What kind of fairy tales did you read or watch?

Ruthanne

Ruthanne

Caregiver
Location
Midwest
When you were growing up what fairy tale stories did you watch or read and which ones did you particularly like?

I liked Cinderella and the Wizard of Oz.
 

Have you ever read any of the Grimm tales in their original versions? Ay-ay-ay.....Grimm is the operant word there. They were written as "morality tales" intended to scare the bejeezits out of kids and send them down the right path.

If you read any of those original tales to children today, you'd be up half the night getting them back to sleep.

I.e.: A vain little girl who is inordinately proud of her new red shoes is sent to the market with her parent's last coin to buy bread so they won't starve to death. On the way home, she encounters a mud puddle and instead of getting her shoes dirty, she throws the bread down and steps on it. OK, think the Brothers Grimm, selfish little bitch needs taken down a peg or two.....let's see what we can do to teach her a lesson. For some reason, she starts dancing and can't stop. She's on the verge of dancing herself to death when she comes upon a woodsman. She begs him to help her stop dancing, so he does so by chopping off her feet and whittling her a pair of wooden feet. Then she spends the rest of her life hobbling around on the wooden feet, in great pain but and here's the BIG but, "properly chastised".

And then you have Cinderella. In the original tale, the stepmother is determined HER daughters will win the prince's heart So when he comes around with the glass slipper and her first daughter's feet are too big to fit in it, she cuts the girl's toes off. The prince thinks, well she's not exactly as pretty as I remember last night, but then maybe I had a little too much to drink, and then rides off with his bride-to-be on the back of his horse, bleeding heavily from her foot. A little birdie flies by and informs the prince he has the wrong girl. Apparently being not too smart, the prince goes back to the house and offers to let the second step-sister try on the shoe. She's a big-foot, too, so her mother cuts off her heels. The prince is satisfied (I didn't mention that although he was good looking, he wasn't exactly an Einstein) and rides off with the second future Mrs. Prince, who is soon in need of a blood transfusion. Same little birdie does the same little warning. Prince turns around, goes back and insists on having Cinderella try on the shoe (yuck....it was probably pretty gnarly by then). The shoe fits, the little birdie shows up and announces that THIS TIME, the prince got it right and the rest is history. I can only hope that the step-sisters found a good podiatrist after all that.

Not exactly Disney-fied fairy tales here.
 
jujube said:
Have you ever read any of the Grimm tales in their original versions? Ay-ay-ay.....Grimm is the operant word there. They were written as "morality tales" intended to scare the bejeezits out of kids and send them down the right path.

If you read any of those original tales to children today, you'd be up half the night getting them back to sleep.

I.e.: A vain little girl who is inordinately proud of her new red shoes is sent to the market with her parent's last coin to buy bread so they won't starve to death. On the way home, she encounters a mud puddle and instead of getting her shoes dirty, she throws the bread down and steps on it. OK, think the Brothers Grimm, selfish little bitch needs taken down a peg or two.....let's see what we can do to teach her a lesson. For some reason, she starts dancing and can't stop. She's on the verge of dancing herself to death when she comes upon a woodsman. She begs him to help her stop dancing, so he does so by chopping off her feet and whittling her a pair of wooden feet. Then she spends the rest of her life hobbling around on the wooden feet, in great pain but and here's the BIG but, "properly chastised".

And then you have Cinderella. In the original tale, the stepmother is determined HER daughters will win the prince's heart So when he comes around with the glass slipper and her first daughter's feet are too big to fit in it, she cuts the girl's toes off. The prince thinks, well she's not exactly as pretty as I remember last night, but then maybe I had a little too much to drink, and then rides off with his bride-to-be on the back of his horse, bleeding heavily from her foot. A little birdie flies by and informs the prince he has the wrong girl. Apparently being not too smart, the prince goes back to the house and offers to let the second step-sister try on the shoe. She's a big-foot, too, so her mother cuts off her heels. The prince is satisfied (I didn't mention that although he was good looking, he wasn't exactly an Einstein) and rides off with the second future Mrs. Prince, who is soon in need of a blood transfusion. Same little birdie does the same little warning. Prince turns around, goes back and insists on having Cinderella try on the shoe (yuck....it was probably pretty gnarly by then). The shoe fits, the little birdie shows up and announces that THIS TIME, the prince got it right and the rest is history. I can only hope that the step-sisters found a good podiatrist after all that.

Not exactly Disney-fied fairy tales here.
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Those are very scary for a young child to read! yikes!!
 

We read all of the traditional fairy tales to our kids. My sons out & out favourite was always "The elves & the shoemaker". We also had a vinyl album of nursery rhymes that they loved.
One bone of contention that we did have was that Cinderella went to the ball at the palace. But one version we had, where she went to two balls. Sometimes when we were particularly tired we tried to edit it down to a single ball. But the kids were having none of it! And demanded the full unabridged version.
Later on when they were a little older. Something called 'Storyteller' came out at newsagents. Available fortnightly, an audio cassette of stories with an accompanying book so that they could follow the plot themselves. Mum & Dad became redundant then, as they liked to put themselves to bed. One of my daughters favourite characters was Gobbelino the witches cat, who had a sibling called Sootica. She still calls her brother Sootica to this day!
 
Goldfynche said:
We read all of the traditional fairy tales to our kids. My sons out & out favourite was always "The elves & the shoemaker". We also had a vinyl album of nursery rhymes that they loved.
One bone of contention that we did have was that Cinderella went to the ball at the palace. But one version we had, where she went to two balls. Sometimes when we were particularly tired we tried to edit it down to a single ball. But the kids were having none of it! And demanded the full unabridged version.
Later on when they were a little older. Something called 'Storyteller' came out at newsagents. Available fortnightly, an audio cassette of stories with an accompanying book so that they could follow the plot themselves. Mum & Dad became redundant then, as they liked to put themselves to bed. One of my daughters favourite characters was Gobbelino the witches cat, who had a sibling called Sootica. She still calls her brother Sootica to this day!
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Awww..that's cute. And I bet you were glad for that audio cassette!
 
I was an avid reader of stories. I read Anderson's and Grimm's and I have to say Anderson's were the grimmest. I loved Kipling's Just So Stories and the Jungle Book, not the bland Disney version but the real, raw in tooth and claw version by the original author. I also delved into Greek and Roman legends as in Kingsley's The Heroes. I read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and J M Barrie's play Peter Pan. I loved Aesop's fables and Uncle Remus' tales from the Briar Patch. As a seventeen year old I read just about all of the stories in The Thousand Nights and One Night as translated by William Burton. Some of these were very X rated and I was greatly shocked.

I still love stories but these days mostly take them in via the cinema - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Avatar and so on.
 
We had a volume of Grimm's and a volume of Andersen's. We knew some of the Grimm's but our parents said Andersen's were too ... grim (thanks, Warrigal! :) ).

We also had other books of fairy tales. I loved "The Gingerbread Boy" (but one version of it is really grim, too!) and the story of the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and the one about why rabbits have short tails, and another one I can't remember much about except that it was told by the "donkey from Hedge Farm."

I guess my favorite is George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin. I'm not sure it's technically a fairy tale.
 
My very first fairy tale that I loved was, The Little Red Hen. I loved how she did everything herself when she couldn't get any help from anyone. In the end she got to eat the whole loaf of bread that she made. When I got a bit older I liked Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood. I liked the scary ones.
 
I heard a lot of fairy tales when I would interview suspects. They can come up with some really good stuff.
 
Mom would read, Wind in the Willows. She took us to see Bambi and cried when his mom didn't make it through the fire. I cried at Dumbo over ones making fun of him. And being separated from his mom. Baba Yaga (Russian Witch), Peter and the Wolf. Winken, Blinkin and Nod,Tubby the Tuba, Wizard of OZ movie, And a song called Rolly Polly. Old Lady That Lived In a Shoe, Peter Rabbit, Chicken Little, Henny Penny. I liked Eloise at the Plaza. and all the Eloise stories mom would read. Today I like Eloise at Christmas. It's such a heartwarming movie.:love_heart:
 
Marley said:
Mom would read, Wind in the Willows. She took us to see Bambi and cried when his mom didn't make it through the fire. I cried at Dumbo over ones making fun of him. And being separated from his mom. Baba Yaga (Russian Witch), Peter and the Wolf. Winken, Blinkin and Nod,Tubby the Tuba, Wizard of OZ movie, And a song called Rolly Polly. Old Lady That Lived In a Shoe, Peter Rabbit, Chicken Little, Henny Penny. I liked Eloise at the Plaza. and all the Eloise stories mom would read. Today I like Eloise at Christmas. It's such a heartwarming movie.:love_heart:
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You have a good memory. Now that you mentioned all of those I recall quite a few, too. Bambi was so sad.
 
As I recall, Bambi's mum was shot at the start of the hunting season. There is also some debate as to whether Cinderella's slippers were made of glass or squirrel fur. Nevertheless, they are quite nasty tales in their original form.

As well as the classic Grimm and Andersen tales, many British children will recall the Beatrix Potter stories.
 
Capt Lightning said:
As well as the classic Grimm and Andersen tales, many British children will recall the Beatrix Potter stories.
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Including that brutal horror story The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding ? :eek1:

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"The Arabian Nights" in German script; ancient book now almost falling apart; my fav.
book as a child in Ge.
(1000 and 1 Night as already mentioned by W.)
 
Best I ever read and enjoyed were the Narnia tales by C.S. Lewis. All the old fairy tales seem so dark.
 

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