The Original Stories

In today's media, the Grimm fairy tales are depicted as being children friendly. The character's are faced with some sort of obstacle, in which they overcome and live happily ever after and etc. Its commonly known that the portrayal of the stories now isn't the correct portrayal, but most people don't the the true extent of how grim the original stories were.

A main point in the original stories is how violent they were. Horrific incidents occur all the time in these stories. In "Snow White," a story which everyone knows from their children, is one of these kinds of horrific stories. The wicked queen was originally forced to dance in red iron hot shoes, killing her (Greenspan). Things get even more horrific. In "The Goose Maid," a rather unknown story, has a woman being stuffed naked into a barrel filled with nails, then dragged through the streets (Greenspan). In "Cinderella,"another well known story, the stepsisters cut off all of their toes, in a foolish attempt to fit into the glass slipper. At the end of the story, their eyes are pecked out by doves (Greenspan).

Grimm stories additionally feature child abuse. In "The Juniper Tree", a stepmother beheads her stepson while he bent over, and then proceeds to chop up the body and feeds it to her husband, who greatly enjoys the meal and asks for more (Greenspan). In another tale, "Frau Trude," a young girl is transformed into block of wood, and cast into a fire(Greenspan).

Something else that is quite shocking about the Grimm Brothers is a story which is often withheld from newer collections, for obvious reasons. The name of the story is "The Jew in the Brambles," in which the main character tortures a Jewish man by having dance upon a thicket of thorns, while calling him "a dirty dog" (Greenspan). Some of the Grimm Brother's stories were so anti-semitic, that during the Third Reich, Nazis used some stories as propaganda (Hall). One example is "Little Red Riding Hood" was symbolized as the wolf being a Jew, and Germany suffering at the hands of the wolf/Jew (Greenspan).