Fairy Tales.

Hello and Happy Monday. Glad that you are here. 

I read to my son every night. We have these little rituals at night and always curl up in bed while he waits for his bedtime story. I love that he is into books for now.

Have you heard of the Brothers Grimm? Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were German linguists and academics who wrote the most famous German children’s books and fairy tales. Stories like “Little Red Riding Hood”, “The Frog Prince”, “Hansel and Gretel”, “Sleeping Beauty” and many more. I found an old Brothers Grimm book on my son’s bookshelf the other day and started reading to him when I realized how dark all these stories actually are. When you are a child I believe you won’t realize that your parents just read to you that a little girl (Little Red Riding Hood) walked all by herself through the dark deep woods to find grandma’s house. Then she met a weird wolf who asks her were the grandma lives. She tells him and the wolf devours her, jumps in her bed and waits for the girl. The wolf then of course gets shot by a hunter who slits him open and puts many rocks into the wolf’s belly.  Then throws him into a well. The hunter rescues the girl, brings her back to the parents and everything is a-okay. The end. While all this sounds like a horror movie in a way this is supposed to make kids sleep. And my siblings and I slept, believe it or not. We were fine. We did not think about anything bad really or are traumatized. Or are we? Hah! 

While reading Grimm’s fairy tales you will find tons of magic. Like in Disney films and other fairy tales. However, with Grimms’, children who don’t behave might also burn to death in an oven next to a gingerbread house. And all this just because they ate pieces of the woman’s house instead of starving to death. Their parents abandoned them and sent them in the deep dark woods because they were all poor and had nothing to eat. Way to go, parents!  [wondering: a witch? or just a woman who wants to live far away from society, built herself her dream house in the middle of nowhere and now these kids come and try to eat it all up?] 

Some of these tales are just dark. Besides child abandonment (Hello, Hansel and Gretel) you will read about a woman who is kept in a tower for it seems thousand years because her hair has become so long that the prince who wants to rescue her climbs up into the tower on her hair. Say what? Yep, bizarre, I know. Rapunzel at its best. I think that these fairy tales all have one thing in common. They all do use an extraordinary language to mirror our fears and hopes of this world and to let us know that a few lucky ones are able to escape this gingerbread house, forest or tower that metaphorically means life. Of course Grimm’s tales are a bit on the darker side but as far as life lessons and moral they are right on. You teach your kids to not trust strangers (or wolfs in the park, damn you wolves!), that family is important and whatnot. And in the end we all live awesomely every after. 

However, do Fairy tales still teach us lessons today? Are Fairy tales just for kids? What are you reading to your kids?