FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 1
FAIRY TALES
ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 2
Forgotten Origins, moral changes, and age-old stories...
I have chosen these particular tales simply because they are ones I like best,
and the ones I find the most interesting. The differences between the
earliest versions of the stories found and the versions printed by Perrault
and the Grimm brothers is often surprising, and show the different concerns
of the people who took the stories up, changed them to reflect their
viewpoints, and passed them on.
• Little Red Riding Hood
• Cinderella
• Sleeping Beauty
• Snow White
• Beauty and the Beast
• Bluebeard
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 3
Little Red Riding Hood, the girl who foolishly pauses to talk with a wolf
and ends up being gobbled up by him in bed...
Or Does She?
Not in the earliest versions of the tale, no. Though we don't get told the
colour of her cape, the heroine of one version uses her wit to escape
unharmed. Rather than a dire warning it appears to be a coming-of-age
story in which the girl is not punished for turning from a child to a woman,
she tricks the wolf and escapes. An Italian tale follows a similar pattern -
the grandmother has been eaten by an ogress, and as the girl escapes she is
assisted by a gate and a river to whom she'd shown kindness on her way
there. In both tales, the wolf/ogress encourages the girl to unknowingly eat
part of her grandmother's flesh. In both, the girl escapes when the false
grandmother lets her go outside to answer the call of nature, with a rope
tied to her. In one, she ties it to a tree and runs away, in the other she ties it
to a goat, and is chased by the ogress but the river lets the girl through and
sweeps the ogress away.
Societies which practised cannibalism in the past believed that by eating
their enemy, they would take on his strength. The girl in these stories
(though she refuses the food in the second one) is growing up and taking on
the knowledge and wisdom of her grandmother. She can deal with the
threat of the wolf in her own way.
The Ones That Didn't Get Away
Perrault has his Red Riding Hood gobbled up, followed by a verse
informing us that "pretty girls, who're bred as pure as pearls, should
question the words addressed to them by men". There she and her
grandmother stay in the wolf's stomach, the old lady punished for
foolishness in allowing him in, the little girl punished for flirting with
strangers.
The version given to us by the Grimms also has Little Red being devoured
by the wolf, but she and her grandmother are rescued by a woodcutter who
chops open the wolf's belly, and out they pop alive, if a little shocked. On
her way to her Grandmother's house, Little Red stops to eat wild
strawberries:
" '... Just another one. And one more. This is the last . . . Well, this one . . .
Mmmm.' The red fruit peeped invitingly through the leaves in the grassy
glade, and Little Red Riding Hood ran back and forth popping strawberries
into her mouth".
At the end of the tale, the girl tells her mother "We must always keep to the
path and never stop. That way, we come to no harm!"
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 4
Perrault and the Grimms both tell us to be good, don't stray from the path,
beware of men, and especially, repress any interest in sex. The Grimm's
grandmother and girl need a man to save them from their peril, while the
original heroines take on the wisdom which comes with age, and survive on
their own wits.
Cinderella, one of the best-known fairy tales, has over 340 variations
and can be traced back as far 850-60 CE (Common Era), where a version was
written down in China.
The Chinese Cinderella was taken down from a family servant, but the text
makes clear that the audience already knew the tale. The ill-treatment from the
stepmother and stepsisters, the festival where Cinderella (Yeh-hsien) loses her
shoe, the local warlord who wishes to marry the owner of the shoe, are all there.
There is also a magical golden fish which appears in the pond and comforts Yeh-
hsien, until the stepmother discovers this and has it killed.
From Animal Helper to Fairy Godmother
The bones of the fish in the Chinese story work the magic which helps
Cinderella. In "Rashin Coatie", the Scottish version of the tale,
Cinderella's dead mother returns in the form of a calf, who helps
Cinderella. Even when the calf is killed, it contines to help and protect
her. In the version collected by the Grimm brothers a hazel tree grows
over the dead mother's grave, and the tree shakes down the dresses
Cinderella wears to the ball. It also shelters the dovers which help and
protect her, and in the end peck out the sisters' eyes. The Grimms' version
also includes the sisters hacking off their heels and toes in order to
squeeze their feet into the shoes.
Perrault's version gives Cinderella a godmother with no apparent
connection to the spirit of her mother; it is this version which gives us the
pumpkin, mice and fairy godmother, and which has become the most
well-known version of the tale. The dead mother (and Cinderella's ashes
imply mourning) who watches over her daughter disappears.
There are also similarities between the Cinderella story and
"Donkeyskin"; there are many tales in which the heroine is a servant who
dresses up in magical clothing and wins over the Prince, but is
unrecognized in her rags by day. In "Donkeyskin" however, the heroine is
not maltreated by her stepmother, but runs away from home to escape the
incestuous intentions of her own father, which is no doubt why the story
is little-known today. It was included in Perrault's collection of tales, and
variations on it abound.
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 5
Sleeping Beauty, or Briar Rose in the Grimms' telling, endures more
hardships than a pleasant hundred years' sleep in her earlier incarnations.
The version told by the Brothers Grimm, ending with the Princess being awakened
by the chaste kiss of the rescuing Prince, is now the best-known, the brothers
having shorn the story of its elements of cannibalism, rape and adultery.
The Sleeping Beauty, E F Brewtmall
The Not-So-Chivalrous Prince
Marina Warner traces the origins of the Sleeping Beauty story to a tale
which appeared in an Authurian romance, "Perceforest". This was first
printed in 1528. This may have influenced the version which Perrault drew
on, Giambattista's "Sun, Moon and Talia".
Instead of a Prince, our hero is a King, who comes across the Sleeping
Beauty (Talia) in the woods. As she won't wake up no matter how much he
shouts, he rapes her instead of awakening her with a kiss, then goes home
to his wife. Talia, still sleeping, gives birth to twins (Sun and Moon). One
day one of them sucks the plinter out of her finger when trying to suckle,
and Talia wakes up.
A year later the King finds himself in the same part of the wood, and drops
in to discover that his sleeping beauty is awake and his two children are
healthy and well. His childless wife is none too happy about this, and tricks
the children into coming to the court, whereupon she (like Snow White's
stepmother) orders the cook to kill them and cook her a delicious meal from
them. The cook serves her goat kid instead.
The Queen then summons Talia to the court, and prepares to have her burnt
at the stake for sleeping with her husband, even though Talia was in a
comatose state at the time. The King comes in just in time; the Queen taunts
him that she fed him his own children, and he has her thrown onto the fire.
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 6
The cook then admits to his deception and the children are revealed to be
safe. The King marries Talia, and all live happily ever after.
The Ogress Mother-in-Law
Perrault rang his own changes on this version. The Prince does not even
kiss the sleeping Princess, she just happens to wake up as he kneels beside
her. However, he is afraid to take her home and marry her because his
mother is an ogre with a fondess for eating children, so he sneaks to the
woods to visit his love for a few nights each week. She gives birth to two
children, Aurora and Day. When the old king dies, the Prince becomes
King, and makes his marriage public.
He then skips off to war, leaving the kingdom and care of his wife and
children to his mother, apparently having forgotten her taste for human
flesh. The ogress soon decides that she will eat the children, and then the
queen. The cook saves them as usual, but the ogress discovers his
deception. As she is about to have them all thrown into a vat filled with
snakes and vipers, the King arrives home, and his mother is so distraught
that she throws herself into the vat instead.
The behaviour of the Prince/King in Perrault's version seems less explicable
than Basile's, even if more moral. It is not really surprising that the Grimms
chose to cut out this element altogether, and concerntrate on Briar Rose's
enchantment, ending with her waking. The earlier versions of the story do
give us more insight into the social history of the time, though, where a
childless wife was often replaced with one who could provide children, and
the tensions between the mother-in-law and the new wife (who was
ultimately taking over the place of the mother) were strong.
The child with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as
black as a raven's wing or an ebony window frame, appears in many
guises.
In "The Juniper Tree", the child as red as blood and as white as snow is a son,
who is again mistreated by his stepmother, killed, and fed to his father in a stew.
His half-sister buried his bones with his dead mother, at which point he turns into
a bird, and eventually kills his own murderer.
From Mother to Stepmother
The tale of the girl driven out by her jealous and wicked stepmother is, as
usual, best-known through Disney. What is less often known is that the
Grimm brothers made a major alteration to the story between the first
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 7
edition of their collection of tales and the third, in 1819. The story they
took down had no stepmother - instead, it was the girl's natural mother
who succumbed to murderous jealousy against her own child. This is also
found in the Armenian version, "Nourie Hadig", who has perfectly white
skin and rosey cheeks, and is therefore named "tiny piece of
pomegranite". It is her father who abandons her in the woods, on
instructions from his wife, and there are no dwarves. Instead, Nourie
Hadig finds a sleeping Prince whom she must look after for seven years.
After a brief complication she marries him when he awakes, only to fall
into a sleep herself when she puts on a poisoned ring sent by her mother
(who hears of her through the moon rather than a mirror). When the ring
is removed she wakes again, and her mother dies from anger.
This was clearly too much for the Grimms, who replaced the mother with
a stepmother. As Cinderella shows us, the child of the first wife often was
resented and disliked by the new wife (who wanted to make the future of
her own children secure, after all), and this version has become the
classic. It ends with the evil stepmother dancing herself to death in red-
hot shoes. Snow White is not perfect herself - in spite of the instructins of
the dwarves, who let her live with them if she keeps house, she opens the
door to the stepmother in various guises. On two occasions, it is to
appease her vanity - the woman offers to comb her hair and style it, but
uses a poisoned comb. Snow White awakens when the dwarves remove
the comb from her hair. She puts herself in danger again when a passing
woman offers to tie her corset tighter in the current fashion, and then ties
the laces so tight that the girl faints. The dwarves loosen them and save
her. Finally Snow White is offered a glistening red apple, and cannot
resist taking a bite - both the colour and the apple are symbolic of
forbidden knowledge, particularly sexual. Her side of the apple is
poisoned, and she falls into a deep sleep. She only comes out of it when
the Prince who has fallen in love with her beauty is transporting her glass
coffin through the woods, and a jolt shakes the piece of apple from her
mouth. Unlike Nourie Hadig, Snow White has to be saved by men
throughout.
Another short version of the tale gives us a Count and Countess riding
through a winter landscape, and it is the Count who desires a young girl
as white as the snow, as red as the berries on the trees, and as black as the
raven's wing. No sooner than he has wished this and she appears. Not
altogether surprisingly the Countess is none too pleased to be presented
with a sudden daughter who is more likely a rival; she drops her glove,
sends Snow White into the snow to fetch it, and races away in the
carriage before the girl returns.
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 8
The Beauty who eventually falls in love with the Beast appears in
many forms, the most well-known one generally being attributed to
Mme Leprince de Beaumont.
The first story to bear the name of "Beauty and the Beast", however, was
published in 1740 by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Vielleneuve. The version by
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont was based on de Vielleneuve's tale, and
was published in 1757.
A Tale of Two Tales
Mme de Vielleneuve's "The Story of Beauty and the Beast" is long
and intricate, and Leprince de Beaumont's version is in some ways an
improvement on it. Though she took all the key elements of her story
from de Vielleneuve's, she cut the story short by ending it with the
Beast's transformation back into a handsome Prince (which,
interestingly, does not take place until after the wedding night).
Almost half of de Vielleneuve's tale revolves around warring fairies,
in an lengthy history of the parentage of the Prince and of Beauty
(who turns out to be a Princess), the reason for the curse, and political
machinations of the fairy world. Personally I found the second half of
the tale soon became tedious. Leprince de Beaumont does also leave
out the dream sequences, which I find a pity. She also aimed her
telling solidly at children, and here the tale loses its subversive edges.
Beaumont tells her readers to be good little girls; Vielleneuve makes
numerous digs at the many enforced marriages women had to submit
to, and her Beauty ponders that many women are made to marry men
far more beastly in nature than her Beast.
The Animal Bridegroom
Beauty and the Beast is one of many fairy tales which feature a
"beastly" groom. In "Princess Zeineb and King Leopard", by Jean-
Paul Bignon, the Princess is presented to the leopard because her
father trespassed on his property, much as in "Beauty and the Beast".
"East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon" starts in a similar fashion,
with a white bear replacing the leopard. Both tales contain a different
twist - the animal lovers cast off their animal shapes at night, but
must not be seen by their brides in this condition for seven years. As
in the story of Cupid and Psyche, the brides can't resist a peek, and
have to go on a long and arduous search to find their lovers, who are
magicked away as they are seen.
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 9
"The Green Serpent", by the prolific Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy
(whose tales nearly always involved violence, nightmare situations or
tortures of some form), gives us another twist on the same theme. Her
Princess is endowed by an angry fairy with perfect ugliness. She finds
herself afloat on strange and angry seas, but cruelly rejects an offer of
help from a hideous green serpent. The serpent saves her life
nevertheless, and she continues to recoil from him in horror.
Laidronette then finds herself in a great palace, where she is waited
upon by tiny fat men, who inform her that their King is away waging
war. The King soon visits her in the night, in the form of a beautiful
voice which informs her that he loves her in spite of her ugliness. Her
invisible lover returns to her many times, and reveals that he is under
a curse, of which there are two years left. He asks for her hand in
marriage; she agrees, and promises not to look at him until the two
years are up. When she, like Psyche and the others, cannot resist and
looks at her husband, he is none other than the green serpent. She
spends three years battling her way through various tortures until at
last she and her husband are reunited, both regaining their beauty
along the way.
Bluebeard, who keeps the bodies of his murdered wives in a secret
chamber, killing each new wife as she discovers it. The tale is often
thought to have been based on Gilles de Rais, a Breton nobleman who was
hanged in 1440 for the murders of hundreds of children. Their stories don't seem
to have that much similarity to me, though, and there is an earlier tale which is
much closer to the story of Bluebeard.
The Deaths of the Wives
Breton legends tell the story of Triphine, who married Cunmar the
Accursed. As she prayed one day by the family tombs, the ghosts of
Cunmar's previous wives warned her that he can killed each of them as
they became pregnant. Triphine was pregnant herself, and tried to run
away, but was killed by her husband along with the unborn child.
Medieval frescos discovered in a church in Brittany show Cunmar
handing a small key to Triphine, and Triphine discovering a chamber in
which her dead predecessors are hanging.
Why does Bluebeard murder his wives? The tale has its earliest origins in
the Bible, as Eve eats from the forbidden tree, disobeying commands and
in search of forbidden knowledge. In the Bluebeard story, the spot of
blood on the key (or egg) gives the new bride away. Some say his rage is
the rage of a man convinced that he has been cuckolded by his wife;
Bettleheim suggests that the spot of blood on the key is evidence that the
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 10
bride did betray her husband while he was away.
Bearing in mind that the storytellers were often older women, another
answer seems the most likely to me. The story isn't warning against the
moral consequences of sex, but of the practical consequencies. Childbirth
was one of the principal causes of death. The husband is killing his wife
by making her pregnant. It was not unusual for a man to have many
wives, as death in childbirth was so common. Rather than being a tale of
sadistic serial killers, Bluebeard was a tale of everyday life.
The Various Versions
Perrault's collection of fairy tales includes the traditional Bluebeard who
gives his wife a key to his secret chamber, but instructs her not to use it.
When she does, she drops the key in the blood in shock, only to find that
she cannot wash off the spot of blood. Just before her husband kills her
too, her brothers arrive and rescue her, neatly leaving them all with
Bluebeard's vast fortune.
The alternate passed on by the Grimm brothers is "Fitcher's Bird". In this,
a sorcerer spirits away three sisters to be his brides. He gives them a
magic egg which they are instructed to take with them everywhere, and
prohibits them from entering a certain room. When the first sister enters
it, she finds a basin filled with dead people, and drops the egg. She cannot
wash the blood from the egg, and soon joins the people in the basin. The
same thing happens to sister number two. The youngest sister outwits the
sorcerer by making an effigy of herself from flowers and bones, and
placing it in her window. She covers herself in honey and rolls in the
feathers of her quilt. Covered in feathers, she escapes unrecognized.
A similar tale is given by Italo Calvino, from Italian folklore. This villan
has a silver nose, and again preys upon three sisters. He fixes a flower in
their hair, and the room they open leads to hell. When he sees that the
flower is charred, he throws them into the flames of hell too. The
youngest sister guesses the purpose of the flower, and places it in a jar of
water in her room while she goes to open the door. She rescues her sister
and hides them in laundry bags which are taken back to their mother. She
then hides herself in a laundry bag, along with much of Silver Nose's
money.
An old English version is called "Mr Fox". Lady Mary has many lovers,
but her favourite is the rich and mysterious Mr Fox. A wedding is agreed
on, and the night before it Lady Mary sneaks away to take a peek at the
castle of her husband-to-be, which she has never seen. She passes through
the first gate, and on through the seond in spite of its injunction to "be
bol, be bold, but not too bold". Over the third door is added "Lest your
heart's blood should run cold" - but still Lady Mary goes in, and there she
finds the bodies of murdered women. She runs, but Mr Fox comes in
dragging another body behind him. Lady Mary hides behind a cask, and
watches as Mr Fox cuts off the hand of the maiden in order to get at her
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FAIRY TALES ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION 11
diamond ring. The hand lands in Mary's lap, but Mr Fox does not look
behind the cask, and she escapes.
At the wedding breakfast the next day, Mr Fox comments on the pale
looks of his bride-to-be, and she tells the company that she had a terrible
dream the night before. She recounts the events of the night as a dream,
with Mr Fox interrupting her story with "It is not so, nor was it not so".
At the end of her tale she produces the hand, whereupon her brothers
jump up and hack Mr Fox to pieces with their swords. Shakespeare refers
to this version of the tale in "Much Ado About Nothing" (Benedick, act 1,
scene 1).
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