This book was a favorite of mine when I was young; my mother gave it to me on my tenth birthday. I read it, along with collections of Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and Oscar Wilde, over and over again. I treasure this canon of fairy and folk tales, drawing upon its themes and details often in my own writing.
When I was a child back in the mid-seventies, you could only see any given Disney cartoon about once every seven years in a movie theater (preferably a drive-in, with homemade treats, to save money). In one generation, the way children experience entertainment has changed radically. Kids today, mine included, can pop in a video or DVD on a whim and memorize a film through repeated viewings in close succession.
Patrick loves to quote The Brady Bunch Movie when Mike says, "You know, Cindy, when you tattle on your friends, you're really tattling on yourself." When it comes to fairy tales, this rule certainly applies.
I'm not a Disney-basher, but I do find it interesting to track the way The Big Mouse's storytelling has evolved, from the more or less faithful rendition of Snow White (1937), in all its grimness (pun intended); to the changing of the ending of The Little Mermaid (1989) from Andersen's tragic original; to the drastic morphing or outright invention of heroines like Princess Jasmine (1992), Fa Mulan (1998), and bran-new Princess Maddie (2008) for the sake of multiculturalism in recent years.
I heartily agree with Disney’s strategy: every girl should be able to identify with a Disney Princess, and since it's much harder to code-switch when experiencing a visual medium as opposed to a written, the princesses' physical characteristics assume paramount importance. But back to the originals.
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were linguistics professors who contributed significantly to the first comprehensive German dictionary. Germany as we now know it did not exist then; after the fall of The Holy Roman Empire, that geographical area was divided into many small kingdoms and principalities.
The Brothers Grimm gathered the folk tales that made up their famous collections (and conducted their groundbreaking research in the field of linguistics) in the early nineteenth century in an effort to help create a German identity. Contrary to popular myth, they did not go door to door, cottage to cottage to record the stories, but gathered them primarily from the middle class and aristocracy, who in turn had often heard the tales from their servants.
The stories themselves bear the hallmarks of a rich and diverse cultural imagination, but they also have much in common with one another. The reader finds strong Christian overtones throughout, and nearly every tale has a not very subtle moral. Goodness is rewarded; evil is punished harshly and unstintingly. The stories are grisly as a matter of course, a fact that can stun readers raised with post-Victorian notions of what childhood should be.
Modern readers who cringe at the ghastly particulars that adorn nearly every tale would do well to bear in mind that until very recently in human history, even very small children witnessed all kinds of 'PG-13' details in daily life. Animals were slaughtered; parents and siblings died. Rules of inheritance and birthright were inflexible and unforgiving.
Food could be scarce, so every bit of offal was used and valued. Large families lived with almost no privacy in very tight quarters. Medical and surgical procedures were performed in the home, with highly inconsistent results. We take modern plumbing and hygiene for granted, but even the shoddiest gas station restroom would be a miraculous and relatively odor-free environment to a nineteenth-century observer.
For me, the darkness of the original tales adds to my enjoyment of them. They feel real, despite their fantastical and archetypal elements; the characters are human and three-dimensional in a way that those in Disney movies can never be. When I want to rediscover for myself or teach my children about richness and humanity, I'll turn to the original folk tales every time.