Hey there,
I’m back, yay ^^ finally i’m finding some time and actually also something to write about. This has occupied my mind for more than a week now and I’ve already discussed it with a number of people. And now I feel I should also put it into writing 
.
So, what is this about? Yes, it had something to do with fairy tales. I couldn’t really find a good title… Anyway, here it goes: This semester I’m taking a course on American Folklore. It’s a small class and very relaxed and not very … scholarly as it is just a Language Course and its purpose is to get us taklking in English. It is somehow a lot of … chatting and telling each other stories. So at the end of that one session we got to fairy tales. We had been discussing the Inuit story of Sedna, a girl who is tricked by a petrel – a large bird – into marrying him and when she finds out that he’s a bird she tries to escape. Her father and brothers try to rescue her, they get her into their boat and set off but then the petrel comes after them and attacks them and also makes the waters of the ocean whirl so that there are huge waves. The men decide they have no chance against him and decide to sacrifice Sedna. So they throw her over board. She tries to climb into the boat again but her brothers keep hitting her hands with their peddles and first her fingertips fall off and turn into seals. Then also the second joints fall off and they turn into different water animals, the third joints turn into walrusses and her thumbs become whales. Sedna then sinks to the bottom of the sea and finally becomes a powerful spirit, who controls the sea creatures. People fear her and hold ceremonies in her honor.
I guess everyone would agree that this is quite a … brutal story. We all found it a bit strange but I think in essence it has its own beauty and read or rather told in its own cultural setting serves its purpose to explain an importan part of that culture. That’s what folklore does. From there on we then got to the fact that folk stories somehow tend to be brutal and violent. Just think of some of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Cinderella’s step sisters cut their feet to fit into the shoe, the grandma of Rotkäppchen is eaten alive by a wolf, and another wolf tries to persuade the poor seven goat-kids to open the door and eats them all but one (who’s hiding in the big grandfather clock). Yes, that’s not nice.
I wish I could give you what exaclty our teacher said, but I can only say what she meant, or rather what I think she meant. Her point was that these kind of stories were made to scare children off of doing “bad things” and that nowadays stories for children were constructed differently, not working with making them scared and that she would not read Grimm’s fairy tales to her kids. We were bewildered. Not read fairy tales to kids? Is it because we’re German and we took it as an insult of our national heritage? Maybe And then she said something that got my mind running. “Think of all the nightmares that could have been avoided.” (or something along those lines)
Boom. Silence. And I think all eight of us were thinking very hard if they had had any nightmares whatsoever containing fairy tale characters. The discussion didn’t went much further then but it had given me something to think about. Or rather several things.
I was virtually raised with fairy tales. My mum read to my sister and me every night from the time my sister was a baby and I was three years old until we moved houses when I was eight (by then I was reading on my own). My grandma had a really nice colourful fairy tale book that we used to read together. I remember the pictures of Rotkäppchen and Der Wolf und die sieben Geißlein. I can’t remeber so much as one nightmare featuring a wolf or something like that. I asked my mum to make sure and she said she wasn’t all sure but didn’t think I had nightmares. Of course that doesn’t prove anything. I might have had them and simply do not remember them anymore. But these then wouldn’t have been very intense dreams, as I definitely can remember nightmare from quite a young age featuring strange monsters and a flood. Of all the people I asked (numbering five at the moment) only one could tell me of a fairy tale nightmare. That is by far not representative but still. I do not think kids get nightmares from fairy tales. And I also have arguments:
Firstly, fairy tales are set in “Once upon a time…” “In a far away kingdom …” not in our time, nor world, not in the reality of a child. And I think children can distinguish that.
Secondly, fairy tales are closed stories. They have set endings, most of all the famous happy endings the bad guys always get punished and the good ones win and live “happily ever after” … “und sie lebten glücklich bis an ihr Lebensende.”The reason why modern horror movies are so very scary is that they tend to have open endings. Even if the good guys won for the moment, the evil might find a way to return. That even scares me and I think it would scare a child to death if the wolf in Der Wolf und die sieben Geißlein did not drown in the well in the end but, say, is chased off into the forest. He would be able to return. But the way the tale is constructed he cannot – he is dead.
I don’t have all the Grimm’s fairy tales in mind at the moment so I cannot prove it for ever single one of them but I think they are true in essence. I also don’t know if it applies to fairy tales of other cultures, I’m not an expert.
But just one more thing worth thinking about: These stories have been passed on orally for centuries. And children have been listening to them for centuries. Wouldn’t they have stopped telling stories that scared children to death and resulted in them having nightmare every night? Kids having nightmares is not only heartbreaking, it’s also nerve-wracking.
