coming from a lens of religious, middle-class background. Thus, the heroes are often those from noble origins, yet endowed in the cloak of humility by pretending to be poor, or they may start in poverty and ultimately inherits a kingdom and a happy marriage. Christian values, despite the sexual innuendoes and violent undertones are embedded within the tales.
Some fairy tales are created more equally than others
I did highlight a few which made an impact on me, or at least made me stop reading a while and reflect for at least a few seconds. Here’s a few of the stories:
- The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was: Those who are fearless do not think of fear. Maybe it’s only certain people who can ignore fear, but perhaps a lack of fear doesn’t mean bravery.
- The Louse and the Flea: A simple gossip and dumb inertia can take a whole system down.
- The Knapsack, the Hat and the Horn: A quaint story of a young man who can summon soldiers from a knapsack, a hat that summons canon fire and a horn that blows out cities. And the missus that wanted to curb his powers.
- The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces: A king tasked a traveler to find out where his daughters run to every night, wrecking their shoes. The path takes him to an enchanted castle where the princesses partnered with princes and “dance” all night.
- The Duration of Life: Man is given seventy years to live, from the initial thirty. He requested for more from God but in doing so, he had to borrow all the other years from other animals, which is reflected in his behaviour throughout his years.
These are the ones that struck out to me, aside from the popular ones that we already know. I took my time in reading them, and perhaps it took me about a month to finish all the stories. I think some of these stories merit further reflection, and the simplest of stories often seed the most potent of messages.
Just look at the Clever Hans, who was always listening to his mother’s instructions, but always for the wrong thing. He would then bring another gift to his friend Gretel with the instructions for the previous gift, but the instructions are outdated now. Isn’t this an absurd behaviour that we see too often in the business world — to listen to instructions without actually knowing the context?
However, after having read 150+ stories, you’d get the pattern and the stories repeat, sometimes with different parts here and there, oftentimes exactly the same. There are often three sons, the elder would get fucked over but the youngest would come through, sometimes even rescuing the previous two. A prince would meet a princess, fall in love with a second one, while the first had to sneak into the prince’s castle wearing three different dresses that she would give to the second princess in exchange of spending the night with the prince. The prince would ultimately remember the first princess and ditch the second one. And so on and so forth.
Timeless, but in many ways, outdated
In some ways, Grimm’s fairy tales were my first introduction to violence. Some of the outcomes of the stories are absurd. Characters would be threatened by death and bad things happen to good people. But there is an underlying absurdity to all this, that would reject the Christian doctrine that the text itself promotes. You don’t go around killing your own mother; or any of your family members; you don’t ditch your daughter and use her as a servant like in Cinderella; you don’t starve your kids. There is a somewhat unethical complicity in some of these stories.
The treatment of women fare no better in these fairy tales. Princesses are often pretty, yes, as any Disney princesses often are, but they do not have any say on their own marriages. They are prizes for princes, and they seldom ever reject the victor. Women with any resemblance of power is presented in a bad light, as in the case of the Hat, the Knapsack and the Horn, where the scheming princess steal her betrothed’s things to snatch away his sources of powers.
The brothers did their best to censor out all the saucy parts of the tales. We can assume that when the princess is visiting the prince (or vice versa) that they probably smashed. However, the violence remains gratuitous though one can argue that it fits to the vein of the stories always teetering on someone’s death. Violence, unfortunately, never really fell out of fashion. But as readers, I think we need to be more forgiving of the faults of past authors.
The Grimms versus Andersen. Who wins?
The brunt of Grimm’s fairy tales were published a good couple of decades before Andersen published his. But in many ways, they were quite different stories. Grimm’s tales are quite simple and straightforward, inherent from its oral tradition to amuse and oftentimes to teach. The ending is often abrupt and neat. We are reminded of the mortality of the characters, but we get the happy ending nonetheless.
Andersen’s tales are complex as fuck, often jumping from one viewpoint to the next, often including several layers of plotlines interweaving within the same story. Grimm’s stories are adapted from existing stories, Andersen tried to be as original as possible. The context switching is no joke. Yet, at times Andersen’s outlook is bleak, nihilistic and comparable to the griminess of Russian authors (Looking at you, Dostoyevsky). So who wins?
We do. It was never really a two horse race (not discounting other fairy tale writers and editors, such as Perrault), and both parties wrote with different ends in mind: The Grimms to bolster German cultural stocks and Andersen to exorcise his own demons. But we benefit from these beautiful stories. These stories will continue to instruct, enchant and astound us, and the next generations ahead. To understand these stories and to remember them is a way to figure out ourselves, to understand ourselves and ultimately to help ourselves.
