"The Disneyfication of fairy stories over the past 70-odd years since Uncle Walt released his animated take on
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has put into most people's minds a primary-coloured world of beautiful people facing dastardly villains and apparently insurmountable obstacles on their path to a life of happiness alongside Mr or Ms (or, more likely, HRH) Right; a world where good always triumphs and there's no better relationship than one built upon the size of a kingdom. A world, largely, for children. But the picture painted by the Grimms was of a vast, dark, world-encompassing forest in which still darker deeds were committed – and went unpunished. Lopping off heads with axes was de rigueur; the story of
The Robber Bridegroom, to cite one particularly bloody example, contained a horrifying passage in which the robbers
"dragged with them another young girl. They were drunk, and paid no heed to her screams and lamentations. They gave her wine to drink, three glasses full, one glass of white wine, one glass of red, and a glass of yellow, and with this her heart burst in twain. Thereupon they tore off her delicate raiment, laid her on a table, cut her beautiful body in pieces and strewed salt thereon."
But all this x-rated brutality isn't as out of place as it might at first appear. The folk tales that have, over the years, become sanitised and cutesy, originally started life as stories for grown-ups...
One fulltext online version of
The Robber Bridegroom is at
Project Gutenberg.
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