Han Christian Andersen and the Kama Sutra

[grouchy_firth]

I've just started reading a collection of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. I'm a little confused. I had always been under the impression that fairy tales, as indeed most children's stories, carried some kind of moral message - a way of introducing the child to the concept of good and bad, reward and punishment, very much like Disney films do

Comments

[potterwitch]

Mhm, fairy tales do have a tendency to the ridiculous. Ones that developed from folk tales tend to make more sense, but Andersen made all his up, so there's not really a good excuse for how confusing they can be. But, as an English Lit student having attended a lecture on fairy tales, I come bearing clarification! (Which is too long to fit in one comment, so I'll post in two.)

Andersen's tales are supposed to be Christian parables, and this comes through very nicely in some of them--The Little Mermaid, for example. In the original version, the little mermaid goes through the whole kerfuffle of growing legs, feeling like she's walking on knives, and trying to seduce the prince in order to gain a human soul, so she has a chance to obtain the eternal rewards of heaven after she dies. Though she eventually balks at killing the prince to save herself, there's none of the true love which the Disneyfied version contains; the mermaid's motivation for making a human man fall in love with her is purely mercenary. Because that's not very nice

[potterwitch]

I prefer the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm; they're based on real folk tales, which themselves are generally more exciting than the Grimm versions. The earliest known version of Little Red Riding Hood is far better than the one we know now, for example

[grouchy_firth]

Those explanations rely very much on an ends justifying the means mentality, don't you think?

[potterwitch]

Yep. I don't know enough about social history to say whether that makes sense for the period or not, but like you said, it's quite hard to explain all the killing, stealing and blackmail otherwise.

At least the lovely medieval story about Naughty Red Riding Hood makes sense. She was wearing a red cloak; obviously asking for it :^P

[anonymous]

(This is Paul, btw - the fascist dictatorship that is LiveJournal wanted me to create an ID thing to comment, and I couldn't be bothered. Come over to the light side of Blogspot...)

They sound rather like The Heptameron, a cheery 16th century French collection of short 'moral' tales supposedly written by Marguerite de Navarre. The goings-on in these included, if I remember rightly, oodles of matricide and parricide in the name of honour, and at one point the rape of a nun.

I guess trying to apply modern minds to medieval texts makes about as much sense as the argument halfway through Donnie Darko about whether Smurfs have sex or not.

Speaking of which, I am poor and Michael Douglas is rich. Therefore it's acceptable for me to go after Catherine Zeta-Jones? Perhaps doubly so, as discovering the union might kill him and let me claim the riches I covet. I could come around to the Indian way of thinking...