NationStates Jolt Archive

It came up before in another thread, so I thought I'd link it. :)

http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~wbarker/fairies/grimm/

Our German teacher used to read these to us during class. Boy, did these guys know how to scare the crap out of kids while putting the real important moral values back in.

http://hca.gilead.org.il/

That last link was Hans Christian Anderson stories.

Thank you for those links. I'll use them with my classes.

Most old fairytales were creepy and depressing in their original form. The only reason we have all the nicey nice 'and everybody lived happily ever after' stuff is because book publishers, etc, all decided that children wouldn't be able to cope with the actual stories.

I quite like the (mostly) original versions of all the Hans Christian Anderson stories.

To paraphrase one of my other favourite authors in a book (Terry Pratchet), most of the old stories came down to blood originally.

I just find it interesting to read the stories and see how morality was taught in a much more aggressive way a hundred or two hundred years ago.

For example, Hans Christian Anderson's The Red Shoes is a pretty harsh tale of what happens to people with too much vanity, or The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is one about thoughtlessness.

The Grimm tales, though, were collected from villagers who had passed it down from one generation to the next, and that intrigues me, because there's symbology that has survived for perhaps more than a thousand years, if you only know how to winkle it out of the stories.