I’ve just finished reading a book that contained so much stomach-churning violence, cruelty, greed and lust, I had to reach for the bottle of antacid after every chapter.
The title of this book? Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
It took me all of these years to finally learn the shocking truth: all of the sweet, happily-ever-after stories my parents used to read to me when I was a kid were nothing more than candy-coated versions of the original sordid tales, written back in the 1800s by Jacob (sometimes spelled Jakob) and Wilhelm Grimm, two really sadistic German guys.
It’s pretty obvious the Grimms hated their parents. I mean, every parent in their stories is depicted as a cruel, selfish, kid-hating monster. The tales of “Rapunzel” and “Hansel and Gretel” are prime examples.
In “Rapunzel,” a woman has a terrible craving for rampion, which is some kind of European salad root. Her husband, wanting to please her, climbs over a tall stone wall and steals some rampion from a witch’s garden. He does this repeatedly until the witch finally catches him.
“Have mercy on me!” he begs the witch. “If I don’t keep my wife supplied with rampion, she’ll make my life a living hell!”
“You can have all you want,” the witch tells him, cackling wickedly, “in exchange for your firstborn child.”
“It’s a deal,” the man says, relieved he won’t have to scale any more walls. Besides that, in those days a child was a small price to pay for a decent salad.
Alas, according to the bargain, when the couple’s first child is born, the witch promptly arrives to claim her. She names the baby “Campanula Rapunculus” (Rapunzel for short), which is the scientific name for rampion. The witch then imprisons the child in a tower and subjects the poor girl to years of verbal abuse and cruel and unusual hair yanking.
Well, in my parents’ Disney version of this story, one day a handsome prince happens to come trotting by on his white horse, hears Rapunzel’s cries for help, climbs up the tower (using her mile-long braid as a rope), then rescues her and whisks her off to his palace, where they live happily ever after.
Not so. According to the Grimms, the poor guy climbs the tower, falls off into a patch of dagger-like thorns and accidentally gouges out both of his eyeballs (pardon me while I take another swig of antacid).
And these guys wrote their stories for kids? There must have been an epidemic of nightmares back in those days if this was an example of their bedtime stories.
And then there were Hansel and Gretel’s parents who, by no stretch of the imagination, ever could be confused with the German equivalent of Ward and June Cleaver. When they were down to their last crust of bread and no longer could feed their little family of four, they decided to lighten the grocery bill by getting rid of their two kids.
“Take them for a nice long walk in the Forest of No Return,” their mother, cackling wickedly (women apparently did a lot of wicked cackling back then), instructed their father.
The father had a few misgivings about his wife’s plan, especially since it meant he would have to enter the Forest of No Return himself, and the name didn't exactly evoke images of a fun place for a walk. But because he was so henpecked, he gave in to his spouse's demands...just to stop her incessant nagging.
Are you seeing the pattern here? Rapunzel's mother nagged her husband about rampion for her salad, and Hansel and Gretel's mother nagged her husband about ditching the kids for food. Both women obviously were a couple of hungry old nags...and probably were the original inspirations for the modern-day word "hangry."
Anyway, I’m sure you know what happened to Hansel and Gretel, what with the cannibalistic child-eating witch in the gingerbread house and all, but the part of the original story you might not be familiar with is when the two kids finally managed to escape from the witch’s house and were making a beeline for home, they came upon a huge pond not far from their house and crossed it by riding on the back of a giant duck.
Just a thought here, but if there was a pond with ducks tame enough to allow kids to ride on them, then why didn’t Hansel and Gretel’s parents just go nab one of those and whip up a big batch of duck fricassee for the family instead of ditching the kids?
All I can say is after reading the real versions of my favorite fairy tales, I’m more than slightly disillusioned. It wouldn’t even surprise me to find out “Beauty and the Beast” originally was called “The Two Beasts”…until Beauty underwent extensive cosmetic surgery and electrolysis.
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Sally Breslin is a native New Englander and an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net
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READERS, I DESPERATELY NEED YOUR OPINION! IS THE COVER BELOW MORE APPEALING AND EYE-CATCHING THAN THE CARTOON ONE PICTURED AT THE TOP RIGHT OF THIS PAGE? I CAN'T DECIDE WHETHER TO CHANGE THIS BOOK'S COVER OR NOT!
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