18 OF YOUR FAVORITE FAIRY TALES AND THEIR DARK ORIGINS - Were these ever truly meant for kids?

The following original tales are far from the Disney cartoons we all grew up on, some of which if were true to their origins , should have strict R ratings. These are certainly not tales for children.

Sleeping Beauty

In one of the very earliest versions of this classic, published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile as Sun, Moon, and Talia, the princess doesnt prick her finger on a spindle, but rather she gets a sliver of flax stuck under her fingernail. She falls down, apparently dead, but her father cant face the idea of losing her, so he lays her body on a bed in one of his estates. Later on, a king out hunting in the woods finds her, and since he can’t wake her up, he chooses to rape her while she’s unconscious, then heads home to his own country. Some time after that, still unconscious, she gives birth to two children, and one of them accidentally sucks the splinter out of her finger, so she wakes up. The king who raped her is already married, but he burns his wife alive so he and Talia can be married. Don’t worry, the wife tries to kill and eat the babies first, so it’s all healthy and moral.

Little Red Riding Hood

If you can believe it, the Brothers Grimm did make this story a lot nicer than it was when they got their hands on it. In Charles Perrault’s version, included in his 1697 collection Stories or Fairy Tales from Past Times: Tales of Mother Goose, there is no intrepid huntsman. Little Red simply strips naked, gets in bed, then dies, eaten up by the big bad wolf, with no miraculous relief (in another version, she eats her own grandmother first, her flesh cooked up and her blood poured into a wine glass by our wolfish friend). Instead, Perrault gives us a little rhyming verse reminding us that not all wolves are wild beasts — some seduce with gentleness, sneak into our beds, and get us there. The sexual undertones are not lost on us though — after all, the contemporary French idiom for a girl who has lost her virginity was elle avoit vû le loup — she has seen the wolf.

Rumpelstiltskin

Simple story: a miller’s daughter is trapped and forced to spin straw into gold, on pain of death. A little man appears to her, and spins it for her, but says that he will take her child in payment unless she can guess his name. In the Grimm version, as retold by Pullman, when the maiden finally figures out Rumpelstiltskin’s name, he reacts rather badly: ‘The Devil told you that! The Devil told you that!’ the little man yelled, and in his fury he stamped his right foot so hard that he drove it into the ground right up to his waist. Then he took hold of his left foot with both hands and tore himself in two.

Cinderella

Here, Perrault is much nicer than Grimm was — in his version, the two cruel stepsisters are married off to members of the royal court after Cinderella is properly married to the prince. In the Grimm story, not only do the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet in order to fit into the glass slippers (surprise, surprise, the blood pooling in their shoes gives them away), but at the end, they have their eyes pecked out by doves. You know, just for good measure.

Snow White

In the original 1812 Grimm version of this tale, the evil Queen is Snow White’s actual mother, not her stepmother. We don’t know, but that makes it a lot more terrifying to us. The Disney version also left out the fact that the Queen sends the huntsman out to bring back Snow White’s liver and lungs, which she then means to eat. And the fact that she is actually not in a deep sleep when the prince finds her — she’s dead, and he’s carting off her dead body to play with when his servant trips, jostles the coffin, and dislodges the poison apple from SW’s throat. Most notable, however, is the punishment the Grimms thought up for her. When the queen shows up at Snow White’s wedding, she’s forced to step into iron shoes that were cooking in the fire, and then dances until she falls down and dies.

Hansel and Gretel

Well, with the version of the story we know, its already pretty gruesome — the evil stepmother abandons the children to die in the forest, they happen upon a cannibalistic witch’s cottage, she fattens them up to eat, they outwit and kill her and escape. The Grimm version is basically the same, but in an early French version, called The Lost Children, the witch is the Devil, and the Devil wants to bleed the children on a sawhorse. Of course, they pretend not to know how to get on, so the Devil has his wife (who tried to help the poor kids earlier in the story) show them. They promptly slit her throat, steal all the Devil’s money, and then run off.

Rapunzel

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Well, in the Grimm version, she does, a little too often, to a prince, and ends up getting pregnant, innocently remarking to her jailer witch that her clothes feel too tight. The witch, not to have any competition, chops off Rapunzel’s hair and magically transports her far away, where she lives as a beggar with no money, no home, and after a few months, two hungry mouths to feed. As for the prince, the witch lures him up and then pushes him out from the window. Some thorn bushes break his fall, but also poke out his eyes. However, with all this extra bloodshed, there’s still a happy ending.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

In this stories earliest known incarnation, there was no Goldilocks — but only the three bears and a fox called Scrapefoot, who enters the three bears’ palace, sleeps in their beds and fools around with their salmon of knowledge. In the end, she either gets thrown out of the window or eaten, depending on who’s telling the tale. Interestingly, it has been suggested that the use of the word “vixen” to mean female fox is how we got Goldilocks, by means of a crafty old lady in the intervening story incarnations.

The Little Mermaid

We all know this story: she sells her voice for a pair of legs, flops around for a bit, then wins her prince’s heart, right? Well, not exactly. In Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale, she trades tongue for legs all right, but part of the deal is that every step will be nearly unbearable, like walking on sharp swords, and the day after the prince marries someone else, she will die and turn into sea foam. Hoping to win the prince’s heart, she dances for him, even though it’s agony. He claps along, but eventually decides to marry another. The mermaid’s sisters sell their hair to bring her a dagger and urge her to kill the prince and let his blood drip onto her feet, which will become fins once again. She sneaks up on him, but can’t bring herself to do it. So she dies, and dissolves into foam. Later, Andersen changed the ending, so that the mermaid becomes a “daughter of the air” — if she does good deeds for 300 years, she can get a soul and go to heaven. Many scholars find this nonsensical.

The Frog Prince

Being the very first story in the Grimm Brothers’ collection (and so it is in Pullman’s), this story is simple enough: the princess kisses the frog, out of the goodness of her heart, and he turns into a prince. Or, if you’re reading the original version, the frog tricks the resentful princess into making a deal with him, follows her home, keeps pushing himself further and further onto her silken pillow, until finally she pushes him against the wall. Somehow, this action is rewarded by his transformation into a prince, but it’s not even the most violent version. In other early spins, she has to cut off his head instead. That’s rather far off from the traditional kiss, don’t you think?

Ponocchio

In Carlo Collodi’s original, once Gepetto carves Pinocchio, the marionette runs away. He’s caught by the police who assume Gepetto has abused him and they imprison him. Pinocchio goes back to Gepetto’s house that night and accidentally kills the wise talking cricket. He later gets hung from a tree and dies.

Peter Pan

It should be no shocker that the timeless tale of Peter Pan has questionable content that kids just shouldn’t be exposed to. Moral messages such as “never grow up...do whatever you want”, “it's okay to kill”, and “pediphillia”. After all, Peter Pan was named after the greek god Pan. In the books written by J.M. Barrie, when Wendy first flies to Neverland, Tinkerbell convinces one of the Lost Boys, named Tootles, that she's actually a bird that Peter wants killed, so he shoots Wendy with a bow and arrow, and she almost dies. Ashamed of his actions once he finds out the truth, Tootles then begs Peter to kill him. And these are children, mind you.

Aladdin

The Middle Eastern fairy tale in which Aladdin, then trapped in the magic cave, rubs a ring he wears and a lesser genie takes him back to his mother. His mother then cleans the lamp and reveals a more powerful genie who gives Aladdin his wealth and palace. The sorcerer (not called Jafar) tricks Aladdin’s new wife, gets the lamp, and has the genie transport the palace to his home. Aladdin uses the ring genie to transport there, kills the sorcerer, and then brings his palace back to where it was.

The Ugly Duckling

Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Ugly Duckling is a famous story world-round. In the real version has the little chick originally harassed constantly by the other barnyard animals. He escapes and lives with wild geese and ducks who are soon slaughtered by hunters. An old woman takes him in, but her cat and hen harass him even more so he leaves again. After much abuse and spending winter alone, he decides to join the swans who return in spring.

Mulan

In Chu Renhuo’s version of Mulan, he has the warrior come home from war to find her father dead, her mother remarried, and the khan calling her to be his concubine. As it’s all too much for her, Mulan takes her own life.

Bluebeard

In this Charles Perrault piece, Bluebeard isthe story of a wealthy, ugly, blue-bearded man whos been married many times; but trouble is, no one knows what happens to his wives. After convincing one of his neighbor’s reluctant daughters to marry him and her moving in, he leaves for a while. He leaves all the chateau’s keys in her possession, including one to a door she’s forbidden to open. Curiousity gets the best of her and she opens the room, finding the bodies of his ex-wives hanging from hooks on the wall and the floor heavily pooled with blood.

The Fox and The Hound

Daniel P. Mannix’s The Fox and the Hound isn’t originally so much about friendship. In this version, the fox purposefully leads one of a man’s dogs onto railroad tracks where it’s hit by a train and dies. Furious, the master trains a dog (the one who befriends the fox in the Disney story) who finally chases the fox so much that the fox collapses from exhaustion and dies. The dog is close to death too, but its master nurses it back to health before later taking the dog out back and killing it because he can’t have a dog in the nursing home.

The Pied Piper

A story which tries to account for the strange disappearance or death of most of the town’s young children. The true story goes that the piper agreed with the mayor to get rid of the rat infestation. He did, luring the rats to a watery death in the river. However, the mayor refused to pay the full amount so the piper later returned and lured the children away. Many people believe the children may have been led away to participate in a children’s crusade.

Hope you enjoyed seeing the dark side of the fairy/folk tales we grew up to love.

With love,
Doc