The Origins of Fairy Tales

Who doesn't love fairy tales? We grew up on them. Our parents used to read them to us at bedtime. We can sing along to all the disneyfied songs. Well, I can anyway. Except Let It Go. I can't stomach that one. Sorry.

Anyway. These stories have been around for longer than we have. But they didn't always end happily ever after.

The Origins of Fairy Tales

The fairy tales most of us know started out much in a much more gruesome version. In the first version of Sleeping Beauty, she wasn't woken up with true love's kiss. A guy basically came in and raped her. When she was pregnant, she had no choice but to marry him. Because that's how they rolled in the Middle Ages. I never found mention of that in Snow White stories

Cinderella's stepsisters didn't simply try to wriggle their huge feet into the dainty glass slipper. The first one cut off a piece of her toe when the Prince wasn't watching to get the shoe to fit. He put her on the back of his horse, but on the way to the castle, blood started dripping from the shoe. So the prince returns her to her mother. The second sister tries a different tactic. She cuts off a bit of her heel. Again, the Prince sweeps her off her feet and onto his horse. Again, blood drips from the slipper and he brings her back. Meanwhile, poor Cinderella has had the chance to escape from whatever place they locker her up in, and manages to get to the Prince, to be taken away to his castle.

Some of this gruesomeness still shows. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are eaten by a wolf. Hansel and Gretel get caught by a witch. Hansel is about to be eaten when they manage to roast the witch and escape.

Did people really tell these stories to their children? I imagine they did. After all, a public execution, whether it be a hanging or a beheading, was considered to be amusement for the masses and people flocked to the town squares to watch people being sentenced to death. I doubt they'd care about a little murder or assault in the bedtime stories of their children.

The Question is "Why?"

It doesn't puzzle me that violence and horror wasn't an issue to our ancestors. I'm more puzzled by the fact that they bothered to make stories of it. Why did they make a point of filling the minds and the subconsciousness of their children with it?

Archetypes

My guess is that it has something to do with archetypal images. Each and every fairy tale is packed full of them. That's why we had such a hard time turning our fairy tales into believable Deep POV stories in our Writers' Workout. Because the characters we started out with lacked depth. Depth we had to create. 

A typical fairy tale character tends to be rather one-sided. You've got the evil witch, the damsel in distress, the heroic and handsome prince, the hard worker who prevails in the end.

A lot of these stories were written in a time when catholocism ruled Europe. Women didn't have a lot to say. They went from being the property of their father, to being the property of their husband. Widows and spinsters were frowned upon and often distrusted.

When you consider that, the violent and often dominant nature towards women that was exhibited in these stories is not so strange after all.

Let's go back and have a look at Sleeping Beauty.

• A young child is cursed by a witch--condemned to an enchanted sleep until true love finds her. Let's unwrap that achetype. The young woman is kept prisoner until a suitable husband arrives on the scene.
• The castle where she sleeps is surrounded by an impenetrable hedge of thorns and guarded by a fierce dragon. This could be interpreted as a girl who tries to refuse the confines of marriage and life under the thumb of a husband. The dragon and thorns are symbols of her resistance.
• A man comes, strong enough to cut through the thorns and slay the dragon. Instead of gifting her with true love's kiss, we already know what he would have done in the middle ages. Meaning as much as: Resisting your husband will get you a beating.

Now, I'm not saying every man alive during that time beat his wife. But it was accepted as a normal part of married life. And considering the stories they fed their children, this is no miracle.

Is This a Call to Arms Against Fairy Tales?

Most definitely not. I grew up on them. If I end up having children, so will they. The fairy tales we know now are much cleaner and more wholesome versions. They still carry a lot of symbolism and archetypes and they do have their worth. A lot of them are filled with morality--sometimes even spirituality.

But when reading a story, it never hurts to consider what lies beneath the surface.

This was written as the third companion post to my serialised fairy tale on Steemit: The Land Down the Well.

If you would like to read the story, you can find the links in my library section on the left side of the page, under Fiction Bookshelf.

As always, dear friends, thank you so much for sharing this with me.

Hugs

Jasmine

Disclaimer: This post came to be through my personal beliefs and observations, and an interest in archetypal psychology. It in no way represents an absolute truth, and I'm always open to discussions on the topic, as I am to each and every other topic I write about.