How Grimm's Fairy Tales Work

the juniper tree. Yeah, and we should say this is a two parter um. You should have already previously listened to one. We probably should have put this one out first and then done the other one. Hey, but whatever, what evs we we just think this is a nice

I really enjoyed these two. Actually, I think if you can make the case that we did it in the right or because now people have thought about fairy tales and have jailed and bathed in them for like the last day or so, and now they're ready to understand what's been haunting them. But where did they come from? Right? What's the deal? And we're going to tell you what's the deal? This is I really did enjoy these O. This kind of reignited my kind of brought up a

lot of stuff. Oh yeah, did you find yourself weeping? Not weeping, just kind of like remembering childhood? And I don't know, I enjoyed it. I guess I didn't read that many fairy tales. It reminded me that fairy tales are No, they're not awful, they're just very um dark, Yes, but I appreciate that part. I think it's more just the have you ever have you ever seen a picture of a human being without a face. Uh yeah, I think that's kind of how I think of fairy tales.

They're they're blank, they're anonymous, they're um flat. I think it's that I've actually run into that term a lot in researching for this episode. There's certainly not a lot of character development and oh and that's part of like their charm, their lure. But it's also like, you know, that's the memory I formed of them is like, um, I'm used to characters or psychologist is lacking as well, like people do stuff for almost no apparent reason whatsoever,

and a lot of it's horrible stuff. Um. And that's actually kind of set the stage for fairy tales to be told and retold and retold and interpreted and analyzed. And um, I think that's what makes them so enduring is that they are there's there's there're so minimalists that they just survive because humans will change an update and we'll go from wearing bell bottoms and macromay vest to

wearing like silver jump suits, which are in right now. Um, But ultimately we're still like very similar to what we were, you know, sixty years ago. And I think fairy tales um reflect that well said. And also I can say that because from what I understand, despite the fact that there is serious study of fairy tales, no one really has any definitive say over what they are. Like trying to define what a fairy tale is, chuck, Um, It's a story usually encompassing like a moral or ethical uh, lesson,

but fantastical elements. Sure, okay, uh that often had dark undertones or overtones. That's actually a pretty great definition, but it does raise some questions. It's like, what is the difference between a fairy tale and a fable, or a fairy tale and a nursery rhyme? You know, what's the what is it specifically about fairy tales, and I think it's all I think they're all very similar and it's all part of folklore. So if you listened, I think in February this year, we did one on folklore, so

it ties in heavily with that. Um. And also we didn't I don't know why we just defined fairy tale because we never defined what vocal fry was. Apparently I feel like we did. Yeah, we got some complaints like you never said what it was, but we demonstrated it over and over. Yeah, and we said it's like a flat, creaky way of speaking. Yeah. I don't know. I feel

like we got the point across. Um. Okay, So fairy tales specifically, when you think of fairy tales, you you might think of Disney, but if you give it a little more thought, you're probably going to come up with, um, the Brothers Krim, Yeah, Matt Damon and um Heath ledger R yeah for real, uh yeah, Jacob and Wilhelm Graham uh and of course there Well, let's just go ahead and say there's a couple of types of fairy tales.

There's the there's the oral tale. Yeah, the oral tale, which is and and the grand Brothers kind of exists between the two worlds. But one is the oral world, which we talked about in folklore, the age old tradition of passing stories down um via mouth parts, over and over and over, changing them, adding some spice, just like telling a joke or a ghost story or something like that,

right exactly, um. And fairy tales specifically, as far as they went with oral tales are typically associated with women and typically associated with women, um, undertaking domestic chores. That that's typically where they were passed down. Um. And so you've got the oral tale and well, which makes sense. Though when I read this, I was like, why are there so many fairy tales to have women at the loom or spinning stuff, because apparently that's where they were told.

It makes sense. Yeah, it's like, hey, I'm I'm bored out of my mind here spending the straw into gold. Let me eat some peyote and make up a story and you sit there and listen. Um. There's also the literary fairy tale, which appears to be there's a handful of people like Charles Perrault or challer Piero right um. And then there's also Hans Christian Anderson very famously, and these people are are reputed as having created, you know, many fairy tales, and those are called literary fairy like

they were original authors and made these upright. That's apparently a total like misattribution. Like for example, Little Red riding Hood, right, is a great example that's typically attributed to Charles Parrault in the I think the seventeenth or sixteenth century. Charles

Charles Parralt his ancestor um and Charles Pearl. He was very famous, as famous as Hans Christian Anderson was um for for writing down fairy tales and the collections and just being delightful, right, and he was great and at the end of every one of his there was a moral to the story. Um. But the people tend to think that either if he didn't come up with it,

it was originated right before then. But we found an article, um that was from it covered a two thousand nine study carried out cultural anthropologists who basically went to some biologists and said, hey, do you guys know how you trace um species and create the tree of life the taxonomy of biology? Can you do that with Little Red Riding Hood? And they said, man, you are one crazy lady or one whacked out hepcat actually may have been a man, doctor Jamie Trani. It was a man and

still is probably. I mean it's only been six years. You never know. Um. So Dr Tarrani went to some biologists and figured out how to apply the same methods to this story Little Red Riding Hood, and he found that not only was it not just like a few years older than Pearl's version, it was as as as much as years old. Basically, yeah, they found variations in China and Iran and the Middle East. Um, they found some unit for the asp stables another person, they said,

they found some of those from sixth century BC. So basically what they're saying is maybe nobody made these up. Well, someone at some point did, at least as far as Little Red Riding Hood goes. That there's some common ancestor that predates years before the present, and um it was.

It's a very widespread tale. Um. Not only did Dr Tehranni um trace the lineage back to six BC, UM he found that you could take these tales all around the world and lump them into groups, just a few, a handful of groups, and that UM places as desparate as Iran and Nigeria and Europe all were in the same group, whereas like Japan and Burma and China were in their own group. But they all kind of bear this resemblance where there is a lion or tiger or a wolf who was posing as something else in order

to get the drop on someone else. Yeah, and it's sometimes usually a little girl, but I think in Iran it was a boy. So details change again simple folklore, I think, but the structure, the skeleton of the story is still very much the same, traceable back years. So that that kind of answers the question that I don't know if we raised or not yet who owns or who? Who? Who came up with fairy tales? But humans did. That's

the best answer you could possibly come up with. These humans came up with it and over the over the years, like you said, people in bellyship, people add people subtract um, and the Grimm brothers did exactly that same thing. All right, let's let's talk a little bit about these these grim bros.

Um Jacob and Wilhelm did already say that they were born in Yakub in Part one, which I appreciated yea and wille Helm Jacob or Yakub was born in seventy five, home just a year later, and they were they were kind of rich kids. Their dad was a lawyer and they had some money. Uh. Their original house if you look at it, it's funny. It looks like I mean, it's a total Bavarian like gingerbread house. And Um, they grew up in Germany and when they were ten years old,

their dad died of pneumonia. Uh, and all of a sudden they didn't have the kind of dough that they were used to having. They did was not good and in a little scary. I don't get the sense that they were like dirt poor or anything, because they still had some relatives that had some cash well. Plus also, I mean they made it all the way through law school in honor of their father, So I mean that wasn't free even back then. Yeah. There, I think their

aunt paid for school. Uh. They graduated each graduate at the top of their class, and I guess what would be considered high school. And then their auntie paid for law school. And it wasn't long after law school that they got into the UM. It was about to say writing that they did right. But the editors for sure, collecting and editing and writing business. They were what's called philologists.

Curating is the word I met um. And they were also they consider of themselves and were considered linguists as well. And by the way, they were Hessians, which means that they were um from the same place as the headless horseman from a sleepy hollow legend. He was a Hessian mercenary.

That yeah, Um. So anyway, they they came. They graduated from law school during this period called German romanticism um, which was basically this idea that before years before, in the in the midsts of history, the Germanic people were very interesting. They had a very good grasp on things, and a lot of this was passed down through oral folk folklore and um. That this stuff was disappearing thanks

to industrialization. So you get the idea that there's a little bit of nervousness at least among the intellectual um people of Germany at the time, that this cultural history was drying up very quickly, and there was a movement to collect this oral knowledge before it disappeared. And that's what um, that's what the Grimm brothers were doing when they set about collecting these stories, although they weren't very

honest about it at least at first. Yeah, it was, um, we know them now is as just simply the grim Brothers fairy tales. But the original collection was called um Nursery and Household Tales or die kenda went house minchen and german Man. You're German? Is it's coming back? And there are eighty six stories originally in the collection. And by the way, big shout to the article from the New Yorker Once Upon a Time A Lord of the fairy Tale by Joan uh at Casella. Yes, very nice.

I think that's it. Yeah, she wrote a great article. Um, and that's the largely the basis of our podcast. By the way, that's right, so thanks for that. But um, eighty six original stories. And like you said, originally they in the in the forward, in the introduction they were like, this is a this is all German all the time, basically word for word. We went around to the peasantry and collected this um these marks was it marching or marking? Uh for what the tales German for tales the marching

or marken house myrchin merchant. So they went around to the Vulk the peasantry and collected the merchant from them. Yeah, it didn't change a word specifically. They said they had a primary source, a woman named Dorothea VMan, and she was a peasant and a village near them. Um. But it turns out and that all of this again was folklore, which I can't fault them too much because that was their business. No, but they jumped it up to be

a little more folks tho than it was. Well, they both basically lied in there in the introduction in their first um, the first edition, which was published in two volumes in eighteen twelve and eighteen fifteen. Right, and so this nursery and household tales became known as rooms fairy tales. And at first it was definitely um a much more of an intellectual pursuit. There are lots of footnotes. They tried to make it seem like they were just collecting

and preserving this German folk knowledge and all that. But it turns out that they they did have that primary source and that woman, but she was pretty far from a peasant. Apparently she was the wife of a tailor, which was part of the merchant class, not the peasant class, and she was just one source. They relied on friends and family and relatives and other collections of fairy folk folk tales and fairy tales that they just lifted. Um. And we're not suggesting there were thieves. This was a

common thing to do. It was. But again they bald faced ly lied in there in the in the introduction in preface, which is funny, but it's um. Yeah, they were. They were they were trying to adopt an aura for their project that they wanted it to have that it didn't necessarily have. Well, yeah, and I don't think we mentioned the source wasn't even a German descent. She was

a French. You cannot. Yeah, So they even kind of trump that up right, which means that a lot of the stuff that, like Red Riding cap Um, is a rip off of Charles Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood or an adaptation whatever you want to call it. But again, this is in the midst of this German romanticism, where German culture was trying to be promoted and um uh, celebrated and preserved. Um. So all of this stuff was very much painted as German, even though not necessarily any

of it was German. In origin, but it was far more ancient than even the French that they were lifting it from. That's right. Um, all right, here, let's take a little break and let's come back and let's talk a little bit more about these grand brothers and we're back and Chuck. Before we get back to it, I want to shout out to guest producer Noel, who is responsible for the fairy tale themed jingle that this episode

in the first one too. Yeah, we asked and he was like, too easy, I'll do with my eyes closed while I'm asleep. He did with an alligator chasing me. That's right, So thanks Noel. It's awesome. All right. These are grand brothers. Uh. They were. They were tight. They were really really close with each other. They were they worked really close with each other. They were buddies from what I can tell. Uh, And apparently for most of

their career they worked at desks facing each other. That classic writing partner than we are now, Yes, even though it's one desk, right and we only sit here to record. Yeah, I guess there is some similarity here there. Sure we're making magic and they were too. I think that's the similarity, right, Sure, yakop was it was a difficult introvert in Willehelm was pretty laid back. Wilhelm would eventually get married because he was more outgoing and had four kids, whereas Yakop stayed

a bachelor his whole life. Um, and they were tight. They worked as librarians together for a lot of their career. Uh. And like you said, they were uh philologists. It is um like they worked on most things, I think eight things together. Yakop wrote twenty one books on his own, bill Holm fourteen. And they were I mean, one of them wrote a book on grammar. One of them wrote like a history book. They were smart dude. They were

smart dudes. Um. But their their life's work, aside from the fairy tales, ended up being they seemed to be sort of obsessed with making a German dictionary complete, like writing a dictionary. Yeah, they've made it to f I believe before they died. Yeah, and then some some other people came along and said we're going to carry on this work and finish and it was completed. But it

was a massive project. Yeah, I mean, like for decades they worked up just to get through f right and I think, um who died first, I believe Wilhelm, the younger one, died first and Jacob carried the dictionary on for four more years even after his death. But um Yacob said, Okay, I'm done with the fairy Tales. I'm gonna move on to other stuff. And Wilhelm actually edited

that thing for forty five years. It went through seven editions of the Fairytale Thing, Yes, the Nursery and Household Tales, the Grim fairy Tales, Scary it went, I'm sorry, I switched. Um it went from uh, it went from yeah, I guess eighteen twelve to yeah. Eighteen fifty seven was when he released the last edition, and they were very different books by the time the first edition in the last edition came out, and even between the first and second editions,

they were tremendously different books. Because Um, the Grimm brothers decided that their book wasn't selling like they thought it would e G. Hot k Yeah, if you listen to the previous episode, it was originally much darker and aimed at adults and was poorly reviewed and didn't sell well. Right, and for grammarians listening by e G. I'm an example not that is I would have said I E had I meant that. But um, they they decided that if they could just kind of alter their book just a

tiny bit, it would sell a lot better. So they went through and took out all the sex, basically. Yeah, and tradition of modern Americans take out the sex, pump up the violence, right, But these are like early nineteenth century Germans doing this, and I guess it's that that same thing. Um, And here, Chuck, I have a question, and it's a rhetorical question, but so you know how nursery rhymes are just fairy tales are just weird. They're

very weird. There's a lot of random things that just seem really out of talking eggs that break and right, but also like really horrific violence for children's story and all that. Yeah, I think that this is the point where that weirdness sets in because they went through and they took the same tales and they altered them just slightly for children. But it went from these are adults or these are stories for adults meant to be told from one adults to another, not for kids, to let's

adapt these for kids. And um, in that adaptation, that weirdness set in that's still there today. Yeah, I think that's when it happened. That wasn't even a rhetorical question. That was just a statement, thank you you're putting it out there. Had I ended an up speak, though, I

could have made the case that it was rhetorical. Uh So, in this and then the very next edition out of the seven, they went ahead and after the bad sales and stuff, and like I said, they sanitized it and geared it too kids, but they also dropped that stuff from the intro. All the lies in the intro were like, I guess, why why do we even do that? Yeah? You know, of course, sorry everybody. That was just dumb

on our parts. It was Wilhelm yaco Is likes like no yucom and it just goes back and forth for like eight pages. Uh So, in the previous podcast we mentioned Rupunzel. How that was, um, how Rapunzel. Basically the lady in question got pregnant after having sex. Yeah, so they would they would, uh, they would whitewash that kind

of stuff. They would sanitize the sexier parts. Right, They just took out the fact that she got pregnant and didn't mention what the prince and she were doing, right, They just left it up to the parents to imagine and the kids to just be dummies and not know

what they were talking about. Right, But like we said to the violent stayed um and in some cases even got worse, like when Um Hansel and Well, the violence got worse, but they also did sanitize it a little bit, just to make it a little more palatable, like in

Hansel and gretel Uh. In the previous show, we mentioned that Um it was it was a stepmother, an evil stepmother, which we'll we'll talk about later as a recurring motif UM that took the children out in the woods to abandon them, and the original version it was both a real mother and a real father, And they were like, all right, you know that's really bad, so let's at least make it an evil stepmother that the dad tries to battle and say no, don't do this, right, but

eventually gives into, gives into and the kids are still taking out in the woods to die, but it's just a little bit more like, Okay, well it's not the real parents because that's just horrific. So the violence is still there, but they've taken away a little bit of the psychological terror by replacing the mother slightly with a stepmother. UM, and yeah, I think that that's a I guess that is something of a cleansing process as far as editing goes.

But the violence is still in there, and it seems very weird, especially today when you look back at this and think like they were reading this to kids. But there's a very smart woman named A s byatt who's children's off herself but also an expert on children's books, and she wrote the introduction to a UM collection I think actually the an addition of the Grimm's Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar, who's a basically the foremost expert on fairy tales working today. Yeah, that's Zip's not around anymore.

He's retired because that guy, He's still available for comment for sure, but Tatar seems to be the She's taken up the mantle from him and uh in this edition. A s By writes in the introduction of it that, yes, this violence seems weird, but if you step back and think of it as uh seventeenth and eighteenth century Tom and Jerry cartoons, it becomes way more understandable and at

the same time way more acceptable as well. Like, think about all the horrible things that Jerry did to Tom, and what you're looking at is the same exact stuff in a fairy tale, So it's not quite as odd

as you would think. Yeah, And as far as the historical motif or the motif of the evil step mom, there's a historical realism there that um, someone else pointed out that at the time, you know, women died in childbirth a lot, and so oftentimes there was a widow or a widower left with kids that they would bring

in a stepmother and resources could be scared. So you'll see this recurring motif over and over, this evil stepmother who basically is competing for both the affections and food of their little children that they inherited that they don't like. So that's why you see it pop up over and over and over, because that's kind of what happens sometimes. Yeah, And that's the sociohistorical interpretation of fairy tales, which is

um basically takes fairy tales largely on their face. I mean, like, if you have a talking egg or something like that, you're not going to be like well, obviously in the twelfth century, eggs talked, but there were a lot of there's a lot of context in background that um that I think people imbue with a lot more fancifulness than

need be. For example, like the the presence of wicked step mothers throughout or in the case of Hansel and gretel um a child abandonment like if you look back at the fourteenth century, during famines and plagues, I think it was the Black Death in particularly just leveled Europe. A lot of people abandoned their children because they just

couldn't feed them any longer. So this wasn't like so outlandish that it only belongs in fairy tale, and it might have been like a fairly approachable theme that people talked about to kind of hash out the feelings of collective societal guilt at the fact that child abandonment was rampant. You know, it's I think the sociohistorical interpretation is probably my favorite. Can we talked about the juniper tree real quick?

I love this one. So, like we said, in fairy tales, there's there's incests, there's cannibalism, there's murder, there's torture, there's buried alive. There are all kinds of things that happen in the junifer tree. Maybe well, I don't know, maybe the worst one of them all. So in this case, we have an evil stepmother, of course, who hates her stepchild,

who was a boy. So she comes home and says, hey, you want an apple, and the boy says, sure, let me lean in there and get one, and she it's a trunk, and she slams the trunk down and cuts his head off. And that's just the beginning. So she's like, all right, probably not a wise move. Let me put the kid in a chair. Let me stick this head back on his neck and wrap a scarf around it, and just here, open his eyes here, and put a little smile on his face. And then her real daughter

comes in, not a stepdaughter, her favorite, real daughter. And it's like, he looks all weird. Why is he just sitting there like adult? She says, I don't know, go slap him and and bring him around a bit. Boxes the ear, I think, is what she So she boxes his ear. His head falls off. And by the way, the little girl, which makes it even more horrific what you're about to say, loved the little boy though it was a stepbrother, even though in the mom's eyes they

were rivals. For these scarce resources. A little girl loves a little boy, so go ahead. So she knocks his head off, and the mom's like, you knocked your brother's head off, But you know what, We're gonna just keep this quiet between us and you won't get in any trouble.

Let's just cook him into a stew and feed him to your father or step And the little girls like beside herself with like guilt and shame and horror at the fact that she or the thought that she killed her beloved stepbrother, but she goes along with it because this is what her mom is saying. And the father comes home and he eats the stew and actually it's

black pudding. Yeah, I'm not sure what that is. But um, the father eats it and he's like this is all for men, a little misogyny and greed on the end, because he's like, no one else in this family is going to eat this, yeah but me. It's pretty nuts. And in the end, the little the little girl takes the boy's bones and buries him by the juniper tree, and he's reborn as a bird and ends up killing the wicked stepmother um, and then comes back to life as the boy so it all works out in the

end for the boy. But it's pretty nuts as far as like these stories go, Like that has it all? Do you want to talk about how children played butcher with each other? Yes, this one's very short, and we should point out many of these are very short, like Little Red Riding Hood was only four pages long. I think Rapunzel was only two or three. But that also, in and of itself, was the work of the Grim brothers.

They would embellish this stuff tremendously and often double it and double it from a few paragraphs to a couple of pages. So still short. And by the way, if you want to read a really neat analysis of the juniper tree, read Ernest Parkins analysis on word words and edgeways. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. He finds at out of neat symbolism in it. All right, here's how children played butcher with each other. It's a great title. A man once slaughtered

a pig while his children were looking on. When they started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other, you beat the little pig, and I'll be the butcher. Whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into

his brother's neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a room bathing the youngest child in a tub, heard the cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs, and when she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of the child's neck and in a rage, thrust it into the heart of the child who had been the butcher. Then she rushed back to the house to see what her other child was doing in the tub, but in

the meantime it had drowned in the bath. The woman was so horrified that she fell into a state of utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and hanged herself. When her husband returned home from the fields and saw this, he was so distraught that he died shortly thereafter the end. That's like the episode of Dragnet where they have a pop party and the parents forget their child is in the bath and it drowned. Was

that on Dragnet? Wow? So you know, of course I'm laughing, because I mean, you can't take that seriously, right if you watch Dragnet you can well no, I mean that story it's just so over the top and weird and violent and dark and stuff just happens like again, there's almost no psychology to these things. People just do stuff

well supposedly. Uh. I think Wilhelm Grim said specifically about that one, like No, the clear lesson here is it's like, don't play with knives and things, which is and that's a good point, and I don't know if we've even said that, Like the the predominant theory for why these things even exist is um, as far as being taught to children goes, they are lessons their tails and how to grow up, how to avoid strangers, stay away from knives, stay away from I guess, which is like don't eat

houses made of gingerbread, just good life lessons that kind of stuff. They're sexual predators out there, yeah, which we'll talk about, but let's take another break. You're ready for it, yes, okay, So Chuck you um, you said that there are sexual predators out there and they're little red riding hood in particular, Like if you read it, especially if you read the Grim version and not the Charles Barrault version, it's um

like everything comes out great in the end, she saved. Um, you can read between the lines a little bit and that's the key. Though, Like these these fairy tales even after they became sanitized through seven editions, even after they became disneyfied um, there's still this underlying thread, the theme, the central theme, the message look out for sexual predators, don't cut your brother's head off with a knife like that. They can't be expunge and the story still remain the same.

It's it's so woven into the fabric of them, and I think that's one of the things that makes them interesting. But alternately, something else I ran across, and I think that a s buy it Um article was the idea that they don't have any designs on you. They're not trying to teach you a lesson necessarily in and of themselves. They just are what they are. Maybe the person telling you that fairy tale wants you to learn that lesson. The fairy tale in and of itself couldn't care less

whether you you learned that lesson or not. It's just here's a snapshot of what happened in twelve seventeen to this little boy who played with knives with his brother. Will learn it or don't, we don't care. Yeah, but that's uh. What was Zip's first name? Jack? Jack? Zip's he was may still be here he said, he's retired now, Yeah, he's He worked at the University of Minnesota. Is a comparative literature professor and German professor go Golden Gophers. Yeah,

uh uh. And he for many many years was the pre eminent fairy tale dude. He was where you would go. He turns up all over the place in his research. But he said, though, um that there usually is like a come upance, Like he says, whoever is a tyrant at which an evil brother or mother who wants her own daughter dead, they will always be punished. There will

always be justice. And usually the characters that are of humble origins go on to have like great success, like the you know, the uh, poor maiden marries the prince in the end in most cases it's true, but not always. Or the king who wants to have an incestuous relationship with his daughter ends up getting killed or something like that. Yeah. In that case, I believe what was his wife was dying and he said, I will only remarry if I can find someone as beautiful as you, and turns out

that's my daughter. What was that one called, like many or something like it was called the creep King. Yeah, but that's a recurring theme. Actually it's a very ancient one. It falls under the Cinderella story um which apparently so there's a I don't know if we mentioned it or not,

but there's a folklore cataloging device like cataloging convention. And I think Cinderella stories, which is the persecuted heroin is uh number five ten A yeah, for real, it's the Arne Thompson Uther classification five ten A persecuted heroin Cinderella

stories the Uther pen dragon, and that's another. Cinderella is another one, like there was one woman in particular who collected three eighty five different versions of the Cinderella story from around the world, and I think they've identified as many as fifteen. So Cinderella is another very very ancient one as well. And the one that you recounted about the king you wants to Mary's daughter, that particular one from Greece. Yeah, I think that was called all Kinds

of Fur. It's all hyphenated, like that's her name or something. I think it's um. So we're talking talk about like sanitizing it and um Joan a Casella comes to the Grimm's defense like saying you can't really fault these guys for for changing this stuff, because again, it doesn't really belong to anybody. They belong to the ages, and the Grimms just put their stamp on it. Um. And then also, you know, uh, if you if you just take an oral tradition and faithfully write it down, it's going to

be virtually unreadable. So they definitely stylized that. They added some more pros, and they made it a lot more memorable, and it became a beloved book. It's a Unesco book Memory of the World, I think collection, so like it's a it's a very well beloved book. But some people say, you know, if why should the Grimms be the only ones to be able to change fairy tales? Why why does it have to end with them? Maybe it's time to rewrite them some Well, isn't that what uh tartar

zips that's his position. No, no no, no, but I thought the one in who uh name? What isn't that what she's done? Didn't she release a new version? In two thousand five, she released an annotated version, but she didn't rewrite them. What SIPs is saying is like, here's the basic story, go rewrite it as your own and um, there's been some feminist collections that that are rewritten stories. Yeah, like why is every girl defenseless and needs a man

to rescue her from poverty or danger? Right, And that's a feminist interpretation of a lot of um, the fairy tales, some people say, if you look a little further, like, yes, all the ones that Disney picked and all the most popular ones are very much patriarch patriarchally slanted to where it is a damvel in distress as a prince that has to come help her and she's helpless until he comes along and then whatever. Um, But if you look a little further, there are some very there are other

ones where they're resourceful heroines. And think of Hansel and Gretel. Gretel tricks the witch and kills her all by herself without the help of Hansel, who's being fattened up by himself. Right, Yeah, And I'm sure Disney, Walt Disney himself was just like, man, they love this stuff, like of course I'm gonna they're

eating it up. Yeah, but there, but there. You can also look at Hollywood two is a means of taking these classic fairy tales and rewriting the Grim versions like, Um, there's a huge I don't want to call it a movement, but there's there's like a trend, I guess, trend to to taking these things that were disneyfied versions of the stories and restoring them back even even to their pre grim darker roots, just making them dark again roots there grimmar pre grim roots. Yeah. Um, have you ever seen

Freeway with Reese Witherspoon? Oh? Yeah, that was a little red writing a little red riding hood. And if you're a feminist, I guarantee you appreciate that version a little Red riding Hood because she takes no guff and comes out on top and at no points for yeah, and Brooks shields as his wife, and she like it's crazy. It's a neat, neat movie. But that's a good example of a rewriting of a classic fairy tale. Like, no,

it doesn't have to end with the Grims totally. Uh. In The Company of Wolves, wasn't that a that was a rewrite of or redo of a little writing her two a little more of a horror though, right? I think so? I didn't see it. I didn't either. I think that was Neil Jordan's right, crying game, Yeah, like one of his early movies. So um, we have to talk a little bit about the Nazis here, because the

Nazis were big on co opting things for their own purposes. Uh. And one of the things that co opted were Grim's fairy tales. And since World War Two there's been a big I don't know about big again, maybe it was such a trend, but there were folks who said that, you know, when you look at these, they're talking about German nationalism and discipline and violence and obedient and order and obedience. And I think the grand brothers were like, yeah,

it's totally nationalism. We were all about Germany. But but we died like decades before Hitler was even born. Yeah, Like, I don't think they would have appreciated that it was co opted by the Nazis, and Hitler saying like, put these in schools, this is awesome, Like read this stuff, put them in boy scout rooms everywhere, that's funny. So um, the Allies came in and occupied Germany and one of the things they said was like, you guys can't teach

this Grim book anymore. And bandit and a lot of towns around Germany became very political because it was very much associated with the Third Reich. And one of the reasons why is because the Third Reich said, go teach this to young German kids, to make sure that they know they're German and that they will triumph over the Allied Wolf because they're all little red riding hood that's right, little Nazi kids, that's right. So um, again, people make the case like, you can't really hang that on the

Grim brothers. They didn't foresee Nazism and this this German nationalism in and of itself isn't necessarily inherently evil, and if you put it in the context of German romanticism, most countries in Europe were undergoing nationalist fever, you know. So um. There was some anti semitism though, and some of the tales, yeah, and that can't be gotten around either. Yeah.

One was called The Jew and the Brambles, where the protagonists torments a Jewish person by dancing, making him dance on the thicket of thorns, uh, calls him a dirty dog. And then there's I mean, there's various I think said three basically of the two hundred tales had Jewish characters, and they were never like favorable. Yeah, the other two um referenced the Jewish stereotype of being stingy with money

or something like that. Yeah, the good bargain. And a lot of people are like, well, let's just expunge those two um, and some people have from their collections. I think that's the other thing too, is you can if the Grim's kind of set a precedent for you can take these tales and cleanse them if you want, or do whatever you want to them, like there they belong to the ages. Well, and that's then comes in the people who posit whether or not it's that's good for

Should we sanitize that? Should we not? Uh? W h Alden, I love this. He described the people who sanitize him as the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positive Parents, positivist parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, or the cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives. Man. That is so w ah Todden. He couldn't just leave it at one description. H So he clearly wasn't in favor of it. Some people think, uh it's good for us.

Um A man name uh Bruno Bettelheim in a name Bruno Bedelheim. Yeah, totally is it sounds like a bond villain or something. A book called The Uses of Enchantment, and he was very Freudian in nature that he basically says that we all, all these kids have these unconscious desires and these books help, uh what like these repressed desires come out, help them deal with them. Yeah. Well it helps children, yeah, deal with their repressed desires. Like the example of the UM. So we talked about the

sociohistorical interpretation of the presence of wicked stepmothers. Right, there are lots of stepmothers and they were competing for resources bet Ohaim and the Freudians say, well, no, the stepmothers are there because UM children love their mother, but they also hate their mother, and this gives them a way

to work through the complex. Yeah, that complex um combination of emotions where they can hate the wicked stepmother, but they can also love the biological mother who's absent or appears early on and then dies, but who is always very loving and kind. Right, so they can work that out.

That's a great example of it. Yeah, and then you have Zips, who Jack Zip says, you know what it really is is, uh, children see the fairy tale as like a counterworld of reflection of their own world, and it allows them to, you know, consider what's going on in that world and then take steps in their own world to reform it and not do those things right.

And specifically it teaches children to identify tyrants and people who are power mad, and people who hoard money or harm other people, because those people almost invariably come to

a terrible end in those things. And then fairy tales, right, So you've got all these different interpretations Freudian Carl Young got into it um, sociohistorical feminist interpretation, Jack Zipe's own personal leftist interpretation, right um, and all of them, although they compete here there none of them are wrong and none of them are right. And then again, it's the

beauty of fairy tales. It's like a blank white piece of ply would that we project our own thoughts and fears and hopes and ideas onto culture by culture, age by age. And Tatar and her collection did a pretty smart thing. I think she actually collected some of the more disturbing one in the back of the book under the title Tales for Adults. Basically read these first on your own. See if you want to read them to your kid, don't frontload it with the juniper tree. Right.

And actually, Joan Accella says that you should take an exact and if and just cut the juniper tree out of your said that. I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if your kids got a strong fortitude. It's up to the parents. But it wasn't always up to the parents. There was a big movement in the mid twentieth century for um realism among children's books. Yeah,

and and the Grimms were first on the chopping block there. Instead, it was replaced by like Judy Goes to the Firehouses. Zachcella says, I totally like think about it. It's like a total fifties children's book, like see Dick and Jane Run. You know. Um and it was I guess Maurice Syndec with Where the Wild Things Are? Who? Who said I we were not doing that anymore. He brought the cool

back to children's books. He definitely did. Yeah, I have it, read many children's books lately, But I think there's a lot of you read Daddy Sat on a duck, right, Yeah, I did read that. Lots of far jokes in that one. Yeah, that was written by one of our listeners. Um, highly recommended it is. It's very good. But I think these days there's a mix of things going on, realism, fanciful stuff stories and now uh well this is more of

a young adult novel. But Colum Alloy of the December sort of three part children's novels, like big, big books about this fantastical world in Oregon, this forest in Oregon where I can't I bought them all. I can't wait to read him. It's cool man, Yeah, I think he's he's that's more the tradition of the like lion which in the wardrobe And you said that, I wanted to say, Avon is not the name Narnia Narnia. Um, yeah, I have no idea where children's books are these days either.

I wonder though, what what it reflects about society at large, whatever phase children's books are, whether it's realism or fancifulness, you know, yeah, like are we like when you're in an economic downturn? Is realism or fantasy the one that steps in? Yeah, I would guess fantasy because people want to escapism. Then I was way into that stuff. I wasn't into like Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and stuff like that. But I love Maurice Sendak really and stuff that was really kind of out there. I love

Dr Seuss. I found out that it's um not every boy read Ramona Quimpy books. I thought it was Nix apparently not. Yeah. I read uh some Judy Bloom Yeah, of course. Um and I did read the first couple of the The Chronic What Cools of Narnia? Did you ever see that skit? No, it's one of the setting live shorts they were doing, Chris Parnell and Sandberg. We're doing a rap the Chronic What Cools of Narnia. I didn't see that. It's like a very weird, misplaced What

did you see Mr Shows coming back on Netflix? Yeah? Well close as we're gonna get the Mr Show. I don't think they can call it Mr Show. No, they're calling it uh with like w slash Bob and David. I can't wait. Man. I saw a couple of clips and it looks like, Yeah, it looks like it's going

to be as good as it ever was. I'm pretty Before we leave you, since we're talking about fairy tales, we thought would be appropriate to mention that two of our horror fiction contest submitters are published once published again. J McMurray published The Dreamings of Leonard J. M. Leaper and you can check that out at take publishing dot com not Leper, no Leaper. And then also you can find Patrick Scott. He wrote play I Believe, which was in Meat for Tea magazine and you can find uh

information about that at meat for t dot com. Uh. Since I said meat for Tea, it's time for listener, man, I don't I wish it was time for us to meet for tea No M E A T. Yeah, okay kidding, I'm gonna call this uh a little bit more on vocal Fry. We've got a lot of response from this one. I think it's second in controversy only homelessness. Yeah. A lot of a lot of ladies wrote in women that were very appreciative. A lot of men wrote in, um who were not appreciative. Many were too, Yeah, many were,

But a lot of dudes wrote in. I think they're part of the men's movement. You know. It was divided like you would expect, but there were men who wrote in to support us. There are women who who wrote into to criticize vocal Fry. They agreed with Naomi Wolf. Yeah, And I just want to clear up, I don't mean all old white men are awful. I don't I you don't even need to say that. If you're not one of the ones that are doing these things, then great, who cares? Yeah, I know you don't need to defend

the ones who are all right, here we go. Hey, guys, just want to say thanks so much for your recently for recently tackling some very charged gender issues in the most mature but not apologist of ways. I like how this emails on, whether it be female puberty, vocal Fry, or your excellent double duo with the stuff you misson

History Class Crew and listener mail. You nailed what I consider to be the best way to handle the ubiquitous double standards that women find themselves held to state that it is unequivpably wrong, then calmly and rationally pick apart why you were not trying to start a gender war, though I'm sure there are those out there who will

take it as such. Uh see the beginning of this email. Um, but you meticulously undercut the meticulously undercut the arguments and unconscious justifications that allow these attitudes to endure underneath all the truths by consensus and familial and cultural norms. Very little remains to give weight to these perspectives, and I believe that both genders are, albeit slowly shedding them, thanks to the efforts of you and many others on this path.

Very well said right now, this is the road to equality, dudes. I throw that in there, and I cannot say how much I appreciate your proper championing of it. We are all persons, no matter our gender, and should you respected as such, free as much as possible of worthless generalizations. Also, as a side note, I was once upon a time a linguist and very much agree with your handling of socio linguistics A linguists. Sorry, Chuck, is that because I

said like linguists, linguisticator or something. A linguists most fundamental tenant is that no use of language to communicate is wrong, and thus linguistic evolution should be no more surprising than that of pop music or fashion. Yeah, the prescriptivists are just screaming at their ipous ideas and perspectives change and language, by its nature will rise to meet it. Cheers. That is from David, a long time Stuff you Should Know FAM. Thanks a lot, David. That was a very kind email,

Very well said UM representative. I would say about half of the emails that we got about vocal Fride the other half. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweak to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com