Warning: Fairy tales may be hazardous to your mental health.

Check out these answers. And the next time somebody you know starts moaning about the violence on TV these days, hand them a copy of Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen. That'll shut them up.

What happened in each of these original stories? Here are the nightmare spoilers

1. In the original Cinderella tale, the ugly stepsisters go to the wedding, only to have their eyes plucked out by birds. (Are these the same birds who twitter around Cinderella while she sings all those saccharine songs?)
2. At the end of Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid', the mermaid turns into sea foam. (You may have to be Danish to appreciate this.)
3. In Carlo Collodi's 1883 The Adventures of Pinocchio, the mischievous puppet meets a talking cricket and kills it. (Well, it is a bug.)
4. In 'Sleeping Beauty', the king finds an unconscious princess and has non-consexual sex with her. (There are babies.)
5. In 'Rapunzel', the hair-climbing prince is blinded when he falls into some thorns. (If there's a moral there, we fail to find it.)
6. In the original 'Snow White', the evil queen asks a huntsman for Snow White's lungs and liver, and eats them. (Okay, they're not really her lungs and liver, just a boar's, but the queen doesn't know that. She thinks she's Hannibal.)
7. Also in 'Snow White', the evil queen is forced to entertain at the wedding by dancing in red-hot shoes until she dies. (Those fairy tale 'good guys' don't fool around.)
8. In the Grimm Brothers' 'The Juniper Tree', a woman decapitates a boy by slamming a chest down on his neck. Then she reattaches the head with a scarf to conceal the crime. (This is weird on so many levels, we've lost count.)
9. In the French version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', Red is eaten by the wolf, but nobody shows up to resurrect her. (Actually, we like this idea. It prevents sequels of the 'Return of the Big, Bad Wolf' variety. Also, it's realistic.)
10. Robert Carlyle beware: In the original version of 'Rumpelstiltskin', the angry little man stamps his foot so hard he gets stuck in the floor and tears himself in two trying to get out. (We would never let that happen to Robert Carlyle. Not even in Trainspotting.)

Now you know why folklorists need therapy so frequently.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

20.06.16 Front Page

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