On Dec 17, 2004, at 21:14, Weronika Patena wrote:
The fact that those used to be stories for children tells you something about how life must have been then...
It may tell you something about life back then, but only after you remember that, originaly, those *weren't* stories for children :)
They didn't become children's stories until after the Brothers Grimm collected and published them. Those stories had been told and retold, in different versions, for centuries before. But they were told by adults to adults, like the stories of Illiad an Odyssey, or the Languedoc "romances", or 1001/Arabian Nights (or Boccacio's "Decameron" <g>)... Charles Perrault's fairy tales, earlier, and much less scary than the Grimms' ones, were meant for adults. Hans Christian Andersen's "fairy tales" (some folk, some written by him) - ditto (mostly). Afanasjev collection - same. Not to mention fairy tales/myths from Asia and Africa and South America...
Only a smattering of the various tales made it into the kid-lit canon; usually about 10-15 from a volume of hundreds (Andersen's full output, for example, was published in Poland in 5 volumes - thin paper, no illustrations. 1001 Nights was *11* volumes. OK, so Polish uses long words, but, still...) The stories from Decameron (a full 100 of them) are the only ones that never made it into the kid-lit at all, ever.
US, BTW, favours the Perrault fairy tales over the Grimm ones (while I never even heard of Perrault until I came here <g>) as kid-lit scanon; they were re-written and "sanitised" for the use of the ladies of the French court in 17th c, while the Brothers Grimm collected theirs from the peasants and passed them on "as is" (during the Romantic Period). Certainly, it's Perrault on whose tales Disney movies are based, not the Brothers Grimm...
Possible conclusions (? <g>):
1) The psyche of a German (or Polish) child is (has been judged) more sturdy (more bloodthirsty?) than that of a US one...
2) The peasants can cope with life's (or fairy tale's) horrors better than aristocrats...
3) The idea of PC or SSS (Save Someone's Sensibilities) has been around for a long, long, time...
4) Speaking of time, it's mine to take off... :)
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Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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