Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic FFQ: Favorite fairytales

That was in Shelley Duvall's Fairy Tale Theatre, but I don't see anything about The Goose Girl or King Thrushbeard in that series.

Thanks so much, folcs. It sounds like I have a good list going of stories almost everybody knows. (I needed universally known stories so that they are still recognizable when I mess with them in my L&C story.)

I'm intrigued by the Goose Girl, which I haven't read yet. It sounds like I'm missing out on something.

BTW, I love the Seven Chinese Brothers. I don't know if it is well-known enough to use, but it makes a great story.


Elisabeth
who just realized I probably am looking for childhood folk tales and not fairytales.

The Goose Girl

The ending is a bit gruesome, but it's an interesting story.

Oh that ending made me laugh! Yes, I am strange. But so many fairy-tales are gruesome. I suppose it's to keep the adults amused since they're the ones who have to read them to their kids.

Here's a link to something that gave me nightmares as a child - it makes me laugh now, but Good God!

Little Suck-a-Thumb

Thanks for this thread, Elisabeth. I've been doing searches for books I liked as a kid, and getting all nostalgic.

Way to suck me in. Actually, fairytales as we conceive of them today are not really like the way they were used in the past, thus explaining the gruesome, non-Disney, endings. No one is exactly sure where they came from. We see them as fun, entertaining tales, almost always with a happy ending. In reality, they were usually meant as a way to entertain and a way to teach lessons. As such, they were, in the Western tradition at least, passed own orally via the women in the family. This explains why there are so many variations on a theme in many different cultures. Propp and Levi-Strauss are two major theorists on the whys and wherefores of fairytales. Just in case you're interested...but frankly, I wouldn't read them unless you're dying to know. They tend to put me to sleep, and the translations are horrid.

I would have to say that ''Beauty and the Beast'' is my favorite fairy tale .

Camy

In very many traditional fairy tales, the principal evil-doer is a woman, who eventually meets with a gruesome death. This reeks of the witch hunts, if you ask me.



Here in Scandinavia, we had the brilliant story-telling Dane, H.C. Andersen.



It was Andersen who originally wrote the fairy tale about the little mermaid. But Andersen's original is just so sad! The little mermaid saves the prince's life and falls in love with him, and in order to have a chance to be with him, she sacrifices her voice so that she can have a pair of legs instead and be able to walk on land. But she can't tell the prince what she has done for him, and he just doesn't understand at all... he doesn't care about her... Okay, here it is:

Little Red Riding Hood

Anyway, it sure is a fascinating story.



Ann

Ann, if you haven't already, you need to read Hazel's LNC fairytale:


The Evil Stepmother\'s Manifesto



LabRat

Oh wow, LabRat!!! That's just wonderful! Hansel and Gretel, indeed, and their wicked stepmother and the wicked witch!!!



Ann

Project Gutenburg

Heres a link to a lot of Fairy and Folk Tales!


Desiree

Yes, that's where I was able to download for free all those wonderful fairy tale collections from my childhood. The Green Book of Fairy Tales, The Lilac Book of Fairy Tales and so on. I don't remember how many there were in the series, but it was quite a lot. I'd recommend them to anyone who's interested in fairytales.

ETA: I checked them out. I had the detail slightly wrong, but I remembered (how I have no clue after all these years!) that they were all edited by Andrew Lang. You can find them here . Brown Fairy Book, Green Fairy Book and so on.

LabRat

In case anyone wants to read the werewolf version of Little Red Riding Hood, it is here.

Ann

my (non-Disney) fave's were always:

Cinderella... really sad/happy at the same time... loved the Drew Barrymore version
The little match girl
Rumplestiltskin

and although not really fairy tails...
The Secret Garden
and The little Princess
by Francess Hodgson Burnett

Oooh
and don't forget the Australian Classic The Complete Adventures of Snuggle...e Ragged Blossom and Little Obelia"
by May Gibbs ..... not sure if her works are as well known overseas...


favourite DISNEY one's include:
Little Mermaid (First movie I ever saw at the cinema... aged 4)
Aladdin (Just gotta love that Robin Williams as Gene)
and
Beauty and the Beast... so moving...I cried in this one when we think the beast dies...

Thanks so much to all who posted here.

Y'all take your fairytales very seriously. I've always tended to believe that fairytales were violent because that was what was popular in entertainment during that time period. If you look at the television, movie and radio stories which were popular in the middle of the twentieth century, it's obvious that most of them would not be nearly as popular 50 years later and vice versa. Some of that, of course, has to do with a society that pushes limits, but much of it also has to do with changing ideas of entertainment.

Anyway, thanks so much for all of this. I'll get to writing as soon as my Kerth nominations list is complete.

Elisabeth

I think you're right in saying that this was popular in entertainment. I want to point out though, that more than just entertainment it was folk entertainment, 'old wives tales' meant to be told outloud, not read, so we probably have a limited amount of all the ones that existed (although the orality makes it sketchy to even pinpoint at an origin). A lot of them were passed down from mother to daughter and while I subscribe to the view that superficially they were cautionary morality tales, I think there was also a vicarious pleasure in narrating the violent demise of evil doers. I like to think of it in terms of the Middle Age mentality of living in fear and these tales as providing some sort of comfort in the uncertainty. Because of course nothing in fairy tales tends to be uncertain (the handmaiden was EVIL she deserved her fate!).

Anyway as far as this displays women's (often devalued) creativity I feel there is something subversive about them. Kind of like fanfiction (in that it exists outside the sphere of commodification). That is right up until fairy tales got coopted by the bourgois salons and aspiring (male) writers. Then it was watered down (gah, imagine how nasty they must have been if what we always get has been edited already), made palatable to the upper classes and sent forth as quaint little tales that they could enjoy as they continued oppressing the lower classes.

alcyone