She's just seven years old and she's been taken into the woods by the huntsman. In Snow White, the stepmother asks for the lungs and liver of the little girl. Comics from Japanese Manga to the erotic and ‘adult’ depict the characters of the Grimm brothers’ tales.īut even in their original, they are far from saccharine, according to Maria Tatar, professor of Germanic folklore and mythology at Harvard University: “These tales are not politically correct. They have morphed into countless adaptations Disney disneyfied them and new filmmakers and novelists continue to rework them. Some stories have fallen out of favour but some – Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – seem eternal. They lived in the town of Kassel in Germany and studied law and language as well as writing more than 150 stories which they published in two volumes between 18. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were writing in a different world. On the covers are the most innocent of titles: Grimm’s Fairy Tales in their English version or Children’s and Household Tales in the original German editions published two hundred years ago. Nice tales for nice children.īut behind the safe titles lie dark stories of sex and violence – tales of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest, as one academic puts it. They are far from anything we might imagine as acceptable today. If they were a video game, there would be calls to ban them.
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