November 5, 2015 • 51 mins
Unless you were raised alone in a basement (in which case you may be the subject of one), you probably grew up on fairy tales. That's appropriate because they may be humanity's greatest psychic projection screen.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Nol. He's back. He's
actually sitting in for this one. And that makes this
stuff you should know. Yeah, we left a trail of
(00:22):
breadcrumbs or pebbles, depending on what part of the episode.
That's right, we're talking about that's that's my favorite one.
Now that in the Juniper Tree or my favorite and
the juniper tree. Yeah, and we should say this is
a two parter um. You should have already previously listened
to one. We probably should have put this one out
(00:44):
first and then done the other one. Hey, but whatever,
what evs we we just think this is a nice
I really enjoyed these two. Actually, I think if you
can make the case that we did it in the
right or because now people have thought about fairy tales
and have jailed and bathed in them for like the
last day or so, and now they're ready to understand
what's been haunting them. But where did they come from? Right?
(01:06):
What's the deal? And we're going to tell you what's
the deal? This is I really did enjoy these O.
This kind of reignited my kind of brought up a
lot of stuff. Oh yeah, did you find yourself weeping?
Not weeping, just kind of like remembering childhood? And I
don't know, I enjoyed it. I guess I didn't read
that many fairy tales. It reminded me that fairy tales
(01:26):
are No, they're not awful, they're just very um dark, Yes,
but I appreciate that part. I think it's more just
the have you ever have you ever seen a picture
of a human being without a face. Uh yeah, I
think that's kind of how I think of fairy tales.
(01:49):
They're they're blank, they're anonymous, they're um flat. I think
it's that I've actually run into that term a lot
in researching for this episode. There's certainly not a lot
of character development and oh and that's part of like
their charm, their lure. But it's also like, you know,
that's the memory I formed of them is like, um,
I'm used to characters or psychologist is lacking as well,
(02:10):
like people do stuff for almost no apparent reason whatsoever,
and a lot of it's horrible stuff. Um. And that's
actually kind of set the stage for fairy tales to
be told and retold and retold and interpreted and analyzed.
And um, I think that's what makes them so enduring
is that they are there's there's there're so minimalists that
(02:33):
they just survive because humans will change an update and
we'll go from wearing bell bottoms and macromay vest to
wearing like silver jump suits, which are in right now. Um,
But ultimately we're still like very similar to what we were,
you know, sixty years ago. And I think fairy tales
(02:53):
um reflect that well said. And also I can say
that because from what I understand, despite the fact that
there is serious study of fairy tales, no one really
has any definitive say over what they are. Like trying
to define what a fairy tale is, chuck, Um, It's
(03:13):
a story usually encompassing like a moral or ethical uh, lesson,
but fantastical elements. Sure, okay, uh that often had dark
undertones or overtones. That's actually a pretty great definition, but
it does raise some questions. It's like, what is the
difference between a fairy tale and a fable, or a
(03:35):
fairy tale and a nursery rhyme? You know, what's the
what is it specifically about fairy tales, and I think
it's all I think they're all very similar and it's
all part of folklore. So if you listened, I think
in February this year, we did one on folklore, so
it ties in heavily with that. Um. And also we
didn't I don't know why we just defined fairy tale
(03:56):
because we never defined what vocal fry was. Apparently I
feel like we did. Yeah, we got some complaints like
you never said what it was, but we demonstrated it
over and over. Yeah, and we said it's like a flat,
creaky way of speaking. Yeah. I don't know. I feel
like we got the point across. Um. Okay, So fairy
(04:17):
tales specifically, when you think of fairy tales, you you
might think of Disney, but if you give it a
little more thought, you're probably going to come up with, um,
the Brothers Krim, Yeah, Matt Damon and um Heath ledger
R yeah for real, uh yeah, Jacob and Wilhelm Graham
uh and of course there Well, let's just go ahead
(04:40):
and say there's a couple of types of fairy tales.
There's the there's the oral tale. Yeah, the oral tale,
which is and and the grand Brothers kind of exists
between the two worlds. But one is the oral world,
which we talked about in folklore, the age old tradition
of passing stories down um via mouth parts, over and
(05:01):
over and over, changing them, adding some spice, just like
telling a joke or a ghost story or something like that,
right exactly, um. And fairy tales specifically, as far as
they went with oral tales are typically associated with women
and typically associated with women, um, undertaking domestic chores. That
that's typically where they were passed down. Um. And so
(05:23):
you've got the oral tale and well, which makes sense.
Though when I read this, I was like, why are
there so many fairy tales to have women at the
loom or spinning stuff, because apparently that's where they were told.
It makes sense. Yeah, it's like, hey, I'm I'm bored
out of my mind here spending the straw into gold.
Let me eat some peyote and make up a story
(05:43):
and you sit there and listen. Um. There's also the
literary fairy tale, which appears to be there's a handful
of people like Charles Perrault or challer Piero right um.
And then there's also Hans Christian Anderson very famously, and
these people are are reputed as having created, you know,
(06:04):
many fairy tales, and those are called literary fairy like
they were original authors and made these upright. That's apparently
a total like misattribution. Like for example, Little Red riding Hood, right,
is a great example that's typically attributed to Charles Parrault
in the I think the seventeenth or sixteenth century. Charles
(06:28):
Charles Parralt his ancestor um and Charles Pearl. He was
very famous, as famous as Hans Christian Anderson was um
for for writing down fairy tales and the collections and
just being delightful, right, and he was great and at
the end of every one of his there was a
moral to the story. Um. But the people tend to
(06:49):
think that either if he didn't come up with it,
it was originated right before then. But we found an article,
um that was from it covered a two thousand nine
study carried out cultural anthropologists who basically went to some
biologists and said, hey, do you guys know how you
trace um species and create the tree of life the
(07:09):
taxonomy of biology? Can you do that with Little Red
Riding Hood? And they said, man, you are one crazy
lady or one whacked out hepcat actually may have been
a man, doctor Jamie Trani. It was a man and
still is probably. I mean it's only been six years.
You never know. Um. So Dr Tarrani went to some
(07:29):
biologists and figured out how to apply the same methods
to this story Little Red Riding Hood, and he found
that not only was it not just like a few
years older than Pearl's version, it was as as as
much as years old. Basically, yeah, they found variations in
China and Iran and the Middle East. Um, they found
(07:51):
some unit for the asp stables another person, they said,
they found some of those from sixth century BC. So
basically what they're saying is maybe nobody made these up. Well,
someone at some point did, at least as far as
Little Red Riding Hood goes. That there's some common ancestor
that predates years before the present, and um it was.
(08:14):
It's a very widespread tale. Um. Not only did Dr
Tehranni um trace the lineage back to six BC, UM
he found that you could take these tales all around
the world and lump them into groups, just a few,
a handful of groups, and that UM places as desparate
(08:34):
as Iran and Nigeria and Europe all were in the
same group, whereas like Japan and Burma and China were
in their own group. But they all kind of bear
this resemblance where there is a lion or tiger or
a wolf who was posing as something else in order
to get the drop on someone else. Yeah, and it's
(08:57):
sometimes usually a little girl, but I think in Iran
it was a boy. So details change again simple folklore,
I think, but the structure, the skeleton of the story
is still very much the same, traceable back years. So
that that kind of answers the question that I don't
know if we raised or not yet who owns or who? Who?
(09:18):
Who came up with fairy tales? But humans did. That's
the best answer you could possibly come up with. These
humans came up with it and over the over the years,
like you said, people in bellyship, people add people subtract um,
and the Grimm brothers did exactly that same thing. All right,
let's let's talk a little bit about these these grim bros.
Um Jacob and Wilhelm did already say that they were
(09:41):
born in Yakub in Part one, which I appreciated yea
and wille Helm Jacob or Yakub was born in seventy five,
home just a year later, and they were they were
kind of rich kids. Their dad was a lawyer and
they had some money. Uh. Their original house if you
look at it, it's funny. It looks like I mean,
(10:01):
it's a total Bavarian like gingerbread house. And Um, they
grew up in Germany and when they were ten years old,
their dad died of pneumonia. Uh, and all of a
sudden they didn't have the kind of dough that they
were used to having. They did was not good and
in a little scary. I don't get the sense that
they were like dirt poor or anything, because they still
had some relatives that had some cash well. Plus also,
(10:23):
I mean they made it all the way through law
school in honor of their father, So I mean that
wasn't free even back then. Yeah. There, I think their
aunt paid for school. Uh. They graduated each graduate at
the top of their class, and I guess what would
be considered high school. And then their auntie paid for
law school. And it wasn't long after law school that
(10:44):
they got into the UM. It was about to say
writing that they did right. But the editors for sure,
collecting and editing and writing business. They were what's called philologists.
Curating is the word I met um. And they were
also they consider of themselves and were considered linguists as well.
And by the way, they were Hessians, which means that
(11:04):
they were um from the same place as the headless
horseman from a sleepy hollow legend. He was a Hessian mercenary.
That yeah, Um. So anyway, they they came. They graduated
from law school during this period called German romanticism um,
which was basically this idea that before years before, in
(11:26):
the in the midsts of history, the Germanic people were
very interesting. They had a very good grasp on things,
and a lot of this was passed down through oral
folk folklore and um. That this stuff was disappearing thanks
to industrialization. So you get the idea that there's a
little bit of nervousness at least among the intellectual um
(11:50):
people of Germany at the time, that this cultural history
was drying up very quickly, and there was a movement
to collect this oral knowledge before it disappeared. And that's
what um, that's what the Grimm brothers were doing when
they set about collecting these stories, although they weren't very
honest about it at least at first. Yeah, it was, um,
(12:11):
we know them now is as just simply the grim
Brothers fairy tales. But the original collection was called um
Nursery and Household Tales or die kenda went house minchen
and german Man. You're German? Is it's coming back? And
there are eighty six stories originally in the collection. And
(12:33):
by the way, big shout to the article from the
New Yorker Once Upon a Time A Lord of the
fairy Tale by Joan uh at Casella. Yes, very nice.
I think that's it. Yeah, she wrote a great article. Um,
and that's the largely the basis of our podcast. By
the way, that's right, so thanks for that. But um,
eighty six original stories. And like you said, originally they
(12:56):
in the in the forward, in the introduction they were like,
this is a this is all German all the time,
basically word for word. We went around to the peasantry
and collected this um these marks was it marching or marking?
Uh for what the tales German for tales the marching
or marken house myrchin merchant. So they went around to
(13:21):
the Vulk the peasantry and collected the merchant from them. Yeah,
it didn't change a word specifically. They said they had
a primary source, a woman named Dorothea VMan, and she
was a peasant and a village near them. Um. But
it turns out and that all of this again was folklore,
(13:41):
which I can't fault them too much because that was
their business. No, but they jumped it up to be
a little more folks tho than it was. Well, they
both basically lied in there in the introduction in their
first um, the first edition, which was published in two
volumes in eighteen twelve and eighteen fifteen. Right, and so
this nursery and household tales became known as rooms fairy tales.
And at first it was definitely um a much more
(14:06):
of an intellectual pursuit. There are lots of footnotes. They
tried to make it seem like they were just collecting
and preserving this German folk knowledge and all that. But
it turns out that they they did have that primary
source and that woman, but she was pretty far from
a peasant. Apparently she was the wife of a tailor,
which was part of the merchant class, not the peasant class,
and she was just one source. They relied on friends
(14:28):
and family and relatives and other collections of fairy folk
folk tales and fairy tales that they just lifted. Um.
And we're not suggesting there were thieves. This was a
common thing to do. It was. But again they bald
faced ly lied in there in the in the introduction
in preface, which is funny, but it's um. Yeah, they were.
They were they were trying to adopt an aura for
(14:49):
their project that they wanted it to have that it
didn't necessarily have. Well, yeah, and I don't think we
mentioned the source wasn't even a German descent. She was
a French. You cannot. Yeah, So they even kind of
trump that up right, which means that a lot of
the stuff that, like Red Riding cap Um, is a
rip off of Charles Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood or
(15:12):
an adaptation whatever you want to call it. But again,
this is in the midst of this German romanticism, where
German culture was trying to be promoted and um uh,
celebrated and preserved. Um. So all of this stuff was
very much painted as German, even though not necessarily any
of it was German. In origin, but it was far
(15:34):
more ancient than even the French that they were lifting
it from. That's right. Um, all right, here, let's take
a little break and let's come back and let's talk
a little bit more about these grand brothers and we're
(16:07):
back and Chuck. Before we get back to it, I
want to shout out to guest producer Noel, who is
responsible for the fairy tale themed jingle that this episode
in the first one too. Yeah, we asked and he
was like, too easy, I'll do with my eyes closed
while I'm asleep. He did with an alligator chasing me.
That's right, So thanks Noel. It's awesome. All right. These
(16:28):
are grand brothers. Uh. They were. They were tight. They
were really really close with each other. They were they
worked really close with each other. They were buddies from
what I can tell. Uh, And apparently for most of
their career they worked at desks facing each other. That
classic writing partner than we are now, Yes, even though
it's one desk, right and we only sit here to record. Yeah,
(16:51):
I guess there is some similarity here there. Sure we're
making magic and they were too. I think that's the similarity, right, Sure,
yakop was it was a difficult introvert in Willehelm was
pretty laid back. Wilhelm would eventually get married because he
was more outgoing and had four kids, whereas Yakop stayed
a bachelor his whole life. Um, and they were tight.
(17:15):
They worked as librarians together for a lot of their career. Uh.
And like you said, they were uh philologists. It is
um like they worked on most things, I think eight
things together. Yakop wrote twenty one books on his own,
bill Holm fourteen. And they were I mean, one of
them wrote a book on grammar. One of them wrote
like a history book. They were smart dude. They were
(17:36):
smart dudes. Um. But their their life's work, aside from
the fairy tales, ended up being they seemed to be
sort of obsessed with making a German dictionary complete, like
writing a dictionary. Yeah, they've made it to f I
believe before they died. Yeah, and then some some other
people came along and said we're going to carry on
(17:56):
this work and finish and it was completed. But it
was a massive project. Yeah, I mean, like for decades
they worked up just to get through f right and
I think, um who died first, I believe Wilhelm, the
younger one, died first and Jacob carried the dictionary on
for four more years even after his death. But um
(18:16):
Yacob said, Okay, I'm done with the fairy Tales. I'm
gonna move on to other stuff. And Wilhelm actually edited
that thing for forty five years. It went through seven
editions of the Fairytale Thing, Yes, the Nursery and Household Tales,
the Grim fairy Tales, Scary it went, I'm sorry, I switched.
Um it went from uh, it went from yeah, I
(18:37):
guess eighteen twelve to yeah. Eighteen fifty seven was when
he released the last edition, and they were very different
books by the time the first edition in the last
edition came out, and even between the first and second editions,
they were tremendously different books. Because Um, the Grimm brothers
decided that their book wasn't selling like they thought it
(18:58):
would e G. Hot k Yeah, if you listen to
the previous episode, it was originally much darker and aimed
at adults and was poorly reviewed and didn't sell well. Right,
and for grammarians listening by e G. I'm an example
not that is I would have said I E had
I meant that. But um, they they decided that if
they could just kind of alter their book just a
(19:19):
tiny bit, it would sell a lot better. So they
went through and took out all the sex, basically. Yeah,
and tradition of modern Americans take out the sex, pump
up the violence, right, But these are like early nineteenth
century Germans doing this, and I guess it's that that
same thing. Um, And here, Chuck, I have a question,
(19:44):
and it's a rhetorical question, but so you know how
nursery rhymes are just fairy tales are just weird. They're
very weird. There's a lot of random things that just
seem really out of talking eggs that break and right,
but also like really horrific violence for children's story and
all that. Yeah, I think that this is the point
(20:04):
where that weirdness sets in because they went through and
they took the same tales and they altered them just
slightly for children. But it went from these are adults
or these are stories for adults meant to be told
from one adults to another, not for kids, to let's
adapt these for kids. And um, in that adaptation, that
(20:26):
weirdness set in that's still there today. Yeah, I think
that's when it happened. That wasn't even a rhetorical question.
That was just a statement, thank you you're putting it
out there. Had I ended an up speak, though, I
could have made the case that it was rhetorical. Uh So,
in this and then the very next edition out of
the seven, they went ahead and after the bad sales
(20:48):
and stuff, and like I said, they sanitized it and
geared it too kids, but they also dropped that stuff
from the intro. All the lies in the intro were like,
I guess, why why do we even do that? Yeah?
You know, of course, sorry everybody. That was just dumb
on our parts. It was Wilhelm yaco Is likes like
no yucom and it just goes back and forth for
(21:09):
like eight pages. Uh So, in the previous podcast we
mentioned Rupunzel. How that was, um, how Rapunzel. Basically the
lady in question got pregnant after having sex. Yeah, so
they would they would, uh, they would whitewash that kind
of stuff. They would sanitize the sexier parts. Right, They
(21:29):
just took out the fact that she got pregnant and
didn't mention what the prince and she were doing, right,
They just left it up to the parents to imagine
and the kids to just be dummies and not know
what they were talking about. Right, But like we said
to the violent stayed um and in some cases even
got worse, like when Um Hansel and Well, the violence
(21:49):
got worse, but they also did sanitize it a little bit,
just to make it a little more palatable, like in
Hansel and gretel Uh. In the previous show, we mentioned
that Um it was it was a stepmother, an evil stepmother,
which we'll we'll talk about later as a recurring motif
UM that took the children out in the woods to
abandon them, and the original version it was both a
(22:10):
real mother and a real father, And they were like,
all right, you know that's really bad, so let's at
least make it an evil stepmother that the dad tries
to battle and say no, don't do this, right, but
eventually gives into, gives into and the kids are still
taking out in the woods to die, but it's just
a little bit more like, Okay, well it's not the
real parents because that's just horrific. So the violence is
(22:32):
still there, but they've taken away a little bit of
the psychological terror by replacing the mother slightly with a stepmother. UM,
and yeah, I think that that's a I guess that
is something of a cleansing process as far as editing goes.
But the violence is still in there, and it seems
very weird, especially today when you look back at this
(22:53):
and think like they were reading this to kids. But
there's a very smart woman named A s byatt who's
children's off herself but also an expert on children's books,
and she wrote the introduction to a UM collection I
think actually the an addition of the Grimm's Fairy Tales
by Maria Tatar, who's a basically the foremost expert on
(23:17):
fairy tales working today. Yeah, that's Zip's not around anymore.
He's retired because that guy, He's still available for comment
for sure, but Tatar seems to be the She's taken
up the mantle from him and uh in this edition.
A s By writes in the introduction of it that, yes,
this violence seems weird, but if you step back and
(23:38):
think of it as uh seventeenth and eighteenth century Tom
and Jerry cartoons, it becomes way more understandable and at
the same time way more acceptable as well. Like, think
about all the horrible things that Jerry did to Tom,
and what you're looking at is the same exact stuff
(23:58):
in a fairy tale, So it's not quite as odd
as you would think. Yeah, And as far as the
historical motif or the motif of the evil step mom,
there's a historical realism there that um, someone else pointed
out that at the time, you know, women died in
childbirth a lot, and so oftentimes there was a widow
(24:19):
or a widower left with kids that they would bring
in a stepmother and resources could be scared. So you'll
see this recurring motif over and over, this evil stepmother
who basically is competing for both the affections and food
of their little children that they inherited that they don't like.
So that's why you see it pop up over and
(24:40):
over and over, because that's kind of what happens sometimes. Yeah,
And that's the sociohistorical interpretation of fairy tales, which is
um basically takes fairy tales largely on their face. I mean, like,
if you have a talking egg or something like that,
you're not going to be like well, obviously in the
twelfth century, eggs talked, but there were a lot of
there's a lot of context in background that um that
(25:02):
I think people imbue with a lot more fancifulness than
need be. For example, like the the presence of wicked
step mothers throughout or in the case of Hansel and
gretel um a child abandonment like if you look back
at the fourteenth century, during famines and plagues, I think
it was the Black Death in particularly just leveled Europe.
(25:23):
A lot of people abandoned their children because they just
couldn't feed them any longer. So this wasn't like so
outlandish that it only belongs in fairy tale, and it
might have been like a fairly approachable theme that people
talked about to kind of hash out the feelings of
collective societal guilt at the fact that child abandonment was rampant.
(25:45):
You know, it's I think the sociohistorical interpretation is probably
my favorite. Can we talked about the juniper tree real quick?
I love this one. So, like we said, in fairy tales,
there's there's incests, there's cannibalism, there's murder, there's torture, there's
buried alive. There are all kinds of things that happen
(26:06):
in the junifer tree. Maybe well, I don't know, maybe
the worst one of them all. So in this case,
we have an evil stepmother, of course, who hates her stepchild,
who was a boy. So she comes home and says, hey,
you want an apple, and the boy says, sure, let
me lean in there and get one, and she it's
a trunk, and she slams the trunk down and cuts
his head off. And that's just the beginning. So she's like,
(26:29):
all right, probably not a wise move. Let me put
the kid in a chair. Let me stick this head
back on his neck and wrap a scarf around it,
and just here, open his eyes here, and put a
little smile on his face. And then her real daughter
comes in, not a stepdaughter, her favorite, real daughter. And
it's like, he looks all weird. Why is he just
(26:51):
sitting there like adult? She says, I don't know, go
slap him and and bring him around a bit. Boxes
the ear, I think, is what she So she boxes
his ear. His head falls off. And by the way,
the little girl, which makes it even more horrific what
you're about to say, loved the little boy though it
was a stepbrother, even though in the mom's eyes they
were rivals. For these scarce resources. A little girl loves
(27:13):
a little boy, so go ahead. So she knocks his
head off, and the mom's like, you knocked your brother's
head off, But you know what, We're gonna just keep
this quiet between us and you won't get in any trouble.
Let's just cook him into a stew and feed him
to your father or step And the little girls like
beside herself with like guilt and shame and horror at
the fact that she or the thought that she killed
(27:36):
her beloved stepbrother, but she goes along with it because
this is what her mom is saying. And the father
comes home and he eats the stew and actually it's
black pudding. Yeah, I'm not sure what that is. But um,
the father eats it and he's like this is all
for men, a little misogyny and greed on the end,
because he's like, no one else in this family is
(27:57):
going to eat this, yeah but me. It's pretty nuts.
And in the end, the little the little girl takes
the boy's bones and buries him by the juniper tree,
and he's reborn as a bird and ends up killing
the wicked stepmother um, and then comes back to life
as the boy so it all works out in the
end for the boy. But it's pretty nuts as far
as like these stories go, Like that has it all?
(28:20):
Do you want to talk about how children played butcher
with each other? Yes, this one's very short, and we
should point out many of these are very short, like
Little Red Riding Hood was only four pages long. I
think Rapunzel was only two or three. But that also,
in and of itself, was the work of the Grim brothers.
They would embellish this stuff tremendously and often double it
(28:42):
and double it from a few paragraphs to a couple
of pages. So still short. And by the way, if
you want to read a really neat analysis of the
juniper tree, read Ernest Parkins analysis on word words and edgeways. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty cool. He finds at out of neat symbolism
in it. All right, here's how children played butcher with
(29:04):
each other. It's a great title. A man once slaughtered
a pig while his children were looking on. When they
started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other,
you beat the little pig, and I'll be the butcher.
Whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into
his brother's neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a
room bathing the youngest child in a tub, heard the
cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs, and when
(29:24):
she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of
the child's neck and in a rage, thrust it into
the heart of the child who had been the butcher.
Then she rushed back to the house to see what
her other child was doing in the tub, but in
the meantime it had drowned in the bath. The woman
was so horrified that she fell into a state of
utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and
hanged herself. When her husband returned home from the fields
(29:45):
and saw this, he was so distraught that he died
shortly thereafter the end. That's like the episode of Dragnet
where they have a pop party and the parents forget
their child is in the bath and it drowned. Was
that on Dragnet? Wow? So you know, of course I'm laughing,
because I mean, you can't take that seriously, right if
you watch Dragnet you can well no, I mean that
(30:06):
story it's just so over the top and weird and
violent and dark and stuff just happens like again, there's
almost no psychology to these things. People just do stuff
well supposedly. Uh. I think Wilhelm Grim said specifically about
that one, like No, the clear lesson here is it's like,
don't play with knives and things, which is and that's
(30:28):
a good point, and I don't know if we've even
said that, Like the the predominant theory for why these
things even exist is um, as far as being taught
to children goes, they are lessons their tails and how
to grow up, how to avoid strangers, stay away from knives,
stay away from I guess, which is like don't eat
(30:49):
houses made of gingerbread, just good life lessons that kind
of stuff. They're sexual predators out there, yeah, which we'll
talk about, but let's take another break. You're ready for it, yes, okay,
(31:20):
So Chuck you um, you said that there are sexual
predators out there and they're little red riding hood in particular,
Like if you read it, especially if you read the
Grim version and not the Charles Barrault version, it's um
like everything comes out great in the end, she saved. Um,
you can read between the lines a little bit and
(31:40):
that's the key. Though, Like these these fairy tales even
after they became sanitized through seven editions, even after they
became disneyfied um, there's still this underlying thread, the theme,
the central theme, the message look out for sexual predators,
don't cut your brother's head off with a knife like that.
They can't be expunge and the story still remain the same.
(32:02):
It's it's so woven into the fabric of them, and
I think that's one of the things that makes them interesting.
But alternately, something else I ran across, and I think
that a s buy it Um article was the idea
that they don't have any designs on you. They're not
trying to teach you a lesson necessarily in and of themselves.
(32:23):
They just are what they are. Maybe the person telling
you that fairy tale wants you to learn that lesson.
The fairy tale in and of itself couldn't care less
whether you you learned that lesson or not. It's just
here's a snapshot of what happened in twelve seventeen to
this little boy who played with knives with his brother.
Will learn it or don't, we don't care. Yeah, but
(32:43):
that's uh. What was Zip's first name? Jack? Jack? Zip's
he was may still be here he said, he's retired now, Yeah,
he's He worked at the University of Minnesota. Is a
comparative literature professor and German professor go Golden Gophers. Yeah,
uh uh. And he for many many years was the
pre eminent fairy tale dude. He was where you would go.
(33:06):
He turns up all over the place in his research.
But he said, though, um that there usually is like
a come upance, Like he says, whoever is a tyrant
at which an evil brother or mother who wants her
own daughter dead, they will always be punished. There will
always be justice. And usually the characters that are of
humble origins go on to have like great success, like
(33:28):
the you know, the uh, poor maiden marries the prince
in the end in most cases it's true, but not always.
Or the king who wants to have an incestuous relationship
with his daughter ends up getting killed or something like that. Yeah.
In that case, I believe what was his wife was
dying and he said, I will only remarry if I
(33:49):
can find someone as beautiful as you, and turns out
that's my daughter. What was that one called, like many
or something like it was called the creep King. Yeah,
but that's a recurring theme. Actually it's a very ancient one.
It falls under the Cinderella story um which apparently so
there's a I don't know if we mentioned it or not,
but there's a folklore cataloging device like cataloging convention. And
(34:14):
I think Cinderella stories, which is the persecuted heroin is
uh number five ten A yeah, for real, it's the
Arne Thompson Uther classification five ten A persecuted heroin Cinderella
stories the Uther pen dragon, and that's another. Cinderella is
another one, like there was one woman in particular who
(34:36):
collected three eighty five different versions of the Cinderella story
from around the world, and I think they've identified as
many as fifteen. So Cinderella is another very very ancient
one as well. And the one that you recounted about
the king you wants to Mary's daughter, that particular one
from Greece. Yeah, I think that was called all Kinds
of Fur. It's all hyphenated, like that's her name or something.
(34:56):
I think it's um. So we're talking talk about like
sanitizing it and um Joan a Casella comes to the
Grimm's defense like saying you can't really fault these guys
for for changing this stuff, because again, it doesn't really
belong to anybody. They belong to the ages, and the
Grimms just put their stamp on it. Um. And then also,
(35:17):
you know, uh, if you if you just take an
oral tradition and faithfully write it down, it's going to
be virtually unreadable. So they definitely stylized that. They added
some more pros, and they made it a lot more memorable,
and it became a beloved book. It's a Unesco book
Memory of the World, I think collection, so like it's
(35:39):
a it's a very well beloved book. But some people say,
you know, if why should the Grimms be the only
ones to be able to change fairy tales? Why why
does it have to end with them? Maybe it's time
to rewrite them some Well, isn't that what uh tartar
zips that's his position. No, no no, no, but I thought
(35:59):
the one in who uh name? What isn't that what
she's done? Didn't she release a new version? In two
thousand five, she released an annotated version, but she didn't
rewrite them. What SIPs is saying is like, here's the
basic story, go rewrite it as your own and um,
there's been some feminist collections that that are rewritten stories. Yeah,
(36:19):
like why is every girl defenseless and needs a man
to rescue her from poverty or danger? Right, And that's
a feminist interpretation of a lot of um, the fairy tales,
some people say, if you look a little further, like, yes,
all the ones that Disney picked and all the most
popular ones are very much patriarch patriarchally slanted to where
(36:40):
it is a damvel in distress as a prince that
has to come help her and she's helpless until he
comes along and then whatever. Um, But if you look
a little further, there are some very there are other
ones where they're resourceful heroines. And think of Hansel and Gretel.
Gretel tricks the witch and kills her all by herself
without the help of Hansel, who's being fattened up by himself. Right, Yeah,
(37:04):
And I'm sure Disney, Walt Disney himself was just like, man,
they love this stuff, like of course I'm gonna they're
eating it up. Yeah, but there, but there. You can
also look at Hollywood two is a means of taking
these classic fairy tales and rewriting the Grim versions like, Um,
there's a huge I don't want to call it a movement,
but there's there's like a trend, I guess, trend to
(37:27):
to taking these things that were disneyfied versions of the
stories and restoring them back even even to their pre
grim darker roots, just making them dark again roots there
grimmar pre grim roots. Yeah. Um, have you ever seen
Freeway with Reese Witherspoon? Oh? Yeah, that was a little
red writing a little red riding hood. And if you're
(37:48):
a feminist, I guarantee you appreciate that version a little
Red riding Hood because she takes no guff and comes
out on top and at no points for yeah, and
Brooks shields as his wife, and she like it's crazy.
It's a neat, neat movie. But that's a good example
of a rewriting of a classic fairy tale. Like, no,
it doesn't have to end with the Grims totally. Uh.
(38:10):
In The Company of Wolves, wasn't that a that was
a rewrite of or redo of a little writing her
two a little more of a horror though, right? I
think so? I didn't see it. I didn't either. I
think that was Neil Jordan's right, crying game, Yeah, like
one of his early movies. So um, we have to
talk a little bit about the Nazis here, because the
(38:31):
Nazis were big on co opting things for their own purposes. Uh.
And one of the things that co opted were Grim's
fairy tales. And since World War Two there's been a
big I don't know about big again, maybe it was
such a trend, but there were folks who said that,
you know, when you look at these, they're talking about
German nationalism and discipline and violence and obedient and order
(38:54):
and obedience. And I think the grand brothers were like, yeah,
it's totally nationalism. We were all about Germany. But but
we died like decades before Hitler was even born. Yeah, Like,
I don't think they would have appreciated that it was
co opted by the Nazis, and Hitler saying like, put
these in schools, this is awesome, Like read this stuff,
put them in boy scout rooms everywhere, that's funny. So um,
(39:17):
the Allies came in and occupied Germany and one of
the things they said was like, you guys can't teach
this Grim book anymore. And bandit and a lot of
towns around Germany became very political because it was very
much associated with the Third Reich. And one of the
reasons why is because the Third Reich said, go teach
this to young German kids, to make sure that they
know they're German and that they will triumph over the
(39:38):
Allied Wolf because they're all little red riding hood that's right,
little Nazi kids, that's right. So um, again, people make
the case like, you can't really hang that on the
Grim brothers. They didn't foresee Nazism and this this German
nationalism in and of itself isn't necessarily inherently evil, and
if you put it in the context of German romanticism,
(40:00):
most countries in Europe were undergoing nationalist fever, you know.
So um. There was some anti semitism though, and some
of the tales, yeah, and that can't be gotten around either. Yeah.
One was called The Jew and the Brambles, where the
protagonists torments a Jewish person by dancing, making him dance
on the thicket of thorns, uh, calls him a dirty dog.
(40:22):
And then there's I mean, there's various I think said
three basically of the two hundred tales had Jewish characters,
and they were never like favorable. Yeah, the other two
um referenced the Jewish stereotype of being stingy with money
or something like that. Yeah, the good bargain. And a
lot of people are like, well, let's just expunge those
two um, and some people have from their collections. I
(40:45):
think that's the other thing too, is you can if
the Grim's kind of set a precedent for you can
take these tales and cleanse them if you want, or
do whatever you want to them, like there they belong
to the ages. Well, and that's then comes in the
people who posit whether or not it's that's good for
Should we sanitize that? Should we not? Uh? W h Alden,
(41:07):
I love this. He described the people who sanitize him
as the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of
Positive Parents, positivist parents, the League for the Promotion of
Worthwhile Leisure, or the cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives. Man.
That is so w ah Todden. He couldn't just leave
it at one description. H So he clearly wasn't in
(41:30):
favor of it. Some people think, uh it's good for us.
Um A man name uh Bruno Bettelheim in a name
Bruno Bedelheim. Yeah, totally is it sounds like a bond
villain or something. A book called The Uses of Enchantment,
and he was very Freudian in nature that he basically
(41:51):
says that we all, all these kids have these unconscious
desires and these books help, uh what like these repressed
desires come out, help them deal with them. Yeah. Well
it helps children, yeah, deal with their repressed desires. Like
the example of the UM. So we talked about the
sociohistorical interpretation of the presence of wicked stepmothers. Right, there
(42:12):
are lots of stepmothers and they were competing for resources
bet Ohaim and the Freudians say, well, no, the stepmothers
are there because UM children love their mother, but they
also hate their mother, and this gives them a way
to work through the complex. Yeah, that complex um combination
of emotions where they can hate the wicked stepmother, but
(42:32):
they can also love the biological mother who's absent or
appears early on and then dies, but who is always
very loving and kind. Right, so they can work that out.
That's a great example of it. Yeah, and then you
have Zips, who Jack Zip says, you know what it
really is is, uh, children see the fairy tale as
like a counterworld of reflection of their own world, and
(42:55):
it allows them to, you know, consider what's going on
in that world and then take steps in their own
world to reform it and not do those things right.
And specifically it teaches children to identify tyrants and people
who are power mad, and people who hoard money or
harm other people, because those people almost invariably come to
(43:16):
a terrible end in those things. And then fairy tales, right,
So you've got all these different interpretations Freudian Carl Young
got into it um, sociohistorical feminist interpretation, Jack Zipe's own
personal leftist interpretation, right um, and all of them, although
they compete here there none of them are wrong and
(43:38):
none of them are right. And then again, it's the
beauty of fairy tales. It's like a blank white piece
of ply would that we project our own thoughts and
fears and hopes and ideas onto culture by culture, age
by age. And Tatar and her collection did a pretty
smart thing. I think she actually collected some of the
more disturbing one in the back of the book under
(44:02):
the title Tales for Adults. Basically read these first on
your own. See if you want to read them to
your kid, don't frontload it with the juniper tree. Right.
And actually, Joan Accella says that you should take an
exact and if and just cut the juniper tree out
of your said that. I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah,
(44:22):
I mean, I don't know if your kids got a
strong fortitude. It's up to the parents. But it wasn't
always up to the parents. There was a big movement
in the mid twentieth century for um realism among children's books. Yeah,
and and the Grimms were first on the chopping block there. Instead,
it was replaced by like Judy Goes to the Firehouses.
Zachcella says, I totally like think about it. It's like
(44:44):
a total fifties children's book, like see Dick and Jane Run.
You know. Um and it was I guess Maurice Syndec
with Where the Wild Things Are? Who? Who said I
we were not doing that anymore. He brought the cool
back to children's books. He definitely did. Yeah, I have it,
read many children's books lately, But I think there's a
lot of you read Daddy Sat on a duck, right, Yeah,
(45:07):
I did read that. Lots of far jokes in that one. Yeah,
that was written by one of our listeners. Um, highly
recommended it is. It's very good. But I think these
days there's a mix of things going on, realism, fanciful
stuff stories and now uh well this is more of
a young adult novel. But Colum Alloy of the December
sort of three part children's novels, like big, big books
(45:30):
about this fantastical world in Oregon, this forest in Oregon
where I can't I bought them all. I can't wait
to read him. It's cool man, Yeah, I think he's
he's that's more the tradition of the like lion which
in the wardrobe And you said that, I wanted to say,
Avon is not the name Narnia Narnia. Um, yeah, I
(45:50):
have no idea where children's books are these days either.
I wonder though, what what it reflects about society at large,
whatever phase children's books are, whether it's realism or fancifulness,
you know, yeah, like are we like when you're in
an economic downturn? Is realism or fantasy the one that
steps in? Yeah, I would guess fantasy because people want
(46:11):
to escapism. Then I was way into that stuff. I
wasn't into like Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and
stuff like that. But I love Maurice Sendak really and
stuff that was really kind of out there. I love
Dr Seuss. I found out that it's um not every
boy read Ramona Quimpy books. I thought it was Nix
apparently not. Yeah. I read uh some Judy Bloom Yeah,
(46:35):
of course. Um and I did read the first couple
of the The Chronic What Cools of Narnia? Did you
ever see that skit? No, it's one of the setting
live shorts they were doing, Chris Parnell and Sandberg. We're
doing a rap the Chronic What Cools of Narnia. I
didn't see that. It's like a very weird, misplaced What
(46:57):
did you see Mr Shows coming back on Netflix? Yeah?
Well close as we're gonna get the Mr Show. I
don't think they can call it Mr Show. No, they're
calling it uh with like w slash Bob and David.
I can't wait. Man. I saw a couple of clips
and it looks like, Yeah, it looks like it's going
to be as good as it ever was. I'm pretty
Before we leave you, since we're talking about fairy tales,
(47:18):
we thought would be appropriate to mention that two of
our horror fiction contest submitters are published once published again.
J McMurray published The Dreamings of Leonard J. M. Leaper
and you can check that out at take publishing dot
com not Leper, no Leaper. And then also you can
find Patrick Scott. He wrote play I Believe, which was
(47:40):
in Meat for Tea magazine and you can find uh
information about that at meat for t dot com. Uh.
Since I said meat for Tea, it's time for listener, man,
I don't I wish it was time for us to
meet for tea No M E A T. Yeah, okay kidding,
I'm gonna call this uh a little bit more on
(48:04):
vocal Fry. We've got a lot of response from this one.
I think it's second in controversy only homelessness. Yeah. A
lot of a lot of ladies wrote in women that
were very appreciative. A lot of men wrote in, um
who were not appreciative. Many were too, Yeah, many were,
But a lot of dudes wrote in. I think they're
part of the men's movement. You know. It was divided
(48:25):
like you would expect, but there were men who wrote
in to support us. There are women who who wrote
into to criticize vocal Fry. They agreed with Naomi Wolf. Yeah,
And I just want to clear up, I don't mean
all old white men are awful. I don't I you
don't even need to say that. If you're not one
of the ones that are doing these things, then great,
who cares? Yeah, I know you don't need to defend
(48:47):
the ones who are all right, here we go. Hey, guys,
just want to say thanks so much for your recently
for recently tackling some very charged gender issues in the
most mature but not apologist of ways. I like how
this emails on, whether it be female puberty, vocal Fry,
or your excellent double duo with the stuff you misson
History Class Crew and listener mail. You nailed what I
(49:08):
consider to be the best way to handle the ubiquitous
double standards that women find themselves held to state that
it is unequivpably wrong, then calmly and rationally pick apart
why you were not trying to start a gender war,
though I'm sure there are those out there who will
take it as such. Uh see the beginning of this email. Um,
but you meticulously undercut the meticulously undercut the arguments and
(49:30):
unconscious justifications that allow these attitudes to endure underneath all
the truths by consensus and familial and cultural norms. Very
little remains to give weight to these perspectives, and I
believe that both genders are, albeit slowly shedding them, thanks
to the efforts of you and many others on this path.
Very well said right now, this is the road to equality, dudes.
(49:53):
I throw that in there, and I cannot say how
much I appreciate your proper championing of it. We are
all persons, no matter our gender, and should you respected
as such, free as much as possible of worthless generalizations. Also,
as a side note, I was once upon a time
a linguist and very much agree with your handling of
socio linguistics A linguists. Sorry, Chuck, is that because I
(50:14):
said like linguists, linguisticator or something. A linguists most fundamental
tenant is that no use of language to communicate is wrong,
and thus linguistic evolution should be no more surprising than
that of pop music or fashion. Yeah, the prescriptivists are
just screaming at their ipous ideas and perspectives change and language,
(50:36):
by its nature will rise to meet it. Cheers. That
is from David, a long time Stuff you Should Know FAM.
Thanks a lot, David. That was a very kind email,
Very well said UM representative. I would say about half
of the emails that we got about vocal Fride the
other half. If you want to get in touch with us,
you can tweak to us at s y s K podcast.
(50:57):
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has
always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Nol. He's back. He's
actually sitting in for this one. And that makes this
stuff you should know. Yeah, we left a trail of
(00:22):
breadcrumbs or pebbles, depending on what part of the episode.
That's right, we're talking about that's that's my favorite one.
Now that in the Juniper Tree or my favorite and
the juniper tree. Yeah, and we should say this is
a two parter um. You should have already previously listened
to one. We probably should have put this one out
(00:44):
first and then done the other one. Hey, but whatever,
what evs we we just think this is a nice
I really enjoyed these two. Actually, I think if you
can make the case that we did it in the
right or because now people have thought about fairy tales
and have jailed and bathed in them for like the
last day or so, and now they're ready to understand
what's been haunting them. But where did they come from? Right?
(01:06):
What's the deal? And we're going to tell you what's
the deal? This is I really did enjoy these O.
This kind of reignited my kind of brought up a
lot of stuff. Oh yeah, did you find yourself weeping?
Not weeping, just kind of like remembering childhood? And I
don't know, I enjoyed it. I guess I didn't read
that many fairy tales. It reminded me that fairy tales
(01:26):
are No, they're not awful, they're just very um dark, Yes,
but I appreciate that part. I think it's more just
the have you ever have you ever seen a picture
of a human being without a face. Uh yeah, I
think that's kind of how I think of fairy tales.
(01:49):
They're they're blank, they're anonymous, they're um flat. I think
it's that I've actually run into that term a lot
in researching for this episode. There's certainly not a lot
of character development and oh and that's part of like
their charm, their lure. But it's also like, you know,
that's the memory I formed of them is like, um,
I'm used to characters or psychologist is lacking as well,
(02:10):
like people do stuff for almost no apparent reason whatsoever,
and a lot of it's horrible stuff. Um. And that's
actually kind of set the stage for fairy tales to
be told and retold and retold and interpreted and analyzed.
And um, I think that's what makes them so enduring
is that they are there's there's there're so minimalists that
(02:33):
they just survive because humans will change an update and
we'll go from wearing bell bottoms and macromay vest to
wearing like silver jump suits, which are in right now. Um,
But ultimately we're still like very similar to what we were,
you know, sixty years ago. And I think fairy tales
(02:53):
um reflect that well said. And also I can say
that because from what I understand, despite the fact that
there is serious study of fairy tales, no one really
has any definitive say over what they are. Like trying
to define what a fairy tale is, chuck, Um, It's
(03:13):
a story usually encompassing like a moral or ethical uh, lesson,
but fantastical elements. Sure, okay, uh that often had dark
undertones or overtones. That's actually a pretty great definition, but
it does raise some questions. It's like, what is the
difference between a fairy tale and a fable, or a
(03:35):
fairy tale and a nursery rhyme? You know, what's the
what is it specifically about fairy tales, and I think
it's all I think they're all very similar and it's
all part of folklore. So if you listened, I think
in February this year, we did one on folklore, so
it ties in heavily with that. Um. And also we
didn't I don't know why we just defined fairy tale
(03:56):
because we never defined what vocal fry was. Apparently I
feel like we did. Yeah, we got some complaints like
you never said what it was, but we demonstrated it
over and over. Yeah, and we said it's like a flat,
creaky way of speaking. Yeah. I don't know. I feel
like we got the point across. Um. Okay, So fairy
(04:17):
tales specifically, when you think of fairy tales, you you
might think of Disney, but if you give it a
little more thought, you're probably going to come up with, um,
the Brothers Krim, Yeah, Matt Damon and um Heath ledger
R yeah for real, uh yeah, Jacob and Wilhelm Graham
uh and of course there Well, let's just go ahead
(04:40):
and say there's a couple of types of fairy tales.
There's the there's the oral tale. Yeah, the oral tale,
which is and and the grand Brothers kind of exists
between the two worlds. But one is the oral world,
which we talked about in folklore, the age old tradition
of passing stories down um via mouth parts, over and
(05:01):
over and over, changing them, adding some spice, just like
telling a joke or a ghost story or something like that,
right exactly, um. And fairy tales specifically, as far as
they went with oral tales are typically associated with women
and typically associated with women, um, undertaking domestic chores. That
that's typically where they were passed down. Um. And so
(05:23):
you've got the oral tale and well, which makes sense.
Though when I read this, I was like, why are
there so many fairy tales to have women at the
loom or spinning stuff, because apparently that's where they were told.
It makes sense. Yeah, it's like, hey, I'm I'm bored
out of my mind here spending the straw into gold.
Let me eat some peyote and make up a story
(05:43):
and you sit there and listen. Um. There's also the
literary fairy tale, which appears to be there's a handful
of people like Charles Perrault or challer Piero right um.
And then there's also Hans Christian Anderson very famously, and
these people are are reputed as having created, you know,
(06:04):
many fairy tales, and those are called literary fairy like
they were original authors and made these upright. That's apparently
a total like misattribution. Like for example, Little Red riding Hood, right,
is a great example that's typically attributed to Charles Parrault
in the I think the seventeenth or sixteenth century. Charles
(06:28):
Charles Parralt his ancestor um and Charles Pearl. He was
very famous, as famous as Hans Christian Anderson was um
for for writing down fairy tales and the collections and
just being delightful, right, and he was great and at
the end of every one of his there was a
moral to the story. Um. But the people tend to
(06:49):
think that either if he didn't come up with it,
it was originated right before then. But we found an article,
um that was from it covered a two thousand nine
study carried out cultural anthropologists who basically went to some
biologists and said, hey, do you guys know how you
trace um species and create the tree of life the
(07:09):
taxonomy of biology? Can you do that with Little Red
Riding Hood? And they said, man, you are one crazy
lady or one whacked out hepcat actually may have been
a man, doctor Jamie Trani. It was a man and
still is probably. I mean it's only been six years.
You never know. Um. So Dr Tarrani went to some
(07:29):
biologists and figured out how to apply the same methods
to this story Little Red Riding Hood, and he found
that not only was it not just like a few
years older than Pearl's version, it was as as as
much as years old. Basically, yeah, they found variations in
China and Iran and the Middle East. Um, they found
(07:51):
some unit for the asp stables another person, they said,
they found some of those from sixth century BC. So
basically what they're saying is maybe nobody made these up. Well,
someone at some point did, at least as far as
Little Red Riding Hood goes. That there's some common ancestor
that predates years before the present, and um it was.
(08:14):
It's a very widespread tale. Um. Not only did Dr
Tehranni um trace the lineage back to six BC, UM
he found that you could take these tales all around
the world and lump them into groups, just a few,
a handful of groups, and that UM places as desparate
(08:34):
as Iran and Nigeria and Europe all were in the
same group, whereas like Japan and Burma and China were
in their own group. But they all kind of bear
this resemblance where there is a lion or tiger or
a wolf who was posing as something else in order
to get the drop on someone else. Yeah, and it's
(08:57):
sometimes usually a little girl, but I think in Iran
it was a boy. So details change again simple folklore,
I think, but the structure, the skeleton of the story
is still very much the same, traceable back years. So
that that kind of answers the question that I don't
know if we raised or not yet who owns or who? Who?
(09:18):
Who came up with fairy tales? But humans did. That's
the best answer you could possibly come up with. These
humans came up with it and over the over the years,
like you said, people in bellyship, people add people subtract um,
and the Grimm brothers did exactly that same thing. All right,
let's let's talk a little bit about these these grim bros.
Um Jacob and Wilhelm did already say that they were
(09:41):
born in Yakub in Part one, which I appreciated yea
and wille Helm Jacob or Yakub was born in seventy five,
home just a year later, and they were they were
kind of rich kids. Their dad was a lawyer and
they had some money. Uh. Their original house if you
look at it, it's funny. It looks like I mean,
(10:01):
it's a total Bavarian like gingerbread house. And Um, they
grew up in Germany and when they were ten years old,
their dad died of pneumonia. Uh, and all of a
sudden they didn't have the kind of dough that they
were used to having. They did was not good and
in a little scary. I don't get the sense that
they were like dirt poor or anything, because they still
had some relatives that had some cash well. Plus also,
(10:23):
I mean they made it all the way through law
school in honor of their father, So I mean that
wasn't free even back then. Yeah. There, I think their
aunt paid for school. Uh. They graduated each graduate at
the top of their class, and I guess what would
be considered high school. And then their auntie paid for
law school. And it wasn't long after law school that
(10:44):
they got into the UM. It was about to say
writing that they did right. But the editors for sure,
collecting and editing and writing business. They were what's called philologists.
Curating is the word I met um. And they were
also they consider of themselves and were considered linguists as well.
And by the way, they were Hessians, which means that
(11:04):
they were um from the same place as the headless
horseman from a sleepy hollow legend. He was a Hessian mercenary.
That yeah, Um. So anyway, they they came. They graduated
from law school during this period called German romanticism um,
which was basically this idea that before years before, in
(11:26):
the in the midsts of history, the Germanic people were
very interesting. They had a very good grasp on things,
and a lot of this was passed down through oral
folk folklore and um. That this stuff was disappearing thanks
to industrialization. So you get the idea that there's a
little bit of nervousness at least among the intellectual um
(11:50):
people of Germany at the time, that this cultural history
was drying up very quickly, and there was a movement
to collect this oral knowledge before it disappeared. And that's
what um, that's what the Grimm brothers were doing when
they set about collecting these stories, although they weren't very
honest about it at least at first. Yeah, it was, um,
(12:11):
we know them now is as just simply the grim
Brothers fairy tales. But the original collection was called um
Nursery and Household Tales or die kenda went house minchen
and german Man. You're German? Is it's coming back? And
there are eighty six stories originally in the collection. And
(12:33):
by the way, big shout to the article from the
New Yorker Once Upon a Time A Lord of the
fairy Tale by Joan uh at Casella. Yes, very nice.
I think that's it. Yeah, she wrote a great article. Um,
and that's the largely the basis of our podcast. By
the way, that's right, so thanks for that. But um,
eighty six original stories. And like you said, originally they
(12:56):
in the in the forward, in the introduction they were like,
this is a this is all German all the time,
basically word for word. We went around to the peasantry
and collected this um these marks was it marching or marking?
Uh for what the tales German for tales the marching
or marken house myrchin merchant. So they went around to
(13:21):
the Vulk the peasantry and collected the merchant from them. Yeah,
it didn't change a word specifically. They said they had
a primary source, a woman named Dorothea VMan, and she
was a peasant and a village near them. Um. But
it turns out and that all of this again was folklore,
(13:41):
which I can't fault them too much because that was
their business. No, but they jumped it up to be
a little more folks tho than it was. Well, they
both basically lied in there in the introduction in their
first um, the first edition, which was published in two
volumes in eighteen twelve and eighteen fifteen. Right, and so
this nursery and household tales became known as rooms fairy tales.
And at first it was definitely um a much more
(14:06):
of an intellectual pursuit. There are lots of footnotes. They
tried to make it seem like they were just collecting
and preserving this German folk knowledge and all that. But
it turns out that they they did have that primary
source and that woman, but she was pretty far from
a peasant. Apparently she was the wife of a tailor,
which was part of the merchant class, not the peasant class,
and she was just one source. They relied on friends
(14:28):
and family and relatives and other collections of fairy folk
folk tales and fairy tales that they just lifted. Um.
And we're not suggesting there were thieves. This was a
common thing to do. It was. But again they bald
faced ly lied in there in the in the introduction
in preface, which is funny, but it's um. Yeah, they were.
They were they were trying to adopt an aura for
(14:49):
their project that they wanted it to have that it
didn't necessarily have. Well, yeah, and I don't think we
mentioned the source wasn't even a German descent. She was
a French. You cannot. Yeah, So they even kind of
trump that up right, which means that a lot of
the stuff that, like Red Riding cap Um, is a
rip off of Charles Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood or
(15:12):
an adaptation whatever you want to call it. But again,
this is in the midst of this German romanticism, where
German culture was trying to be promoted and um uh,
celebrated and preserved. Um. So all of this stuff was
very much painted as German, even though not necessarily any
of it was German. In origin, but it was far
(15:34):
more ancient than even the French that they were lifting
it from. That's right. Um, all right, here, let's take
a little break and let's come back and let's talk
a little bit more about these grand brothers and we're
(16:07):
back and Chuck. Before we get back to it, I
want to shout out to guest producer Noel, who is
responsible for the fairy tale themed jingle that this episode
in the first one too. Yeah, we asked and he
was like, too easy, I'll do with my eyes closed
while I'm asleep. He did with an alligator chasing me.
That's right, So thanks Noel. It's awesome. All right. These
(16:28):
are grand brothers. Uh. They were. They were tight. They
were really really close with each other. They were they
worked really close with each other. They were buddies from
what I can tell. Uh, And apparently for most of
their career they worked at desks facing each other. That
classic writing partner than we are now, Yes, even though
it's one desk, right and we only sit here to record. Yeah,
(16:51):
I guess there is some similarity here there. Sure we're
making magic and they were too. I think that's the similarity, right, Sure,
yakop was it was a difficult introvert in Willehelm was
pretty laid back. Wilhelm would eventually get married because he
was more outgoing and had four kids, whereas Yakop stayed
a bachelor his whole life. Um, and they were tight.
(17:15):
They worked as librarians together for a lot of their career. Uh.
And like you said, they were uh philologists. It is
um like they worked on most things, I think eight
things together. Yakop wrote twenty one books on his own,
bill Holm fourteen. And they were I mean, one of
them wrote a book on grammar. One of them wrote
like a history book. They were smart dude. They were
(17:36):
smart dudes. Um. But their their life's work, aside from
the fairy tales, ended up being they seemed to be
sort of obsessed with making a German dictionary complete, like
writing a dictionary. Yeah, they've made it to f I
believe before they died. Yeah, and then some some other
people came along and said we're going to carry on
(17:56):
this work and finish and it was completed. But it
was a massive project. Yeah, I mean, like for decades
they worked up just to get through f right and
I think, um who died first, I believe Wilhelm, the
younger one, died first and Jacob carried the dictionary on
for four more years even after his death. But um
(18:16):
Yacob said, Okay, I'm done with the fairy Tales. I'm
gonna move on to other stuff. And Wilhelm actually edited
that thing for forty five years. It went through seven
editions of the Fairytale Thing, Yes, the Nursery and Household Tales,
the Grim fairy Tales, Scary it went, I'm sorry, I switched.
Um it went from uh, it went from yeah, I
(18:37):
guess eighteen twelve to yeah. Eighteen fifty seven was when
he released the last edition, and they were very different
books by the time the first edition in the last
edition came out, and even between the first and second editions,
they were tremendously different books. Because Um, the Grimm brothers
decided that their book wasn't selling like they thought it
(18:58):
would e G. Hot k Yeah, if you listen to
the previous episode, it was originally much darker and aimed
at adults and was poorly reviewed and didn't sell well. Right,
and for grammarians listening by e G. I'm an example
not that is I would have said I E had
I meant that. But um, they they decided that if
they could just kind of alter their book just a
(19:19):
tiny bit, it would sell a lot better. So they
went through and took out all the sex, basically. Yeah,
and tradition of modern Americans take out the sex, pump
up the violence, right, But these are like early nineteenth
century Germans doing this, and I guess it's that that
same thing. Um, And here, Chuck, I have a question,
(19:44):
and it's a rhetorical question, but so you know how
nursery rhymes are just fairy tales are just weird. They're
very weird. There's a lot of random things that just
seem really out of talking eggs that break and right,
but also like really horrific violence for children's story and
all that. Yeah, I think that this is the point
(20:04):
where that weirdness sets in because they went through and
they took the same tales and they altered them just
slightly for children. But it went from these are adults
or these are stories for adults meant to be told
from one adults to another, not for kids, to let's
adapt these for kids. And um, in that adaptation, that
(20:26):
weirdness set in that's still there today. Yeah, I think
that's when it happened. That wasn't even a rhetorical question.
That was just a statement, thank you you're putting it
out there. Had I ended an up speak, though, I
could have made the case that it was rhetorical. Uh So,
in this and then the very next edition out of
the seven, they went ahead and after the bad sales
(20:48):
and stuff, and like I said, they sanitized it and
geared it too kids, but they also dropped that stuff
from the intro. All the lies in the intro were like,
I guess, why why do we even do that? Yeah?
You know, of course, sorry everybody. That was just dumb
on our parts. It was Wilhelm yaco Is likes like
no yucom and it just goes back and forth for
(21:09):
like eight pages. Uh So, in the previous podcast we
mentioned Rupunzel. How that was, um, how Rapunzel. Basically the
lady in question got pregnant after having sex. Yeah, so
they would they would, uh, they would whitewash that kind
of stuff. They would sanitize the sexier parts. Right, They
(21:29):
just took out the fact that she got pregnant and
didn't mention what the prince and she were doing, right,
They just left it up to the parents to imagine
and the kids to just be dummies and not know
what they were talking about. Right, But like we said
to the violent stayed um and in some cases even
got worse, like when Um Hansel and Well, the violence
(21:49):
got worse, but they also did sanitize it a little bit,
just to make it a little more palatable, like in
Hansel and gretel Uh. In the previous show, we mentioned
that Um it was it was a stepmother, an evil stepmother,
which we'll we'll talk about later as a recurring motif
UM that took the children out in the woods to
abandon them, and the original version it was both a
(22:10):
real mother and a real father, And they were like,
all right, you know that's really bad, so let's at
least make it an evil stepmother that the dad tries
to battle and say no, don't do this, right, but
eventually gives into, gives into and the kids are still
taking out in the woods to die, but it's just
a little bit more like, Okay, well it's not the
real parents because that's just horrific. So the violence is
(22:32):
still there, but they've taken away a little bit of
the psychological terror by replacing the mother slightly with a stepmother. UM,
and yeah, I think that that's a I guess that
is something of a cleansing process as far as editing goes.
But the violence is still in there, and it seems
very weird, especially today when you look back at this
(22:53):
and think like they were reading this to kids. But
there's a very smart woman named A s byatt who's
children's off herself but also an expert on children's books,
and she wrote the introduction to a UM collection I
think actually the an addition of the Grimm's Fairy Tales
by Maria Tatar, who's a basically the foremost expert on
(23:17):
fairy tales working today. Yeah, that's Zip's not around anymore.
He's retired because that guy, He's still available for comment
for sure, but Tatar seems to be the She's taken
up the mantle from him and uh in this edition.
A s By writes in the introduction of it that, yes,
this violence seems weird, but if you step back and
(23:38):
think of it as uh seventeenth and eighteenth century Tom
and Jerry cartoons, it becomes way more understandable and at
the same time way more acceptable as well. Like, think
about all the horrible things that Jerry did to Tom,
and what you're looking at is the same exact stuff
(23:58):
in a fairy tale, So it's not quite as odd
as you would think. Yeah, And as far as the
historical motif or the motif of the evil step mom,
there's a historical realism there that um, someone else pointed
out that at the time, you know, women died in
childbirth a lot, and so oftentimes there was a widow
(24:19):
or a widower left with kids that they would bring
in a stepmother and resources could be scared. So you'll
see this recurring motif over and over, this evil stepmother
who basically is competing for both the affections and food
of their little children that they inherited that they don't like.
So that's why you see it pop up over and
(24:40):
over and over, because that's kind of what happens sometimes. Yeah,
And that's the sociohistorical interpretation of fairy tales, which is
um basically takes fairy tales largely on their face. I mean, like,
if you have a talking egg or something like that,
you're not going to be like well, obviously in the
twelfth century, eggs talked, but there were a lot of
there's a lot of context in background that um that
(25:02):
I think people imbue with a lot more fancifulness than
need be. For example, like the the presence of wicked
step mothers throughout or in the case of Hansel and
gretel um a child abandonment like if you look back
at the fourteenth century, during famines and plagues, I think
it was the Black Death in particularly just leveled Europe.
(25:23):
A lot of people abandoned their children because they just
couldn't feed them any longer. So this wasn't like so
outlandish that it only belongs in fairy tale, and it
might have been like a fairly approachable theme that people
talked about to kind of hash out the feelings of
collective societal guilt at the fact that child abandonment was rampant.
(25:45):
You know, it's I think the sociohistorical interpretation is probably
my favorite. Can we talked about the juniper tree real quick?
I love this one. So, like we said, in fairy tales,
there's there's incests, there's cannibalism, there's murder, there's torture, there's
buried alive. There are all kinds of things that happen
(26:06):
in the junifer tree. Maybe well, I don't know, maybe
the worst one of them all. So in this case,
we have an evil stepmother, of course, who hates her stepchild,
who was a boy. So she comes home and says, hey,
you want an apple, and the boy says, sure, let
me lean in there and get one, and she it's
a trunk, and she slams the trunk down and cuts
his head off. And that's just the beginning. So she's like,
(26:29):
all right, probably not a wise move. Let me put
the kid in a chair. Let me stick this head
back on his neck and wrap a scarf around it,
and just here, open his eyes here, and put a
little smile on his face. And then her real daughter
comes in, not a stepdaughter, her favorite, real daughter. And
it's like, he looks all weird. Why is he just
(26:51):
sitting there like adult? She says, I don't know, go
slap him and and bring him around a bit. Boxes
the ear, I think, is what she So she boxes
his ear. His head falls off. And by the way,
the little girl, which makes it even more horrific what
you're about to say, loved the little boy though it
was a stepbrother, even though in the mom's eyes they
were rivals. For these scarce resources. A little girl loves
(27:13):
a little boy, so go ahead. So she knocks his
head off, and the mom's like, you knocked your brother's
head off, But you know what, We're gonna just keep
this quiet between us and you won't get in any trouble.
Let's just cook him into a stew and feed him
to your father or step And the little girls like
beside herself with like guilt and shame and horror at
the fact that she or the thought that she killed
(27:36):
her beloved stepbrother, but she goes along with it because
this is what her mom is saying. And the father
comes home and he eats the stew and actually it's
black pudding. Yeah, I'm not sure what that is. But um,
the father eats it and he's like this is all
for men, a little misogyny and greed on the end,
because he's like, no one else in this family is
(27:57):
going to eat this, yeah but me. It's pretty nuts.
And in the end, the little the little girl takes
the boy's bones and buries him by the juniper tree,
and he's reborn as a bird and ends up killing
the wicked stepmother um, and then comes back to life
as the boy so it all works out in the
end for the boy. But it's pretty nuts as far
as like these stories go, Like that has it all?
(28:20):
Do you want to talk about how children played butcher
with each other? Yes, this one's very short, and we
should point out many of these are very short, like
Little Red Riding Hood was only four pages long. I
think Rapunzel was only two or three. But that also,
in and of itself, was the work of the Grim brothers.
They would embellish this stuff tremendously and often double it
(28:42):
and double it from a few paragraphs to a couple
of pages. So still short. And by the way, if
you want to read a really neat analysis of the
juniper tree, read Ernest Parkins analysis on word words and edgeways. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty cool. He finds at out of neat symbolism
in it. All right, here's how children played butcher with
(29:04):
each other. It's a great title. A man once slaughtered
a pig while his children were looking on. When they
started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other,
you beat the little pig, and I'll be the butcher.
Whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into
his brother's neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a
room bathing the youngest child in a tub, heard the
cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs, and when
(29:24):
she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of
the child's neck and in a rage, thrust it into
the heart of the child who had been the butcher.
Then she rushed back to the house to see what
her other child was doing in the tub, but in
the meantime it had drowned in the bath. The woman
was so horrified that she fell into a state of
utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and
hanged herself. When her husband returned home from the fields
(29:45):
and saw this, he was so distraught that he died
shortly thereafter the end. That's like the episode of Dragnet
where they have a pop party and the parents forget
their child is in the bath and it drowned. Was
that on Dragnet? Wow? So you know, of course I'm laughing,
because I mean, you can't take that seriously, right if
you watch Dragnet you can well no, I mean that
(30:06):
story it's just so over the top and weird and
violent and dark and stuff just happens like again, there's
almost no psychology to these things. People just do stuff
well supposedly. Uh. I think Wilhelm Grim said specifically about
that one, like No, the clear lesson here is it's like,
don't play with knives and things, which is and that's
(30:28):
a good point, and I don't know if we've even
said that, Like the the predominant theory for why these
things even exist is um, as far as being taught
to children goes, they are lessons their tails and how
to grow up, how to avoid strangers, stay away from knives,
stay away from I guess, which is like don't eat
(30:49):
houses made of gingerbread, just good life lessons that kind
of stuff. They're sexual predators out there, yeah, which we'll
talk about, but let's take another break. You're ready for it, yes, okay,
(31:20):
So Chuck you um, you said that there are sexual
predators out there and they're little red riding hood in particular,
Like if you read it, especially if you read the
Grim version and not the Charles Barrault version, it's um
like everything comes out great in the end, she saved. Um,
you can read between the lines a little bit and
(31:40):
that's the key. Though, Like these these fairy tales even
after they became sanitized through seven editions, even after they
became disneyfied um, there's still this underlying thread, the theme,
the central theme, the message look out for sexual predators,
don't cut your brother's head off with a knife like that.
They can't be expunge and the story still remain the same.
(32:02):
It's it's so woven into the fabric of them, and
I think that's one of the things that makes them interesting.
But alternately, something else I ran across, and I think
that a s buy it Um article was the idea
that they don't have any designs on you. They're not
trying to teach you a lesson necessarily in and of themselves.
(32:23):
They just are what they are. Maybe the person telling
you that fairy tale wants you to learn that lesson.
The fairy tale in and of itself couldn't care less
whether you you learned that lesson or not. It's just
here's a snapshot of what happened in twelve seventeen to
this little boy who played with knives with his brother.
Will learn it or don't, we don't care. Yeah, but
(32:43):
that's uh. What was Zip's first name? Jack? Jack? Zip's
he was may still be here he said, he's retired now, Yeah,
he's He worked at the University of Minnesota. Is a
comparative literature professor and German professor go Golden Gophers. Yeah,
uh uh. And he for many many years was the
pre eminent fairy tale dude. He was where you would go.
(33:06):
He turns up all over the place in his research.
But he said, though, um that there usually is like
a come upance, Like he says, whoever is a tyrant
at which an evil brother or mother who wants her
own daughter dead, they will always be punished. There will
always be justice. And usually the characters that are of
humble origins go on to have like great success, like
(33:28):
the you know, the uh, poor maiden marries the prince
in the end in most cases it's true, but not always.
Or the king who wants to have an incestuous relationship
with his daughter ends up getting killed or something like that. Yeah.
In that case, I believe what was his wife was
dying and he said, I will only remarry if I
(33:49):
can find someone as beautiful as you, and turns out
that's my daughter. What was that one called, like many
or something like it was called the creep King. Yeah,
but that's a recurring theme. Actually it's a very ancient one.
It falls under the Cinderella story um which apparently so
there's a I don't know if we mentioned it or not,
but there's a folklore cataloging device like cataloging convention. And
(34:14):
I think Cinderella stories, which is the persecuted heroin is
uh number five ten A yeah, for real, it's the
Arne Thompson Uther classification five ten A persecuted heroin Cinderella
stories the Uther pen dragon, and that's another. Cinderella is
another one, like there was one woman in particular who
(34:36):
collected three eighty five different versions of the Cinderella story
from around the world, and I think they've identified as
many as fifteen. So Cinderella is another very very ancient
one as well. And the one that you recounted about
the king you wants to Mary's daughter, that particular one
from Greece. Yeah, I think that was called all Kinds
of Fur. It's all hyphenated, like that's her name or something.
(34:56):
I think it's um. So we're talking talk about like
sanitizing it and um Joan a Casella comes to the
Grimm's defense like saying you can't really fault these guys
for for changing this stuff, because again, it doesn't really
belong to anybody. They belong to the ages, and the
Grimms just put their stamp on it. Um. And then also,
(35:17):
you know, uh, if you if you just take an
oral tradition and faithfully write it down, it's going to
be virtually unreadable. So they definitely stylized that. They added
some more pros, and they made it a lot more memorable,
and it became a beloved book. It's a Unesco book
Memory of the World, I think collection, so like it's
(35:39):
a it's a very well beloved book. But some people say,
you know, if why should the Grimms be the only
ones to be able to change fairy tales? Why why
does it have to end with them? Maybe it's time
to rewrite them some Well, isn't that what uh tartar
zips that's his position. No, no no, no, but I thought
(35:59):
the one in who uh name? What isn't that what
she's done? Didn't she release a new version? In two
thousand five, she released an annotated version, but she didn't
rewrite them. What SIPs is saying is like, here's the
basic story, go rewrite it as your own and um,
there's been some feminist collections that that are rewritten stories. Yeah,
(36:19):
like why is every girl defenseless and needs a man
to rescue her from poverty or danger? Right, And that's
a feminist interpretation of a lot of um, the fairy tales,
some people say, if you look a little further, like, yes,
all the ones that Disney picked and all the most
popular ones are very much patriarch patriarchally slanted to where
(36:40):
it is a damvel in distress as a prince that
has to come help her and she's helpless until he
comes along and then whatever. Um, But if you look
a little further, there are some very there are other
ones where they're resourceful heroines. And think of Hansel and Gretel.
Gretel tricks the witch and kills her all by herself
without the help of Hansel, who's being fattened up by himself. Right, Yeah,
(37:04):
And I'm sure Disney, Walt Disney himself was just like, man,
they love this stuff, like of course I'm gonna they're
eating it up. Yeah, but there, but there. You can
also look at Hollywood two is a means of taking
these classic fairy tales and rewriting the Grim versions like, Um,
there's a huge I don't want to call it a movement,
but there's there's like a trend, I guess, trend to
(37:27):
to taking these things that were disneyfied versions of the
stories and restoring them back even even to their pre
grim darker roots, just making them dark again roots there
grimmar pre grim roots. Yeah. Um, have you ever seen
Freeway with Reese Witherspoon? Oh? Yeah, that was a little
red writing a little red riding hood. And if you're
(37:48):
a feminist, I guarantee you appreciate that version a little
Red riding Hood because she takes no guff and comes
out on top and at no points for yeah, and
Brooks shields as his wife, and she like it's crazy.
It's a neat, neat movie. But that's a good example
of a rewriting of a classic fairy tale. Like, no,
it doesn't have to end with the Grims totally. Uh.
(38:10):
In The Company of Wolves, wasn't that a that was
a rewrite of or redo of a little writing her
two a little more of a horror though, right? I
think so? I didn't see it. I didn't either. I
think that was Neil Jordan's right, crying game, Yeah, like
one of his early movies. So um, we have to
talk a little bit about the Nazis here, because the
(38:31):
Nazis were big on co opting things for their own purposes. Uh.
And one of the things that co opted were Grim's
fairy tales. And since World War Two there's been a
big I don't know about big again, maybe it was
such a trend, but there were folks who said that,
you know, when you look at these, they're talking about
German nationalism and discipline and violence and obedient and order
(38:54):
and obedience. And I think the grand brothers were like, yeah,
it's totally nationalism. We were all about Germany. But but
we died like decades before Hitler was even born. Yeah, Like,
I don't think they would have appreciated that it was
co opted by the Nazis, and Hitler saying like, put
these in schools, this is awesome, Like read this stuff,
put them in boy scout rooms everywhere, that's funny. So um,
(39:17):
the Allies came in and occupied Germany and one of
the things they said was like, you guys can't teach
this Grim book anymore. And bandit and a lot of
towns around Germany became very political because it was very
much associated with the Third Reich. And one of the
reasons why is because the Third Reich said, go teach
this to young German kids, to make sure that they
know they're German and that they will triumph over the
(39:38):
Allied Wolf because they're all little red riding hood that's right,
little Nazi kids, that's right. So um, again, people make
the case like, you can't really hang that on the
Grim brothers. They didn't foresee Nazism and this this German
nationalism in and of itself isn't necessarily inherently evil, and
if you put it in the context of German romanticism,
(40:00):
most countries in Europe were undergoing nationalist fever, you know.
So um. There was some anti semitism though, and some
of the tales, yeah, and that can't be gotten around either. Yeah.
One was called The Jew and the Brambles, where the
protagonists torments a Jewish person by dancing, making him dance
on the thicket of thorns, uh, calls him a dirty dog.
(40:22):
And then there's I mean, there's various I think said
three basically of the two hundred tales had Jewish characters,
and they were never like favorable. Yeah, the other two
um referenced the Jewish stereotype of being stingy with money
or something like that. Yeah, the good bargain. And a
lot of people are like, well, let's just expunge those
two um, and some people have from their collections. I
(40:45):
think that's the other thing too, is you can if
the Grim's kind of set a precedent for you can
take these tales and cleanse them if you want, or
do whatever you want to them, like there they belong
to the ages. Well, and that's then comes in the
people who posit whether or not it's that's good for
Should we sanitize that? Should we not? Uh? W h Alden,
(41:07):
I love this. He described the people who sanitize him
as the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of
Positive Parents, positivist parents, the League for the Promotion of
Worthwhile Leisure, or the cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives. Man.
That is so w ah Todden. He couldn't just leave
it at one description. H So he clearly wasn't in
(41:30):
favor of it. Some people think, uh it's good for us.
Um A man name uh Bruno Bettelheim in a name
Bruno Bedelheim. Yeah, totally is it sounds like a bond
villain or something. A book called The Uses of Enchantment,
and he was very Freudian in nature that he basically
(41:51):
says that we all, all these kids have these unconscious
desires and these books help, uh what like these repressed
desires come out, help them deal with them. Yeah. Well
it helps children, yeah, deal with their repressed desires. Like
the example of the UM. So we talked about the
sociohistorical interpretation of the presence of wicked stepmothers. Right, there
(42:12):
are lots of stepmothers and they were competing for resources
bet Ohaim and the Freudians say, well, no, the stepmothers
are there because UM children love their mother, but they
also hate their mother, and this gives them a way
to work through the complex. Yeah, that complex um combination
of emotions where they can hate the wicked stepmother, but
(42:32):
they can also love the biological mother who's absent or
appears early on and then dies, but who is always
very loving and kind. Right, so they can work that out.
That's a great example of it. Yeah, and then you
have Zips, who Jack Zip says, you know what it
really is is, uh, children see the fairy tale as
like a counterworld of reflection of their own world, and
(42:55):
it allows them to, you know, consider what's going on
in that world and then take steps in their own
world to reform it and not do those things right.
And specifically it teaches children to identify tyrants and people
who are power mad, and people who hoard money or
harm other people, because those people almost invariably come to
(43:16):
a terrible end in those things. And then fairy tales, right,
So you've got all these different interpretations Freudian Carl Young
got into it um, sociohistorical feminist interpretation, Jack Zipe's own
personal leftist interpretation, right um, and all of them, although
they compete here there none of them are wrong and
(43:38):
none of them are right. And then again, it's the
beauty of fairy tales. It's like a blank white piece
of ply would that we project our own thoughts and
fears and hopes and ideas onto culture by culture, age
by age. And Tatar and her collection did a pretty
smart thing. I think she actually collected some of the
more disturbing one in the back of the book under
(44:02):
the title Tales for Adults. Basically read these first on
your own. See if you want to read them to
your kid, don't frontload it with the juniper tree. Right.
And actually, Joan Accella says that you should take an
exact and if and just cut the juniper tree out
of your said that. I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah,
(44:22):
I mean, I don't know if your kids got a
strong fortitude. It's up to the parents. But it wasn't
always up to the parents. There was a big movement
in the mid twentieth century for um realism among children's books. Yeah,
and and the Grimms were first on the chopping block there. Instead,
it was replaced by like Judy Goes to the Firehouses.
Zachcella says, I totally like think about it. It's like
(44:44):
a total fifties children's book, like see Dick and Jane Run.
You know. Um and it was I guess Maurice Syndec
with Where the Wild Things Are? Who? Who said I
we were not doing that anymore. He brought the cool
back to children's books. He definitely did. Yeah, I have it,
read many children's books lately, But I think there's a
lot of you read Daddy Sat on a duck, right, Yeah,
(45:07):
I did read that. Lots of far jokes in that one. Yeah,
that was written by one of our listeners. Um, highly
recommended it is. It's very good. But I think these
days there's a mix of things going on, realism, fanciful
stuff stories and now uh well this is more of
a young adult novel. But Colum Alloy of the December
sort of three part children's novels, like big, big books
(45:30):
about this fantastical world in Oregon, this forest in Oregon
where I can't I bought them all. I can't wait
to read him. It's cool man, Yeah, I think he's
he's that's more the tradition of the like lion which
in the wardrobe And you said that, I wanted to say,
Avon is not the name Narnia Narnia. Um, yeah, I
(45:50):
have no idea where children's books are these days either.
I wonder though, what what it reflects about society at large,
whatever phase children's books are, whether it's realism or fancifulness,
you know, yeah, like are we like when you're in
an economic downturn? Is realism or fantasy the one that
steps in? Yeah, I would guess fantasy because people want
(46:11):
to escapism. Then I was way into that stuff. I
wasn't into like Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and
stuff like that. But I love Maurice Sendak really and
stuff that was really kind of out there. I love
Dr Seuss. I found out that it's um not every
boy read Ramona Quimpy books. I thought it was Nix
apparently not. Yeah. I read uh some Judy Bloom Yeah,
(46:35):
of course. Um and I did read the first couple
of the The Chronic What Cools of Narnia? Did you
ever see that skit? No, it's one of the setting
live shorts they were doing, Chris Parnell and Sandberg. We're
doing a rap the Chronic What Cools of Narnia. I
didn't see that. It's like a very weird, misplaced What
(46:57):
did you see Mr Shows coming back on Netflix? Yeah?
Well close as we're gonna get the Mr Show. I
don't think they can call it Mr Show. No, they're
calling it uh with like w slash Bob and David.
I can't wait. Man. I saw a couple of clips
and it looks like, Yeah, it looks like it's going
to be as good as it ever was. I'm pretty
Before we leave you, since we're talking about fairy tales,
(47:18):
we thought would be appropriate to mention that two of
our horror fiction contest submitters are published once published again.
J McMurray published The Dreamings of Leonard J. M. Leaper
and you can check that out at take publishing dot
com not Leper, no Leaper. And then also you can
find Patrick Scott. He wrote play I Believe, which was
(47:40):
in Meat for Tea magazine and you can find uh
information about that at meat for t dot com. Uh.
Since I said meat for Tea, it's time for listener, man,
I don't I wish it was time for us to
meet for tea No M E A T. Yeah, okay kidding,
I'm gonna call this uh a little bit more on
(48:04):
vocal Fry. We've got a lot of response from this one.
I think it's second in controversy only homelessness. Yeah. A
lot of a lot of ladies wrote in women that
were very appreciative. A lot of men wrote in, um
who were not appreciative. Many were too, Yeah, many were,
But a lot of dudes wrote in. I think they're
part of the men's movement. You know. It was divided
(48:25):
like you would expect, but there were men who wrote
in to support us. There are women who who wrote
into to criticize vocal Fry. They agreed with Naomi Wolf. Yeah,
And I just want to clear up, I don't mean
all old white men are awful. I don't I you
don't even need to say that. If you're not one
of the ones that are doing these things, then great,
who cares? Yeah, I know you don't need to defend
(48:47):
the ones who are all right, here we go. Hey, guys,
just want to say thanks so much for your recently
for recently tackling some very charged gender issues in the
most mature but not apologist of ways. I like how
this emails on, whether it be female puberty, vocal Fry,
or your excellent double duo with the stuff you misson
History Class Crew and listener mail. You nailed what I
(49:08):
consider to be the best way to handle the ubiquitous
double standards that women find themselves held to state that
it is unequivpably wrong, then calmly and rationally pick apart
why you were not trying to start a gender war,
though I'm sure there are those out there who will
take it as such. Uh see the beginning of this email. Um,
but you meticulously undercut the meticulously undercut the arguments and
(49:30):
unconscious justifications that allow these attitudes to endure underneath all
the truths by consensus and familial and cultural norms. Very
little remains to give weight to these perspectives, and I
believe that both genders are, albeit slowly shedding them, thanks
to the efforts of you and many others on this path.
Very well said right now, this is the road to equality, dudes.
(49:53):
I throw that in there, and I cannot say how
much I appreciate your proper championing of it. We are
all persons, no matter our gender, and should you respected
as such, free as much as possible of worthless generalizations. Also,
as a side note, I was once upon a time
a linguist and very much agree with your handling of
socio linguistics A linguists. Sorry, Chuck, is that because I
(50:14):
said like linguists, linguisticator or something. A linguists most fundamental
tenant is that no use of language to communicate is wrong,
and thus linguistic evolution should be no more surprising than
that of pop music or fashion. Yeah, the prescriptivists are
just screaming at their ipous ideas and perspectives change and language,
(50:36):
by its nature will rise to meet it. Cheers. That
is from David, a long time Stuff you Should Know FAM.
Thanks a lot, David. That was a very kind email,
Very well said UM representative. I would say about half
of the emails that we got about vocal Fride the
other half. If you want to get in touch with us,
you can tweak to us at s y s K podcast.
(50:57):
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has
always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com
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