SOME of the most popular fairy tales revolve around the theme “from rags to riches” and end in “they live happily ever after.”
We think of fairy tales as “harmless” stories for the young, to keep them away from having bad thoughts about the real world.
But beneath these fantasy stories of castles, queens and kings lie these tales’ horrible origins.
According to Charles Panati, author of “Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things,” many of these fairy tales’ original themes centered on rape, child abuse and abandonment—as if from the same headlines we read and watch today.
For example, the Cinderella story—believed to be the best-known fairy tale in the world—involved the brutal mutilation of women’s feet in a vain attempt to claim, in the original version of this tale, the satin slipper. Since the prince would marry whoever would fit into the slipper, the stepmother cut off the toes of her eldest daughter. When the foot was still too large, the stepmother hacked off her daughter’s heel.
The prince accepted the ugly and secretly mutilated daughter, only to be told later by a bird that the foot inside the shoe was not intact—and that Cinderella was the beauty he was after.
In the original version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” Panati said the wolf had not even digested the grandmother when he pounced on Red, “ripping her limb to limb.”
The original authors of these fairy tales worked with “immoral” and “inhumane” themes because from the 16th to the early 19th centuries, children were regarded as miniature adults.
At that time, public floggings, hangings, disembowelments and imprisonment were well attended in town squares. Thus violence, cruelty and death were no strangers to children. Panati said these fairy tales “blended blissful fantasy with harsh reality.”
In the original version of the story, Sleeping Beauty’s nightmares began when a prince planted her a kiss. She was “raped” and “abandoned,” and her illegitimate children were threatened with “cannibalism,” according to Panati.
In that story, wise men forewarned a great king that his newborn daughter, Talia or the “sleeping beauty,” was in peril from a poison splinter in flax. Although the king banned flax from the palace, Talia as a young girl happened upon a flax-spinning wheel and immediately caught a splinter beneath her fingernail, falling dead.
The king, who was grief-stricken, laid his daughter’s body on a velvet cloth, locked the palace gates and left the castle forever.
“At this point,” according to Panati, “our modern version and the original diverge.”
In the original version, a nobleman who was hunting in the woods discovered the abandoned palace and the body of Talia. Instead of merely kissing her, he raped her and departed. Nine months later, the sleeping princess gave birth to twins—a boy and a girl named Sun and Moon. Fairies looked after the twins.
One day, the male infant sucked his mother’s finger and the poisonous splinter was dislodged, restoring Talia to consciousness.
Months passed, and the nobleman—recollecting his encounter with the fair-haired sleeping beauty—revisited the palace and found her awake. He confessed to being the father of Talia’s children, and they enjoyed a week-long affair before he left her again—for his wife, whose existence he conveniently never mentioned.
Panati said the original story, at this point, gets increasingly “bizarre.”
The nobleman’s wife learned of her husband’s bastard children. She had them captured and assigned them to her cook, with orders that their young throats be slashed and their flesh prepared in a savory hash. Only when her husband had half-finished the dish did she gleefully announce, “You are eating what is your own.” The nobleman believed he had eaten his children, but it turned out that the goodhearted cook spared the twins and substituted goat meat.
The enraged wife ordered that the captured Talia be burned alive at the stake. The father of her children, however, saved Sleeping Beauty at the last moment. It was only then that they, perhaps, lived happily ever after.
Eventually, these violent tales were modified and the children were spared from the horrible versions.
All that we know now is that Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella lived good lives, and this was the story we were told as children and will tell our own kids.
