The fairy story gained wider popularity after German composer Engelbert Humperdinck made it the basis of a children’s opera, first produced in Munich in 1893. However, the opera—as well as subsequent versions of the story—omits the most traumatizing aspect of the traditional tale: the parents’ deliberate abandonment of their children to the wild beasts of the forest.
“Hansel and Gretel” was not only known through German oral tradition. A version circulating in France as early as the late seventeenth century had a house made not of gingerbread but of gold and jewels, in which a young girl is held captive by a giant whom she eventually shoves into his own fire. But it was the brothers Grimm who immortalized the tale for future generations.
In Germany, the story lost popularity following the atrocities of Hitler. Shortly after the war, when a major exhibition of children’s books was presented in Munich, many people objected to the story’s celebration of incinerating an opponent in an oven.
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”: 1812, Germany
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s stay in the Germany town of Kassel, in order to collect oral-tradition fairy tales, resulted in more than one marriage. Whereas Wilhelm married the girl who told him “Hansel and Gretel,” his sister, Lotte, married into the Hassenpflug family, who had told the Grimms “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
The brothers Grimm were the first to artfully combine the elements of blossoming youth, fading beauty, and female rivalry into an enduring fairy tale. But theirs was not the first published version of such a story. The Pentamerone contains a tale of a beautiful seven-year-old girl named Lisa who falls unconscious when a comb sticks in her hair. Placed in a glass coffin (as is Snow White), Lisa continues to mature (as does Snow White, who is also seven years old when she is abandoned), growing more and more lovely. A female relative, envious of Lisa’s beauty, vows to destroy her (as the jealous queen swears to accomplish Snow White’s death). The woman opens the coffin, and while dragging Lisa out by the hair, dislodges the comb, restoring the beauty to life.
Basile’s story appears to be the earliest recorded Snow White—like fairy tale. It is uncertain whether the Grimms, writing their version of “Snowdrop” (as they named the girl) two hundred years later, were familiar with the Italian legend.
It was the Grimm version that Walt Disney brought to the screen in 1938 in the first feature-length cartoon.
Many early translators of the Grimm story omitted a gory fact: The queen not only orders Snow White killed but also, as proof of the death, demands that her heart be brought to the palace. Disney reinstated this original detail, but he chose to leave out a more gruesome one. In the German story, the queen, believing the heart returned by the huntsman is Snow White’s (it’s from a boar), salts and actually eats the organ. And the original fairy tale ends with the defeated queen being forced to don slippers made of iron, which are heated red hot in a fire. In an agonized frenzy, she dances herself to death.
“The Princess on the Pea”: 1835, Copenhagen
Charles Perrault and the brothers Grimm wrote what are known as “classic” fairy tales. By comparison, the nineteenth-century author Hans Christian Andersen recounted what folklorists call “art” fairy tales. They were cultivated in the period of German Romanticism, and though rooted in folk legend, they are more personal in style, containing elements of autobiography and social satire.
Andersen, born in 1805 on the Danish island of Funen, was the son of a sickly shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman. His own life was something of a fairy tale, for he rose from street urchin to darling of European society. He published Tales Told for Children in Copenhagen in 1835, but belittled his fairy tales as “those trifles,” being prouder of his concurrently published first novel, Improvisatoren, which quickly settled into oblivion.
In a traditional Swedish version of the tale—one that predates Andersen’s immortal telling—the princess, to test the legitimacy of her nobility, sleeps on seven mattresses, with a pea between each. And she is subjected to a number of additional tests, in which such items as nuts, grains, pinheads, and straw are placed between her mattresses—all to discern if she is sensitive enough to detect their uncomfortable bulge, and thus prove herself of royal birth.
The heightened sensitivity of royals was also the source of folktales in the East. The earliest such Eastern story appears in Book XII of the Katha Sarit Sagara of Somadeva the Kashmiri, who lived in the third century A.D. In that tale, three brothers of a wealthy Brahman vie to see who is the most sensitive. While sleeping on a pile of seven mattresses, the youngest brother awakens in agony, with a crooked red indentation along his skin. Investigators examine the bed and locate a single human hair beneath the bottommost mattress.
The version of “The Princess on the Pea” told today is a slight modification of Andersen’s original, which he said he had first heard as a child. Andersen placed his princess on a bed of twenty straw mattresses and twenty featherbeds, with a single pea at the bottom. When the Danish story was first rendered into English in 1846, the translator, Charles Boner, feeling that one pea under forty mattresses stretched credulity, added two peas. Thus, the modern numbers are: forty mattresses and three peas. What Boner never explained, unfortunately, is the logic that led him to conclude that the addition of two peas makes the story more believable.
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”: 1831, England
A fascinating early version of the Goldilocks story was written in 1837 by British poet laureate Robert Southey, under the title “Story of the Three Bears.” Southey’s Goldilocks was neither young nor beautiful; rather, she was an angry, hungry, homeless gray-haired crone, perhaps in her mid-sixties, who broke into the bears’ well-appointed home for food and lodging. The character’s evolution from an ill-tempered wiry-haired curmudgeon, to a silver-haired beauty, and finally to a radiant golden-haired maiden occurred over many years and at the hands of several writers.
Southey claimed that he had heard the tale from an uncle. And once the poet published the story, it gained wide acceptance. British readers assumed that “Story of the Three Bears” was an original creation of the Southey family. So did historians until only a few decades ago.
In 1951, an old manuscript was discovered in the Toronto Public Library’s Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. Home-printed and bound, the booklet was titled “The Story of Three Bears metrically related, with illustrations locating it at Cecil Lodge in September 1831.” Subtitled “The celebrated nursery tale,” it had been put into verse and embellished with drawings as a birthday gift for a little boy, Horace Broke, by his thirty-two-year-old maiden aunt, Eleanor Mure. That was six years before the tale appeared under Robert Southey’s name.
The two stories contain strong similarities. In Eleanor Mure’s version, the unwelcome intruder to the bears’ home is also an “angry old woman,” but the bowls in the parlor contained not Southey’s porridge but milk turned sour. In Southey’s version, when the homeless old woman is discovered in bed by the bears, she jumps out the window, never to be seen again. But in Mure’s earlier tale, the incensed bears resort to several cruel tactics to rid themselves of the hag:
On the fire they throw her, but burn her they couldn’t,
In the water they put her, but drown there she wouldn’t.
Worse arrives. In desperation, the bears impale the old woman on the steeple of St. Paul’s church.
Researchers can only surmise that Robert Southey’s uncle picked up the salient details of Eleanor Mure’s story. What is indisputable, however, is that the British poet laureate introduced the fairy tale to a generation of English readers.
Who transformed the rickety old woman to a radiant young Goldilocks?
Twelve years after the publication of Southey’s story, another British writer, Joseph Cundall, published Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children. In an introductory note, Cundall explained to his readers: “I have made the intruder a little girl instead of an old woman”; then he jus
tified the transformation by adding, “because there are so many other stories of old women.” And he named the girl Silver-Hair.
The character was known by that name for several years, appearing in a variety of children’s books.
Then in 1868, in Aunt Friendly’s Nursery Book, the intruder to the bears’ home is once again transformed: “There lived in the same forest a sweet little girl who was called Golden Hair.” Thirty-six years later, in 1904, in Old Nursery Stories and Rhymes, the intruder’s appearance remained unaltered, but her name was changed to fit her tresses: “The little girl had long golden hair, so she was called Goldilocks.” And Goldilocks she has remained.
“Bluebeard”: 1697, France
In Charles Perrault’s “La Barbe Bleue,” the main character is a rich seigneur who forbids his new bride to open one door in his immense castle. She disobeys, discovers the bodies of his former wives, and is herself rescued from death only at the last minute.
Similar stories, involving a forbidden room, a wife’s curiosity, and her eleventh-hour rescue, exist throughout the folklore of Europe, Africa, and the East. But Perrault’s 1697 version is believed to be based in part on a true case: the heinous crimes of the fifteenth-century marshal of France Gilles de Rais, and his conviction for torturing and killing one hundred forty young boys, whom he first sexually molested. De Rais’s celebrated trial for satanism, abduction, and child murder stunned Europe in the 1400s, and the case was still a source of discussion in Perrault’s day. De Rais fascinated Perrault.
Baron Gilles de Rais was born in September 1404 at Champtoce, France. As a young man, he distinguished himself in battle against the British, and he was assigned to Joan of Arc’s guard and fought at her side. Inheriting vast wealth, he maintained a court more lavish than that of the king of France, and at age thirty-one he took up the practices of alchemy and satanism, hoping to enhance his power and riches.
He also began the ritualistic killing of children. Each murder was initiated with a feast and the drinking of a stimulant. Then the child was taken to an upper room, bound, and told in detail how he was to be sexually abused and slaughtered. This was done so that de Rais could delight in the youth’s terror. Eventually, after the actual debauchery and torture, the child was usually beheaded.
De Rais was obsessed with angelic-looking children. He erected on his estate a personal “Chapel of the Holy Innocents” and staffed it with hand-selected choirboys. As rumors raged throughout the countryside concerning the mysterious disappearances of children, one mother, in 1438, publicly accused Gilles de Rais of her son’s death. That prompted scores of similar accusations.
De Rais was arrested two years later and brought to trial. Under threat of torture, he confessed, blaming his crimes on an adolescence of parental overindulgence. He was hanged and burned at Nantes, on October 26, 1440.
Charles Perrault drew upon several monstrous aspects of the de Rais case. And he replaced its pedophiliac elements with details from a sixth-century trial of a multiple wife-murderer. “Bluebeard” was a fairy tale of a unique nature, one that would set a model for other grotesque tales based on actual murders. One of the most popular in that genre to follow the Perrault story involved a bloodthirsty count named Dracula.
Dracula: 1897, England
The nineteenth-century Irish writer Bram Stoker came serendipitously upon the subject matter for his novel Dracula while engaged in research at the British Museum. He discovered a manuscript of traditional Eastern European folklore concerning Vlad the Impaler, a fifteenth-century warrior prince of Walachia. According to Romanian legend, the sadistic Prince Vlad took his meals al fresco, amidst a forest of impaled, groaning victims. And Vlad washed down each course with his victims’ blood, in the belief that it imbued him with supernatural strength.
Vlad’s crimes were legend. On red-hot pokers, he impaled male friends who had fallen from favor, and women unfaithful to him were impaled, then skinned alive. Imprisoned himself, he tortured mice and birds for amusement. His mountaintop retreat, known as Castle Drakula, suggested the title for Stoker’s novel.
Although Stoker had found his model for Dracula, it was a friend, a professor from the University of Budapest, who suggested a locale for the fiction by relating lore of the vampires of Transylvania. The novelist traveled to the area and was immediately impressed with its dark, brooding mountains, morning fogs, and sinister-looking castles.
Dracula was an immense success when published in 1897, wrapped in a brown paper cover. And the novel was responsible for reviving interest in the Gothic horror romance, which has continued into the present day in books and films.
Frankenstein: 1818, Switzerland
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, evolved from several evenings of storytelling in June 1816, at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland. The nineteen-year-old Mary engaged in a storytelling competition with her twenty-four-year-old husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; her eighteen-year-old stepsister, Claire Clarement (then carrying the child of her lover, Lord Byron); the twenty-eight-year-old Byron; and his personal physician, twenty-three-year-old John Polidori.
During a rainy week, Byron suggested that they entertain themselves by writing original ghost stories. Mary’s inspiration came one evening as she sat by the fireplace, listening to Shelley and Byron argue over the source of human life and whether it could be artificially created. Electric current was the focus of considerable scientific research at the time, and the two poets debated the possibility of electrically reanimating a corpse, imbuing it with what they called “vital warmth.”
When the discussion concluded late in the evening, Shelley retired. But Mary, transfixed in speculation, was unable to sleep. For an 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley vividly recalled her burst of inspiration:
I saw—with shut eyes but acute mental vision—the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together…. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion….
Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me…. On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began the day with the words, “It was on a dreary night in November,” making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 1900, United States
Born in Chittenango, New York, in 1856, Lyman Frank Baum began his career as a journalist but switched to writing children’s books, more than sixty of them before his death in 1919, in Hollywood. His first book, Father Goose, published in 1899, was a commercial success, and he followed it the next year with a novel that would quickly become a classic.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was conceived one evening in 1899 when Baum was improvising a story to entertain his sons and several neighborhood children. He imagined a girl named Dorothy, swept from her Kansas home and deposited in a strange and magical land, where she encounters a scarecrow, a tin woodsman, and a cowardly lion. Suddenly, a neighborhood girl, Tweety Robbins, interrupted Baum to ask the name of the magical land.
The masterful storyteller was momentarily stumped. Years later, in an interview published in the St. Louis Republic, Baum divulged the origin of the immortal name Oz. Next to him that night had been a three-tiered filing cabinet, the first drawer labeled A–G, the second H–N, and the last O–Z. “Oz,” he said, “it at once became.”
Though Baum told that yarn often, his later biographers believe it might reflect a bit of his own imaginative fabrication. For when he first submitted the manuscript for the book to his publisher in 1899, the story was titled The Emerald City, that being the name of the magical land. During the publishing process, Baum retitled the book to From Kansas to Fairyland, then The City of the Great Oz. But Oz, even at that late date, was the name not of the kingdom but only of the wizard.
Finally, he arrived at a title that pleased himself and his publisher: The Wonderful Wiza
rd of Oz. Only then, enamored with the idea of naming the land Oz, did he hurriedly pencil through the manuscript that the Emerald City was located “in the land of Oz.”
Baum wrote thirteen more Oz books, and the popular series was continued with another book after his death. He did invent the name Oz, and his biographers have posited three of their own plausible theories for its origin:
• That Baum modified the name of the biblical region of Uz, Job’s homeland.
• That, delighting in the “Ohs” and “Ahs” his tales elicited from children, he respelled the latter exclamation Oz.
• That he slightly altered Charles Dickens’s pseudonym, “Boz,” for he greatly admired the British author’s novels.
Nursery Rhymes: Antiquity, Europe and Asia
Although the concept of rhymes is ancient, only in the 1820s did the term “nursery rhyme” come into use. Previously, such verses were simply known as “songs” or “ditties,” and in the 1700s, specifically, as “Tom Thumb songs” or “Mother Goose rhymes.” In America, in the next century, “Mother Goose rhymes” would win out as the generic name for all children’s verse, regardless of authorship.
There have been many attempts to censor the sadistic phrases found in several popular rhymes—for example, “She cut off their tails with a carving knife.” And many groups have claimed that certain rhymes, replete with adult shenanigans, are entirely unfit for children. The fact is, most nursery rhymes were never intended for children. That is why the adjective “nursery” was not used for centuries. It first appeared in the year 1824, in an article for a British magazine titled “On Nursery Rhymes in General.”
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 24