Reading about fairy tales and their evolution in time was chilling. I knew there were a lot of versions which were very diverse. It all makes sense since fairy tales come from oral stories which mothers and grandmothers told their (grand)children. Or do they?
Turns out that fairy tales were stories women told younger people as a way of sharing knowledge. The stories were metaphorical, they did not depict things that acctually happened. Therfore there was magic involved, but the exagerations were there only as a metaphor for something that could acctually happen. Especially when it comes to nature, which even to this day has aspects which we cannot explain. Depending on who was listening, their background and stage in life, they could extract different messages from the stories.
The difference between myths and fairy tales, is that the fairy tales put the power in the hands of the protagonist, while in myths the power was held by a God, usually a myserable one. This is not to say, that in fairy tales the protagonist would do things (only) on their own. Usually they had help …or not, depending on which actions they took. Usually, if not always, actions which were for the benefit of other or their own growth were rewarded, while greed and disregard for others was punished. Those communities were more tolerant of diversity as you need different skills for different situations, but we can see through the evolution of fairy tales how those differences have been reduced to one popular version.
Unlike popular belief, I think what we call fairy tales predated myths and are not just a decay of myth in the profane. I think the Gods appeared everywhere as a personification of natural events (most clear in hindu tradition), so that humans could have a closer and more familiar approach to them. The rites for most archaic God(desses) are rituals that deal with aspects of survival (fertility, food, health, death). Once survival of the species wasn’t an issue anymore, the Gods turned to power and the world turned to mysery. Some stories turned into myths, some remained fairy tales.
The fairy tales we are familiar with now have nothing to do with the original versions. I remember when I first found out that the fairy tales recorded by the brothers Grimm were much more crueler and not what we would consider suited for children now. I heard the interpretation that around that time parents told those scary stories to caution children about how hard life was at the time. Yes, and no. Those stories weren’t for children. They were for young adults, usually women. And the evil characters we know today weren’t evil. They were testing if the young protagonist had the skills or the ability to build the skills needed to survive in the current society. In the stories where Baba Yaga appears, each version has different endavours for the character who reached her depending what was valued in the society of the storyteller. What stays the same is the ritualistic relation and respect to nature without which the protagonist could not even get to her.
The Little Mermaid died in most versions in the end because the moral was not to change who you are for anyone because itvis nit worth it. Also, in a version, her sisters gave their hair to the sea witch to have Ariel’s voice back, but the witch asks for Ariel to kill the prince. This is a metaphor for renouncing the unhealty attachement. Wether it is a toxic relationship or an addiction, the attachment is so deep that we feel it as a part of us. Giving it up does feel like a death.
The most altering aspect is not that these stories have been reduced to child tales, unserious and with little value, erasing the sassy and grousome aspect of the narrative which was meant to reveal both the joyfull and cautionary aspects of life. What has changed is that those stories warned young women against men (their fathers or men they were set to marry). Men, the closest men to women, were depicted as abusers. If not, a major point of warning against marriage was that pregnancy came after and pregnancy meant death for a lot of women of the time. I love how I get the counter arrgument that “my grandma had 9 children and live well until 90 years old”. I am happy for her, but most women can’t make it through that. Now or than. A fun fact is tha until Middle Ages (with the exception of late Roman Empire where it was illegal to be unmarried and childless) is that less women had more children. Most women didn’t have any, but could help their sisters, nieces, friends raise theirs. Women worked and owned propriety in Middle Age Europe. They were the first to brew beer and they gained money from the services provodes, like spinning. Spinster became an insult in the mouth or Modern Europe men as these women could provide for themselves and didn’t need a man. Nowadays, almost all women have one or two children. Overall more children are born now than before and the survival rate is much higher. However, women are isolated in their role as mother, unlike most human history.
The first version of “Sleeping beauty” was of a beautiful woman asleep in the forest who was raped by a prince who happened to walk by, because he couldn’t wake her up. In the first versions of “Beauty and the Beast”, the father sells or traids Belle for his life, and in some of those versions Belle kills the Beast or dies herself. The moral of these stories is “you can’t fix what’s broken …but you can die trying”. “Bluebeard” was never adjusted for children because men couldn’t portray the serial killer male character in any acceptable way like they did with the Beast or couldn’t turn him into a female character like they did in Cinderella. In Bluebeard’s first versions, the main female character saves herself with the help of her sisters, though in current versions, her brothers rescue her.
When men started to write down those stories and see their own evil and unjust behaviour, instead of changing, they tried to erase the narrative. The abusive father/man was turned into the vilain mother which was then turned into the vilain step-mother, as the society couldn’t present mothers as evil to children while putting all the care for them on the mother’s backs. Furthermore, the stories written down by men, starting with the first version of “Sleeping beauty” in 1528, portraied women in rivalry and acting out of vangence. However, women were mostly about cooperation, until men started to isolate them from each other and create contexts of conflict rather than cooperation. Stories from China and other Asian countries may also speak of rivalry between women in harems, but that is just because the husbands played them against each other. One cannot be abusive towards someone who has a support system and therfore it was crucial that his “favorite” be separate from the rest.
Of course, this was going on since ancient times. In Archaic Greece women had rights and mostly had Godesses. The stories were mostly transmited verbaly, but than, in Classical Greece, men wrote down the versions which suited only them and made them known as the only versions. They also invented the Gods which were all abusers and rapists and murderers, because only in a world that is in conflict the physical strength of a man can rule. Where there is peace, intuition rules and intuition is more organically accessed by women.
Hakini is the Indian Goddess of clairvoyance, the Greek oracles were women, Celtic druids were most probably women too given that girls education cost more than boys education and that back then men would go to war to defend agains the Romans. This is not to say that women didn’t participate in war as grave archeolocical evidence proves that 30 to 50 percent of the armies/ hunters were women. So, the spirituality endavour was also split between men and women. The problem is that historians either disregarded or misinterpeted women’s roles in both of this areas in their efforts to strip women of all power. Please, don’t tell me they didn’t know what they were doing, because they were either stupid or ill intended. Can’t be wise and unaware at the same time.
Christianity used the Sybils prophecies to build their Jesus myth and give proof of his holiness, just to turn around and dismiss them as soon as the religion took over the other beliefs and women’s voices became inconvenient
Also, did you notice how fairy tales do not have fairies, usually? In Romania and slavic countries they are called “basme” which would mean “made-up stories” which is more accurate. Those are stories that never happened, but that nonetheless hold truth for each person hearing them, it’s own. When I was younger I used to need everything to be clear and metaphors were confusing me as I could see more meanings to them. As I embrased the idea that there is no one single, objective truth, I started to enjoy methaposrs more and more.
Speaking of fairies, those beings represented the disturbing factor, the unexpected which you cannot account for. They appeared in stories to keep the other characters present and alert as it used to be much more likely to get into a dangerosu situation back then, if you were in your head (or phone, nowadays). So fairies were never good or bad. They were unavoidable 😄
Fairy comes from “fate” which in turn come from “fari” which meant “to speak”. Fate was always a story woven by women to guide, not to determine someone’s destiny. Those stories were told by older women to younger people to share knowledge before writing became accessible to (almost) everyone. Even now, most stories are oral and the saying that “when an old person dies a library is lost” still holds true.
The joy of creating 