A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales
medievalists.net
medievalists.net
What else could they do to actively make users run away? Sirens blazing?
Comic Sans and fellow-kids memes
They can have quite graphic content.
My wife and I were reading from a "Trove of childrens songs, fairy tales etc" to our newborn, to get in the practice of reading to our child. Simple rhyming stuff, 3 blind mice, the luminous dong, tom thumb, jack and the beanstalk. It was getting more serious.
Then a story: man earns and travels with a reaver at his side and ends up winning the heart of a princess - who up 'til that point kept a garden decorated with the blood dripping heads of failed suitors. I mean, she was under the influence of an evil troll(iirc) so no disrespect to her but I thought I might wait a few years until I read that one to my kids...
Darker material gives stories gravitas as well as putting the moral lessons in starker, simpler terms. If you don't follow instructions, or exhibit some antisocial behavior, you're not just "punished", you're slaughtered. Little Red Riding Hood strayed from the path and was eaten alive by a wolf. You can't get more clear than that. If and when the hunter saves her, that's mostly for the benefit of the parent, not the kid.
I'll think you'll find that most children, even from a very early age (preschool and before), are quite capable of discerning fiction from reality, and adept at distinguishing and recognizing (if not understanding) the moral lessons. The problem, IMO, with many fairy tales isn't the gore but that neither the moral lesson nor the plots resonant; so the gore just seems gratuitous rather than punctuation. Nobody is afraid of wolves anymore (we killed them all generations ago), and we rarely if ever let kids out into the world without safety rails, even up to college. The latter wouldn't matter if kids feared wolves--the graphic detail would make the moral lesson stick, which is kinda the point--but they just aren't.
I think you'll also find that, especially in the U.S., we live in a ridiculously violent culture; violence that we at best only superficially disguise. It's not the guns dropping legions of "bad guys"--again, most children understand fiction--it's just... I dunno, violence as an end unto itself rather than a means...? Fairy tale gore in books is the last thing I would ever be concerned about. I've actively tried to read these sorts of stories to my kids, to add diversity to their diet, but they don't seem to ever get into it. I think maybe it's just too unbelievable and dull, not too raw. The modern world is too different, modern culture much more slick and appetizing, and they know it even at 3.
https://eraebarnes.com/2017/10/06/from-wild-beasts-to-a-barr...
I am rather shocked at this sentiment. We live in an incredibly peaceful culture, in historical context. For example, people used to be hung in the town square. Burned alive for entertainment. People would wander around town with a sword, picking fights to the death, and it was legal.
I once asked my dad why punishments for people who conspired against the king were so public and so hideously brutal. He replied that the people lived in brutal times, death at a young age was common, so it had to be amped up to get their attention.
These days, I never even saw a dead body (outside of a mummy in a museum) until my 50s. It's incredible if you think about it.
In my travels and readings I've found that countries have distinct tendencies toward violence that clearly emanate from their culture, not from objective markers like poverty, income, etc. For example, in the 1990s Ecuador had the lowest homicide rate in the Americas, despite often crushing poverty. In the early 2000s there was a surge of Columbian immigrants in search of work. Columbian culture was far more violent than Ecuador's, much like the U.S. (as opposed to simply a consequence of organized crime), and rates of violence soared. Not because the Columbian immigrants were criminals, but because those who resorted to crime did so in a more violent manner.
But my point wasn't to say that the U.S. is unsafe. Just that what makes a culture (and people) violent isn't superficial behaviors. Guns don't make America violent. America loves guns because we're a violent society. To be clear, we love guns not because we feel we have to defend ourselves, but we because we fetishize the idea of defending ourselves amidst our own violence. Take away the guns and homicides might drop, but the tendency toward violence will simply remain latent, and all the other manifestations of that culture of violence will remain. It doesn't mean we can't become a safer, better society. We have and we are. We'll just follow a different, often trailing path as compared to less violent societies.
If we want our kids to internalize a different set of norms and expectations, it's these subtle cues that we have to watch for, not the artifice. Kids can see through artifice, at least to the extent they haven't internalized the norms the artifice reflects or disguises. They don't need to be protected from video games or gun culture or gore; they need to be taught to recognize our society's preference for conflict over cooperation, for winner-take-all strategies, rather than to let it seep in quietly. Those cues are subtle and pervasive and to some extent exist even within, e.g., Disney's otherwise saccharine world. For example, Disney's woke culture messaging (as well meaning and useful as it is) reflects the narrative of two groups pitted against each other, one right and one wrong, where the latter either needs to be vanquished or converted. Unlike in traditional fairy tales, in American narratives the boogeyman is your nextdoor neighbor, not a troll or a witch. We think we're sending sophisticated, moral, good messages, and we are, but it's not all we're sending.
But when you say the US is "exceptionally violent" that is indeed what you're saying.
> they need to be taught to recognize our society's preference for conflict over cooperation, for winner-take-all strategies,
Oh come on. This just reads like selection bias. Just drive to work some day, and look at all the cars cooperating so the traffic smoothly flows. They go to work, and cooperate with the people at the workplace, cooperate with their suppliers, cooperate with their customers, and pretty much everyone they interact with all day, every day.
The winner-take-all mentality is in organized sports, which are specifically designed for that, and those are in every country. (And even then the teams have to cooperate with each other, and cooperate with other teams on rules and schedules.) But not much in other activities. Humans would all literally die in short order if we don't cooperate.
Thought I'd throw in this thought:
Free markets are based on voluntary cooperation. Socialism is based on forced cooperation. I can't even think of a functioning system based on non-cooperation.
Compared to present countries, not the past, the US indeed is exceptionally violent, especially given the wealth in the country.
* Homicide rate is among the highest of all OECD countries, for example: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location...
* The US still has legal capital punishment.
* The whole approach to the penal system being very revenge-based, resulting in very high incarceration rates etc.
* The prevalence of sexual violence, e.g. compare the US with Canada: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health...
First off, what is and is not an OECD country is selection bias right from the start. "Among" the highest is subjective as well, and it's far from the highest. Next, the US is a large and diverse country. There are some neighborhoods with very high homicide rates (in Chicago, for example). This is not at all representative of the rest of the country, but it averages into the statistics.
The TV series "Sons of Anarchy" is certainly entertaining, but has nothing to do with reality in the US.
The homicide rate is still very, very low compared to deaths from other causes. It doesn't even rate a mention in lists of deaths from causes. I wouldn't characterize that as "exceptionally violent".
> The US still has legal capital punishment.
28 states have capital punishment, 22 do not. In 2019, 22 people total were executed. While this is 22 too many and it needs to stop, it is statistically insignificant compared to the population of 328,000,000.
> The whole approach to the penal system being very revenge-based
I agree with that, but don't agree it makes society violent.
> The prevalence of sexual violence
I clicked on the reference, expecting to see rates of conviction for sexual violence. It's not there.
American society is brutal in many respects. It is truly winner-take-all and rest be damned, you should have tried harder. Be it medicine (you either can afford it or are screwed - unimaginable for any european country), education (public universities are almost/totally free everywhere), penal system etc.
I find it interesting how US top 1% succeeded to persuade the remaining 99% of the population that this is best system for them, when clearly it isn't. Not if you want the best place for your kid to grow up and be given fairest and best chances and have a good safe life. I guess Hollywood helped, but rather than contemplating some conspiracy it seems to me its more some sort of self-fulfilling myth.
We know class mobility is largely a myth, and US society is deeply divided into classes based on money. And as for violence - its there on more noticeable levels than across the pond.
Indirect coercion due to lack of the means of subsistence is not voluntary.
> Socialism is based on forced cooperation.
It's not. Socialism is not Stalinism.
What would, in my opinion, be an effect of 19th century sensibilities, of Romantic, Gothic and Wagnerian sensibilities, would be the attribution of any sort of gravitas to the original material. I think the violence is not even supposed to shock, scare or be believable. It is supposed to be ridiculous: the tone of story will shift in a single page into some ridiculous over-the-top violence and then go back to normal as if nothing happened. The attitude towards violence is pretty much the same as in that of Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
About children not caring about fairy tales: I don't think it's that unusual, though I don't think it has got anything to do with either children or fairy tales. A minority of people hugely enjoy something and it's because of them that the everyone else enjoys it, because they manage to make it sound fun by constantly playing with it. People don't just happen to aggregate, collate and modify folklore to the benefit of folklorists. They do it because they happen to be the main audience for folk tales. Because they are constantly alternating between telling and hearing them, even in their old age, they get good at it.
I'm comparing with my own experience. I loved (modern) fairy tales as a kid, and the world wasn't that different when I grew up.
I've seen that kind of story-telling in action in a Waldorf kindergarten, and it is really capturing.
I think the "ye olde storyteller that wanders from town to town" has morphed into the modern day comedian. The comedian often tells a mundane story, but they tell it well.
A child dying in the flames she sparked by playing with a bunch of matches while she was home alone. The cats were trying to warn her, now they can only watch from afar as the child and house burn.
A homeless child having a final hallucination while watching (again) a bunch of matches burn while freezing to death outside. Another child dying from hunger because he refuses to eat what his parents are putting on the table. Yes, not the most uplifting stories, but where I come from, everyone knows these stories, and almost everyone knows them since they are about 5.
My feeling was that I would wait a bit longer for the more gruesome story than some of the others.
If you raise children in a bubble of safety and only throw them out into the real world at adulthood, they have many problems.
Scary stories are a safe way to introduce developing humans to the realities of the world so they are prepared for them.
Biologically it is the likely source of a lot of mental illness. Basically your brain tunes itself towards the expectations set in its early environment, if the adult environment is quite a lot different than the childhood one, the feedback systems tuned to keep things on the level can’t cope with the foreign environment and you get mental illness.
It wasn’t so long ago that wandering off into the forest would likely get you murdered or worse.
In this instance, I wasn't planning to censor the story out of existence. Just perhaps wait a bit longer than the other stories would require.
Interesting theory on the mental illness. I won't entirely subscribe to it as I think there are a wide variety of illnesses with a wide variety of causes. Whether this is the "likely source of a lot" remains to be proven I think.
the audio version recorded by none other than Terry Jones is extremely good. The humour and sexiness of the translation (no, really!) come through in spades, and his midlands accent is exactly correct and sounds wonderful.
lesser-known gems i like are his translations ( of gawain, pearl, and sir orfeo), his critical essays (monsters and critics), and his short stories (smith of wooton major, farmer giles of ham).