Holy Fairytales....

As I post this… I realize I am not only posting on the wrong day, but also on the wrong topic, but a post is a post and I hope you enjoy :)

Having seen a few seasons of Once Upon a Time before, I already had a little bit of an idea of good old Rumple’s portrayal, so once I read the Grimm brothers version, I was a little bit disappointed. Then, though, I considered the nature of fairy tales, and how they do not form rounded characters, but instead take advantage of stock characters to tell a story. Grimm brothers portrayed him similarly to how I have seen leprechauns be portrayed: little,mischievous, magical (especially in the realm of gold) and singing songs. The show gives him a family and a unique circumstance that the viewer has to spend a little bit of time deciphering and deciding how they feel. I stopped watching the show I think three seasons in, and the show continues to play with the idea that the new version of Rumplestilskin has to decide between good and evil, which I found really interesting (unfortunately the show continued to a dizzying spiral of ridiculous, melodramatic nonsense, and it stopped being cute for me).

I don't think I could really blog about this without mentioning the splitting in two of Rumplestilksin at the end of the story, but I'm going to turn on my English-major-brain, and bring up how divided Mr. Gold and Rumplestilskin are in the show, and perhaps the creators were considering that in their portrayal.

*** side bar: Disney World has a really cool store front of Mr. Gold’s shop tucked away in Hollywood Studios that is a must see if you are down there! I'm a sucker for little details.

Alright, so the sausage was a big hit with the class. I also found it a little odd and unnerving and really strange as a pair with a sausage, bird, and mouse working together in their home. However the story that left a big impression on me somehow was “The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces” because it was so dark, and the princesses were so very rude. They were literally murdering these princes and then laughing about it! Moral: don't do what your not supposed to because in the end you'll get caught. That is all fine and dandy, but what about all those decapitated heads that those princesses didn't care about enough to save. I mean I guess the princes should have stopped doing it after the first few failures but what can you do? I mean another prince always needs to go slay the dragon for the princess…..but really this story was just like a cold hearted massacre.

The other story that stood out to me was, of course, “The Juniper Tree” which had all the delicious makings of a great story (I'm so sorry). I think the concepts of reality is off so much in this story. The boy is eaten….but comes back to life. The boy's head is cut off with the apple box…stepmom wraps it in cloth back on the neck and it magically stays? Boy turns into bird….and can carry limestone. I understand that this is a magical fairytale but please have at least a few concepts that are realistic. However, I did love how the stepmom goes bonkers at the end and then just gets crushed with a limestone slab that is dropped by Bird Boy Superman. I like the justice behind it, but also what is up with the family (it's like they don't even care she's dead) I know she is terrible and all….but ouch, no mourning.

God I love the Brothers Grimm; Judge me all you want!

Ah, alas, we have finally found my one weakness: The Brothers Grimm FairyTales. these were the very first type of fairytales I ever read or was told about as a kid. oh, the nostalgia, it hurts. anyways, in case you don't notice, I love these stories. They are like disney but with more twists than an M. Night Shymalan film and more strangeness than a Steven King Thriller. They really drag you in with obscene gestures and out of right field ideas. I love it! and where was I going with this again? ohhhhh right. The main things that fascinate me most about these stories are how unpolished and crude they are, it really makes it work. 

For instance, in the story The Juniper tree, the main line thats echoed throughout the story (My mother she killed me, my father he ate me…Must I go farther?) is just plain gruesome. although, it does sort of end in the lighter side of things with the kid turning into a bird so I guess its not all bad. but still he does get killed and eaten by the very two people who birth him. Thats not even the strangest story. That whole business with the bird, the mouse, and the sausage is just plain looney toons if you ask me. I mean, if a talking sausage is a main character in your story, theres either something very wrong with you or theres probably some really strong substance you're on. 

In reading all of these stories, they all have something completely insane about them I seriously cannot believe parents actually read these stories to their children to teach them lessons. I mean I am sure as hell they would work 110% of the time in scarring children into learning to do and not to do some things. I do enjoy the seriousness mixed with eccentric twists with a passion. I kind of wish these were required to be read in elementary schools. they would have been so much more enjoyable to read then like shakespeare and grapes of wrath, plus you could have been able to laugh morbidly at these stories and not even be looked at funny. I mean the evil stepsisters in Cinderella getting their eyes pecked from their heads by the helpful birds is funny in a vengeful sort of way, nothing weird about laughing at their pain cause they deserved it, right? Kids would totally dig these more then any story that teachers told them in school and it would give them some solid morals to hold on to (in most cases), you sure as hell aint going to get morals from someplace like Romeo and Juliet. well, at least not ones kids have any actual need to retain. but these stories stay true for kids century after century and decade after decade for the most part. Okay thats enough of my spiel for the night, Thanks for listening!

The Grimmest Of Tales

I’ve always wanted to read Grimm’s Fairy Tales but have never gotten an opportunity until now.  Some of them are interesting and I have heard as a kid.  The one that surprised me the most was Little Red Riding Hood.  The one version I was told when I was a kid was very tame compared to the one we read in class.  First off Little Red Riding Hood never even met the wolf on the path on the way to her grandma’s house.  There was no huntsmen, didn’t know what happened to grandma, and Little Red Riding Hood got away from the wolf.  The part that really caught me off guard was the huntsman shooting the wolf in the shoulder, eviscerating the wolf to pull out the undigested Little Red Riding Hood and Grandmother.  Then to have Little Red Riding Hood put rocks in his belly and sew him back together, just to have the wolf run off the bleed to death internally.

One of the stories I really enjoyed was The Cat and the Mouse Set Up House.  I was laughing when the cat said was saying the kittens were named Top Off, Half Gone, All Gone, since that was the status of how much fat was left every time the cat said he was going to be the godfather of a kitten.  The story to me made me think of Tom and Jerry, except the cat ends up actually getting the mouse.  Having the cat as in the story as a cunning character and the mouse eventually figuring out what was going on did remind me of the cartoon but again, the cat actually got the mouse.

The Three Leaves Snake was also one of my favorites.  I liked the ending, the story was wrapped up in a nice neat little bow.  The man stuck to his word but revived his wife because he either didn’t want to die or actually loved her, since he agreed to the terms it implies he loved her, I think.  The wife gets revived doesn’t love her husband, cheats on him, tries to kill him but ends being killed for her treachery.  Everyone got what they deserved, no loose ends, hearts are broken but when I think of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that’s kind of what I expect.

Viewer Discretion Advised

I have really enjoyed reading the Brother Grimm Fairy Tales this past week. I have always loved fairy tales, but adding these dark twists make me love them even more. I have always had a sick sense of humor so I love these violent acts that were added in. In The Juniper Tree when the stepmother cut up the boy’s body and put it in the stew, oh my god. And then the dad ate him! And said it was the best strew he had ever tasted! Wow, I really just love that. Like who would think to write that? Wow. That was great. And then in The Two Traveling Companions when the shoemaker cut out the tailor’s eyes! Why would anyone do that? “Oh I will give you food, but give me your eyes!” That does not help the tailor in any way. That is just sick. I think it added a good element to the story.

I do think these stories teach good lessons though, while still having brutal acts in them. In The Two Traveling Companions, people are being taught to always do good. Karma is a real thing. When the tailor helped out all of the animals, they all helped him out. When the shoe maker cut out the tailor’s eyes, abandoned him, and tried to hurt him, the shoemaker was the one who ended up dying of starvation. When you do the right thing, things go your way and end well; that is a great lesson for everyone to know. This lesson was shown in multiple other fairy tales like The Juniper Tree and The Three Snake Leaves.

I really enjoyed The Three Snake Leaves as well because of the romance. The prince was willing to be buried alive to show his love for the princess. And then he even brought her back to life! But then the story shows how girls are evil and don’t appreciate things boys do for them, and the princess cheated on him and had him murdered. But she could never get away with that. The loyal servant who was probably my favorite character, saved the prince’s life! He did not have to do that, he could have saved the snake leaves for himself, but he didn’t. I also loved that the King went against his own daughter because she was a terrible person. She deserved that. It was a good twist, even though it was a little less violent.

Another one bites the dust

These stories...I am seriously becoming greatly annoyed with the endings. They end so abruptly and with someone dying in some awful way.


Can we not forget there was a talking sausage in one of these. I have seen talking animals and manipulated objects...a sausage? And he stirs the stew with his body? Okay. And how did that story end? "They all died," is basically what it said.

In every single story, whether someone got eaten or someone got killed, my jaw still dropped. I have never read any of the stories that we were given to read. I have never even heard of them. I can understand why though. That cat and mouse story too...can I just rant about that for a quick second? THE CAT EATS THE MOUSE!! What?! That mouse did not have a chance. From day one. Why did that poor thing think it was such a good idea to live with something that normally eats your kind?!

"Oh sure Mr. Zombie, I will live with you because you won't eat my brains." <<That's what that story was like.

Also...people think girls are naive and easily distracted, etc. Read any of these stories. I bet you that almost all of them will have a man who is not thinking with his first brain...and will fall in love with "the most beautiful girl he has ever seen," ENOUGH TO BE BURIED ALIVE WITH HER!

End rant. :)

I found this....take it in. Look at the sausage...just look at it. 

Yum, Yum, Run, Run

I am really enjoying these readings. My favorite by far has been The Two Traveling Companions. I think it has been my favorite so far because of the fact that the tailor is so much of a human. What I mean by this is he isn’t a knight who is beyond legends and can overcome anything with his sword and his strength. The tailor also is affected by stress and fear unlike many heroes we see who fear nothing. The tailor fears the consequences of the king if he cannot complete the tasks the kings asks for him to. He is not arrogant and does not foolishly think he can do these tasks without any trouble. Instead, he fears he will fail and he runs from fear of the consequences. Although this can be seen as cowardly, it can also be seen as smart. The tailor also shows compassion towards many different creatures and in return he receives their help in his time of need. This is what I like about this story the most; you cannot do everything on your own and you should always help those who need it so when you need help yourself, they will feel more inclined to help you.  Also, let’s be honest, I like seeing justice being served. Therefore, when the shoemaker lost his way at the end, I was sort of happy.

The next reading I really want to talk about is Hans My-Hedgehog. This story was interesting to say the least. A boy born to a mother and father who is half boy, half hedgehog and can play the bagpipes, what else is there to say? Oh yeah, he can “take off” his hedgehog half off his body and turn into a normal looking boy. When I read this I was completely shocked, I did not see that coming. I understand the whole reason behind not taking it off in the very beginning, but it kind of still seems weird he didn’t take it off sooner.  I also didn’t like the fact that the boy let his father return with him to the kingdom with him. He didn’t want you when you were a hedgehog-boy, why would you want him now?

Finally, The Cat and the Mouse Set Up House was a fun read as well. This reading had an ending I didn’t see coming. . . not. I knew as soon as the cat started eating the fat that it was going to come winter time and there would be no food left to eat so the cat would end up eating the mouse. Although it didn’t quite end up as I thought, the mouse still ended up being eaten. What can you expect? It is a cat and a mouse. Not quite sure what the lesson here would be; don’t say too much? Either way, this reading was funny; I loved the names the cat came up with; come on mouse, those names were a dead give away from the very beginning.

These readings have been very interesting; it is fun to read these stories in the non-Disney version. They have some of the same elements as the Disney movies, but have many differing elements as well; especially the cannibalism, murder, and mutilation elements of them.

Were Not in Kansas Anymore

The stories this week are definitely not like the familiar fairy tales of last week. These stories were dark and seemed to lack a lesson for kids. I’ve never heard of any these stories or any derivative of them. I struggled to see how they fit in with the tales that have stayed popular to this day. The others seem to have purpose, but these just seem to tales or legends with no real point. After reading them all, I saw that they are a lot of similar elements and stock characters. We have evil step-mothers, beautiful ladies and princesses, infertile couples, magic and lots of strangeness. I found some humor in the strangeness, like the sausage that can cook and apparently walk or something. I also thought the it was humorous how the King in “The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces” didn’t know where his daughters were going at night and instead of watching over them himself he had to bribe young men with the chance of marrying one of the girls to do it.

Although there weren’t any obvious lessons in some of the stories, there was definitely common theme of good beating out evil. What I got from the tales was that as long as you’re a kind person and you put your faith in God, everything will work out for you in the end. And justice will be served to the evil people. It’s unclear to me if these stories are supposed to be religious because they have a lot of magical and impossible things happening in them, but I guess it is the magic of God perhaps.

The two extra stories I read were “The Girl with No Hands” and “The Three Little Men in the Woods.” These story were similar to all the rest and I found none of it really surprising. There was an evil jealous step-mother and a beautiful, kind girls and one who magically grows her cut off hands back. Oh and of course in both stories the beautiful girls face hardships, but end up living happily ever after married to a king. 

There Once Was a ______ Who Was ________

Reading fairytales in this class has been such a treat. Yes, because they're much easier to swallow than Kors and Peters, sure, but also because none of them are what they seem. I've always (well, at least since I've been in school) known that they are far from innocent tales and that they typically have dark and twisted morals, but I never realized just quite how dark they truly are. The first batch of readings were mostly fairytales that I've heard of before and they only had a few bits of variation to them, but out of this group of assigned tales, I've never heard of any of them before. Contrary to the majority of people, I didn't really grow up on fairytales. My favorite books when I was younger were the watered down classics for kids, the Little House on the Prairie books and odd things like The Magic Treehouse and Secrets of Droon series. When I was even younger, I liked things like Eric Carle and love the Very Hungry Caterpillar and Papa, Please Get The Moon for Me (which is why I chose The Moon as one of my picks)

But besides the hidden innuendos, dark themes and double-meanings, the aspect of these tales that I can really appreciate are the patterns. Dr. Sandona talked about fairytales during his portion of the Approaches to Literature class when he discussed structuralism, and now that I can get past the organization and categorizing that broke the rules of Literature and drove me nuts from this school of theory, I absolutely understand what he was saying: there is only one story.

 While I hate the thought that every story can be traced back to a few different patterns, I will admit that the majority of stories and tales can be predicted to end a certain way. Once in a while, we'll get that jaw-dropping surprise ending, but after you've read enough books, you can pretty much guess the ending. With fairytales, this seems to always be the case. Maybe we didn't know that this stepmother was going to decapitate her son and let his head roll into a trunk of apples, but we knew that she didn't like him and that her jealous and disgust wasn't going to lead this boy into a happy ending.
                                   
                                      


There are distinct patterns in all of these stories, and while not all of them follow one specific pattern, there are a good two or three that we can categorize together into groups of similar stories. For example, The Three Snake Leaves, The Riddle and The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces are three different tales that all have similar patterns. In each of these, there is one princess, or twelve princesses, who each have some sort of quirk, but the king promises that if a prince can solve this quirk or is willing to accept it, he will be able to marry the princess, and if not, he will die. It's also interesting to note that all of these princesses are beautiful. The only quality they are ever given is beauty and the only reason a prince caves to follow her's or the king's orders is because she has such great beauty. In fact, beauty seems to be their only redeeming quality. The princess in The Three Snake Leaves, grows out of love with the prince, lusts after another man and kills the prince even after he has managed to revive her life and was willing to be buried alive with her. In The Riddle, the princess doesn't know the value of all the men who have lost their lives and thinks it's laughable that they are killed if she solves their puzzle. Even when she doesn't have the answer, she will not accept defeat and take the man as her betrothed, she lies and cheats to get the answer with the hopes that this prince will die too. And the twelve princesses are so vain and self-composed that they (except the youngest) never think it would be possible for a prince to outsmart them.

In a way, this pattern can be seen as empowering because these women all believe they can outsmart men and have their own plans. However, it always takes a turn for the worst because man trumps woman each time and the princess ends up punished or married. In fact, in all of these fairytales, once a woman is beyond the age of a little girl like Gretel, she is seen as manipulative, with high orders demanded of men and selfish or she's a downright evil stepmother/mother or a witch! The only innocent females are ones who can be classified as children and anyone who is older is never as intelligent, witty or resourceful as a man. It's sad that while it appears innocent on the surface, there are certainly misogynistic undertones in fairytales. We've always known the damsel in distress pattern, but even when that is not the case on the surface, women seem to always be getting themselves into trouble, or at least, that is how it is presented. Fairytales have never quite been for children, but it's children who read them and have lessons ingrained in them from the start whether they know it or not, and it's only when we've grown out of innocence ourselves that we can see what we read as children wasn't quite as innocent as we'd thought. There is absolute comfort in a pattern and that's why we're soothed by fairytales and tell them to our children, but what are we really teaching them?

My mother chopped my head off, my father swallowed me. My sister buried all my bones, under the Juniper Tree. Ka-twee! Ka-twee! You'll never find, a prettier bird than me!

(If you're wondering, yes I wrote that title entirely from memory.)
I know these are the Grimm's fairy tales, and violence is to be expected, but even so this set of readings seemed somewhat darker than the previous. Maybe it's because the new readings are stories I'm not familiar with and therefore I haven't become accustomed to their dark nature like I have been with any of the ones that Disney has gotten hold of. If you're wondering what I mean, I'm taking about the traditional ruination of your childhood via internet: "Hey, you used to like Cinderella, did you? Did you know in one of the older versions she doesn't wake up, and the prince rapes her comatose body?" Once you get enough of that from online randos you kinda become numb to it, but NOW I get an all new set of stories to make me say "wow okay that just happened." I do think happy endings where everybody gets along are overrated though, so needless to say I was pretty okay with when the stepmother in The Juniper Tree got her head smashed in with a millstone and when the shoemaker in The Two Traveling Companions got his eyes pecked out, went mad and died lost and alone in the forest. People  back then knew how to write a satisfying ending.

However, if there's one story from the readings that I think is Disneyfiable, it has to be Iron Hans. Kid's born into a rich family, does a noble deed by helping a strange man escape enslavement, henceforth befriending the man and getting taken out of his sheltered life. Then he's exposed to the wild man's magic that turns his hair gold, henceforth marking him as a "special snowflake." He is thrown out into the real world, where he takes on the roll of the mysterious-and-secretly-superior underdog, and he and the princess playfully charm each other and fall in love.Then he uses the very Genie-like powers of the super special friend he made to become a hero, get the girl, and get dem monies yo. Reunites with his family and releases Iron Hans from the spell that was put on him then I guess Hans like, becomes his godfather or something? And everybody lives happily ever after. The only thing it was missing was an identifiable villain, which would obviously have to be the king of the opposing army in the war, who plots to kill the good king, destroy his kingdom, and take his daughter for his bride in the Disney version. There's simply no other way to do it.

Along with the assigned readings, I also read The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs and The Girl with no Hands. I'll give you one guess as to which one has heavy religious connotations, and I'll tell you that it's not the one with "Devil" in the title. Seriously though, I thought I was reading something straight from the bible with all the devil trickery and the praying and the angels. It's a totally feel-good god-loving thing that's saying everything will be alright as long as you belieeeeve, and nobody got killed, maimed, or otherwise beaten down in that one, so it really was not up my ally. Well, except for the main character spoiler: she loses her hands, but her hands grow back, so everyone's happy and not at all maimed la-dee-da. I know it's not a show I payed for but I still want my money back.