March 19, 2024 • 35 mins
Folklorist Dr. Jeana Jorgensen talks about how fairy tales have a seedy underbelly that can be harmful in the real world.
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
This episode discusses sensitive topics. Please listen with care.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
So in twenty seventeen, this person who styles herself a
folklorist was writing these blog posts about the Romantic era,
the nationalism movement folklora Danny, which is like, okay, on
the surface, that all sounds like stuff that folklorists talk about, fine, whatever,
But she was writing these posts in an effort to
(00:37):
justify racism and stuff that we would view as very
right wing takes on nationalism.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
And then in her blog post she.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Cited me, and I was like, WHOA, don't drag me
into this.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'm Miranda Hawkins. Welcome to the Deep Dark Woods. I
initially started this podcast because I love how dark and
twisted the brothers Grim stories are, and for many of us,
we consider these to be the original tales. But the
more I've learned, the more I've realized there's a seed
(01:17):
underbelly to these stories that's been harmful in the real world.
The Grim Tales, for example, were co opted by the
Nazi Party to support Germany's national identity and to be
used as propaganda for fascism, white supremacy, racism, anti semitism,
and homophobia among other things. Doctor Gina Jorgensen is a folklorist,
(01:42):
gender studies scholar, lecturer at Butler University and author of
Folklore One on one, fairy Tales one on one, and
Sex Education one o one. She is here with me
today to talk about the darker side of fairy tales
and folklore. When it comes to the Grim Brothers collecting
(02:06):
these tales, you know, they talk about preserving for culture.
Can we kind of get into like, what is a
subtext of that, because that, you know, is a little
it is a little tricky.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yes, it's very tricky.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
So in the early eighteen hundreds when Yakub and Wilhelm
Grimm were being scholars in Germany, Germany wasn't Germany yet,
So it was it was Prescia, it was Hanover, It
was all these little principalities and baronies and duchies and
stuff like that. Moreover, Napoleon was rolling through and wrecking
things and taking things over. So there was this very
(02:39):
beleaguered sense of like, we are one people, we share
a language for the most part, we share cultural heritage.
We should really kick out our oppressors and become a
country for reals. And this was known as romantic nationalism
at the time, and the Grim Brothers were participating in
this strand of it that said, if we can prove
(02:59):
that we have a shared historical heritage, we can prove
that we should be a country. And they were coming
at this from two angles, first language and linguistics, and
second folklore and fairy tales. So they were active as linguists,
and so they were also One of their friends, Clemens Fontana,
was collecting folk songs and top and he was like, hey, guys.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Come do this cool thing with me.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
So as they were documenting folk tales and fairy tales
of the German people, they thought they were really contributing
to this thing that was both artistic and political at
the same time. And where it gets really tricky is
that they weren't doing what they said they were doing.
They made it sound like they were going out among
(03:43):
the folk peasants and the agricultural workers and the people
who are closest to the heart of the land, and
in reality, they were interviewing a lot of middle class
people who were of French descent. So they were getting
fairy tales from people who were very literate and very
educated and very urban. And they had some more like
(04:05):
role like peasant class tellers as well. So this was
an issue because when they first published the first two
volumes of their fairy tales, a lot of their stories
actually had French origins. So we can document that there
are earlier versions of say Bluebeard and Cinderella and Little
redding Hood that came maybe directly, maybe not, from the
(04:27):
French traditions of Charles Perraut, who was writing in the
sixteen nineties. And this leads to the really thorny issue
of who owns folklore because you know, when folklore travels,
as it does word of mouth, it travels with people
who are migrant workers, who are traders, who are explorers
and so on. If it has the tiniest kernel of
(04:47):
relevance to people, it'll take root and change to kind
of adapt to local norms, local language, local whatever. So
the fact that French fairy tales came up to Germany
and people were like, oh, yeah, we like these, we're
gonna keep telling them, they became German tales for sure.
They weren't maybe originally German tales, but maybe they weren't
originally French tales either. You know, this question of origins
(05:09):
is really complicated because if we're talking about documenting something
that starts as oral tradition, unless you have a time machine,
we have no idea when the first or original version
was composed or told until somebody happens to write it down,
which probably happens much later in its chain of transmission.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
So like, I kind of I get.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Where the Grims were coming from and being like this
is super German. Heck yeah, but it's hard to make
that claim for anybody.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, and what about the people who are like this
sln itself to like Nazis, right, the whole idea of
preserving the culture.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Yeah, So the link with Nazis came later, and it
was probably not something the grim Brothers intended their version
of nationalism. I mean, it was influenced by politics of
the day and those weren't necessarily nice. But what happened
in later years in Germany was in the preceding era
(06:10):
to World War Two, the Vimar Republic fairy tales were
being used in a lot of different ways by artists,
by writers. There were a lot of people who were
interested in both preserving the Grimms fairy tales on the
one hand, and writing new inventive versions exploring like capitalism,
socialism and other things. On the other hand, so the
Vimar Republic was a pretty like vibrant time for fairy tales.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And then when the Nazis took.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Over, there was a sort of shift where they saw
the Grims tales as sort of these authentic stories that
reveal some sort of ancient Teutonic like Viking Aryan ancestor
times and links. And so they started to treat the
Grim's tales as almost like a sacred text, where it
(06:59):
was discouraged to change them and play with them and
retell them. And so there were still authors who were
retelling fairy tales and doing interesting things, but it had
to be more according to the party line. The tales
that were being told and that were being reworked picture
books for children and things like that, the Nazi Party
(07:20):
wanted them to correspond to the values they were trying
to promote. So there was a lot of propaganda in
these tales about loyalty, purity, mothers being self sacrificing, men
being brave, and things like that. So that was a
theme that became really prominent in those tales. And there
were some people actually in the Nazi Party who wrote
(07:42):
fairy tales. I didn't know that that was a thank you,
Jack Scipes for pointing this out moment. This guy, Hans
Friedrich Blank, he was writing tales. They were all about
this really positive side of marriage and fertility. In Zipes's words,
he wrote tales for kids, he wrote tales for adults,
and he had these magical characters like Mother Hall who
(08:03):
would like affirm the importance of gerosexual marriage and women.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Staying at home and things like that.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
And Blank was actually a high Nazi official of culture,
so he was working for the Nazi party and writing
these tales that were in line with the values they
were trying to promote, because most fascist regimes are extremely
heteronormative and have an emphasis on the right people having
the right kind of babies, so they were trying to
(08:29):
use fairy tales in that regard.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I also didn't know that there was there were people
writing new stories at that time. So, just to kind
of a guess circle back on a couple things, It's
not so much that the Grim Brothers were Nazis themselves
or had that idea. It's that people have taken their
stuff and used that as like a textbook moving forward.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Yes, exactly. I would not characterize the grim brothers as
Nazis or fascists. I think they were basically nerds who
loved the idea of what the country could become. They
were linguists, their historians, They did some legal scholarship, They
did what philology, which would now have become folklore, anthropology, philosophy,
and a million other little disciplines. So they wanted to
(09:18):
do their nerdy thing and affirm that the German people
deserve to have their own country. So yeah, I wouldn't
characterize them as being in line with fascism like at all.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
That being said, the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm did
publish some tales that, when you look back at them now,
are extremely problematic. One example is a story of the
Jew and the Thornbush. Doctor Gina Jorgensen will tell us
about that one after the break. So the brothers grim
(09:56):
tales were dedicated to preserving German culture and promoting a
German national identity. Generations later, their tales were co opted
by the Nazis. We've already seen plenty of gruesome stories
and motifs, but some of the lesser known tails are
even more problematic, like this one tale that folklore's doctor
(10:18):
Gina Jorgensen told me about called the Jew and the
thorn Bush.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Yeah, so the Jew and the thorn Bush. It's one
of their tails where there's this young guy and he's
a servant and his master lets him go and totally
underpays him, like three pennies or something like that. But
this guy is very let's say, naive, and he's like,
oh cool, I'm rich. So he's gone along and he
meets this little old man who asks for money, and
(10:44):
the guy's like, oh yeah, here's all my money. And
the guy's like, all right, so you're very pure of parts.
You can have three wishes. So the young man wishes
for a gun that can hit everything that he aims at,
a fiddle that will make everyone dance when he plays it,
and he also wishes for.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
People to always do what he requests.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
And I feel like that's the trump card that kind
of makes the other two wishes like not matter but whatever.
So he keeps traveling along and he sees a Jewish
guy in the road and he's admiring a bird and
the Jews Guy's like, man, I wish I had that bird.
So the guy shoots it, which I feel like that
is also counter productive.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
And then the young man tells the.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Jew go into the bushes and get it, and there's
all these thorns, so the guy trying to like navigate
the thorns, and then the young man starts playing his
fiddle and the Jewish guy can't help but dance until
his clothes are being shredded around him. He's being all
torn up, and this young man just has a hearty
laugh and he says like, Okay, I'll stop playing if
you like give me all your money or something or
(11:38):
like a lot of gold. So they do that, and
the gat goes on his way. The Jewish guy goes
and finds like a constable or judge or whatever and
is like this man stole from me, blah blah blah.
And they get the young guy and they're like, okay, yeah,
this sounds realistic, so we will hang you now. And
the guy says just one last request, and they have
to grant his request.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
He has to play his fiddle.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
The jewsh Guy's like, no, no, anything but that, and
so the guy plays his fiddle and nobody can stop dancing,
and so again they kind of beg him to stop
playing his fiddle so that they they're like.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Screaming and they're pleading with him to stop.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
And so he says, give me my life, let me
keep those hundred gold coins so they.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Got from the Jewish guy.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
And also he tells the Jewish guy to confess to
being a swindler and a thief essentially, and the Jewish
kind of confesses that he stole all this money, and
so the Jewish guy takes the young man's place on
the gallows.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, that's just a straight up fucked up tail.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
It really is.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
And I read this stuff and I was like, I'm Jewish,
and I'm like, oh, that's not that's not good representation all.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
No, not at all. Just curious where do you think
this tale came from? Because it just seems so different.
It's not even something I had heard of before.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
So, this tale in the Grims that is known as
the Jew and the Thornbush, it has an international tail type.
It is that well known. It is tail type five
ninety two titled the Dance among Thorns, And so it
has all of these really common motifs in it, the
granting the wishes. You get this fiddle that compels people
(13:12):
to dance, and in different versions, it's not always a
Jewish person who is forced to dance. Sometimes it's a monk,
it could be somebody else. This tale type is known
since the fifteenth century in Europe, and it's told.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
All over the place.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
So we have versions in Danish, in Finnish, German, obviously,
we have Swiss versions, we have Romanian versions, there's Chinese versions,
Syrian versions. So this is a widely known tale and
it doesn't always target Jewish people as the antagonist. It
can be kind of you know, insert your scapegoat here,
(13:51):
but it is really well known. So this isn't something
that the Grims necessarily invented or promoted. I can't speak
to why they made the choices they made, but it
was probably just documenting here's a thing, and it would
have sort of fit with some of the anti Semitic
sentiments of the time, because you know, nineteenth century in
(14:11):
Germany not a great time to be a Jewish person,
and so yeah, it was probably just more a reflection
of the general culture than of the Grim Brothers anti
Semitism specifically. But again that's it's hard to speculate because
I'm not inside their brains. In most modern editions of
the Grim's fairy tales, unless they are prepared by and
for scholars, this tale is left out.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, so it definitely sounds like this tale. While again
because of that time and that's what they made the decision,
we can't really talk about it, but it definitely sounds
like this tale. It just kind of depends on what
culture or where your were, dependent on who it was
aimed at. I want to circle back around to somethings
that we're talking about earlier, specifically with the underlying messages
(14:55):
in these fairy tales. So we have like clear things
like the one that we just talked about, but then
we have that underlying message of like Cinderella or like
you know, shaping, like the loyalty, the heterosexual marriage. Like
these are like the things. But like what about other stories,
like you know, Little Red writing Hood and things like that,
Like what are some of the messages and these these
(15:16):
other main stories.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
That's an interesting one.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
There are definitely some writers in Germany in say the
nineteen twenties and post World War One defeat who interpreted
Little Red Writing Hood as this sort of metaphor for.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
The Germanic people.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
This is again drawing on the work of Jack Sypes,
who pointed out that this one guy linked the wolf
to the early Roman Empire, little red cap to like
the idea of germanness, the hunter to the idea of
the great German protector or the feur, and this idea
that literal writing hood's subjugation was linked to how the
German people were being put down and subjugated.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Post World War One. They didn't really say it was the.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
Jews, but I feel like they were maybe implying, you know,
we should have a convenian scapegoat here. So it was
just a sort of are racist and nationalistic interpretation, But yeah,
some German writers definitely tried to link a little red
writing hood to like and we too have been victimized.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And then what about specifically, I guess the idea of
like how women are supposed to be, like the idea
of like loyalty and how we're supposed to act or
how they expected like women to act and things of
that sort.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Yeah, so the Grimms did put that seed in there,
And again there's some debate as to whether they were
actively sexist or just sort of following the norms of
their times without questioning We do know because we have
different editions of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, including an eighteen
ten manuscript that wasn't really ever published, but it was
recovered later on. Because they changed their tales from the
(16:54):
first edition in eighteen twelve and eighteen fifteen. They went
through seven major revisions up through eighteen fifty seven, and
so we know that they had an active hand, especially Humgrim.
He was very actively editing some of the tales because
their first edition was like, here's some scholarship fellow nerds,
and it was full of annotations and all of this
(17:15):
stuff that would probably not interest the general reader. And
then as their books started taking off, they're like, oh oh,
people are reading these, Oh oh, people are reading these
to their kids. And they realized that they had some
images in there that they didn't want kids to be reading.
And sort of the bizarre thing is that we think
of children's literature in the twenty first century in America
(17:38):
very differently than people were thinking of children's literature in
the mid eighteen hundreds in Europe. So, first off, the
idea of childhood had shifted and was sort of a
recent European concept. I gather that in the middle Ages,
children were kind of like little minimes, like tiny adults
who just died a lot, and they were dressed as
adults and treated as adults, and there wasn't really this
(18:00):
separate life stage of childhood in the way that we
would think about it day. So when the Grims entered
the stage, there was this idea that was tied to
romanticism of the innocence of the child and how this
is idealized, and how we should all aspire to such
(18:22):
naivete and all this stuff that was also linked to nature.
And so children's literature was sort of a new genre
at the time, and the way it was often thought
of was sex.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Was not okay, and I feel like that is a.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Similar current as you've seen a lot of children's literature today.
But violence was okay because it was acceptable to scare
the crap out of kids to make them behave.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
So there were.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Children's books at the time like Slovenly Peter is a
translation of a German title, where like if kids wouldn't
stop sucking in their thumbs, someone would come along and
cut them off, Or if you wouldn't stop playing by
the fire, someone push you into the fire, and that
was acceptable, that.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Was fine, that's really intense.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Yeah, So the Grims were in this sort of tradition,
this new tradition of children that are s at the time,
where they're like, okay, so we're going to revise some
of our tales. There are references to pregnancy that they
took out. There are references to sexuality that they took out,
but they left in violence, and they left in scatological references,
and later British translators into English would like take a lot.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Of those out.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Yeah, it was just sort of this like different take
on it. But one of the things they did as
they revise their tales with the sort of new audience
of children in mind, is they really highlighted gender roles
for girls and women that were more subservient, more domesticated,
things like that. So if you look at early versions
(19:48):
of snow White, when she is either chased away or
runs away from the evil queen and she finds the dwarves,
they're like, oh, yeah, you can chill here, And then
in later versions of the same tale they're like, oh,
you can stay here if you make the beds and
cook for us and sweet. It's like a list of
what a girl should do at home explicitly laid out
(20:08):
in this fairy tale, which is kind of wild. So again,
the grims were sort of seeding those more conservative, proper
gender roles. So I can see where later people would
pick up on that and be able to amplify it
because it was already there.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
So yeah, so it's like teaching or brainwashing. However you'd
like to say, like from a very early stage of
like this is how you should be, that subservient thing,
and then also to like your big thing is to
get married, that's your happily ever after, which I'm definitely
seeing a shift, and especially in a lot of the
Cinderellas I've been watching lately, a lot of the adaptations
and watching and reading and all that sort of thing.
(20:50):
So I'm kind of also curious again still talking about
like women and gender roles and everything. You know, we
still read these tales. But do you think like women
these days have the same takeaway today like that they
did then, or do you think that that is changing.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So we know that
in the past, especially in the eighteen hundreds in Europe,
tales were often told among groups of women, who were
doing the domestic task that almost literally every woman had
to do because we didn't have anywhere to buy clothes yet,
so women would regularly spend time spinning and weaving and
(21:29):
sewing and repairing clothing and so on. This was a
major activity that women at most social economic statuses like
had to do on the regular So part of how
they made the work bearable is by telling stories.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
And we think that.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
There are some little like seeds of subversiveness in some
of these tales, like there's a little known rumpel Stiltskin
relative where you know, this girl has promised to a
king if she can spin all the straw and goal
or just spin all the straw in general, blah blah blah,
and she obviously has no magic, and she's like, a crap,
(22:05):
what I'm gonna do? And these three old women show up,
and they are hideously ugly old women, and they say,
we'll help you, but you have to invite us to
your wedding and treat us like family, and the girl's
like sold. So they complete this insane task for her
and disappear, and she's married to this king, and the
king obviously thinks that he's going to get really really
(22:25):
rich by having a wife who can either spin so
much stuff in general or spin stuff into gold. And
these three women show up at the wedding and she's
like empty, so and so come sit with us.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
And the king is like, oh okay.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
And the king is like leaning over because he can't
stop looking at these ugly women, and he's like, so
I have to ask, and he goes through each of
their features, like one has a really big lip, one
has a really big thumb, one has a really big foot,
and each one answers, Oh, it's from licking the flax,
or oh it's from treading on the wheel, and the
king is horrified. He says, my beautiful young wife shall
never spin again. And so that is for this young
(23:01):
peasant girl who just like married up, definitely a happy ending,
and it promises and escape from the tedious work that
the people telling the tale would have still had to
be doing day in and day out. So there are
these like little glimpses of the tales not being as
conservative or like foreclosing possibilities as they're often assumed to be.
(23:24):
So like, that's one puzzle piece from the past. And
again we don't have a time machine, so we can't
ask people what did you think of these stories? But
that's one clue that these stories even existed, and that
we can look at the parallels between the content of
the tales and the context of the teller's lives. Nowadays,
it is a major debate in feminist fairy tale studies
(23:44):
what kids actually think of gender roles and fairy tales,
because in the nineteen seventies we had this whole debate happening,
and a lot of feminists were like, these stories are
straight up bad for kids. They've got passive princesses, they've
got lots of domestic labor for women, you have to
be pretty to be rewarded, blah blah blah, and other
feminists were like, yeah, but that's the narrow slice of
(24:05):
what's become canonical. There are so many interesting tales from
oral tradition around the world where girls are going on
quests and girls are killing dragons and girls are doing
like a million frickin things. So yeah, if you have
a narrow view, fairy tales can be kind of like
conservative traditional gender roles, and maybe that's not good for kids,
But broaden your horizon. There's so much more out there.
(24:26):
And then the next stage of that debate, which folklorist
and author case Stone played a large role in, was
being like, Okay, but really, what do kids actually think?
And she interviewed kids, what do you think?
Speaker 1 (24:36):
What do you remember? What do you notice?
Speaker 3 (24:38):
So kids are not these little passive lumps of brain
meat to be imprinted on, Like, kids have their own
ideas and their own ways of receiving fairy tales and
thinking about them and processing them. So I think it
is a really important corrective, which the parallel in literary
studies is called reader response theory or reception theory, to
(24:59):
remember that whatever it's in the text, that's not the
only puzzle piece here, Like the text is going to
be received and interpreted by a human with an active
brain who might take away different things from it than
the next human over.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Will be right back after the break. I originally reached
out to doctor Jorgenson because someone told me about how
doctor Jorgenson's work had been appropriated by alt right people online.
So she told me what happened.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, I've kept a blog. I've blogged at a couple
different places for over a decade. Now, I personally feel
that academics should be doing outreach. We shouldn't keep all
of our knowledge locked up in the ivory tower. So
that is just part of my personal mission, is why
I write books for the general public and not necessarily
stuff that's like locked behind paywalls all the time, although
(25:54):
I write that too.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
So this thing happened.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
So in twenty seventeen, this person who styles herself a
folklorist was writing these blogs about the Romantic era, the
nationalism movement, folklore identity, which is like, okay, on the surface,
that all sounds like stuff that folklore is talk about,
find whatever. But she was writing these posts in an
effort to justify racism and stuff that we would view
(26:24):
as very right wing takes on nationalism. And so she
cited my mentor Alan Dundas to I guess, sort of
justify that folklore is about cultural heritage and blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
And then in her blog post.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
She cited me, and I was like, WHOA, don't drag
me into this, but I guess that's what happens when
you put your words out on the internet.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Who knows how they get used.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
So she had this whole like anti whatever, like rant,
like it's a word salad. It doesn't even make a
whole lot of sense. And so I did not like
being tagged into this discussion. So I wrote a blog
posts I was blogging for Patheos at the time, called
dear white Supremacists, why.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Would you cite me?
Speaker 3 (27:11):
And I took issue with her use of my mentor's work.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
I took issue with her use of my work.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
I was really confused as to why she was citing
a queer Jewish academic in her very like anti all
those things work. I just feel like it is completely
misrepresenting the contemporary field of folkloristics to support white nationalism,
white supremacy, to say, oh, as poor white white Europeans,
(27:43):
we are sober leaguered, poor us blah blah blah. Yeah,
it's a very weird move that she was making. And
so I made my own blog post, and I don't
think anything really came of it. I was worried because
her work was being picked up by like Altright and
neo Nazi leaning outlets, and that was a little worse
and I was.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Like, I hope I don't get doxed. And nothing really
came of.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
It, so thankfully that just kind of faded into Internet obscurity,
but it was. It was weird, and it is something
that folklorists do encounter sometimes in that, you know, we
aren't interested in questions of heritage and mythology and identity,
all these really interesting topics. But so are white nationalists
and so are fascists, because they need to create this
(28:29):
illusion of a racially pure origin story that ties together
communities and excludes other communities.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Which is completely false.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Like communities have always been diverse, both in terms of
like ethnicity and culture and language, like there's no such
thing as racially pure or culturally pure or whatever. But
these people need these stories to prop up their beliefs
and to justify increasingly violent actions.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
So folklost. Whenever we encountered this.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
We're like, oh, this is gross. This is not actually
accurate either, and it's something that you see. So I
have friends in neopagan circles. I have friends who do
historical reenactments and so on, and they also have to
watch out for the people. It's like, you're really into
Viking stuff. Are you really actually just nerdy about it?
Or are you a white supremacist?
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Oh? Gross.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
So it's an interesting, weird dilemma. But most folkloreers I
know are like, oh, stop, don't use our materials to
justify your disgusting bigotry.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Yeah. I've talked to a couple people who who have
said that folklores are a little bit worried now sometimes
like speaking up or whatever, because they're afraid of how
what they say or what they write is going to
be interpreted or used. So I totally understand that. I
think definitely that was very bold of you to write that.
(29:53):
In response, I'm glad you're okay and everything turned out
for the most part okay, because that does seem like
a very scary situation at least I know I would
have been a little like nervous. But I have one
last question for you. What is your take on these
modern adaptations of the more popular grim stories today? And
(30:14):
do you think that even though we're still telling these stories,
we're starting to tell them in a way that's pulling
away from the anti Semitic.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
And racist fruits. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
So, I think the fact that we still have so
many fairy tale a retelling is going in so many
directions is a testament to how fairy tales are these
shape shifters that as long as we can make them relevant.
They will basically live forever, and I find that really fascinating.
Some authors are using fairy tales to sort of talk
back to anti Semitism. So one really popular example is
(30:48):
the novel Briar Rose by Jane Nolin, which intertwines the
Grimm's version of Briar Rose or Sleeping Beauty with a
family Holocaust narrative. The other really shiny example is my
colleague Veronica Shanis, who's an academic but also an author.
She wrote a novella that is basically the protagonist is
(31:09):
the daughter of the Jew who died dancing in the
Thorns and she wants revenge. The title of this is
Among the Thorns and it's super cool. So yeah, So
there are authors who are explicitly talking back to anti
Semitism and the uses of the fairy tale and Nazi
Germany and things like that. I also see a lot
(31:30):
more general feminist and querytellings of fairy tales. I personally
I really enjoy those. I enjoy doing scholarship on them,
and it is something that again like there is potential
for harm in these stories and sort of my favorite
case study and it pissed me off, so much that
I wrote an academic article about it. But I'm really
(31:50):
interested in gender and sexual minorities and how those of
us in the LGBTQ plus umbrella are represented in tales.
So when our writing tales, when we're just the subjects
of them, all these things, and so I apologize this
has spoilers for Helen Oyam's book Boy Snow. It's basically
a snow white retelling set in mid century East Coast,
and it has this reveal at the end that like
(32:12):
I didn't see coming, and I'm like, what the hell
where the main character's abusive father that she's run away with,
and like she's kind of a snow white figure. But
then she has a step kid, so like she's kind
of the snow white stepmother figure. Is kind of an
interesting story on that regard.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
The main character's.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Parental figure turns out to be a trans man, and
so this person actually assigned female at birth was actually
kind of like a progressive young person in college, was raped,
gave birth to the protagonist, and then was so traumatized
by this that like they looked in the mirror the're like, Okay,
I'm a dude now, And this comes in like the
last five or ten pages of the book. It is
(32:49):
this big reveal and then like the main character is like, oh,
it turns out my mother was there all along under
a spell, which is another fairy tale motif, which I
guess is technically interesting, but it's this horrific story making
out trans identity to be the result of trauma, which
is not true.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
That is not a thing. And I was like, what
the shit did I just read?
Speaker 3 (33:09):
So I had to write an article about this and
like talk about the interconnections between trans identity and trauma
and untrue stereotypes and things like that. And I sort
of contrasted that text with a novella by Gabriel the
Dream called a Pair of Raven Wings, which is available
now on Amazon, And in that story, there is a
transgender character and a retold fairy tale, and they're not
(33:32):
trans because of trauma, because that's usually not a thing. Rather,
they're traumatized by the transphobia of the people around them,
and that's an important reframe. I think that is far
more accurate, And so I'm just really interested, like, you know,
how do fairy tale authors or these authors of modern
fairy tale retellings are we doing damage by not knowing
(33:53):
what the hell we're talking about, and by using someone
else's marginalized identity as a plot point, like maybe don't
do that.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, No, definitely, especially the book that you're just talking
about about, like the trauma causing like the transnists. That's
not how that works at all, whatsoever. So that is
definitely something that people need to be conscious of when
creating new content, whatever that content may be, whether you're
writing or making a movie, or you know, whatever it
is that you're doing. On that note, thank you so
(34:23):
much for joining me. I really super appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Awesome, thank you for having me. I enjoyed this conversation.
I enjoyed going back and brushing up on some of
my research on these things, and it was a pleasure
talking with you.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
That was Folklorist doctor Gina Jorgensen. Don't forget to check
out her books Folklore one on one, fairy Tales one
on one, and Sex Education one on one. Next time
on the Deep Dark Woods, A Beautiful Princess sleeps for
one hundred years. The Deep Dark Woods is a production
of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It was created, written,
(35:00):
and hosted by me Miranda Hawkins. This episode was produced
by mikelle j Une with senior producer Gabby Watts. Executive
producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley, and Maya Howard.
Theme song was composed by Jesse Niswanger, who also sound
designed and mixed this episode. If you enjoyed the show,
(35:23):
please leave a review and you can follow along with
the show on Instagram at School of Humans.
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
This episode discusses sensitive topics. Please listen with care.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
So in twenty seventeen, this person who styles herself a
folklorist was writing these blog posts about the Romantic era,
the nationalism movement folklora Danny, which is like, okay, on
the surface, that all sounds like stuff that folklorists talk about, fine, whatever,
But she was writing these posts in an effort to
(00:37):
justify racism and stuff that we would view as very
right wing takes on nationalism.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
And then in her blog post she.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Cited me, and I was like, WHOA, don't drag me
into this.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'm Miranda Hawkins. Welcome to the Deep Dark Woods. I
initially started this podcast because I love how dark and
twisted the brothers Grim stories are, and for many of us,
we consider these to be the original tales. But the
more I've learned, the more I've realized there's a seed
(01:17):
underbelly to these stories that's been harmful in the real world.
The Grim Tales, for example, were co opted by the
Nazi Party to support Germany's national identity and to be
used as propaganda for fascism, white supremacy, racism, anti semitism,
and homophobia among other things. Doctor Gina Jorgensen is a folklorist,
(01:42):
gender studies scholar, lecturer at Butler University and author of
Folklore One on one, fairy Tales one on one, and
Sex Education one o one. She is here with me
today to talk about the darker side of fairy tales
and folklore. When it comes to the Grim Brothers collecting
(02:06):
these tales, you know, they talk about preserving for culture.
Can we kind of get into like, what is a
subtext of that, because that, you know, is a little
it is a little tricky.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yes, it's very tricky.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
So in the early eighteen hundreds when Yakub and Wilhelm
Grimm were being scholars in Germany, Germany wasn't Germany yet,
So it was it was Prescia, it was Hanover, It
was all these little principalities and baronies and duchies and
stuff like that. Moreover, Napoleon was rolling through and wrecking
things and taking things over. So there was this very
(02:39):
beleaguered sense of like, we are one people, we share
a language for the most part, we share cultural heritage.
We should really kick out our oppressors and become a
country for reals. And this was known as romantic nationalism
at the time, and the Grim Brothers were participating in
this strand of it that said, if we can prove
(02:59):
that we have a shared historical heritage, we can prove
that we should be a country. And they were coming
at this from two angles, first language and linguistics, and
second folklore and fairy tales. So they were active as linguists,
and so they were also One of their friends, Clemens Fontana,
was collecting folk songs and top and he was like, hey, guys.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Come do this cool thing with me.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
So as they were documenting folk tales and fairy tales
of the German people, they thought they were really contributing
to this thing that was both artistic and political at
the same time. And where it gets really tricky is
that they weren't doing what they said they were doing.
They made it sound like they were going out among
(03:43):
the folk peasants and the agricultural workers and the people
who are closest to the heart of the land, and
in reality, they were interviewing a lot of middle class
people who were of French descent. So they were getting
fairy tales from people who were very literate and very
educated and very urban. And they had some more like
(04:05):
role like peasant class tellers as well. So this was
an issue because when they first published the first two
volumes of their fairy tales, a lot of their stories
actually had French origins. So we can document that there
are earlier versions of say Bluebeard and Cinderella and Little
redding Hood that came maybe directly, maybe not, from the
(04:27):
French traditions of Charles Perraut, who was writing in the
sixteen nineties. And this leads to the really thorny issue
of who owns folklore because you know, when folklore travels,
as it does word of mouth, it travels with people
who are migrant workers, who are traders, who are explorers
and so on. If it has the tiniest kernel of
(04:47):
relevance to people, it'll take root and change to kind
of adapt to local norms, local language, local whatever. So
the fact that French fairy tales came up to Germany
and people were like, oh, yeah, we like these, we're
gonna keep telling them, they became German tales for sure.
They weren't maybe originally German tales, but maybe they weren't
originally French tales either. You know, this question of origins
(05:09):
is really complicated because if we're talking about documenting something
that starts as oral tradition, unless you have a time machine,
we have no idea when the first or original version
was composed or told until somebody happens to write it down,
which probably happens much later in its chain of transmission.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
So like, I kind of I get.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Where the Grims were coming from and being like this
is super German. Heck yeah, but it's hard to make
that claim for anybody.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, and what about the people who are like this
sln itself to like Nazis, right, the whole idea of
preserving the culture.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Yeah, So the link with Nazis came later, and it
was probably not something the grim Brothers intended their version
of nationalism. I mean, it was influenced by politics of
the day and those weren't necessarily nice. But what happened
in later years in Germany was in the preceding era
(06:10):
to World War Two, the Vimar Republic fairy tales were
being used in a lot of different ways by artists,
by writers. There were a lot of people who were
interested in both preserving the Grimms fairy tales on the
one hand, and writing new inventive versions exploring like capitalism,
socialism and other things. On the other hand, so the
Vimar Republic was a pretty like vibrant time for fairy tales.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And then when the Nazis took.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Over, there was a sort of shift where they saw
the Grims tales as sort of these authentic stories that
reveal some sort of ancient Teutonic like Viking Aryan ancestor
times and links. And so they started to treat the
Grim's tales as almost like a sacred text, where it
(06:59):
was discouraged to change them and play with them and
retell them. And so there were still authors who were
retelling fairy tales and doing interesting things, but it had
to be more according to the party line. The tales
that were being told and that were being reworked picture
books for children and things like that, the Nazi Party
(07:20):
wanted them to correspond to the values they were trying
to promote. So there was a lot of propaganda in
these tales about loyalty, purity, mothers being self sacrificing, men
being brave, and things like that. So that was a
theme that became really prominent in those tales. And there
were some people actually in the Nazi Party who wrote
(07:42):
fairy tales. I didn't know that that was a thank you,
Jack Scipes for pointing this out moment. This guy, Hans
Friedrich Blank, he was writing tales. They were all about
this really positive side of marriage and fertility. In Zipes's words,
he wrote tales for kids, he wrote tales for adults,
and he had these magical characters like Mother Hall who
(08:03):
would like affirm the importance of gerosexual marriage and women.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Staying at home and things like that.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
And Blank was actually a high Nazi official of culture,
so he was working for the Nazi party and writing
these tales that were in line with the values they
were trying to promote, because most fascist regimes are extremely
heteronormative and have an emphasis on the right people having
the right kind of babies, so they were trying to
(08:29):
use fairy tales in that regard.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I also didn't know that there was there were people
writing new stories at that time. So, just to kind
of a guess circle back on a couple things, It's
not so much that the Grim Brothers were Nazis themselves
or had that idea. It's that people have taken their
stuff and used that as like a textbook moving forward.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Yes, exactly. I would not characterize the grim brothers as
Nazis or fascists. I think they were basically nerds who
loved the idea of what the country could become. They
were linguists, their historians, They did some legal scholarship, They
did what philology, which would now have become folklore, anthropology, philosophy,
and a million other little disciplines. So they wanted to
(09:18):
do their nerdy thing and affirm that the German people
deserve to have their own country. So yeah, I wouldn't
characterize them as being in line with fascism like at all.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
That being said, the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm did
publish some tales that, when you look back at them now,
are extremely problematic. One example is a story of the
Jew and the Thornbush. Doctor Gina Jorgensen will tell us
about that one after the break. So the brothers grim
(09:56):
tales were dedicated to preserving German culture and promoting a
German national identity. Generations later, their tales were co opted
by the Nazis. We've already seen plenty of gruesome stories
and motifs, but some of the lesser known tails are
even more problematic, like this one tale that folklore's doctor
(10:18):
Gina Jorgensen told me about called the Jew and the
thorn Bush.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Yeah, so the Jew and the thorn Bush. It's one
of their tails where there's this young guy and he's
a servant and his master lets him go and totally
underpays him, like three pennies or something like that. But
this guy is very let's say, naive, and he's like,
oh cool, I'm rich. So he's gone along and he
meets this little old man who asks for money, and
(10:44):
the guy's like, oh yeah, here's all my money. And
the guy's like, all right, so you're very pure of parts.
You can have three wishes. So the young man wishes
for a gun that can hit everything that he aims at,
a fiddle that will make everyone dance when he plays it,
and he also wishes for.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
People to always do what he requests.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
And I feel like that's the trump card that kind
of makes the other two wishes like not matter but whatever.
So he keeps traveling along and he sees a Jewish
guy in the road and he's admiring a bird and
the Jews Guy's like, man, I wish I had that bird.
So the guy shoots it, which I feel like that
is also counter productive.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
And then the young man tells the.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Jew go into the bushes and get it, and there's
all these thorns, so the guy trying to like navigate
the thorns, and then the young man starts playing his
fiddle and the Jewish guy can't help but dance until
his clothes are being shredded around him. He's being all
torn up, and this young man just has a hearty
laugh and he says like, Okay, I'll stop playing if
you like give me all your money or something or
(11:38):
like a lot of gold. So they do that, and
the gat goes on his way. The Jewish guy goes
and finds like a constable or judge or whatever and
is like this man stole from me, blah blah blah.
And they get the young guy and they're like, okay, yeah,
this sounds realistic, so we will hang you now. And
the guy says just one last request, and they have
to grant his request.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
He has to play his fiddle.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
The jewsh Guy's like, no, no, anything but that, and
so the guy plays his fiddle and nobody can stop dancing,
and so again they kind of beg him to stop
playing his fiddle so that they they're like.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Screaming and they're pleading with him to stop.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
And so he says, give me my life, let me
keep those hundred gold coins so they.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Got from the Jewish guy.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
And also he tells the Jewish guy to confess to
being a swindler and a thief essentially, and the Jewish
kind of confesses that he stole all this money, and
so the Jewish guy takes the young man's place on
the gallows.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, that's just a straight up fucked up tail.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
It really is.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
And I read this stuff and I was like, I'm Jewish,
and I'm like, oh, that's not that's not good representation all.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
No, not at all. Just curious where do you think
this tale came from? Because it just seems so different.
It's not even something I had heard of before.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
So, this tale in the Grims that is known as
the Jew and the Thornbush, it has an international tail type.
It is that well known. It is tail type five
ninety two titled the Dance among Thorns, And so it
has all of these really common motifs in it, the
granting the wishes. You get this fiddle that compels people
(13:12):
to dance, and in different versions, it's not always a
Jewish person who is forced to dance. Sometimes it's a monk,
it could be somebody else. This tale type is known
since the fifteenth century in Europe, and it's told.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
All over the place.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
So we have versions in Danish, in Finnish, German, obviously,
we have Swiss versions, we have Romanian versions, there's Chinese versions,
Syrian versions. So this is a widely known tale and
it doesn't always target Jewish people as the antagonist. It
can be kind of you know, insert your scapegoat here,
(13:51):
but it is really well known. So this isn't something
that the Grims necessarily invented or promoted. I can't speak
to why they made the choices they made, but it
was probably just documenting here's a thing, and it would
have sort of fit with some of the anti Semitic
sentiments of the time, because you know, nineteenth century in
(14:11):
Germany not a great time to be a Jewish person,
and so yeah, it was probably just more a reflection
of the general culture than of the Grim Brothers anti
Semitism specifically. But again that's it's hard to speculate because
I'm not inside their brains. In most modern editions of
the Grim's fairy tales, unless they are prepared by and
for scholars, this tale is left out.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, so it definitely sounds like this tale. While again
because of that time and that's what they made the decision,
we can't really talk about it, but it definitely sounds
like this tale. It just kind of depends on what
culture or where your were, dependent on who it was
aimed at. I want to circle back around to somethings
that we're talking about earlier, specifically with the underlying messages
(14:55):
in these fairy tales. So we have like clear things
like the one that we just talked about, but then
we have that underlying message of like Cinderella or like
you know, shaping, like the loyalty, the heterosexual marriage. Like
these are like the things. But like what about other stories,
like you know, Little Red writing Hood and things like that,
Like what are some of the messages and these these
(15:16):
other main stories.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
That's an interesting one.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
There are definitely some writers in Germany in say the
nineteen twenties and post World War One defeat who interpreted
Little Red Writing Hood as this sort of metaphor for.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
The Germanic people.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
This is again drawing on the work of Jack Sypes,
who pointed out that this one guy linked the wolf
to the early Roman Empire, little red cap to like
the idea of germanness, the hunter to the idea of
the great German protector or the feur, and this idea
that literal writing hood's subjugation was linked to how the
German people were being put down and subjugated.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Post World War One. They didn't really say it was the.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
Jews, but I feel like they were maybe implying, you know,
we should have a convenian scapegoat here. So it was
just a sort of are racist and nationalistic interpretation, But yeah,
some German writers definitely tried to link a little red
writing hood to like and we too have been victimized.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And then what about specifically, I guess the idea of
like how women are supposed to be, like the idea
of like loyalty and how we're supposed to act or
how they expected like women to act and things of
that sort.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Yeah, so the Grimms did put that seed in there,
And again there's some debate as to whether they were
actively sexist or just sort of following the norms of
their times without questioning We do know because we have
different editions of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, including an eighteen
ten manuscript that wasn't really ever published, but it was
recovered later on. Because they changed their tales from the
(16:54):
first edition in eighteen twelve and eighteen fifteen. They went
through seven major revisions up through eighteen fifty seven, and
so we know that they had an active hand, especially Humgrim.
He was very actively editing some of the tales because
their first edition was like, here's some scholarship fellow nerds,
and it was full of annotations and all of this
(17:15):
stuff that would probably not interest the general reader. And
then as their books started taking off, they're like, oh oh,
people are reading these, Oh oh, people are reading these
to their kids. And they realized that they had some
images in there that they didn't want kids to be reading.
And sort of the bizarre thing is that we think
of children's literature in the twenty first century in America
(17:38):
very differently than people were thinking of children's literature in
the mid eighteen hundreds in Europe. So, first off, the
idea of childhood had shifted and was sort of a
recent European concept. I gather that in the middle Ages,
children were kind of like little minimes, like tiny adults
who just died a lot, and they were dressed as
adults and treated as adults, and there wasn't really this
(18:00):
separate life stage of childhood in the way that we
would think about it day. So when the Grims entered
the stage, there was this idea that was tied to
romanticism of the innocence of the child and how this
is idealized, and how we should all aspire to such
(18:22):
naivete and all this stuff that was also linked to nature.
And so children's literature was sort of a new genre
at the time, and the way it was often thought
of was sex.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Was not okay, and I feel like that is a.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Similar current as you've seen a lot of children's literature today.
But violence was okay because it was acceptable to scare
the crap out of kids to make them behave.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
So there were.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Children's books at the time like Slovenly Peter is a
translation of a German title, where like if kids wouldn't
stop sucking in their thumbs, someone would come along and
cut them off, Or if you wouldn't stop playing by
the fire, someone push you into the fire, and that
was acceptable, that.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Was fine, that's really intense.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Yeah, So the Grims were in this sort of tradition,
this new tradition of children that are s at the time,
where they're like, okay, so we're going to revise some
of our tales. There are references to pregnancy that they
took out. There are references to sexuality that they took out,
but they left in violence, and they left in scatological references,
and later British translators into English would like take a lot.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Of those out.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Yeah, it was just sort of this like different take
on it. But one of the things they did as
they revise their tales with the sort of new audience
of children in mind, is they really highlighted gender roles
for girls and women that were more subservient, more domesticated,
things like that. So if you look at early versions
(19:48):
of snow White, when she is either chased away or
runs away from the evil queen and she finds the dwarves,
they're like, oh, yeah, you can chill here, And then
in later versions of the same tale they're like, oh,
you can stay here if you make the beds and
cook for us and sweet. It's like a list of
what a girl should do at home explicitly laid out
(20:08):
in this fairy tale, which is kind of wild. So again,
the grims were sort of seeding those more conservative, proper
gender roles. So I can see where later people would
pick up on that and be able to amplify it
because it was already there.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
So yeah, so it's like teaching or brainwashing. However you'd
like to say, like from a very early stage of
like this is how you should be, that subservient thing,
and then also to like your big thing is to
get married, that's your happily ever after, which I'm definitely
seeing a shift, and especially in a lot of the
Cinderellas I've been watching lately, a lot of the adaptations
and watching and reading and all that sort of thing.
(20:50):
So I'm kind of also curious again still talking about
like women and gender roles and everything. You know, we
still read these tales. But do you think like women
these days have the same takeaway today like that they
did then, or do you think that that is changing.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So we know that
in the past, especially in the eighteen hundreds in Europe,
tales were often told among groups of women, who were
doing the domestic task that almost literally every woman had
to do because we didn't have anywhere to buy clothes yet,
so women would regularly spend time spinning and weaving and
(21:29):
sewing and repairing clothing and so on. This was a
major activity that women at most social economic statuses like
had to do on the regular So part of how
they made the work bearable is by telling stories.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
And we think that.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
There are some little like seeds of subversiveness in some
of these tales, like there's a little known rumpel Stiltskin
relative where you know, this girl has promised to a
king if she can spin all the straw and goal
or just spin all the straw in general, blah blah blah,
and she obviously has no magic, and she's like, a crap,
(22:05):
what I'm gonna do? And these three old women show up,
and they are hideously ugly old women, and they say,
we'll help you, but you have to invite us to
your wedding and treat us like family, and the girl's
like sold. So they complete this insane task for her
and disappear, and she's married to this king, and the
king obviously thinks that he's going to get really really
(22:25):
rich by having a wife who can either spin so
much stuff in general or spin stuff into gold. And
these three women show up at the wedding and she's
like empty, so and so come sit with us.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
And the king is like, oh okay.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
And the king is like leaning over because he can't
stop looking at these ugly women, and he's like, so
I have to ask, and he goes through each of
their features, like one has a really big lip, one
has a really big thumb, one has a really big foot,
and each one answers, Oh, it's from licking the flax,
or oh it's from treading on the wheel, and the
king is horrified. He says, my beautiful young wife shall
never spin again. And so that is for this young
(23:01):
peasant girl who just like married up, definitely a happy ending,
and it promises and escape from the tedious work that
the people telling the tale would have still had to
be doing day in and day out. So there are
these like little glimpses of the tales not being as
conservative or like foreclosing possibilities as they're often assumed to be.
(23:24):
So like, that's one puzzle piece from the past. And
again we don't have a time machine, so we can't
ask people what did you think of these stories? But
that's one clue that these stories even existed, and that
we can look at the parallels between the content of
the tales and the context of the teller's lives. Nowadays,
it is a major debate in feminist fairy tale studies
(23:44):
what kids actually think of gender roles and fairy tales,
because in the nineteen seventies we had this whole debate happening,
and a lot of feminists were like, these stories are
straight up bad for kids. They've got passive princesses, they've
got lots of domestic labor for women, you have to
be pretty to be rewarded, blah blah blah, and other
feminists were like, yeah, but that's the narrow slice of
(24:05):
what's become canonical. There are so many interesting tales from
oral tradition around the world where girls are going on
quests and girls are killing dragons and girls are doing
like a million frickin things. So yeah, if you have
a narrow view, fairy tales can be kind of like
conservative traditional gender roles, and maybe that's not good for kids,
But broaden your horizon. There's so much more out there.
(24:26):
And then the next stage of that debate, which folklorist
and author case Stone played a large role in, was
being like, Okay, but really, what do kids actually think?
And she interviewed kids, what do you think?
Speaker 1 (24:36):
What do you remember? What do you notice?
Speaker 3 (24:38):
So kids are not these little passive lumps of brain
meat to be imprinted on, Like, kids have their own
ideas and their own ways of receiving fairy tales and
thinking about them and processing them. So I think it
is a really important corrective, which the parallel in literary
studies is called reader response theory or reception theory, to
(24:59):
remember that whatever it's in the text, that's not the
only puzzle piece here, Like the text is going to
be received and interpreted by a human with an active
brain who might take away different things from it than
the next human over.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Will be right back after the break. I originally reached
out to doctor Jorgenson because someone told me about how
doctor Jorgenson's work had been appropriated by alt right people online.
So she told me what happened.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, I've kept a blog. I've blogged at a couple
different places for over a decade. Now, I personally feel
that academics should be doing outreach. We shouldn't keep all
of our knowledge locked up in the ivory tower. So
that is just part of my personal mission, is why
I write books for the general public and not necessarily
stuff that's like locked behind paywalls all the time, although
(25:54):
I write that too.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
So this thing happened.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
So in twenty seventeen, this person who styles herself a
folklorist was writing these blogs about the Romantic era, the
nationalism movement, folklore identity, which is like, okay, on the surface,
that all sounds like stuff that folklore is talk about,
find whatever. But she was writing these posts in an
effort to justify racism and stuff that we would view
(26:24):
as very right wing takes on nationalism. And so she
cited my mentor Alan Dundas to I guess, sort of
justify that folklore is about cultural heritage and blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
And then in her blog post.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
She cited me, and I was like, WHOA, don't drag
me into this, but I guess that's what happens when
you put your words out on the internet.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Who knows how they get used.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
So she had this whole like anti whatever, like rant,
like it's a word salad. It doesn't even make a
whole lot of sense. And so I did not like
being tagged into this discussion. So I wrote a blog
posts I was blogging for Patheos at the time, called
dear white Supremacists, why.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Would you cite me?
Speaker 3 (27:11):
And I took issue with her use of my mentor's work.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
I took issue with her use of my work.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
I was really confused as to why she was citing
a queer Jewish academic in her very like anti all
those things work. I just feel like it is completely
misrepresenting the contemporary field of folkloristics to support white nationalism,
white supremacy, to say, oh, as poor white white Europeans,
(27:43):
we are sober leaguered, poor us blah blah blah. Yeah,
it's a very weird move that she was making. And
so I made my own blog post, and I don't
think anything really came of it. I was worried because
her work was being picked up by like Altright and
neo Nazi leaning outlets, and that was a little worse
and I was.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Like, I hope I don't get doxed. And nothing really
came of.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
It, so thankfully that just kind of faded into Internet obscurity,
but it was. It was weird, and it is something
that folklorists do encounter sometimes in that, you know, we
aren't interested in questions of heritage and mythology and identity,
all these really interesting topics. But so are white nationalists
and so are fascists, because they need to create this
(28:29):
illusion of a racially pure origin story that ties together
communities and excludes other communities.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Which is completely false.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Like communities have always been diverse, both in terms of
like ethnicity and culture and language, like there's no such
thing as racially pure or culturally pure or whatever. But
these people need these stories to prop up their beliefs
and to justify increasingly violent actions.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
So folklost. Whenever we encountered this.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
We're like, oh, this is gross. This is not actually
accurate either, and it's something that you see. So I
have friends in neopagan circles. I have friends who do
historical reenactments and so on, and they also have to
watch out for the people. It's like, you're really into
Viking stuff. Are you really actually just nerdy about it?
Or are you a white supremacist?
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Oh? Gross.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
So it's an interesting, weird dilemma. But most folkloreers I
know are like, oh, stop, don't use our materials to
justify your disgusting bigotry.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Yeah. I've talked to a couple people who who have
said that folklores are a little bit worried now sometimes
like speaking up or whatever, because they're afraid of how
what they say or what they write is going to
be interpreted or used. So I totally understand that. I
think definitely that was very bold of you to write that.
(29:53):
In response, I'm glad you're okay and everything turned out
for the most part okay, because that does seem like
a very scary situation at least I know I would
have been a little like nervous. But I have one
last question for you. What is your take on these
modern adaptations of the more popular grim stories today? And
(30:14):
do you think that even though we're still telling these stories,
we're starting to tell them in a way that's pulling
away from the anti Semitic.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
And racist fruits. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
So, I think the fact that we still have so
many fairy tale a retelling is going in so many
directions is a testament to how fairy tales are these
shape shifters that as long as we can make them relevant.
They will basically live forever, and I find that really fascinating.
Some authors are using fairy tales to sort of talk
back to anti Semitism. So one really popular example is
(30:48):
the novel Briar Rose by Jane Nolin, which intertwines the
Grimm's version of Briar Rose or Sleeping Beauty with a
family Holocaust narrative. The other really shiny example is my
colleague Veronica Shanis, who's an academic but also an author.
She wrote a novella that is basically the protagonist is
(31:09):
the daughter of the Jew who died dancing in the
Thorns and she wants revenge. The title of this is
Among the Thorns and it's super cool. So yeah, So
there are authors who are explicitly talking back to anti
Semitism and the uses of the fairy tale and Nazi
Germany and things like that. I also see a lot
(31:30):
more general feminist and querytellings of fairy tales. I personally
I really enjoy those. I enjoy doing scholarship on them,
and it is something that again like there is potential
for harm in these stories and sort of my favorite
case study and it pissed me off, so much that
I wrote an academic article about it. But I'm really
(31:50):
interested in gender and sexual minorities and how those of
us in the LGBTQ plus umbrella are represented in tales.
So when our writing tales, when we're just the subjects
of them, all these things, and so I apologize this
has spoilers for Helen Oyam's book Boy Snow. It's basically
a snow white retelling set in mid century East Coast,
and it has this reveal at the end that like
(32:12):
I didn't see coming, and I'm like, what the hell
where the main character's abusive father that she's run away with,
and like she's kind of a snow white figure. But
then she has a step kid, so like she's kind
of the snow white stepmother figure. Is kind of an
interesting story on that regard.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
The main character's.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Parental figure turns out to be a trans man, and
so this person actually assigned female at birth was actually
kind of like a progressive young person in college, was raped,
gave birth to the protagonist, and then was so traumatized
by this that like they looked in the mirror the're like, Okay,
I'm a dude now, And this comes in like the
last five or ten pages of the book. It is
(32:49):
this big reveal and then like the main character is like, oh,
it turns out my mother was there all along under
a spell, which is another fairy tale motif, which I
guess is technically interesting, but it's this horrific story making
out trans identity to be the result of trauma, which
is not true.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
That is not a thing. And I was like, what
the shit did I just read?
Speaker 3 (33:09):
So I had to write an article about this and
like talk about the interconnections between trans identity and trauma
and untrue stereotypes and things like that. And I sort
of contrasted that text with a novella by Gabriel the
Dream called a Pair of Raven Wings, which is available
now on Amazon, And in that story, there is a
transgender character and a retold fairy tale, and they're not
(33:32):
trans because of trauma, because that's usually not a thing. Rather,
they're traumatized by the transphobia of the people around them,
and that's an important reframe. I think that is far
more accurate, And so I'm just really interested, like, you know,
how do fairy tale authors or these authors of modern
fairy tale retellings are we doing damage by not knowing
(33:53):
what the hell we're talking about, and by using someone
else's marginalized identity as a plot point, like maybe don't
do that.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, No, definitely, especially the book that you're just talking
about about, like the trauma causing like the transnists. That's
not how that works at all, whatsoever. So that is
definitely something that people need to be conscious of when
creating new content, whatever that content may be, whether you're
writing or making a movie, or you know, whatever it
is that you're doing. On that note, thank you so
(34:23):
much for joining me. I really super appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Awesome, thank you for having me. I enjoyed this conversation.
I enjoyed going back and brushing up on some of
my research on these things, and it was a pleasure
talking with you.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
That was Folklorist doctor Gina Jorgensen. Don't forget to check
out her books Folklore one on one, fairy Tales one
on one, and Sex Education one on one. Next time
on the Deep Dark Woods, A Beautiful Princess sleeps for
one hundred years. The Deep Dark Woods is a production
of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It was created, written,
(35:00):
and hosted by me Miranda Hawkins. This episode was produced
by mikelle j Une with senior producer Gabby Watts. Executive
producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley, and Maya Howard.
Theme song was composed by Jesse Niswanger, who also sound
designed and mixed this episode. If you enjoyed the show,
(35:23):
please leave a review and you can follow along with
the show on Instagram at School of Humans.
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