Tales from the Dark Woods

Since 1937, when Disney released their animated version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, children everywhere have been able to grow up believing that fairy tales really do end "happily ever after." It is surprising to many modern readers to find out that even in the earliest Brothers Grimm renditions, things weren't always quite so happy. In fact many folk tales were gruesome or aberrantly sexual. Little Red Riding Hood got naked for the wolf after eating her grandmother's remains, Cinderella didn't loose a glass slipper but a "fur slipper," with all the connotations that phrase contains. If the tone of these five popular fairy tale origins (from cracked.com) isn't convincing, then check out this massive library of online folklore and mythology texts (collected by a professor Ashliman who unfortunately retired from the University of Pittsburgh before I got there), which contains many original and chilling versions of all your favorite fairy tales.



If some of the sexual themes seem enough to have made Freud salivate, keep in mind that his disciple, Géza Róheim, made his career studying folk stories from around the world and not surprisingly was able to interpret every single one as containing themes of regression, Oedipal complexes, etc. But just as these stories might harbor sexual fantasies, they might also hint at social instabilities, or even be the remnants of mythologies when the gods no longer serve a purpose beyond entertaining children. Regardless of their origin or thematic scope, the important thing to keep in mind is that folk tales were passed down orally, in an age when there was little else in the way of entertainment and life was often dark and cruel. There really might be a wolf stalking you when you walk to your grandmother's house and stories might serve as warnings as much as amusement. And there was much less need to sugar-coat the stories we told.