The case for not sanitising fairy tales

It's interesting that the article mentions Hans Christian Andersen's “The Little Mermaid” as an example of a story that was “sanitized” by removing the part where Ariel is forced to choose between killing her prince or turning into foam on the waves.

But Andersen's story was itself a sanitized version of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's “Undine”, a fairy/morality tale in which a water spirit marries a human knight in order to gain an immortal soul. In that story, her husband ultimately breaks his wedding vows, forcing Undine to kill him, and losing her chance of going to heaven.

Andersen explicitly wrote that he found that ending too depressing, which is why he made up his whole bit about Ariel refusing to kill Prince Erik, and instead of dying, she turned into a spirit of the air, where if she does good deeds for 300 years, she's eventually allowed to go to heaven after all.

Even as a child, it felt like a cop-out to me. But my point was: “The Little Mermaid” is itself a sanitized version of the original novella, adapted to the author's modern sensibilities.

I'm frequently surprised by what is considered by other parents as too scary for their children to watch or read, when it seems to me the whole point of scary stories is to provide a safe place for children to feel scared and learn what it takes overcome fear.

That's not to say that anything goes, just that I think parents need to be willing to let their children be appropriately afraid and comfort them and teach them courage. Avoiding any scary themes or dangerous ideas, instead of providing safe ways to engage with these things, I think leads to children growing into adults who will have a much harder time recognising and dealing with the real dangers of life.

I hate when people use the word "sanitize" in this context. For one, it's a weasel word and needlessly moralistic. But, even more than that, when people write essays complaining about sanitizing classic stories, most of what they succeed in communicating to me is that they don't actually understand how literature works.

Adjusting older stories to reflect contemporary cultural values has been happening for as long as there have been stories. The reason for that is simple: one of stories' major functions is to express things about ourselves - lessons, observations, etc. When an element gets dropped from a story, it's because that element is no longer culturally relevant, plain and simple. Stories, too, need to choose between evolution and extinction.

Take an oft-bemoaned example: Disney's version of the Little Mermaid. It's a very good adaptation. Adaptation. It differs from Hans Christian Anderson's in part because the lessons we think are important to teach our kids are different. But also, the medium itself affects things: children's movies don't have to be as graphic to achieve the same excitement level and emotional impact as written stories with few or zero pictures. A movie that didn't change anything from the original version of the story wouldn't have had nearly the same cultural impact, because it wouldn't have been nearly as good.

This article is a bit weird: even the Grimms sanitized their own stories to appeal to wider audiences, it seems like people in the 19th century didn't think their original editions were suitable for children. The first edition didn't even get translated into English. Reworking fairy tales for different audiences likely is as old as fairy tales- after all, these were ostensibly originally orally transmitted.

They're fairy tales. There is no canonical version. Stories repeated by the fireside do not have original authors. Neither the Grimms or the Germans they got the stories from have a monopoly on what the correct version of the story is.

The original published versions weren't meant for children in the first place:

> “The original edition was not published for children or general readers. Nor were these tales told primarily for children. It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families. This led to Wilhelm’s editing and censoring many of the tales,” he told the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers...

Its curious, because I have pretty stark objections to The Little Mermaid (chiefly, the subtext seems to be "it's totally ok to change everything about yourself to win the affection of a boy you literally just met" and in light of that, the only moral becomes "read the fine print before signing a contract"), they are neatly addressed by the original text. The original is more an allegory about how changing everything about yourself is actually bad than the fairy tale romance that Disney pitches, which is not AT ALL what I expected.

There's real benefit to exposing kids to darker themes (my eldest loves a book that kills its main character's father on the second page, and after she recovered from being a little weepy about it, it became one of her favorites), but there's also merit to letting the kids choose to hit pause on scary/disturbing/whatever themes until they're in a place to deal with it.

Showing your kids The Two Towers might have a really positive impact on them at the right time, but only if they're mature enough that it doesn't lead to e.g. bed-wetting levels of dis-regulation.

It is hard to me to understand how much this revisionist tendency is just a recent invention and to what extent it has been present throughout the history.

For the most part, I can see old books on bookshelves are still unedited. But maybe some other books have been completely destroyed due to not being acceptable to future readers/powers?

But I really hate it. I dislike when people do not understand that moral and social norms change over time and you can't blindly apply your current views to historical people who were brought up and lived in a different world.

I am pretty sure people in some distant future will think about us as heathens for eating meat, driving cars and wearing plastic. I hope they will be wise enough not to cancel us complete for this and hear out other wisdom we might want to pass.

I have a copy of some early Grimm's version. It's a bunch of disconnected fragments of stories with events out of order and no particular moral.

The Grimm brothers went around interviewing busy people about stories. Not the storytellers for the most part; just regular people. They had imperfect memories of the old stories, got them confused and mixed up, and probably the whole household was competing to tell the scholars their version. Result: fragmentary and confused.

Not one of the stories in this old book resembled anything in any modern telling. E.g. There were several versions of Cinderella-like stories all different, with entirely different endings, some with no ending. Different slippers or no slippers. One or two or three sisters. Various parents dying, sometimes both! Her inheritance stolen and she exacted revenge to get it back. And so on.

The second half was more like story fragments, nothing complete. Just notes really.

So never mind 'original' versions, there may be no such thing.

>Fairy tales can often be brutal and cruel – people and animals die – and yet, despite everything, the positive powers always win. There can be no other ending.

That is a very 21st century view of fairy tales, no less sanitized than what Disney does.

My mom read Grimms to me when I was a kid. I loved it. We also read D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, which I remember being pretty wild.

I've encounter barely any evil, violence, violence or danger in my life on a personal level, let alone the amount seen in fairy tales. It's quite unclear how reading the Grimms would have better prepared me for anything at all. If anything they'd have mislead me.

I might have enjoyed it, but this article claims fairy tales are a way of telling the truth about how the world is.

Part one was great, then suddenly The argument is replaced by "Jesus is the reason I'm right" There's a place for that, but trying to frame fairy tales as Christian fables was decidedly _not_ where I thought the essay was going after the first part.

As a kid in communist Romania, with basically no TV to watch, I spent much time reading whatever I could get my hands on, and fairly tales were a big part of the 'curricula', especially when I was younger.

There's a series of books published here named 'Povești nemuritoare' (Immortal Fairytales) which were hugely popular back then with kids: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pove%C8%99ti_nemuritoare

I don't think they were much sanitized if at all and some stories were really disturbing. I see that the emphasis on what to censor lays on violence (ex: hero cutting the head of the dragon, chopping off toes to fit in shoe, stabbing the groom) but that never bothered me as a kid, I barely noticed that to be honest. Probably because I had little realization in their gruesome meaning.

But stories involving the inevitability of death disturbed me and there were a lot of them. One is Romanian, I fucking hated it: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinere%C8%9Be_f%C4%83r%C4%83_b...

Otherwise the stories tended to be grouped by source/nationality. Like "German stories" or "Arab stories" or "Chinese stories". If these were movies, German stories would be "action & adventure", Arab stories would be "comedy" (loved them) and Chinese ... "Horror and drama" :) If you want to traumatize your kids, give them unsanitized versions of Chinese fairy tales :)

If you like dogs, one can recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_(TV_series) which got praise for "refusing to bowdlerize many of the sadder or more unpleasant aspects of the source works." Not sure if PBS is streaming it anymore but there are magnet links around.

I just found out about the opposite effect, Grimmification: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Grimmification

Apparently many of the fairy tales weren’t originally just for kids, so it made sense that some would have more mature themes. It was adult entertainment.

I think we might worry that broad-appeal media might be too sanitized, even by huge corporations. But that’s always been the case. Niche media is always there to fill in the void. And we’re living in a golden age of media to satisfy every conceivable long-tail interest.

I've been reading the original brother's grimm to kids for _years_ and the stories are always gripping. I don't love the reinforcing motifs of the world as perpetually experienced as dangerous, however.

I've been LOVING working through the Studio Ghibli anthology with my toddler. Been curating a list (and then finding the right file) of the movies they like with the best audio tracks. (she cannot read, so watching them in the original audio, while engaging, isn't as helpful as good dubs. Some english dubs have been terrible, some quite good.

We most recently watched Ponyo ["poh-noh-fish" as its sometimes called around here], had it playing on the background a few more times. She's been vastly less drawn to things like baby shark and it's ilk, with the availability of Ghibli's works, and we discuss the characters and events and the ups and downs in the movies throughout, and after.

The pacing, the anti-imperial bent, dignifying many oft-de-dignified tropes, the art, the music, the foley, the mystery and the spiritualism and obvious deep love of the harmony of nature. mmm. I've paid Jeff Bezos more than I wish I had in my pursuit of the best/easiest files, but alas. Here's my beta, if you'd like. [0]

I discovered Studio Ghibli only as an adult, more than 30 years old, so for anyone who doesn't know about it, you might be one of today's lucky 10,000. huzzah [1]

[0]: https://josh.works/recommended-reading#studio-ghibli [1]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

The world is good, bad and everything else in-between at the same time, and we try to stick to the good bits. I remember reading that children gain the ability to understand that around the age of 7. Prior to that, seeing the bad taints the whole world for them.

I can't tell if that's true, but intuitively rings so. Now, if it is of life-or-death importance to condition your children never to go into the forest alone while you are tilling the fields, perhaps that's a good tradeoff. Most medieval people died in their childhood anyway, worrying about their psychological baggage in adulthood was premature optimisation.

But in 21st century, I think we can do better, and wait with teaching children about the good and evil parts of the world until they are more ready for it.

That's not to say we dumb everything down and take away nuance. But it doesn't have to be gory. Bluey is full of nuance and suitable for all ages.

I remember watching the Czech version of The Little Mermaid, not the Russian one.

It was just so intense, and obsessive.

I would not sanitize them indeed, but I would not just tell my kids (or anyone too young to grasp historical context) the raw versions either. Just like the bedtime books I grew up with, fairy tales (apart from extreme violence) can contain racism and very often contain sexism (very strong gender roles for example). I don't want my kids to see such stories as examples. When I read my old childhood books I often need to catch myself, or explain a context to my children I'm pretty sure they are unable to grasp. We've started buying more modern books.

I.e., in one example in the Dutch Children book "Pinkeltje" he meets an African tribe and the language to describe them is using terms like devilish, undeveloped and black almost as synonyms.

I was listening to a talk by RL Stine of Goosebumps fame. He says that stories are like a rollercoaster. You go through the scary stuff because you know that everything turns out fine in the end. When he made a slightly unhappy ending, readers were pissed and would write letters to him, telling him to write a sequel to that story to give it a proper ending. Bad endings cheat the young reader out of the experience they wanted.

I'd think most of the sanitized stories are just that -- they're seen as incomplete/wrong endings rather than inappropriate. And children are just so unhappy with them, rather than being traumatized. Adults are more willing to accept incomplete endings.

I have no opinion on the sanitation for kids, as I have none; however, I myself love to read non-sanitized fairy tails. It's not a huge hobby but it's a fun interest I would love to devote more time to.

Any and all resources would be appreciated! I'm ignorant in all languages except English (and I'm not great at it! ;P)

I have one 19th century book entitled "fairy tails from the land of the czar". It has several versions of what might be versions of "Cinderella" and "Baba Yaga" stories. I would love to find more books like that, no mater where they are from.

I was always partial to the Looney Tunes' Hansel and Gretel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCwas_GPBxU

J.K. Rowling satirized the idea of "sanitized" fairy tales in The Tales of Beedle the Bard through the character of Beatrix Bloxam, whose bowdlerized versions of Beedle's tales were so wretched they caused kids to vomit, thus undermining her stated goal of writing stories more appropriate for children.

Relatedly, recently an image appeared on Facebook of the character Lady Elaine Fairchilde as she appears in Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood; both her ugly face and her irascible attitude are considerably toned down. It only made me miss the original version of Elaine from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood all the more. Fred Rogers was not one to shy away from the ugly feelings we all feel from time to time; and Elaine's original design draws heavily from the Punch and Judy tradition (which itself could have very dark and scary themes whilst still being entertainment for children, and itself has been toned down).

When all the hard surfaces of our culture have been made soft, spongy and safe, when all the sharp edges are filed down smooth, how will we raise children who grow into adults adequately prepared to deal with the harshness of the real world?

Just want to make a recommendation for Philip Pullman's "Grimm Tales: For Young and Old". It's an excellent publication of fifty fairy tales.

It is a modern retelling and I'm not certain they weren't somewhat sanitized, but Pullman does include a lot of the weirdness from the older stories, along with moral dissonance relative to contemporary ethics.

I agree with the overall idea of the article, but it is important to recognize that our modern assumptions make us think there is a particular version of a fairy tale that is the "correct" or "original" version. Stories handed down orally are likely changed in each telling to better fit their audience, so in that sense, the way fairy tales were told almost always included some type of sanitization or embellishment depending on who was listening.

Our kids love reading Andersen's tales same as: Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis | The Little Prince by A. de Saint-Exupéry | Six Bullerby Children by A. Lindgren (and many more form Lindgren) | Pettson and Findus by S. Nordqvist | Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne | few local authors (Petr Horáček, Jiří Karafiát, Daisy Mrázková...)

I’m not a child psychologist but I observed how my daughter became almost instinctively scared of the wolf. I think that less sanitized fairy tales can be a bridge between children’s imagination and the real world. Modern versions of fairy tales where the wolf becomes good give me more cringes than the ones where he is shot by the hunter.

The example case of "sanitising" Cinderella, do not have a lot of sense. Sure if you compare the Disney version to the Grimm one, the Disney version look like far less horrific. But the Grimm one is just one of the many versions of Cinderella.

The (probably) oldest know version is the story of Rhodopis, where there is only an eagle who bring the shoe of a woman to the king. Apart from the fact than Rhodopis was probably a slave, there is no need for sanitation in this story.

Also, Disney have used the older Perrault version as a base instead of the Grimm one. In the Perault version, Cinderella forgive her stepsisters in the end. There was no need to sanitise anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella

Decent article but a shame there was no mention of the excellent (and oftentimes gruesome) children’s podcast Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grimm-grimmer-grimmest...

https://pinna.fm/library/kids-shows/pinna-podcasts/grimm-gri...

I'm particularly aggrieved by the publishers who try to modern-wash Enid Blyton stories. Really exciting and living prose gets turned into bland nothingnesses. It's depressing.

These fairy tales don't actually have an "original" version. Most of them were folk tales being told and retold for generations before being put to paper, and lots of details would change from time to time and place to place [1]. Disneyfying is just one more step in this process.

[1] Chapter 1 of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre

great article

> While protecting the innocence of children by sheltering them from overly gruesome material is something all good parents seek to do, have we swung so far in our attempt to protect children that we don’t tell stories that help them process dark things?

i am worried that we have done similar harm to young coders by wrapping them in Python and hiding away the power tools like http://raku.org

>Any girl who loved the fairy tales passed young O’Connor’s test. A kindred spirit had been found.

That just filters for weirdos though? You should actually be terrified?

If I’m not mistaken, society used to be structured quite differently. Kids were not grouped so much by age in school, and with so much intermixing of ages in society, young kids were forced to grow up quite quickly.

For example, Alexander Hamilton began working full-time at the age of 11.

Nowadays, we try very hard to shield children from the realities of the world, sanitize their fairy tales, etc. but that’s a relatively recent practice.

There was an article on here a while ago about some culture out there in the world who uses stories to educate children.

Googling yields this Inuit piece: https://www.hatching-dragons.com/en-gb/blog/inuit-childrens-...

Fairy tale or horror story?

„A mother warns her son Konrad not to suck his thumbs. However, when she goes out of the house he resumes his thumb-sucking, until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors.“

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

It's a tangent but I'd like to recommend reading 1001 Nights. It's a rather interesting collection of stories, well suited for reading aloud among consenting adults.

With kids around I'd sanitise quite a bit, there's a lot of sex, violence and bigotry in there that I'd prefer that they won't repeat in other settings and connect my name to.

I recall a quote from Mr. Gaiman:

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

What I find much worse is the kind of narcissism/outrage/drama porn that most “for kids” stories and franchises are.

If my seven year old reads about some horrible things that happened in World War II, that usually leads to some of our best conversations. If she reads some something written for kids about girls and ponies, she just doesn’t want to stop consuming it, drifts off into some fantasy world, and you can’t have a conversation with her at all.

We use kids' tales to teach kids. The lessons of fairy-tale Europe are not the same lessons we need now, but we can use them to teach kids what yesteryear's kids used to be taught.

Theory: A large proportion of adult mental illness is caused by an environment mismatch between adulthood and childhood. Fairy tales with disturbing themes were a good way to safely introduce the real world to children. Insulating children from reality leads to them learning the wrong things about the world both on a conscious intellectual level and a very low level as in cortisol response to stress. You grow up and then have to live in a world that is completely alien compared to your childhood and your brain just doesn't work right because it wasn't trained to handle things while it was malleable enough to learn them.

> Fairy tales are the best way for children to learn that the world contains evil, violence, and danger.

Don’t worry about this. They’ll learn in grade school to be afraid that at any moment, a stranger might come on campus and shoot them all up. And in high school they’ll learn about suicide and rape from their classmates.

They’ll have plenty of horrors to keep track of.

Sherlock Holmes used to take cocaine to help him solve the crime, they replaced it with a pipe ~100 years ago.

Soon we have to change the pipe into a cup of herbal tea.

Just read them Leviticus and Deuteronomy

In the original Cinderella, the slipper was made of fur, not glass. Still now, fur slipper is slang for... Well, you know.

I feel so frustrated by nearly any degree of censorship. "Should we censor fairy tales? Should we censor Roald Dahl? Should we censor the speeches of Confederate generals?" No! Why do the pro-censor groups think that an uninformed populace with incorrect understandings of what people in the past said and did is better for the future?

I encourage everyone to read the original versions of the fairy tales, as told in the Grimms, Perrault, etc.

These stories sometimes read like something from another world. Like they are set in a world with hidden rules and assumptions, that we do not understand and seem alien to us.

My knee jerk reaction to the title was a strong feeling that racist, sexist, and ageist tropes absolutely should be sanitized out of fairy tails. But this article discusses a different kind of sanitizing, and i feel more comfortable with its premise.