After many years spent recording folk tales, they produced a manuscript called Kinder und Hausmärchen or Children's and Household Tales. This manuscript included Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella. As you probably already knew, the original stories were a lot grosser than the Disney films. Cinderella's step-sisters cut off bits of their feet to try and fit the slipper, which was made out of gold, not glass (can you imagine dancing in glass slippers? Holy blisters, Batman! I mean, gold's at least malleable). Snow White's mom (not her step-mother) tries to eat her lungs and liver (nom nom nom).
So here's what I didn't know. You know how we always accuse Disney of having Disneyfied all the fairy tales? The brothers Grimm themselves wrote revised, family friendly versions of their tales. Apparently, they weren't big on maternal cannibalism either.
2 comments:
I dunno-- sometimes I think the world could use a lil' MORE Disnification... there's a lot of angry, negative stuff out there. We can start with all my customers.
I vaguely remember from HS French class that historians are fairly certain that Cinderella was wearing fur shoes (fur= vair) in the original versions but that through the telephone fun that happens with oral history it got changed to glass (glass= verre). Just one more useless tidbit from HS that will never serve me in my career.
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