Today (Thursday 12th December) Google have dedicated their doodle (search page animation) to the Grimm brothers, creators of Snow White and other fairy tales. Interestingly, the ABC newspaper have responded by revealing the true nature of these popular tales. It's worth reading as it's quite eye-opening!
I totally agree with you, it´s worth reading and far interesting.
ReplyDeleteAll of us know the popular Disney stories; Snow white, Cinderella, Bambi… which come from the original stories that the Grimm brothers wrote in the nineteenth century, but they weren´t the proper creators of these stories. What the Grimm brothers did was transforming the stories which came from the German oral story-telling tradition in innocent fairy-tale style stories appropriate and suitable for children.
The Grimms had to get rid of scenes and extracts of the stories which contained a high content of sexual and violent material which could obviously not appear in the stories as we know them now. However, we don´t have to go so far to see the evil and cruelness in these stories; Bambi´s mother was killed, Dumbo´s mother was hurt, Cinderella was treated badly by her step-mother and step-sisters and had to work all day, Snow White´s step-mother wanted to kill her…
Moreover, if you examine the stories carefully you realize that in quite a lot of them the step-mother, or sometimes mother, is evil and wants to harm the protagonist/s. Why is this? Did the Grimms have a mother/ step-mother who was nasty to them? Well, that is what a lot of people think, but as said before it was not the Grimms who invented the stories but the Germans, so we´ll just have to believe that Germans had something against mothers and therefore made them the evil ones in the story.
To conclude I would say that despite the modifications the Grimms did the stories still possess a slight sent of evilness and cruelness which only show to the youngest how hard and unfair life can be, which, in a way, isn´t a bad idea as children sooner or later will see it and realize by themselves.