Do you like fairy tales? Did you know that fairy tales are often influenced by different cultures and times, and that’s why there are different versions around the world? A fairy tale is an instance of a folklore genre that takes the form of a short story. Such stories typically feature beings such as dwarfs, dragons, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, griffins, mermaids, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches, and usually magic or enchantments. In most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale. The term of fairy tale is mainly used for stories with origins in European tradition, and mostly relates to children's literature.
Fairy tales are so ingrained in popular culture — thanks to a thousand children's books and Walt Disney — that almost everyone can recite a handful by heart: Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Bean Stalk, The Pied Piper, and Hansel and Gretel. The stories we know today are the product of hundreds of years of reworking, reimagining and, in some cases, sanitization. Check out the original facts about your favorite fairy tales:
CINDERELLA
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Although about half of the Cinderella
tales across cultures included an evil stepmother, the antagonist in the others
was often Cinderella’s biological father, who would lust after her, and attempt
to marry Cinderella after her mother died.
·
In pantomime versions of Cinderella the
ugly sisters started off being called Clorinda and Thisbe, but their names have
constantly changed down the years to reflect the fashions of time, including
Buttercup and Daisy, Euthanasia and Asphyxia, Alexis and Krystle and even Posh
and Scary.
·
Some early versions of Cinderella have one of the Ugly Sisters
hacking her toes off to make the glass slipper fit her foot.
·
The earliest dateable version of the Cinderella story appears in a Chinese
book written about 850-860AD. The earliest European version was published in
Italy in 1634, and in 1697 Perrault introduced Cinderella, Or the Tale of the Little Glass Slipper.
·
The
very first tale of Cinderella was recorded in China at around AD 850.
That Cinderella is Yeh-hsien. She wears a dress made of kingfisher feathers and
her shoes are made of gold.
GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS
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Early
versions of the Goldilocks and the Three
Bears story had three good-natured and trusting male bears, but over the
years these have changed to a father bear, a mother bear and a baby bear.
·
One of the earliest versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears features
a foul-mouthed old woman rather than a golden-haired young girl. In another,
Goldilocks ends up impaled on the steeple of St Paul's Cathedral.
·
The Goldilocks Zone is the habitable region
round a star where orbiting planets similar to the Earth can support liquid
water – neither too hot, nor too cold. In 2010 astronomers found a 'Goldilocks
planet' (Gliese 581g), which is about three times the size of Earth and lies in
the habitable zone of its star.
RAPUNZEL
·
In
the French version of Rapunzel, the story does not have a happy ending.
Rapunzel is turned into a frog and the prince is cursed with a pig’s snout.
·
In the original 1812 version of the
Brothers’ Grimm’s Rapunzel, the prince visits Rapunzel in the
tower every night to sleep with her, and the maternal fairy finds out when
Rapunzel becomes pregnant.
SNOW WHITE
·
In the Brothers’ Grimm’s Snow White,
the prince falls in love with Snow White after seeing her already deceased in
her coffin. The dwarves give him the coffin after he begs for it and as his
servants carry it back to the palace they trip on a tree stump and the apple
comes out of Snow White’s throat, rendering her alive again.
·
In
the Disney movie Snow White, the evil queen sought Snow White’s heart.
But in the Grimm brothers’ original tale, the evil queen wanted to consume her
lungs and liver.
·
In the same Snow White story,
the evil queen’s punishment is to dance in red hot shoes at Snow White’s
wedding until she dies.
THE LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
·
A wolf was not always the villain in
early versions of Little Red Riding Hood
– sometimes it was an ogre or werewolf.
·
In several versions of The Little
Red Riding Hood, the wolf would also trick the girl into eating parts
of her grandmother as well, as cannibalism used to be a common occurrence in
fairy tales.
·
In some versions of Little Red Riding Hood the heroine is bringing grape juice and
banana bread to her grandmother – in other words she is carrying wine and cake.
·
The Little Red Riding Hood was a popular
story told as a lesson for women in the king’s court to stay celibate until
marriage, as there are “wolves” out there just looking to use innocent girls
for the wrong reasons.
·
The red hood in Little Red Riding Hood was introduced by Charles Perrault in Tales Of Mother Goose (1697), who said
the moral of the story was that children "do very wrong to listen to
strangers." In
the early centuries, the story of the Little Red Riding Hood was used to
warn children of the dangerous wild animals in the woods. People were really
afraid of wolves.
·
The version of Little Red Riding Hood by the Brothers Grimm has the wolf devouring
the heroine and her grandmother. The huntsman rescues them by disemboweling the
wolf and then sews rocks into its belly.
·
In
Roald Dahl’s version of the Little Red Riding Hood, Red Riding Hood is
not as helpless as she was in the story we grew up with. She actually strikes
back against the wolf.
THE THREE LITTLE PIGS
·
In 2012 The Guardian ran an ad relating
the tale of The Three Little Pigs in
the style of modern news coverage, revealing that pigs had falsely accused the
asthmatic wolf of blowing the house down when they were actually attempting
insurance fraud.
·
The 1992 song Three Little Pigs by cartoon band Green Jelly sets the story in Los
Angeles with the three pigs featured as an aspiring guitarist, a
dumpster-diving evangelist and a Harvard architecture graduate, with the wolf
driving a Harley Davidson motorcycle. At the end, the third pig calls 911 and
the wolf is machine-gunned down by John Rambo.
·
The best-known version of Three Little
Pigs is a 1933 Silly Symphony cartoon (above) produced by Walt Disney, starring
Fifer Pig, Fiddler Pig and Practical Pig. The first two pigs get their houses
blown down but escape from the wolf.
“But life isn't a fairy tale which ends
'happily ever after' just because the last line of the story is written. Hurts
have to heal, resentments have to fade, [and] trusts have to mend.” (Rasana Atreya)[i]
[i] Sources used:
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“11 Fun Facts about Fairy Tales” by Aida Rahim
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