Recently, educators and psychologists have often complained that folk tales are too cruel. However, many do not even realize that children hear heavily edited versions of them. In the originals, everything is so creepy and sometimes bloody that you are simply amazed.
But how could you tell such stories to kids ?! Scientists-folklorists explain this phenomenon as follows: fairy tales are part of oral folk art, and adults told what they themselves heard somewhere. And they heard what was actually happening around.
In addition, in ancient times, adults treated children not as toddlers, but as future adults who needed to be prepared for adulthood.
In addition, it is worth noting that in those days the upbringing of children took place naturally: they slept with their parents in the same room, their mothers gave birth to brothers and sisters in their own presence, and there is nothing to say about cooking food from bloody carcasses.
Today, few people know about two people who made a huge contribution to the history of mankind, preserving excellent examples of oral folk art for future generations.
No, these are not the Brothers Grimm! One of them is the Italian Giambattista Basile, who wrote The Tale of Fairy Tales, containing 50 Sicilian tales and published in 1636.
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The other is the Frenchman Charles Perrault. His book, containing 8 fairy tales, was published in 1697. Seven of them became classics. But what was really in them?
"Sleeping Beauty". When she was born, the witch predicted a terrible death for her - death from an injection of a poisoned spindle. Her father ordered all the spindles to be taken out of the palace, but the beautiful Thalia nevertheless pricked herself with a spindle and fell dead.
The inconsolable king put his daughter's lifeless body on a velvet throne and ordered it to be carried to a small house in the forest. They locked the house and left, never to return.
Once a foreign king was hunting in those forests. His falcon broke free from his hands and flew away, the king galloped after him and came across a house. Assuming that the falcon could fly in, the gentleman climbed through the window. The falcon was not there. There was a princess sitting on a throne.
Deciding that the girl was asleep, the king began to wake her, but could not. Inflamed by the beauty of the maiden, the king carried her to bed and "gathered flowers of love." Leaving the beauty on the bed, he returned to his kingdom and forgot about the incident.
Nine months passed, the princess gave birth to twins - a boy and a girl. They lay next to her and suckled. It is not known how long this would have continued if the boy had not once lost his mother's breast and had not begun to suck her finger - the very one pricked with a spindle.
The poisoned thorn jumped out and the princess woke up, finding herself in an abandoned house in the company of babies who had come from nowhere.
Meanwhile, the king, suddenly remembering the sleeping girl and the "adventure", again gathered to hunt in those lands. Looking into the house, he found a beautiful trinity there.
Repented, the king told the princess everything and even stayed for several days. Having left, he promised the beauty to soon send for her and the children - during these few days they managed to fall in love with each other.
Returning home, the king could not forget about the beautiful Thalia and her children - a boy named Sun and a girl named Luna.
And his wife - i.e. the queen, to whom he somehow did not find the time to tell about newborns, suspected something. First, she interrogated one of the royal falconers, and then intercepted the messenger with the king's letter to Thalia.
Meanwhile, the unsuspecting Talia quickly collected the twins and went to her lover. She did not know that the queen ordered to seize all three, kill the kids, prepare several dishes from them and serve them to the king for dinner.
At dinner, when the king was praising meat pies, the queen muttered all the time: "You eat yours!" The king got tired of listening to his wife's mutterings, and he abruptly cut her off: "Of course, I eat mine, because your dowry was worth a penny!"
But this was not enough for the evil queen. Blinded by the thirst for revenge, she ordered the princess herself to be brought to her and said: “You are a vile creature! I'll kill you!" The princess sobbed and screamed that it was not her fault - after all, the king "broke her fort" while she was sleeping. But the queen was adamant and ordered the servants: "Light the fire and throw her there!"
The desperate princess asked to fulfill her last wish - to undress before dying. Her robes were embroidered with gold and precious stones, so the greedy queen agreed.
The princess undressed very slowly. Taking off every piece of her toilet, she screamed loudly and pitifully. And the king heard her. He burst into the dungeon, knocked the queen down and demanded that the twins be returned.
"But you ate them yourself!" said the evil queen. The king sobbed - and ordered the queen to be burned in the already lit fire. But then the cook came and admitted that he had disobeyed the queen's order and left the twins alive by roasting a lamb. The joy of the parents knew no bounds! Having kissed the cook and each other, they began to live and make good money.
And Basile ends the tale with the following morality: "Some are always lucky - even when they sleep."
"Cinderella". The first European fairy tale about Cinderella was described by the same Basile - however, the original Cinderella did not lose a crystal shoe at all. And her name was Zezolla - short for Lucrezuzzi, and she showed a tendency to murder in childhood.
In agreement with her nanny, she ruined the evil stepmother, inviting her to look at her mother's chest. The greedy stepmother bent over the chest, Zezolla pulled down the lid with force - and broke her stepmother's neck.
After burying her stepmother, Zezolla persuaded her father to marry a nanny. But the girl did not feel better, since her life was poisoned by six nanny daughters. She continued to wash, wash, tidy up the house and scoop up the ash.
But one day Zezolla accidentally stumbled upon a magic tree that fulfilled wishes. It was only necessary to say: “Oh magic tree! Undress yourself and dress me! And Cinderella dressed up in beautiful dresses and went to balls.
Once the king himself saw the girl and, of course, immediately fell in love. He sent his servant to find Zezolla, but he could not find her.
The king in love became angry and cried out: "By the souls of my ancestors - if you do not find a beauty, then I will beat you with a stick and kick you as many times as there are hairs in your nasty beard!"
The servant, frightened, found Cinderella and, seizing her, put her in her own cart. But Zezolla shouted to the horses, and they dashed off. The servant fell. Something else that belonged to Cinderella also fell - a shoe.
The servant returned with her to the owner, he jumped up, happily grabbed the shoe and began to cover it with kisses. What was it? Silk slipper? Golden Boot? Glass slipper?
Not at all! It was a pianella - a walker-like galoshe with a cork sole, worn by the women of Naples during the Renaissance. The high platform protected long women's dresses from dirt and dust. Platform heights usually reached 6-18 inches.
And the king gently pressed this large and absurd object to his chest and moaned over it, saying that if it was not my destiny to find you, my love, then I would perish in the prime of life.
Then he sent messengers who traveled all over the kingdom and tried on the found pianella for each woman. So Cinderella was found.
Basile's tale is full of romanticism, but the Northern European versions of Cinderella are much more bloody. For example, in the Scandinavian and Norwegian versions, the prince ordered to smear the step of the palace porch with resin, and the small shoe of the local Cinderella - in these places she was called Ashen-puttel - stuck.
After that, the prince's servants went all over the kingdom to look for the owner of the little leg.
And so they got to Cinderella's house. But besides the very poor thing, there were still two stepmother's daughters! First, the eldest tried on the shoe. Locked in the bedroom, she pulled on her slipper, but in vain - her thumb interfered. Then her mother said, “Take a knife and cut off your finger. When you become queen, you won't have to walk a lot! The girl obeyed - the shoe fit.
The delighted prince immediately put the beauty on a horse and galloped to the palace to prepare for the wedding. But it was not there! When they drove past the grave of Cinderella's mother, the birds sitting in the trees sang loudly that, they say, blood was dripping from the shoe, it was small, and you are not your bride!
The prince looked and actually saw blood flowing from the girl's shoe. Then he returned and gave the shoe to his second stepmother's daughter. And that one had a too thick heel - and the shoe didn't fit again. The mother gave the second daughter the same advice. She cut off part of the heel and, hiding the pain, squeezed her foot into the shoe.
The joyful prince put another bride on a horse and rode to the castle. But the birds were on guard. Finally, the prince, returning to the same house, found his Cinderella, married her and healed himself in complete happiness. And the envious girls were blinded and flogged - so that they would not covet someone else's.
It was this version that served as the basis for the modern fairy tale, only the publishers, taking pity on the little children, deleted even the slightest hints of blood from their version.
By the way, the tale of Cinderella is one of the most popular fairy tales in the world. She has lived for 2500 years and during this time she received 700 versions (and continues to receive now - in endless versions of tearful melodramas).
And the earliest version of the tale was found in Ancient Egypt - there mothers told their children at night a story about a beautiful prostitute who bathed in the river, and at that time an eagle stole her sandal and took her to the Pharaoh.
The sandal was so small and graceful that the pharaoh immediately announced a nationwide wanted list. And, of course, when he found Fodoris - Cinderella - he immediately married her. I wonder what the Pharaoh's wife was that Cinderella?..
"Three Bears". In this tale, it is not the girl Masha (in the Russian version) who breaks into the house of the bears, but an old ragged beggar woman. And it took almost a hundred years for the old woman to turn into a little thief with blond curls.
The English poet Robert Susi published this tale in 1837, “equipping” it with phrases that have been successful for all parents since then: “Who was sitting in my chair ?!”, “Who ate my porridge?” According to Susi, the old woman broke into the house, ate porridge, sat on a chair, and then fell asleep.
When the bears returned, she jumped out the window. “Whether she broke her neck, froze to death in the forest, was arrested and rotted in prison, I don't know. But since then, the three bears have never heard of that old woman. So the tale ended.
The British can be proud - this version was considered the first for many years. True, in 1951 in one of the Toronto libraries they found a book published in 1831 with the same tale. It was written for her nephew by a certain Eleanor Moore.
This tale is rather strange. In it, the old woman climbed up to three bears, because not long before that they offended her. And in the end, when the bears caught her, they slowly and thoroughly discussed what to do with her now: “They threw her into the fire, but she did not burn; they threw her into the water, but she did not sink. Then they took her and threw her on the spire of St. Paul's Church - and if you look carefully, you will see that she is still there!"
The version of the tale edited by Susi existed for a long time, until in 1918 someone changed the gray-haired old woman for a little girl.