Are Grimm’s Fairy Tales too twisted for children?

On the covers are the most innocent of titles: Grimm’s Fairy Tales in their English version or Children’s and Household Tales in the original German editions published two hundred years ago. Nice tales for nice children.

But behind the safe titles lie dark stories of sex and violence – tales of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest, as one academic puts it. They are far from anything we might imagine as acceptable today. If they were a video game, there would be calls to ban them.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were writing in a different world. They lived in the town of Kassel in Germany and studied law and language as well as writing more than 150 stories which they published in two volumes between 1812 and 1814.

(Read the full news article at BBC here.)

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I never thought there was anything remotely strange about the Grimm's Fairy Tales and Mother Goose Rhymes that were read to me when I was younger.  I merely felt the worlds in them were strangely fascinating.  People earn money as woodcutters, peasants or were travelling businessmen.  Going to office to work was an alien concept.

I thought it must be a different imaginery world where a mother would allow her young daughter to visit her grandmother living many miles away, all by herself.  My friend was never out of sight of her mother.

Then I tried to read the Grimm's Fairy Tales, auf Deutsch, and discovered many more tales than the Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella that I was so familiar with.  In addition to not fully understandly every single word, the stories were decidedly weird and took on a darker shade.  Certainly,  Grimm’s Fairy Tales are not politically correct in today's world, with a little giving up all her belongings to others more in need and starving to death in the cold.

Der Struwwelpeter is another startling collection of 10 German stories for children written in 1845.  Perhaps children were made of stronger stuff then to be able to stomach such chilling tales.  And perhaps so were their parents.