I. Citing concerns about alcohol use, an illustrated edition of "Little Red Riding Hood" was banned in two California school districts in 1989 because it depicted our heroine taking food and wine to her grandmother.
II. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm was banned in classrooms below the 6th grade in Arizona in 1994, due to "excessive violence, negative portrayals of female characters, and anti-Semitic references."
III. “Snow White” was restricted to students with parental permission at the Duval, Fl County public school libraries (1992) because of its graphic violence: a hunter kills a wild boar, and a wicked witch orders Snow White’s heart torn out.
Guardians of the Fairy Tale:
The Brothers Grimm
By Thomas O’Neill
Once upon a time there lived in Germany two brothers who loved a good story—one with magic and danger, royalty and rogues. As boys they played and studied together, tight as a knot, savoring their childhood in a small town. But their father died unexpectedly, and the family grew poor. One brother became sickly; the other, serious beyond his years. At school they met a wise man who led them to a treasure—a library of old books with tales more seductive than any they had ever heard. Inspired, the brothers began collecting their own stories, folktales told to them mostly by women, young and old. Soon the brothers brought forth their own treasure—a book of fairy tales that would enchant millions in faraway places for generations to come.
The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, named their story collection Children’s and Household Tales and published the first of its seven editions in Germany in 1812. The table of contents reads like an A-list of fairy-tale celebrities: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, the Frog King. Dozens of other characters—a carousel of witches, servant girls, soldiers, stepmothers, dwarfs, giants, wolves, devils—spin through the pages. Drawn mostly from oral narratives, the 210 stories in the Grimms’ collection represent an anthology of fairy tales, animal fables, rustic farces, and religious allegories that remains unrivaled to this day.
Grimms’ Fairy Tales, as the English-language version is usually called, pervades world culture. So far the collection has been translated into more than 160 languages, from Inupiat in the Arctic to Swahili in Africa. In the United States book buyers have their choice of 120 editions. As a publishing phenomenon the Grimms’ opus competes with the Bible. And the stories and their star characters continue to leap from the pages into virtually every media: theater, opera, comic books, movies, paintings, rock music, advertising, fashion. The Japanese, perhaps the most ravenous of all the Grimms’ fans, have built two theme parks devoted to the tales. In the United States the Grimms’ collection furnished much of the raw material that helped launch Disney as a media giant. Cinderella and Snow White easily hold their own with the new kids on the block, whether Big Bird or Bart Simpson.
As for the brothers, they are recognized as pioneers in the field of folklore research. Their crystalline fairy-tale style—the Grimms extensively edited and rewrote drafts of the narratives—has influenced generations of children’s writers and paved the way for other masters of the genre, from Hans Christian Andersen to Maurice Sendak. But the Grimms’ stories do not speak only to the young. “The age for hearing these fairy tales is three years to death,” says Elfriede Kleinhans, a professional storyteller in Germany. “Our world can seem so technical and cold. All of us need these stories to warm our souls.”
Such lasting fame would have shocked the humble Grimms. During their lifetimes the collection sold modestly in Germany, at first only a few hundred copies a year. The early editions were not even aimed at children. The brothers initially refused to consider illustrations, and scholarly footnotes took up almost as much space as the tales themselves.
Jacob and Wilhelm viewed themselves as patriotic folklorists, not as entertainers of children. They began their work at a time when Germany, a messy patchwork of fiefdoms and principalities, had been overrun by the French under Napoleon. The new rulers were intent on suppressing local culture. As young, workaholic scholars, single and sharing a cramped flat, the Brothers Grimm undertook the fairy-tale collection with the goal of saving the endangered oral tradition of Germany.
For much of the 19th century teachers, parents, and religious figures, particularly in the United States, deplored the Grimms’ collection for its raw, uncivilized content. An American educator in 1885 railed: “The folktales mirror all too loyally the entire medieval worldview and culture with all its stark prejudice, its crudeness and barbarities.” Offended adults objected to the gruesome punishments inflicted on the stories’ villains. In the original “Snow White” the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she falls down dead. In “The Goose Maid” a treacherous servant is stripped, thrown into a barrel studded with sharp nails, and dragged through the streets. Even today some protective parents shy from the Grimms’ tales because of their reputation for violence.
Despite its sometimes rocky reception, Children’s and Household Tales gradually took root with the public. The brothers had not foreseen that the appearance of their work would coincide with a great flowering of children’s literature in Europe. English publishers led the way, issuing high-quality picture books such as Jack and the Beanstalk and handsome folktale collections, all to satisfy a newly literate audience seeking virtuous material for the nursery. Once the Brothers Grimm sighted this new public, they set about refining and softening their tales, which had originated centuries earlier as earthy peasant fare. In the Grimms’ hands, cruel mothers became nasty stepmothers, unmarried lovers were made chaste, and the incestuous father was recast as the devil.
In the 20th century the Grimms’ fairy tales have come to rule the bookshelves of children’s bedrooms. And why not? The stories read like dreams come true: Handsome lads and beautiful damsels, armed with magic, triumph over giants and witches and wild beasts. They outwit mean, selfish adults. Inevitably the boy and girl fall in love and live happily ever after. Read me another one, please.
And parents keep reading because they approve of the finger-wagging lessons inserted into the stories: Keep your promises, don’t talk to strangers, work hard, obey your parents. According to the Grimms, the collection served as “a manual of manners.”
Americans fell in love with the Grimms’ tales when Walt Disney in 1937 released his animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first of three wildly popular Disney adaptations. In converting a short story into an 80-minute musical, the Disney studio sweetened the material, giving the dwarfs names like Sneezy and Happy. In Cinderella (1950) Disney frosted the plot by adding a carriage that turns into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight.
The Grimms’ texts have undergone so many adaptations and translations, often with the intent of censoring objectionable material such as the violence meted out to villains or of making the themes more relevant to contemporary tastes, that most of us know them only in their sanitized versions. The dust-jacket copy of a recent translation plaintively wonders if all the retellings don’t “greatly reduce the tales’ power to touch our emotions and intrigue our imaginations.”
In a fourth-grade classroom in Steinau, Germany, the town where the Grimms spent part of their childhood, I listened as the storyteller Elfriede Kleinhans, an opponent of prim retellings, asked the boys and girls how the princess managed to turn a frog into a prince at the climax of the “The Frog King,” the first tale in the Grimms’ collection. “She kissed it,” the children sang out. “No,” said Kleinhans. “She threw the ugly frog at the wall as hard as she could, and it awoke as a prince. That’s what the real story says.” The children looked as if they didn’t believe her.
Scholars and psychiatrists have thrown a camouflaging net over the stories with their relentless, albeit fascinating, question of “What does it mean?” Did the tossing of the frog symbolize the princess’s sexual awakening, as Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim asserted, or does the princess provide a feminist role model, as Lutz Röhrich, a German folklorist, wondered, by defying the patriarchal authority of her father, the king? Or—maybe—a frog is just a frog.
The tales have also fallen prey to ideologues and propagandists. Theorists of the Third Reich in Germany turned Little Red Riding Hood into a symbol of the German people, saved from the evil Jewish wolf. At the end of World War II, Allied commanders banned the publication of the Grimm tales in Germany in the belief that they had contributed to Nazi savagery.
On campuses across Europe and the United States during the 1970s, the Grimms’ tales were scorned for promoting a sexist, authority-ridden worldview. “Madness Comes From Fairy Tales” was scrawled on walls in Germany. Some of the stories were rewritten to accommodate certain political tastes. A revision of “Cinderella,” for example, has the heroine organizing a union of local maids, prompting the king to arrest her, after which she emigrates to the U.S. to escape the tyranny of kings and queens.
Asked about this landslide of commentary by shrinks and scholars and ideologues, Bernhard Lauer, director and curator of the Museum of the Brothers Grimm in Kassel, Germany, looked sadly at me and protested, “The tales are literary masterpieces! They are not recipes for everyday life.”
Enthralled since childhood by the geography of the Grimms’ tales—the ominous forests, the brooding castles, the firelit cottages and clamorous village streets—I traveled to Germany to see if I could trace the contours of my imaginary map and possibly discover who these Brothers Grimm really were and how they became the preeminent cartographers of make-believe. My plan was to visit towns in Hesse where the brothers lived and worked to find out who told them the stories and how much the Grimms doctored what they heard. And I would roam the back roads to see if landscapes evoked by the fairy tales still lingered in the Hessian countryside.
Snow streaked the ground in brushstrokes as I drove east from Frankfurt and its glass skyscrapers into Grimm country. Except for their final years in Berlin, Jacob and Wilhelm spent most of their lives in the small towns and provincial cities of today’s state of Hesse in the German midsection, close to what—once upon a time—was the border with East Germany. Except for the autobahn’s ribbon of concrete and roadside clusters of metal silos, the Hessian countryside today might look remarkably familiar to the Grimms. Red-roofed villages nestle in the folds of hills and along river valleys. Stone castles rise from nearby heights, sprouting towers and battlements. Fields that will later ripen with corn and beets roll toward thick forests that frame the horizon like the borders of a woodcut.
The oldest of six children, Jacob and Wilhelm were born a year apart in the mid-1780s in Hanau, a market town less than a day’s carriage ride from Frankfurt. Their father, Philipp, the son of a clergyman, was educated in law and served as Hanau’s town clerk, a solid middle-class vocation. Father Grimm preached a life of faith, zealous work, and family loyalty. Their mother, Dorothea, gave the boys freedom to wander the countryside where, as Wilhelm later noted, their “collector’s spirit” was born as they chased down butterflies and bugs.
Nothing remains of the Grimms’ birthplace in Hanau. Like most of the houses they occupied, it was destroyed by aerial bombing during World War II. A bronze statue of the brothers sits in front of the Rathaus, or city hall. It features two long-haired men in frock coats absorbed in reading a book, their greatest joy. Tourists regularly gather at its base, their own noses stuck in books, usually travel guides. The statue marks the beginning of the Deutsche Märchenstrasse, or
German Fairy-tale Road, a 370-mile [600-kilometer] route that meanders through central Germany to sites associated with the Grimms or to picturesque places that simply put the traveler in a fairy-tale mood.
By 1791 the family had moved northeast to Steinau, another small trade center, where the father took the position of district magistrate. The Grimms lived well in a large turreted stone house that doubled as the local courthouse. It survives today as a museum of Grimm manuscripts and memorabilia, with revolving exhibits of contemporary fairy-tale illustrators.
At the center of Steinau stands a gaunt 16th-century castle ringed by a grassy moat. Wandering one night through the tiny town, the kind of quiet, uneventful town “where the fox and hare say good night to each other,” as the Germans say, I entered the moon-shadowed courtyard of the castle and listened to my boots ringing on the cobblestones. In so many of the Grimms’ tales an aspiring commoner is ushered into just such a royal space, challenged to make a princess laugh or to bring back three golden hairs from the devil’s head. Success meant riches and a royal bride. When the Grimms wrote of castles in their tales, perhaps they remembered this boyhood place.
The Steinau years marked the end of ease and innocence for Jacob and Wilhelm. In 1796 their father died at the age of 44. Dorothea was forced to move her family of six children out of the government residence.
With financial help from Dorothea’s sister, a lady-in-waiting for a Hessian princess, Jacob and Wilhelm, at 13 and 12, were sent north to the city of Kassel to attend the Lyzeum, an upper-crust high school. Sharing the same room and bed, the boys coped with loneliness and social slights by studying for ten hours a day. They proved themselves brilliant students, graduating at the top of their classes. The physical effort took its toll on Wilhelm, however. Already of delicate health, he suffered a serious asthma attack at school. Weak lungs and recurring illnesses would vex him the rest of his life.
“We know from his letters that Jacob walked this route many times,” Fischer said. “In one he complained that there are more steps on the streets than stairs in the houses.” We continued past a spiky Gothic church, an organ booming inside, to a three-story stone house just below the town castle. It was here that a young aristocratic law professor, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, impressed by Jacob’s appetite for learning, opened his private library to the older Grimm brother. That changed Jacob’s life. He spent hours poring over Savigny’s collection of rare manuscripts of medieval epics and hero’s tales. The experience awoke in Jacob a passion for deciphering and saving ancient German literature and folktales, a cause that his younger brother would also embrace.
Jacob did not look and act the part of a fiery activist. Short and sturdy, he was by temperament an introvert, his whole being dedicated to bookish research. At Marburg he would decline invitations to stroll the countryside, saying he preferred “a walk in literature.” Fellow students called him “the old one.” Wilhelm, a determined scholar like his brother, was more outgoing. “Wilhelm had an eye for women, and women had an eye for him,” Heinz Rölleke, a Grimm scholar at the University of Wuppertal, told me. Fervent letters passed between Wilhelm and Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff, a wealthy young woman whom he met in a storytelling circle.
Class differences foiled any chance of marriage. Wilhelm at the age of 39 would marry a childhood friend, Dortchen Wild, daughter of a pharmacist and herself a prominent source of fairy tales for the collection. Jacob, a lifelong bachelor, was by far the dominant partner intellectually, initiating most of their projects. Yet the brothers worked well together, signing their joint undertakings simply “Brothers Grimm.”
Children’s and Household Tales, their great collaboration, began in an almost offhand fashion. Immersed in editing and translating medieval manuscripts, the brothers started to gather fairy tales as a favor for a friend planning a collection of German folk literature. After several years the Grimms had assembled 49 tales, taking a few from old books, the rest from acquaintances in Kassel. But when the friend failed to produce the collection, the brothers decided to expand their efforts and publish their own volume.
Collecting fairy tales must have provided Jacob and Wilhelm a welcome distraction from their living circ*mstances. Their mother had died in 1808. Money grew scarcer. Employed as a librarian for the detested resident French ruler, Jacob could barely support his five siblings. Wilhelm was sick from asthma and a weak heart and was unable to work. In 1812, the year the fairy tales were first published, the Grimms were surviving on a single meal a day—a hardship that could explain why so many of the characters in their book suffer from hunger.
Though new editions of the fairy tales continued to appear until 1857, two years before Wilhelm’s death, collection of almost all the oral tales took place when the brothers were in their impressionable 20s.
Altogether some 40 persons delivered tales to the Grimms. Many of the storytellers came to the Grimms’ house in Kassel. The brothers particularly welcomed the visits of Dorothea Viehmann, a widow who walked to town to sell produce from her garden. An innkeeper’s daughter, Viehmann had grown up listening to stories from travelers on the road to Frankfurt. Among her treasures was “Aschenputtel”— Cinderella.
With the exception of Viehmann, the brothers rarely identified their correspondents. Their names and the tales credited to them were learned in most cases only after careful study of the margin notes in the brothers’ personal copies of the Tales.
The true identity of one of the most important informants—a certain “Marie”—came to light only in the mid-1970s. Marie was credited in the notes with narrating many of the most famous tales: “Rotkäppchen” (Little Red Riding Hood), “Schneewittchen” (Snow White), and “Dornröschen” (Sleeping Beauty). Herman Grimm, the oldest son of Wilhelm and guardian of the Grimms’ legacy after the brothers’ deaths, contended for many years that the Marie in question was the old housekeeper of Wilhelm's in-laws.
It took a close reading of the annotations by Heinz Rölleke of the University of Wuppertal to reveal that the storytelling Marie was in fact Marie Hassenpflug, a 20-year-old friend of their sister, Charlotte, from a well-bred, French-speaking family.
I encountered a likeness of Marie on a wall in Wolfgang Hassenpflug’s house in Rinteln. Herr Hassenpflug, a retired engineer with a poet’s head of unruly white hair, is the great-great-grandson of Charlotte Grimm, known as Lotte in family circles. In 1822, he explained, 29-year-old Lotte left the household of her five brothers and married a longtime family friend, Ludwig Hassenpflug, a brother of Marie. Because the direct lines of Jacob and Wilhelm appear to have died out with the death of Wilhelm’s daughter in 1919, Wolfgang Hassenpflug now finds himself the inheritor of many Grimm family treasures, as well as mementos from the Hassenpflug lineage.
The walls of Hassenpflug’s elegant stone house are hung with original portraits of the Grimm brothers and of their sister and her family—copperplate prints all etched by a third brother Grimm, Ludwig. Marie looks out with large soulful eyes, her thin face framed by dark curls.
For my visit Hassenpflug’s wife, Gerda, dressed a table for lunch with one of Lotte’s original damask tablecloths, with “LG” stitched in one corner. Wolfgang told the story of Marie’s “rediscovery” and explained how the family’s French-Huguenot background influenced her storytelling ability. “Like the Grimms she grew up in Hanau, which at the time was a very French town,” Hassenpflug said. “Her nursemaids naturally told French stories. The Grimms may at first have thought Marie’s tales all came from Hesse, but the famous ones we now know came from France and the book by Charles Perrault.”
Marie’s wonderful stories blended motifs from the oral tradition and from Perrault’s influential 1697 book, Tales of My Mother Goose, which contained elaborate versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” and “Sleeping Beauty,” among others. Many of these had been adapted from earlier Italian fairy tales. In the second edition of their own collection the Grimms acknowledged the deep international roots of many of their tales. Included in their notes are references to variants from many other cultures, including Russian, Finnish, Japanese, Irish, and Slavic.
Long before the Grimms’ time, storytelling thrived in the milieu of roadhouses, barns, and, perhaps most energetically, in the Spinnstuben, the spinning chambers of peasant women. During winter nights women softened the long hours of spinning flax into yarn by entertaining themselves with tales spiced with adventure, romance, and magic. The Grimm tales feature many spinners, most famously in “Rumpelstiltskin,” in which a poor miller’s daughter, ordered by a king to spin straw into gold—failure means death, success a royal marriage—enlists the aid of a devilish little man, Rumpelstiltskin.
Given that the origins of many of the Grimm fairy tales reach throughout Europe and into the Middle East and Orient, the question must be asked: How German are the Grimm tales? Very, says scholar Heinz Rölleke. Love of the underdog, rustic simplicity, sexual modesty—these are Teutonic traits.
The coarse texture of life during medieval times in Germany, when many of the tales entered the oral tradition, also colored the narratives. Throughout Europe children were often neglected and abandoned, like Hänsel and Gretel. Accused witches were burned at the stake, like the evil mother-in-law in “The Six Swans.” “The cruelty in the stories was not the Grimms’ fantasy,” Rölleke points out. “It reflected the law-and-order system of the old times.”
Possibly the most German touch of all is the omnipresence of the forest, the place where fairy-tale heroes confront their enemies and triumph over fear and injustice. Rural German society traditionally depended on the Wald. The forest was where farmers grazed their pigs on acorns, royals hunted deer, and woodcutters selected logs for the massive beams still seen in the half-timbered barns and houses of Hessian towns.
Storytellers knew that to place characters in a dark trackless woods would stir up associations of danger and suspense. “The forest was not seen as a safe place. Townspeople would avoid it,” forester Hermann-Josef Rapp told me as we drove wet logging roads through the Reinhardswald, a large forest in the hills of northern Hesse. “There were outlaws and illegal hunters. And Germans have always been afraid of wolves.”
Nowadays the Reinhardswald is thick with beech and introduced spruce, serving local sawmills. But to behold those mighty oaks that were the preferred species in most Grimm fairy tales, one has to visit a remnant forest near Sababurg Castle. Rapp, a trunk of a man in a green oilskin jacket, led me into that forest one day in a pouring rain. Here massive, arthritic-looking oaks, some of them 400 years old or more, loomed like Gothic ruins. I spooked myself staring at the thick, grasping limbs, the wild hairlike mosses, the knobby eyes, the holes that gaped like mouths. How could Little Red Riding Hood’s mother ever have let that sweet little girl go into such woods as these?
Despite the strong Germanic flavoring of the tales, the first edition sold poorly. At the Grimms museum in Kassel, director Bernhard Lauer placed the brothers’ personal copy of the first edition in front of me, handling it as if it were a Fabergé egg. “It’s the most valuable thing in the museum,” he said, “Only a few of the original 900 copies still exist. The paper quality was very poor.”
Mild commercial success did not come until 1825, when the Grimms published the Small Edition, a condensed collection of 50 stories with illustrations by their brother Ludwig. The 1825 volume, of which 1,500 copies were printed, is even rarer than the 1812; only four or five copies survive in libraries. With the debut of the cheaply priced Small Edition, the Grimms had at last figured out who their true audience was: children.
By the second edition in 1819 Wilhelm had taken over the lead responsibility for the fairy tales, Jacob having turned his attentions to a scholarly exegesis on German grammar. Wilhelm proved an inspired editor. By streamlining plots to emphasize action, weaving into the narrative old proverbs and folk poems, and using poetic language to set scenes, Wilhelm created a style that remains a model for fairy-tale writing.
Wilhelm continued to polish and reshape the tales up to the final edition of 1857. Comparisons of the various editions reveal that in his effort to make the stories more acceptable to children and their middle-class parents, Wilhelm removed any hint of sexual activity, such as the premarital couplings of Rapunzel and the prince who climbed into her tower. He also added Christian motifs, accented the child-rearing lessons of the tales, and emphasized gender roles. Though the brothers implied that they were mere recorders of tales, such literary and moral restylings of oral narratives were apparently crucial to bring the tales into the mainstream. “Yet despite all Wilhelm’s additions,” Rölleke said, “the cores of the stories were left untouched.”
The editorial fingerprints left by the Grimms betray the specific values of 19th-century Christian, bourgeois German society. But that has not stopped the tales from being embraced by almost every culture and nationality in the world. What accounts for this widespread, enduring popularity? Bernhard Lauer points to the “universal style” of the writing. “You have no concrete descriptions of the land, or the clothes, or the forest, or the castles. It makes the stories timeless and placeless.”
The tales allow us to express “our utopian longings,” says Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota, whose 1987 translation of the complete fairy tales captures the rustic vigor of the original text. “They show a striving for happiness that none of us knows but that we sense is possible. We can identify with the heroes of the tales and become in our mind the masters and mistresses of our own destinies.”
Fairy tales provide a workout for the unconscious, psychoanalysts maintain. Bruno Bettelheim famously promoted the therapeutic value of the Grimms’ stories, calling fairy tales the “great comforters.” By confronting fears and phobias, symbolized by witches, heartless stepmothers, and hungry wolves, children find they can master their anxieties. Bettelheim’s theory continues to be hotly debated. But most young readers aren’t interested in exercising their unconscious. My 11-year-old daughter, Lucy, thinks it’s cool that witches cast spells and that heroines always seem to get their man. Boys I know go for stuff like the cloak that makes a hero invisible and a rifle that never misses.
The Grimm tales in fact please in an infinite number of ways. Something about them seems to mirror whatever moods or interests we bring to our reading of them. This flexibility of interpretation suits them for almost any time and any culture.
Jacob and Wilhelm moved on from their jobs as librarians in Kassel to teach at universities in Göttingen and Berlin. Between them they published more than 35 books. The brothers also made a name for themselves as patriots, risking their livelihoods by speaking out in favor of democratic reform. But in their last years they retreated from politics and teaching to concentrate on writing the German Dictionary, one of the most ambitious scholarly projects of 19th-century Europe.
The brothers did not live to finish the dictionary or to see the fulfillment of their abiding dream: the founding in 1871 of the German nation. Wilhelm died of an infection in 1859 at the age of 73. Jacob in his eulogy bestowed upon his beloved Wilhelm the name Märchenbruder, the “fairy-tale brother.” Jacob died four years later. He had just finished writing the dictionary definition for Frucht, or fruit, a fitting end to a fertile life.
The Brothers Grimm, for the final fairy tale in their collection, chose a short, parable-like tale called “The Golden Key.” A poor boy goes out into a wintry forest to collect wood on a sled. In the snow he finds a tiny key and near it an iron box. The boy inserts the key. He turns it. He lifts the lid.
That is where the story ends. For once the brothers avoid a tidy ending. Instead, they have issued a golden invitation, since accepted by countless readers, to open the brothers’ books with the key of the imagination. Only then can readers discover what wonderful things await them.
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Should children be told fairy tales?
A 1903 debate
A very brief introduction
Since about 1800, the role of fairy tales in education has repeatedly been under discussion. And not just that: the tendency to shelter children from what was considered ugly, illogical, violent, or frightening, increasingly led to presenting them with watered-down versions of the original tales -- as becomes apparent, for example, when chronologically ordering different versions of the same tale.
Without going into the great variety of arguments (historical, literary, educational, psychological, religious, moral) used over time both pro and contra fairy tales, we want to present here one small but curious episode from that discussion.
This instance nicely illustrates with what arguments (and with what fervour) this matter was debated in times before Freudian fairy tale interpretations, and before the wide acceptance of psychological theories of child development.
In 1903, a German-language education manual for parents, Dr. Karl Oppel's The Parent's Book: Practical Guidance for the Education at Home, was published in a Dutch translation. Oppel was strongly opposed to telling fairy tales, and in his book he clearly said so. But the Dutch translator, Mrs. G.M. van de Wissel-Herderscheê, found Oppel's views in this respect so objectionable, that she inserted some paragraphs of her own in the book, telling the reader she felt obliged to protest against the author's views.
On the next page (below), we present (translated into English) first what Oppel wrote against telling fairy tales to one's children.
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Chapter XIV: THE FAIRY-TALE
The fairy tales, that is fantastic tales of miraculous, supernatural things and events, aim at arresting the imagination by stimulating the imagination in a very vivid way; sorcerers and fairies, spirits and ghosts, fabulous animals and unanimate things endowed with miraculous powers appear as actors in them, bound by no rule or prescription, which makes them really very fit to capture the attention of listeners and readers. But are they recommendable for youth? I know, that I with my opinion will contradict thousands of fathers and educators, but yet I for myself answer this question with a very decided No.
Many fairy tales fill the imagination with horrible images, with terrifying figures and by this they lay the foundation of scare and fear and of the nervosity that is so frequent these days. Is it a wonder, if the child does not want to stay alone in the dark, -- there in the corner sits that terrible man-eater, whets his large knife, leers at him with his terrible eyes and growls: "I smell people's flesh." Why Philip cannot get to sleep? Can you blame him, listen! step, step, step, -- doesn't there that terrible monster ascend the stairs, that wrings the neck of children, and sucks their blood?
When in the much-praised Grimm fairy tales the young man sits down under the gallows to amuse himself with the seven corpses of the hanged, when he aims with skulls at bones, takes the corpses from the coffins and lays them with him in bed, then surely these are no beautiful images that enrichen the imagination; nor are the bad devilish step-mothers; and when in one fairy tale the ghost with his glowing fingers scorches the handkerchief, and in another the old witch with her owl-face pushes poor little boys into the oven, then one should not be surprised, when children become scared, and afraid for not-existing things.
But at the same time fairy tales feed the love for the miraculous and further the belief in the supernatural. One is often surprised to see how some people accept the most unreasonable, let them tell the most nonsensical and even believe it, yes how even civilized people demonstrate a credulity, that would be totally incomprehensible, if one did not know, how the susceptible children's mind had been prepared for this by all kinds of miracle tales.
Does not a very large part of the entire population still lie in the fetters of superstition? And now I do not mean the inhabitants of remote villages, that may not even have a school, but those, who have attended a well-renowned institution of education and have amassed much (useful or useless) knowledge in their brains.
[Oppel here gives some examples: how some ladies don't dare to sit thirteen at their table, and how in 1879 the King of Spain changed his marriage date when he found it was planned on a Friday. He continues:]
How much fear and worry would people save themselves, once the superstition was rooted out! I am of the opinion, that one should never tell children any extranatural (or, as many would have it) supernatural thing, no miracle stories, no fairy tales, nothing of fairies and ghosts; most of all one should not think, that a child, when told it is just a fairy tale, would not believe it for that reason. Far from it. Little children believe everything, because they do not think yet, and it does not matter much, whether one says with it: "It's true," or "It's not true".
Little Fritz enters and asks Grandfather: "Where is Uncle Gustav?" The old man says jokingly: "He's sitting under the book-case." Little Fritz immediately runs to it, gets down on his knees and starts searching Uncle under the book-case. He does not realize for one moment, that not even a dog could be sitting there, let alone a man; he accepts all that is said to him for truth, and I have often experienced, that stories which were told to children explicitly as fantasy, were accepted by them as reality, and that in spite of repeated explanations, such tales made entirely the impression on them of something that really happened.
Niemeyer [
2] is certainly wrong when he says: "It does little harm, when the love for the miraculous is fed by stories about spirits and ghosts, because by getting to know the laws of nature and their effects, all adventurous fantasies will soon dissolve as a haze in the sun." The fifteen year old boy may not believe anymore in the candy house and the frog king, but he has become much more susceptible to believe in other unnatural and miraculous things, and we even see, how people at the age of fifty still take dancing tables, poltergeists, ghosts, predictions, presentiments for the truth.
It stands without contradiction: Miraculous stories offer satisfaction only when one (entirely or partially) believes them. Sensible men do not read fairy tales anymore, they are bored by them; but children like to read them, for they still get goose bumps, when Rübezahl [
3] or the Black Bride appears.
My children were never told fairy tales, nor were they allowed to read them, before they were about fourteen years old; then it was my pleasure to give them permission, but see, they did read them, but found them silly and strange and put them away. Now they are allowed to read fairy tales, as much as they wish, but they do not want to. Instead, they apply to everything without reserve the standard of their reason.
So no more fairy tales, in order not to open the door for superstition!
[Oppel continues suggesting alternatives: travel stories or historical adventures may be just as fascinating and amusing as fairy tales, and such stories are to be preferred because they may offer both some real knowledge of the world, and much better moral examples. He concludes:]
Whatever may be good in fairy tales, one can easily get elsewhere, but their disadvantages must decidedly be avoided.
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Cinderella
The wife of a rich man fell sick, and as she felt that her end was drawing near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, "Dear child, be good and pious, and then the good God will always protect thee, and I will look down on thee from heaven and be near thee." Thereupon she closed her eyes and departed. Every day the maiden went out to her mother's grave, and wept, and she remained pious and good. When winter came the snow spread a white sheet over the grave, and when the spring sun had drawn it off again, the man had taken another wife.
The woman had brought two daughters into the house with her, who were beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart. Now began a bad time for the poor step-child. "Is the stupid goose to sit in the parlour with us?" said they. "He who wants to eat bread must earn it; out with the kitchen-wench." They took her pretty clothes away from her, put an old grey bedgown on her, and gave her wooden shoes. "Just look at the proud princess, how decked out she is!" they cried, and laughed, and led her into the kitchen. There she had to do hard work from morning till night, get up before daybreak, carry water, light fires, cook and wash. Besides this, the sisters did her every imaginable injury -- they mocked her and emptied her peas and lentils into the ashes, so that she was forced to sit and pick them out again. In the evening when she had worked till she was weary she had no bed to go to, but had to sleep by the fireside in the ashes. And as on that account she always looked dusty and dirty, they called her Cinderella. It happened that the father was once going to the fair, and he asked his two step-daughters what he should bring back for them. "Beautiful dresses," said one, "Pearls and jewels," said the second. "And thou, Cinderella," said he, "what wilt thou have?" "Father, break off for me the first branch which knocks against your hat on your way home." So he bought beautiful dresses, pearls and jewels for his two step-daughters, and on his way home, as he was riding through a green thicket, a hazel twig brushed against him and knocked off his hat. Then he broke off the branch and took it with him. When he reached home he gave his step-daughters the things which they had wished for, and to Cinderella he gave the branch from the hazel-bush. Cinderella thanked him, went to her mother's grave and planted the branch on it, and wept so much that the tears fell down on it and watered it. And it grew, however, and became a handsome tree. Thrice a day Cinderella went and sat beneath it, and wept and prayed, and a little white bird always came on the tree, and if Cinderella expressed a wish, the bird threw down to her what she had wished for.
It happened, however, that the King appointed a festival which was to last three days, and to which all the beautiful young girls in the country were invited, in order that his son might choose himself a bride. When the two step-sisters heard that they too were to appear among the number, they were delighted, called Cinderella and said, "Comb our hair for us, brush our shoes and fasten our buckles, for we are going to the festival at the King's palace." Cinderella obeyed, but wept, because she too would have liked to go with them to the dance, and begged her step-mother to allow her to do so. "Thou go, Cinderella!" said she; "Thou art dusty and dirty and wouldst go to the festival? Thou hast no clothes and shoes, and yet wouldst dance!" As, however, Cinderella went on asking, the step-mother at last said, "I have emptied a dish of lentils into the ashes for thee, if thou hast picked them out again in two hours, thou shalt go with us." The maiden went through the back-door into the garden, and called, "You tame pigeons, you turtle-doves, and all you birds beneath the sky, come and help me to pick
"The good into the pot,
The bad into the crop."
Then two white pigeons came in by the kitchen-window, and afterwards the turtle-doves, and at last all the birds beneath the sky, came whirring and crowding in, and alighted amongst the ashes. And the pigeons nodded with their heads and began pick, pick, pick, pick, and the rest began also pick, pick, pick, pick, and gathered all the good grains into the dish. Hardly had one hour passed before they had finished, and all flew out again. Then the girl took the dish to her step-mother, and was glad, and believed that now she would be allowed to go with them to the festival. But the step-mother said, "No, Cinderella, thou hast no clothes and thou canst not dance; thou wouldst only be laughed at." And as Cinderella wept at this, the step-mother said, "If thou canst pick two dishes of lentils out of the ashes for me in one hour, thou shalt go with us." And she thought to herself, "That she most certainly cannot do." When the step-mother had emptied the two dishes of lentils amongst the ashes, the maiden went through the back-door into the garden and cried, You tame pigeons, you turtle-doves, and all you birds under heaven, come and help me to pick
"The good into the pot,
The bad into the crop."
Then two white pigeons came in by the kitchen-window, and afterwards the turtle-doves, and at length all the birds beneath the sky, came whirring and crowding in, and alighted amongst the ashes. And the doves nodded with their heads and began pick, pick, pick, pick, and the others began also pick, pick, pick, pick, and gathered all the good seeds into the dishes, and before half an hour was over they had already finished, and all flew out again. Then the maiden carried the dishes to the step-mother and was delighted, and believed that she might now go with them to the festival. But the step-mother said, "All this will not help thee; thou goest not with us, for thou hast no clothes and canst not dance; we should be ashamed of thee!" On this she turned her back on Cinderella, and hurried away with her two proud daughters.
As no one was now at home, Cinderella went to her mother's grave beneath the hazel-tree, and cried,
"Shiver and quiver, little tree,
Silver and gold throw down over me."
Then the bird threw a gold and silver dress down to her, and slippers embroidered with silk and silver. She put on the dress with all speed, and went to the festival. Her step-sisters and the step-mother however did not know her, and thought she must be a foreign princess, for she looked so beautiful in the golden dress. They never once thought of Cinderella, and believed that she was sitting at home in the dirt, picking lentils out of the ashes. The prince went to meet her, took her by the hand and danced with her. He would dance with no other maiden, and never left loose of her hand, and if any one else came to invite her, he said, "This is my partner."
She danced till it was evening, and then she wanted to go home. But the King's son said, "I will go with thee and bear thee company," for he wished to see to whom the beautiful maiden belonged. She escaped from him, however, and sprang into the pigeon-house. The King's son waited until her father came, and then he told him that the stranger maiden had leapt into the pigeon-house. The old man thought, "Can it be Cinderella?" and they had to bring him an axe and a pickaxe that he might hew the pigeon-house to pieces, but no one was inside it. And when they got home Cinderella lay in her dirty clothes among the ashes, and a dim little oil-lamp was burning on the mantle-piece, for Cinderella had jumped quickly down from the back of the pigeon-house and had run to the little hazel-tree, and there she had taken off her beautiful clothes and laid them on the grave, and the bird had taken them away again, and then she had placed herself in the kitchen amongst the ashes in her grey gown.
Next day when the festival began afresh, and her parents and the step-sisters had gone once more, Cinderella went to the hazel-tree and said --
"Shiver and quiver, my little tree,
Silver and gold throw down over me."
Then the bird threw down a much more beautiful dress than on the preceding day. And when Cinderella appeared at the festival in this dress, every one was astonished at her beauty. The King's son had waited until she came, and instantly took her by the hand and danced with no one but her. When others came and invited her, he said, "She is my partner." When evening came she wished to leave, and the King's son followed her and wanted to see into which house she went. But she sprang away from him, and into the garden behind the house. Therein stood a beautiful tall tree on which hung the most magnificent pears. She clambered so nimbly between the branches like a squirrel that the King's son did not know where she was gone. He waited until her father came, and said to him, "The stranger-maiden has escaped from me, and I believe she has climbed up the pear-tree." The father thought, "Can it be Cinderella?" and had an axe brought and cut the tree down, but no one was on it. And when they got into the kitchen, Cinderella lay there amongst the ashes, as usual, for she had jumped down on the other side of the tree, had taken the beautiful dress to the bird on the little hazel-tree, and put on her grey gown.
On the third day, when the parents and sisters had gone away, Cinderella went once more to her mother's grave and said to the little tree --
"Shiver and quiver, my little tree,
Silver and gold throw down over me."
And now the bird threw down to her a dress which was more splendid and magnificent than any she had yet had, and the slippers were golden. And when she went to the festival in the dress, no one knew how to speak for astonishment. The King's son danced with her only, and if any one invited her to dance, he said, "She is my partner."
When evening came, Cinderella wished to leave, and the King's son was anxious to go with her, but she escaped from him so quickly that he could not follow her. The King's son had, however, used a strategem, and had caused the whole staircase to be smeared with pitch, and there, when she ran down, had the maiden's left slipper remained sticking. The King's son picked it up, and it was small and dainty, and all golden. Next morning, he went with it to the father, and said to him, "No one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits." Then were the two sisters glad, for they had pretty feet. The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut the toe off; when thou art Queen thou wilt have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King's son. Then he took her on his his horse as his bride and rode away with her. They were, however, obliged to pass the grave, and there, on the hazel-tree, sat the two pigeons and cried,
"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
There's blood within the shoe,
The shoe it is too small for her,
The true bride waits for you."
Then he looked at her foot and saw how the blood was streaming from it. He turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, and said she was not the true one, and that the other sister was to put the shoe on. Then this one went into her chamber and got her toes safely into the shoe, but her heel was too large. So her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut a bit off thy heel; when thou art Queen thou wilt have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut a bit off her heel, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King's son. He took her on his horse as his bride, and rode away with her, but when they passed by the hazel-tree, two little pigeons sat on it and cried,
"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
There's blood within the shoe
The shoe it is too small for her,
The true bride waits for you."
He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again. "This also is not the right one," said he, "have you no other daughter?" "No," said the man, "There is still a little stunted kitchen-wench which my late wife left behind her, but she cannot possibly be the bride." The King's son said he was to send her up to him; but the mother answered, "Oh, no, she is much too dirty, she cannot show herself!" He absolutely insisted on it, and Cinderella had to be called. She first washed her hands and face clean, and then went and bowed down before the King's son, who gave her the golden shoe. Then she seated herself on a stool, drew her foot out of the heavy wooden shoe, and put it into the slipper, which fitted like a glove. And when she rose up and the King's son looked at her face he recognized the beautiful maiden who had danced with him and cried, "That is the true bride!" The step-mother and the two sisters were terrified and became pale with rage; he, however, took Cinderella on his horse and rode away with her. As they passed by the hazel-tree, the two white doves cried --
"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
No blood is in the shoe,
The shoe is not too small for her,
The true bride rides with you,"
and when they had cried that, the two came flying down and placed themselves on Cinderella's shoulders, one on the right, the other on the left, and remained sitting there.
When the wedding with the King's son had to be celebrated, the two false sisters came and wanted to get into favour with Cinderella and share her good fortune. When the betrothed couple went to church, the elder was at the right side and the younger at the left, and the pigeons pecked out one eye of each of them. Afterwards as they came back, the elder was at the left, and the younger at the right, and then the pigeons pecked out the other eye of each. And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness as long as they lived.
From Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household Tales, trans. Margaret Hunt (London: George Bell, 1884), 1:93-100.
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Little Red Cap
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Once upon a time there was a sweet little girl. Everyone who saw her liked her, but most of all her grandmother, who did not know what to give the child next. Once she gave her a little cap made of red velvet. Because it suited her so well, and she wanted to wear it all the time, she came to be known as Little Red Cap.
One day her mother said to her, "Come Little Red Cap. Here is a piece of cake and a bottle of wine. Take them to your grandmother. She is sick and weak, and they will do her well. Mind your manners and give her my greetings. Behave yourself on the way, and do not leave the path, or you might fall down and break the glass, and then there will be nothing for your grandmother. And when you enter her parlor, don't forget to say 'Good morning,' and don't peer into all the corners first."
"I'll do everything just right," said Little Red Cap, shaking her mother's hand.
The grandmother lived out in the woods, a half hour from the village. When Little Red Cap entered the woods a wolf came up to her. She did not know what a wicked animal he was, and was not afraid of him.
"Good day to you, Little Red Cap."
"Thank you, wolf."
"Where are you going so early, Little Red Cap?"
"To grandmother's."
"And what are you carrying under your apron?"
"Grandmother is sick and weak, and I am taking her some cake and wine. We baked yesterday, and they should be good for her and give her strength."
"Little Red Cap, just where does your grandmother live?"
"Her house is good quarter hour from here in the woods, under the three large oak trees. There's a hedge of hazel bushes there. You must know the place," said Little Red Cap.
The wolf thought to himself, "Now that sweet young thing is a tasty bite for me. She will taste even better than the old woman. You must be sly, and you can catch them both."
He walked along a little while with Little Red Cap, then he said, "Little Red Cap, just look at the beautiful flowers that are all around us. Why don't you go and take a look? And I don't believe you can hear how beautifully the birds are singing. You are walking along as though you were on your way to school. It is very beautiful in the woods."
Little Red Cap opened her eyes and when she saw the sunbeams dancing to and fro through the trees and how the ground was covered with beautiful flowers, she thought, "If a take a fresh bouquet to grandmother, she will be very pleased. Anyway, it is still early, and I'll be home on time." And she ran off the path into the woods looking for flowers. Each time she picked one she thought that she could see an even more beautiful one a little way off, and she ran after it, going further and further into the woods. But the wolf ran straight to the grandmother's house and knocked on the door.
"Who's there?"
"Little Red Cap. I'm bringing you some cake and wine. Open the door."
"Just press the latch," called out the grandmother. "I'm too weak to get up."
The wolf pressed the latch, and the door opened. He stepped inside, went straight to the grandmother's bed, and ate her up. Then he put on her clothes, put her cap on his head, got into her bed, and pulled the curtains shut.
Little Red Cap had run after the flowers. After she had gathered so many that she could not carry any more, she remembered her grandmother, and then continued on her way to her house. She found, to her surprise, that the door was open. She walked into the parlor, and everything looked so strange that she thought, "Oh, my God, why am I so afraid? I usually like it at grandmother's."
She called out, "Good morning!" but received no answer.
Then she went to the bed and pulled back the curtains. Grandmother was lying there with her cap pulled down over her face and looking very strange.
"Oh, grandmother, what big ears you have!"
"All the better to hear you with."
"Oh, grandmother, what big eyes you have!"
"All the better to see you with."
"Oh, grandmother, what big hands you have!"
"All the better to grab you with!"
"Oh, grandmother, what a horribly big mouth you have!"
"All the better to eat you with!"
The wolf had scarcely finished speaking when he jumped from the bed with a single leap and ate up poor Little Red Cap. As soon as the wolf had satisfied his desires, he climbed back into bed, fell asleep, and began to snore very loudly.
A huntsman was just passing by. He thought, "The old woman is snoring so loudly. You had better see if something is wrong with her."
He stepped into the parlor, and when he approached the bed, he saw the wolf lying there. "So here I find you, you old sinner," he said. "I have been hunting for you a long time."
He was about to aim his rifle when it occurred to him that the wolf might have eaten the grandmother, and that she still might be rescued. So instead of shooting, he took a pair of scissors and began to cut open the wolf's belly. After a few cuts he saw the red cap shining through., and after a few more cuts the girl jumped out, crying, "Oh, I was so frightened! It was so dark inside the wolf's body!"
And then the grandmother came out as well, alive but hardly able to breathe. Then Little Red Cap fetched some large stones. She filled the wolf's body with them, and when he woke up and tried to run away, the stones were so heavy that he immediately fell down dead.
The three of them were happy. The huntsman skinned the wolf and went home with the pelt. The grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine that Little Red Cap had brought. And Little Red Cap thought, "As long as I live, I will never leave the path and run off into the woods by myself if mother tells me not to."
They also tell how Little Red Cap was taking some baked things to her grandmother another time, when another wolf spoke to her and wanted her to leave the path. But Little Red Cap took care and went straight to grandmother's. She told her that she had seen the wolf, and that he had wished her a good day, but had stared at her in a wicked manner. "If we hadn't been on a public road, he would have eaten me up," she said.
"Come," said the grandmother. "Let's lock the door, so he can't get in."
Soon afterward the wolf knocked on the door and called out, "Open up, grandmother. It's Little Red Cap, and I'm bringing you some baked things."
They remained silent, and did not open the door. Gray-Head crept around the house several times, and finally jumped onto the roof. He wanted to wait until Little Red Cap went home that evening, then follow her and eat her up in the darkness. But the grandmother saw what he was up to. There was a large stone trough in front of the house.
"Fetch a bucket, Little Red Cap," she said to the child. "Yesterday I cooked some sausage. Carry the water that I boiled them with to the trough." Little Red Cap carried water until the large, large trough was clear full. The smell of sausage arose into the wolf's nose. He sniffed and looked down, stretching his neck so long that he could no longer hold himself, and he began to slide. He slid off the roof, fell into the trough, and drowned. And Little Red Cap returned home happily, and no one harmed her.
Hansel and Gretel Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Next to a great forest there lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and his two children. The boy's name was Hansel and the girl's name was Gretel. He had but little to eat, and once, when a great famine came to the land, he could no longer provide even their daily bread.
One evening as he was lying in bed worrying about his problems, he sighed and said to his wife, "What is to become of us? How can we feed our children when we have nothing for ourselves?"
"Man, do you know what?" answered the woman. "Early tomorrow morning we will take the two children out into the thickest part of the woods, make a fire for them, and give each of them a little piece of bread, then leave them by themselves and go off to our work. They will not find their way back home, and we will be rid of them."
"No, woman," said the man. "I will not do that. How could I bring myself to abandon my own children alone in the woods? Wild animals would soon come and tear them to pieces."
"Oh, you fool," she said, "then all four of us will starve. All you can do is to plane the boards for our coffins." And she gave him no peace until he agreed.
"But I do feel sorry for the poor children," said the man.
The two children had not been able to fall asleep because of their hunger, and they heard what the stepmother had said to the father.
Gretel cried bitter tears and said to Hansel, "It is over with us!"
"Be quiet, Gretel," said Hansel, "and don't worry. I know what to do."
And as soon as the adults had fallen asleep, he got up, pulled on his jacket, opened the lower door, and crept outside. The moon was shining brightly, and the white pebbles in front of the house were glistening like silver coins. Hansel bent over and filled his jacket pockets with them, as many as would fit.
Then he went back into the house and said, "Don't worry, Gretel. Sleep well. God will not forsake us." Then he went back to bed.
At daybreak, even before sunrise, the woman came and woke the two children. "Get up, you lazybones. We are going into the woods to fetch wood." Then she gave each one a little piece of bread, saying, "Here is something for midday. Don't eat it any sooner, for you'll not get any more."
Gretel put the bread under her apron, because Hansel's pockets were full of stones. Then all together they set forth into the woods. After they had walked a little way, Hansel began stopping again and again and looking back toward the house.
The father said, "Hansel, why are you stopping and looking back? Pay attention now, and don't forget your legs."
"Oh, father," said Hansel, "I am looking at my white cat that is sitting on the roof and wants to say good-bye to me."
The woman said, "You fool, that isn't your cat. That's the morning sun shining on the chimney."
However, Hansel had not been looking at his cat but instead had been dropping the shiny pebbles from his pocket onto the path.
When they arrived in the middle of the woods, the father said, "You children gather some wood, and I will make a fire so you won't freeze."
Hansel and Gretel gathered together some twigs, a pile as high as a small mountain
The twigs were set afire, and when the flames were burning well, the woman said, "Lie down by the fire and rest. We will go into the woods to cut wood. When we are finished, we will come back and get you."
Hansel and Gretel sat by the fire. When midday came each one ate his little piece of bread. Because they could hear the blows of an ax, they thought that the father was nearby. However, it was not an ax. It was a branch that he had tied to a dead tree and that the wind was beating back and forth. After they had sat there a long time, their eyes grew weary and closed, and they fell sound sleep.
When they finally awoke, it was dark at night. Gretel began to cry and said, "How will we get out of woods?"
Hansel comforted her, "Wait a little until the moon comes up, and then we'll find the way."
After the full moon had come up, Hansel took his little sister by the hand. They followed the pebbles that glistened there like newly minted coins, showing them the way. They walked throughout the entire night, and as morning was breaking, they arrived at the father's house.
They knocked on the door, and when the woman opened it and saw that it was Hansel and Gretel, she said, "You wicked children, why did you sleep so long in the woods? We thought that you did not want to come back."
But the father was overjoyed when he saw his children once more, for he had not wanted to leave them alone.
Not long afterward there was once again great need everywhere, and one evening the children heard the mother say to the father, "We have again eaten up everything. We have only a half loaf of bread, and then the song will be over. We must get rid of the children. We will take them deeper into the woods, so they will not find their way out. Otherwise there will be no help for us."
The man was very disheartened, and he thought, "It would be better to share the last bit with the children."
But the woman would not listen to him, scolded him, and criticized him. He who says A must also say B, and because he had given in the first time, he had to do so the second time as well.
The children were still awake and had overheard the conversation. When the adults were asleep, Hansel got up again and wanted to gather pebbles as he had done before, but the woman had locked the door, and Hansel could not get out. But he comforted his little sister and said, "Don't cry, Gretel. Sleep well. God will help us."
Early the next morning the woman came and got the children from their beds. They received their little pieces of bread, even less than the last time. On the way to the woods, Hansel crumbled his piece in his pocket, then often stood still, and threw crumbs onto the ground.
"Hansel, why are you always stopping and looking around?" said his father. "Keep walking straight ahead."
"I can see my pigeon sitting on the roof. It wants to say good-bye to me."
"Fool," said the woman, "that isn't your pigeon. That's the morning sun shining on the chimney."
But little by little Hansel dropped all the crumbs onto the path. The woman took them deeper into the woods than they had ever been in their whole lifetime.
Once again a large fire was made, and the mother said, "Sit here, children. If you get tired you can sleep a little. We are going into the woods to cut wood. We will come and get you in the evening when we are finished."
When it was midday Gretel shared her bread with Hansel, who had scattered his piece along the path. Then they fell asleep, and evening passed, but no one came to get the poor children.
It was dark at night when they awoke, and Hansel comforted Gretel and said, "Wait, when the moon comes up I will be able to see the crumbs of bread that I scattered, and they will show us the way back home."
When the moon appeared they got up, but they could not find any crumbs, for the many thousands of birds that fly about in the woods and in the fields had pecked them up.
Hansel said to Gretel, "We will find our way," but they did not find it.
They walked through the entire night and the next day from morning until evening, but they did not find their way out of the woods. They were terribly hungry, for they had eaten only a few small berries that were growing on the ground. And because they were so tired that their legs would no longer carry them, they lay down under a tree and fell asleep. It was already the third morning since they had left the father's house. They started walking again, but managed only to go deeper and deeper into the woods. If help did not come soon, they would perish. At midday they saw a little snow-white bird sitting on a branch. It sang so beautifully that they stopped to listen. When it was finished it stretched its wings and flew in front of them. They followed it until they came to a little house. The bird sat on the roof, and when they came closer, they saw that the little house was built entirely from bread with a roof made of cake, and the windows were made of clear sugar.
"Let's help ourselves to a good meal," said Hansel. "I'll eat a piece of the roof, and Gretel, you eat from the window. That will be sweet."
Hansel reached up and broke off a little of the roof to see how it tasted, while Gretel stood next to the windowpanes and was nibbling at them. Then a gentle voice called out from inside:
Nibble, nibble, little mouse,
Who is nibbling at my house?
The children answered:
The wind, the wind,
The heavenly child.
They continued to eat, without being distracted. Hansel, who very much like the taste of the roof, tore down another large piece, and Gretel poked out an entire round windowpane. Suddenly the door opened, and a woman, as old as the hills and leaning on a crutch, came creeping out. Hansel and Gretel were so frightened that they dropped what they were holding in their hands.
But the old woman shook her head and said, "Oh, you dear children, who brought you here? Just come in and stay with me. No harm will come to you."
She took them by the hand and led them into her house. Then she served them a good meal: milk and pancakes with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterward she made two nice beds for them, decked in white. Hansel and Gretel went to bed, thinking they were in heaven. But the old woman had only pretended to be friendly. She was a wicked witch who was lying in wait there for children. She had built her house of bread only in order to lure them to her, and if she captured one, she would kill him, cook him, and eat him; and for her that was a day to celebrate.
Witches have red eyes and cannot see very far, but they have a sense of smell like animals, and know when humans are approaching.
When Hansel and Gretel came near to her, she laughed wickedly and spoke scornfully, "Now I have them. They will not get away from me again."
Early the next morning, before they awoke, she got up, went to their beds, and looked at the two of them lying there so peacefully, with their full red cheeks. "They will be a good mouthful," she mumbled to herself. Then she grabbed Hansel with her withered hand and carried him to a little stall, where she locked him behind a cage door. Cry as he might, there was no help for him.
Then she shook Gretel and cried, "Get up, lazybones! Fetch water and cook something good for your brother. He is locked outside in the stall and is to be fattened up. When he is fat I am going to eat him."
Gretel began to cry, but it was all for nothing. She had to do what the witch demanded. Now Hansel was given the best things to eat every day, but Gretel received nothing but crayfish shells.
Every morning the old woman crept out to the stall and shouted, "Hansel, stick out your finger, so I can feel if you are fat yet."
But Hansel stuck out a little bone, and the old woman, who had bad eyes and could not see the bone, thought it was Hansel's finger, and she wondered why he didn't get fat.
When four weeks had passed and Hansel was still thin, impatience overcame her, and she would wait no longer. "Hey, Gretel!" she shouted to the girl, "Hurry up and fetch some water. Whether Hansel is fat or thin, tomorrow I am going to slaughter him and boil him."
Oh, how the poor little sister sobbed as she was forced to carry the water, and how the tears streamed down her cheeks! "Dear God, please help us," she cried. "If only the wild animals had devoured us in the woods, then we would have died together."
"Save your slobbering," said the old woman. "It doesn't help you at all."
The next morning Gretel had to get up early, hang up the kettle with water, and make a fire.
"First we are going to bake," said the old woman. "I have already made a fire in the oven and kneaded the dough."
She pushed poor Gretel outside to the oven, from which fiery flames were leaping. "Climb in," said the witch, "and see if it is hot enough to put the bread in yet." And when Gretel was inside, she intended to close the oven, and bake her, and eat her as well.
But Gretel saw what she had in mind, so she said, "I don't know how to do that. How can I get inside?"
"Stupid goose," said the old woman. The opening is big enough. See, I myself could get in." And she crawled up stuck her head into the oven.
Then Gretel gave her a shove, causing her to fall in. Then she closed the iron door and secured it with a bar. The old woman began to howl frightfully. But Gretel ran away, and the godless witch burned up miserably. Gretel ran straight to Hansel, unlocked his stall, and cried, "Hansel, we are saved. The old witch is dead."
Then Hansel jumped out, like a bird from its cage when someone opens its door. How happy they were! They threw their arms around each other's necks, jumped with joy, and kissed one another. Because they now had nothing to fear, they went into the witch's house. In every corner were chests of pearls and precious stones.
"These are better than pebbles," said Hansel, filling his pockets.
Gretel said, "I will take some home with me as well," and she filled her apron full.
"But now we must leave," said Hansel, "and get out of these witch-woods."
After walking a few hours they arrived at a large body of water. "We cannot get across," said Hansel. "I cannot see a walkway or a bridge."
"There are no boats here," answered Gretel, "but there is a white duck swimming. If I ask it, it will help us across."
Then she called out:
Duckling, duckling,
Here stand Gretel and Hansel.
Neither a walkway nor a bridge,
Take us onto your white back.
The duckling came up to them, and Hansel climbed onto it, then asked his little sister to sit down next to him.
"No," answered Gretel. "That would be too heavy for the duckling. It should take us across one at a time."
That is what the good animal did, and when they were safely on the other side, and had walked on a little while, the woods grew more and more familiar to them, and finally they saw the father's house in the distance. They began to run, rushed inside, and threw their arms around the father's neck.
The man had not had even one happy hour since he had left the children in the woods. However, the woman had died. Gretel shook out her apron, scattering pearls and precious stones around the room, and Hansel added to them by throwing one handful after the other from his pockets.
Now all their cares were at an end, and they lived happily together.
My tale is done,
A mouse has run.
And whoever catches it can make for himself from it a large, large fur cap.
_________________________________________________________________
Hills Like White Elephants Ernest Hemingway
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.
'What should we drink?' the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.
'It's pretty hot,' the man said.
'Let's drink beer.'
'Dos cervezas,' the man said into the curtain.
'Big ones?' a woman asked from the doorway.
'Yes. Two big ones.'
The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
'They look like white elephants,' she said.
'I've never seen one,' the man drank his beer.
'No, you wouldn't have.'
'I might have,' the man said. 'Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything.'
The girl looked at the bead curtain. 'They've painted something on it,' she said. 'What does it say?'
'Anis del Toro. It's a drink.'
'Could we try it?'
The man called 'Listen' through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
'Four reales.' 'We want two Anis del Toro.'
'With water?'
'Do you want it with water?'
'I don't know,' the girl said. 'Is it good with water?'
'It's all right.'
'You want them with water?' asked the woman.
'Yes, with water.'
'It tastes like liquorice,' the girl said and put the glass down.
'That's the way with everything.'
'Yes,' said the girl. 'Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.'
'Oh, cut it out.'
'You started it,' the girl said. 'I was being amused. I was having a fine time.'
'Well, let's try and have a fine time.'
'All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?'
'That was bright.'
'I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?'
'I guess so.'
The girl looked across at the hills.
'They're lovely hills,' she said. 'They don't really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.'
'Should we have another drink?'
'All right.'
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
'The beer's nice and cool,' the man said.
'It's lovely,' the girl said.
'It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,' the man said. 'It's not really an operation at all.'
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
'I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in.'
The girl did not say anything.
'I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural.'
'Then what will we do afterwards?'
'We'll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.'
'What makes you think so?'
'That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy.'
The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.
'And you think then we'll be all right and be happy.'
'I know we will. Yon don't have to be afraid. I've known lots of people that have done it.'
'So have I,' said the girl. 'And afterwards they were all so happy.'
'Well,' the man said, 'if you don't want to you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple.'
'And you really want to?'
'I think it's the best thing to do. But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to.'
'And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?'
'I love you now. You know I love you.'
'I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?'
'I'll love it. I love it now but I just can't think about it. You know how I get when I worry.'
'If I do it you won't ever worry?'
'I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple.'
'Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.'
'What do you mean?'
'I don't care about me.'
'Well, I care about you.'
'Oh, yes. But I don't care about me. And I'll do it and then everything will be fine.'
'I don't want you to do it if you feel that way.'
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
'And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.'
'What did you say?'
'I said we could have everything.'
'No, we can't.'
'We can have the whole world.'
'No, we can't.'
'We can go everywhere.'
'No, we can't. It isn't ours any more.'
'It's ours.'
'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.'
'But they haven't taken it away.'
'We'll wait and see.'
'Come on back in the shade,' he said. 'You mustn't feel that way.'
'I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.'
'I don't want you to do anything that you don't want to do -'
'Nor that isn't good for me,' she said. 'I know. Could we have another beer?'
'All right. But you've got to realize - '
'I realize,' the girl said. 'Can't we maybe stop talking?'
They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.
'You've got to realize,' he said, ' that I don't want you to do it if you don't want to. I'm perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.'
'Doesn't it mean anything to you? We could get along.'
'Of course it does. But I don't want anybody but you. I don't want anyone else. And I know it's perfectly simple.'
'Yes, you know it's perfectly simple.'
'It's all right for you to say that, but I do know it.'
'Would you do something for me now?'
'I'd do anything for you.'
'Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?'
He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.
'But I don't want you to,' he said, 'I don't care anything about it.'
'I'll scream,' the girl siad.
The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. 'The train comes in five minutes,' she said.
'What did she say?' asked the girl.
'That the train is coming in five minutes.'
The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.
'I'd better take the bags over to the other side of the station,' the man said. She smiled at him.
'All right. Then come back and we'll finish the beer.'
He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the bar-room, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.
'Do you feel better?' he asked.
'I feel fine,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.'
_________________________________
Tulips Sylvia Plath
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage -
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
_________________________________
The Walrus and the CarpenterLewis Carroll
"The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright —
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done —
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun."
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead —
There were no birds to fly.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
If this were only cleared away,'
They said, it would be grand!'
If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,
That they could get it clear?'
I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.
O Oysters, come and walk with us!'
The Walrus did beseech.
A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.'
The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head —
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.
But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat —
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.
Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more —
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.
The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
But wait a bit,' the Oysters cried,
Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!'
No hurry!' said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.
A loaf of bread,' the Walrus said,
Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed —
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.'
But not on us!' the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!'
The night is fine,' the Walrus said.
Do you admire the view?
It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!'
The Carpenter said nothing but
Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf —
I've had to ask you twice!'
It seems a shame,' the Walrus said,
To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!'
The Carpenter said nothing but
The butter's spread too thick!'
I weep for you,' the Walrus said:
I deeply sympathize.'
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,
You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none —
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one."
