Dirt Nap City - The Most Interesting Dead People In History

Grimmly Ever After - The Story of The Brothers Grimm

• Dirt Nap City • Season 4 • Episode 112

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When we think of the Brothers Grimm, images of whimsical princesses, charming princes, and talking animals often spring to mind, thanks in large part to the sanitized versions we’ve grown up with. But delve deeper into the origins of these beloved tales, and you uncover a far darker, more complex, and sometimes disturbing reality. This episode of Dirt Nap City pulls back the curtain on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, not as creators of fairytale magic, but as diligent collectors of existing oral traditions, preserving a snapshot of 19th-century German folklore, with all its inherent shadows.

The Grimm brothers embarked on their ambitious project to document the rich tapestry of German oral storytelling, believing these narratives held vital clues to the nation's cultural identity. What they meticulously transcribed were not always tales of pure virtue and innocent wonder. Instead, their original collections, like Children's and Household Tales (1812-1815), were replete with stark realities, brutal punishments, and moral ambiguities. Take "Rapunzel," for instance, where the prince’s visits lead to Rapunzel's pregnancy, a detail conveniently omitted in later adaptations. "Little Red-Cap" (Little Red Riding Hood) originally depicted a far more gruesome end for the grandmother and a more cunning, less bumbling wolf. And the tragicomic figure of "Rumpelstiltskin" still retains a hint of its unsettling origins, where a life-or-death bargain hangs in the balance.

However, the darkness in these tales extends beyond mere violence or difficult themes. A more troubling aspect lies in the antisemitic undertones present in some of the Grimms' collected stories. While not always overtly stated, certain narratives subtly perpetuate negative stereotypes, a reflection of the pervasive prejudice within the society from which these stories emerged. Disturbingly, these themes were later amplified and exploited by the Nazi regime in the 20th century. Hitler’s propagandists recognized the power of these deeply ingrained narratives, twisting existing prejudices within the tales to further their own hateful agenda, transforming folklore into a tool for state-sanctioned bigotry.

Over the decades, as the Grimm tales gained international popularity, they underwent a gradual process of sanitization, particularly as they were increasingly marketed towards children. Publishers and translators smoothed over the rough edges, excised explicit content, and softened harsh moral lessons, creating the "kinder, gentler" versions many are familiar with today. This evolution culminated in the widespread, often drastically altered, adaptations by Disney, which, while enchanting, fundamentally reshaped the narratives, replacing gritty realism with idealized fantasy. This episode explores the journey of these tales, from their raw, often unsettling origins to the polished, palatable versions that have largely eclipsed the Grimms' original, darker legacy. Join us as we uncover the true nature of these iconic stories and the uncomfortable truths they reveal about history, culture, and the enduring power of narrative.

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Alex:

Oh, hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of dirt nap city, the show about interesting dead people. I'm Alex. I'm here with my friend Kelly. Kelly, How you been, man,

Kelly:

I'm doing very well, Alex. I'm on a little bit of a vacation at the moment, which is nice. It's been a busy summer so far. So nice to unplug. But you know, I always got time to talk with you about interesting dead people and dead

Alex:

ends. Oh yeah, I got a couple of interesting guys today. Two, it's, I'm doing a two for today, two for Tuesday.

Kelly:

Those are always interesting because, you know, it's double your pleasure, double your fun.

Alex:

So some of the doubles ones where I think we started with Siskel and Ebert, yeah, most recently, the Wright Brothers, right? And like the Wright Brothers, these dudes were brothers.

Kelly:

Oh, okay, okay.

Alex:

And like, Hanna Barbera, kind of, and the Wright Brothers, kind of, you can't talk about one without the other. They were kind of, you don't even really, there's nothing that I really learned that distinguishes one from the other too much. They kind of did everything together.

Kelly:

And are they known as? Are they known as the something brothers?

Alex:

Kind of, yeah, kind of, yeah, okay, but it's not the Chemical Brothers. It's not the brothers Johnson,

Kelly:

oh, man, you've just just taken away my guesses,

Alex:

but they were German. What were some of the Germans we've had on here? We've had Einstein, yeah. We had diesel, yeah, diesel, Rudolph, diesel, and rudol, Harvey, Zeppelin. What was his name? What was

Kelly:

Zeppelin's name? Count, Baron von

Alex:

Veron von these weren't Baron Vons, but these were German brothers born a year apart, 1785 Jakob was born in 1785 and Wilhelm was born in 1786 and I like doing Germans because you have such a command of the German language, having lived there for A LITTLE WHILE vacation there a few times. Yeah, Jakob died in 1863 vital helm died in 1859 and they were born in Hana Hesse Castle, which is now just castle. It Back then it was part of the Roman Empire. Now it's Germany, but now if you wanted to go visit their grave, it would be in Castle, Germany.

Kelly:

Castle. Okay. Is that northern or southern? Do

Alex:

you know this was Southern Germany?

Kelly:

Okay. Bavaria, yes, yes,

Alex:

yes. And were they? And, more importantly, kind of by the Black Forest, I think

Kelly:

sports fault, were they? Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, were they authors

Alex:

of a sorts, yes, a little Is this the brothers? Grimm? Brothers, Grimm, let's go. Let's talk about the brothers. As

Kelly:

soon as you said, Black Forest, that kind of, that kind of gave it away. Or

Alex:

as they were known, they brutal, grim, the Bruder grim, the Bruder grim. So, like I said, they kind of did everything together, and they weren't as much authors as they were. They were they were both professors. They were scholars, podcast hosts. Yes, their area of expertise was folklore, folklore. So some of the most popular stories that we know came from the Brothers Grimm, but they didn't write them.

Kelly:

These were, these were folklore stories,

Alex:

right? So there's really not a lot of background about these guys that's very interesting. I'll tell you a little bit. I want to dive right into basically what they collected and kind of what it said about the time that the so we there's not too much you know about them being ambulance drivers or hating school or anything like that, their father died in 1796 when Jakob was 11 and Wilhelm was 10. And you know, as we've talked about from some of these other folks that lived back then, that when your father dies, that really puts you in a bad situation, because then you're kind of losing income, right? Yeah, yeah. Stability puts the family in poverty, which was the case this family was, you know, you kind of go down a social class. And when you think about it, when we start talking. About some of these fairy tales or folk stories. Fathers in these stories are idealized and almost well, and all the villains are females in these in these stories, you have all the really other wicked witches, stepsisters and stepmothers and witches and and frowes and all this, this, it's a lot of villains, a lot of female villains, which I think, for two guys that lost their father when they were very young. You know, you can't now, again, they didn't write these stories, but those are the ones that kind of spoke to them. Okay, they grew up very close. Obviously, create experiencing such a trauma at such a young age, you'd become close, and they were both at the top of their classes. I think they both graduated like number one in their class. They went to the University of Marburg, and they both were interested in German folklore. They even lived together, like even after Wilhelm got married, they Jakob, you know, lived in the house with them. They shared a desk their whole life, and they were buried side by side. So really, I don't have anything to say about one that I'm not going to also say about the other. I think one of them was more of a linguist, and the other was more of a storyteller, but it doesn't really matter for for what I want to talk about today. Yeah,

Kelly:

no, I didn't even know they were real people. I always kind of thought it was a fictionalized I don't know. I never knew. I've heard of them, but didn't know much about them. So have

Alex:

you? Have you ever heard of the literary period? Called

Kelly:

romanticism. Romanticism, yeah, I think I've heard of it. I don't know much about it.

Alex:

So romanticism was the end of the 18th century in Europe. It was kind of a response to the industrial revolution. So romanticism and stories and art that was from the Romantic period was all about like appreciation of nature and imagination. And in German, in Germany, that would be a lot about the forest and the forest being kind of a dark place to avoid. But that was the nature in nature in Germany. Was the forest, right? Okay, there was also romanticism. Was was all about individualism and passion and intuition, and that the learning about yourself and the beauty that the world, that if you look around the world's a beautiful place, and it evokes these emotional responses. And a lot of the stories had to do with the of nature, but also the supernatural and the fascination with mysterious things and trolls and witches, and, like you said, and and particularly in Germany, uh, people love to talk about the Middle Ages with, you know, castles and forests and witches and knights and these stories. I mean, we're talking about the 1800s here, but those stories really resonated. I think they still do today. I think if you look at like, Game of Thrones, people are still interested in Harry Potter. People are still interested in that kind of magic, kind of stuff. But the Brothers Grimm were interested in preserving the stories of the different cultures inside Germany, and that they believed that folk tales were kind of a reflection of the soul of the German people. So they wanted to to find that. So they would their methodology was pretty cool. They would go around collecting stories from people. Now, when they wrote their books, they made it sound like they were collecting stories from like peasants and, you know, towns folk. They were mostly middle class women, and they would ask questions like, Do you remember any stories your nanny told you when you were growing

Kelly:

up? I love to ask that question. That's, that's a great that's a great sort of icebreaker, but

Alex:

it wasn't exactly like campfire stories or anything like that. But they would go around and ask different, mostly women, about the stories that were passed to them. And a lot of these were stories that had been passed around for kind of centuries, and they had never been written down. And they found that the culture really had a rich tapestry, I suppose, of of stories that kind of people knew, but it had never been really written down before. So what they would do is they would take these stories, they would gather them, they would find commonalities, they would edit them, they would embellish them, and they would put out, like um, a book with a collection of stories, pretty short. Each one was like 1000 to 2000 words. Um. And they wrote 80 edited 86 stories from 1812, to 1857, and every year, every few years, they put out a new edition. There were seven total editions. That's all they really did, though. Put out seven books. There was a collection of these fairy tales. I'm gonna call them fairy tales. I'm not sure if they ever knew that word. And the very first edition, though, the 1812 version, was the one that I want to focus on, because that was the version that wasn't meant for kids. I think once the books came out, people started reading them as families, and then the kids really got into him. So they responded by every edition after 1812 they they sanitized it made it a little more friendly. And the versions we know today were the DIS are the Disney versions, right? It started with, like Snow White in 1937 100 years later, that were really, really sanitized. But like I said, the first edition was not meant for kids. They added a lot of, like, Christian elements and maybe more archetypes. You know, you see these archetypes, the same kind of tropes over and over there. We know them as tropes now, but they didn't really, you know, they invented those things, right? There was a lot more sexual content in the 1812 version, but so they softened a lot of the sexual stuff, but then ramped up the violence. The violence was not something that they thought kids shouldn't hear about. In fact, discipline was about fear, so the more violent you could make a story. And if you could throw in a a moral to that story, of you better not do this, or somebody's gonna boil you right, or poison you, or eat you or burn you alive you made into pickled brine, or a lot of abandonment, kind of things. They were all about that. Now the word grim already meant, like dark. They didn't, we don't say things are grim because of the Brothers Grimm, like grim with 1m was always a word, yeah, but I think they really leaned into that like, I think maybe because their name was grim, they knew they could go as dark as possible. Yeah. Really lean into that name. Yeah,

Kelly:

the the brothers, the brother Smith, or the brothers Jones, doesn't have that much cache as the Brothers Grimm,

Alex:

I think they did lean into that. They also got rid of anything that was too French. A lot of these stories, their their origin is kind of more French. So, you know, something that might have originally taken place in a chateau is now taking place in a castle, yeah. But there were other little changes, like, you know, Snow White in the original Snow White, the evil queen was her birth mother in the original version, and they changed it to the stepmother. Later on, they found that changing things to stepmothers made them a lot more morally okay to have that person mess with the kid if they were not related to them, right?

Kelly:

Not their blood mother, not their Yeah, which really for 200 for

Alex:

the next 200 years, made it probably really difficult to be a step parent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, like I said, the Brothers Grimm were looking for something they called volksgeist.

Kelly:

Oh, that's people's ghosts. People's spirit, yeah,

Alex:

yeah. Spirit, the kind of to get, the spirit of authentic Germans and, like I said, and not French because of Napoleon, who was kind of running things at the time. They were very anti French.

Kelly:

I see our episode about Napoleon, right? So

Alex:

let's talk about some of the stories. One of them is called um ashen puto.

Kelly:

Ashen puto black like ashen

Alex:

ash Pluto is ash fool or ash girl, which is Cinderella. Okay, Cinderella, cinders would be, you know, like

Kelly:

Cinder yeah, oh yeah, dressed in yellow, went upstairs to kiss a fella. What about schneevich in? Schneevich and Schnee? Schnee is Snow White. Oh, snow witch, no, Snow White. Snow White. White is Vice but

Alex:

schneevich In, I mean, loosely translated to see it snow though Hansel and Gretel, hmm,

Kelly:

yeah, two kids, brother and sister

Alex:

wrote caption.

Kelly:

Red Rapunzel, no, wrote what?

Alex:

Wrote caption, you?

Kelly:

Yeah, well, cop is head but, or Cap, cap, oh, red cap. Who is that Little Red Riding Hood

Alex:

wrote caption, but it was little red cap girl or something, yeah, rumpus did skin

Kelly:

well, I mean, that was a name, but,

Alex:

yeah, that's it's, right, it's Rumplestiltskin, and then Rapunzel was the other one. Wow. So I can talk about any and all of those. Those are the ones we're going to talk about today, but I'm going to let you pick which one to talk about first.

Kelly:

Well, let's say Rapunzel. Let down your hair. So

Alex:

in the 1812 version of Rapunzel. So do you know the story of Rapunzel? Do you know it like off the top of your head? She

Kelly:

has long hair. She's trapped in a tower, and she lets her hair down so that she can be rescued. The guy can climb up using her hair.

Alex:

The guy, yeah, the prince, yeah, right. There's always a prince involved, right? It's always damsels in distress, and some guy rescues them. And we've talked about what rescue means in previous episodes, right, right, so in the original Rapunzel, it was very sexual. In fact, she asked him, she asked the prince, you know, he goes up to visit her a lot, and at one point she asked him, Why are my clothes getting so tight? Because she's pregnant and so in the you know, so a man. And his wife live by a walled garden owned by a witch named Frau goto, and the wife becomes pregnant and craves Rapunzel. And Rapunzel is a salad green in Germany, it's like, okay, watercress or something, or kale or something. So the man sneaks into the garden to steal the Rapunzel. And then the second time he does it, the Witch catches him and she spares him. He says, oh, please spare me. This is a very common thing. She says, I'll do it on one condition that's also very common. You must give me the baby when it's born, otherwise I'll kill you. That's really cool. So he agrees. And when it's born, the Witch names the baby Rapunzel, and takes her away. And then when Rapunzel turns 12, got the locks her in a tower with no doors or no stairs, and whenever the witch wants to visit, she says, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair so I may climb the golden stair. And then she would put down her hair that she had never got cut, and the witch would climb up, and that's how she would see her. Well, a prince overhears this one day, and because, you know, princes are always just walking around,

Kelly:

yeah, they're just like listening here to the ground. Well,

Alex:

he's enchanted, and he sneaks up, climbs her hair, and they begin a secret relationship. He gets her pregnant. This is again, in the original version. Then frog got the finds out that she's pregnant. She cuts off her hair and banishes her to the desert, and then the prince. And she tricks the Prince by letting down her hair. He climbs up. She reveals herself. The Prince jumps off from the tower in horror and lands in thorns, lands in thorns, blinding himself. Then he wanders the desert for years looking for a Rapunzel, until he finally founds her and the the baby his tears of joy heal his eyes, and they return to the kingdom and live happily ever after. Wow, crazy, huh? Now, and she, she gave birth to twins, actually, and they reunited. Now, in subsequent versions, they took out the teen pregnancy part, they made it more violent. They but big morals, like they added a lot of morals and the idea that, you know, discipline through fear, these stories kept kids in line. You know, you better not, you know, go out on your own or this stuff might, might happen to you.

Kelly:

Wow. No, I guess I only knew about the letting the hair down part, but I didn't know the rest of that story,

Alex:

yeah. Well, and then, of course, the Disney version, I think in the in the there's a movie called tangled, oh, yeah, yeah. There's very little of that, you know, yeah. If the I, you know, I don't know if it's better or worse, it's just different, yeah, Disney, yeah, and you're right. Maybe don't want Disney doing the original version. That's

Kelly:

it's no, no. Probably not the right. Demographic.

Alex:

All right, so now we got Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and Rumpelstiltskin.

Kelly:

Well, I remember Little Red Riding Hood. She she was going to her grandmother's in the forest and and there was a big bad wolf that chased her or talked to her, and then she ends up killing the wolf somehow, right, and putting it in, or maybe the wolf ate her grandmother, and he dresses up like, am I getting this mixed up? No, you got it. He dresses up like her grandmother, and she goes in and says, Oh, what big eyes you have, all the better to see you with, what big nose you have, all the better to smell you with, what a big teeth you have, all the better to eat you with. I

Alex:

got a treat for you. Okay, I mentioned these are short stories. I've got the original Little Red Riding Hood. I'm going to read it to you.

Kelly:

Okay, I'd love to hear it.

Alex:

This is the 1812 version, called Little Red Cap. Once upon a time, there was a sweet little girl who was loved by everyone who looked at her, but most of all, by her grandmother, who would have given her anything. Once she gave her a little cap of Red Velvet, which suited her so well that she would never wear anything else from then on, she was called Little Red Cap. One day, her mother said to her, come little red cap. Here's a piece of cake and a bottle of wine. Take these to your grandmother, who is ill and weak, and they will do her good. Set out before it gets hot, and walk nicely and quietly. Don't stray from the path, or you might fall and break the bottle, and when you get to her house, don't forget to say good morning and don't go peeping into every corner. I'll do everything just as you say. Promised little red cap and gave her hand on it. Her grandmother lived out in the woods, half a league from the village, and as little red cap entered the forest, she met a wolf. She didn't know what a wicked creature he was, so she wasn't afraid of him. Good day. Little Red Cap said, The Wolf. Thank you, kindly Wolf. She replied, where are you going? So early little red cap to my grandmother's house. She said, she's sick and weak, and I'm bringing her cake and wine. And where does your grandmother live a good quarter hour from here in the woods under the three big oak trees, you'll know it by the Hazel bushes nearby. The wolf thought to himself, that young thing is a tender morsel better than the old woman. I must be clever and catch them both. He walked a while beside her and said, Little Red Cap, look at the lovely flowers around you. Why don't you look around a bit and listen to the birds, how sweetly they sing. You're walking along as if you were going to school, and it's so beautiful here in the forest. Little Red Cap looked up, and when she saw the sunbeams dancing through the trees and the flowers blooming all around. She thought grandmother would like a bouquet too. It's still early and I'll be on time. So she left the path and wandered into the woods, picking flowers. Each time she picked one, she saw a prettier one further on, and kept going deeper and deeper. Meanwhile, the wolf took the direct path to the grandmother's house and knocked on the door. Who's there? Called the grandmother. Little Red Cap said the wolf, disguising his voice, I've brought you cake and wine. Open the door, lift the latch. Called the grandmother. I'm too weak to get up. The wolf lifted the latch, walked in and without a word, swallowed the grandmother whole, then he put on her clothes, laid himself in her bed and drew the curtains. Later, Little Red Cap arrived. She was surprised to find the door open and called Good morning, no answer. She stepped inside and felt uneasy, dear me. She said, Why do I feel so strange today, when I usually love visiting grandmother. She pulled back the bed curtains and there lay grandmother who looked very odd. Grandmother, what big ears you have, all the better to hear you with my dear grandmother. What big eyes you have, all the better to see you with my dear grandmother. What big hands you have, all the butter better to hug you with my dear grandmother. What a terribly big mouth you have, all the better to eat you with and with that, the wolf leapt out of bed and swallowed Little Red Cap too. Now the wolf, having eaten his fill, lay back down in the bed and fell asleep, snoring loudly. A Huntsman happened to be passing by the house. He thought it odd to hear such loud snoring, and said, I'll see if something's wrong. He went in and saw the wolf lying in bed, so he. Here you are, old sinner, said the Huntsman, I've been looking for you. He raised his gun, but then stopped. What if he swallowed the old woman whole? Maybe I can save her. So he took a knife and cut open the sleeping Wolf's belly. After a few snips, he saw something red, and out popped Little Red Cap crying how dark it was inside, he cut further, and out came grandmother, still alive, but weak. Little Red Cap fetched some large stones, and they filled the wolf's belly with them. When he woke up and tried to run, the stones were so heavy that He collapsed and fell down dead. All three were happy. The Huntsman took the wolf's skin the grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine and felt much better, and Little Red Cap promised herself she would never stray from the path again. The end, wow,

Kelly:

moral, moral, um, don't stray path. That's That's good. I don't know that I've heard that

Alex:

story in many years. Super violent, yeah, cutting the wolf open, and then the grandmother is a big ass Wolf. First of all,

Kelly:

yeah, yeah. Well, wolves, wolves are like that, sure, and

Alex:

talked. Not all wolves are bad. And they don't know talk either.

Kelly:

Dances with Wolves. Wolf of Wall Street. I mean, there's some good ones, but

Alex:

those were the predators in the forest that you had to watch for back then. Yeah, yeah. So that tells you that, like, yeah, there's a definite moral, very short story, but it's all about, like, if you do this, there will be consequences, and maybe someone will come and rescue you, but it's going to be grizzly. It's going to be grim. Yeah, grim word. But, you know, you have to be rescued at that point.

Kelly:

Nice job on the voices, by the way. I really liked the I liked the wolf doing the impression of Little

Alex:

Red riot. Yeah, it's hard. It's like a character inside a character.

Kelly:

Yeah, you've got to get meta on that.

Alex:

Cinderella. You know the story of Cinderella?

Kelly:

Let's see. Dressed in yellow, went upstairs, kiss a fellow, made a mistake, kissed a snake. How many doctors did it take? I think she's the one that went to the ball. She had a wicked stepmother, and she had sisters, wicked stepsisters, and she couldn't go to the ball, but then she met her fairy godmother, who turned a pumpkin into a coach, and she went to the ball, and she dropped her glass slipper, and the prince found it.

Alex:

Yeah, that's the Disney version. In the 1812, version, there wasn't any fairy godmother. It kind of is a cool beginning. She plants a magical Hazel tree on her well, her first her mother. A lot of these stories begin with like, the mother's not, you know, the mother's dead, or the father's dead, or whatever. She plants a magical Hazel tree on her mother's grave. Waters it with her tears and birds drop silver and gold dresses from the tree. That's really a cool

Kelly:

like, start to the story cool nature, nature and nurture together.

Alex:

And it wasn't Yeah, and back then, the animals in the stories were there to, like, sometimes help you, sometimes hurt you, but they were never just like singing sidekicks, like Disney made it right, right? It wasn't just one ball, either. It was a three night festival. Oh, that she would go out every night and try to do this, and she danced with the Prince and all that. And then, in the original version, when the prince tries to find her using that glass slipper, remember, it was the slipper, and he was everyone's trying it on. One of the sisters, one of the wicked stepsisters, cut off her toe to make the shoe fit.

Kelly:

If the shoe fits, you must have quit.

Alex:

And that nasty she'd cut off her toe to make sure it fit. The other one cut off her heel. I think that's worse than colors. Yeah. And the birds, though, were watching that, and they warned the prince, and they'd say, rookie to do, rookie to do, blood is in the shoe. Blood is in the shoe.

Kelly:

Wow, that's the rocket to do.

Alex:

And then, and then, when Cinderella finally gets married at the end, the birds, who knew that she was they were trouble, They pecked out the stepsister's eyes as punishment. Of course, the other common theme to all these stories is there's justice, whether it's divine justice or karmic justice. You get yours in the end, but patience also is a lot of a lot of patience is a virtue, and a lot of these characters have to wait, sometimes entire lifetime, but several years, decades, until somebody gets their comeuppance. But patience is usually rewarded, but it happens, yeah, but there and there's punishment to those who deserve. Deserve it.

Kelly:

So, so. But you know, foundation of good lessons, I guess, foundation of things that are useful for people to know, children to learn,

Alex:

German children back then were taught about patience was a big thing, that if you're if you're nice and you're patient, that magic and marriage will save you if you're a girl, right? That was kind of the the message the second edition got softened a little bit later, and then Disney introduced the whole idea of the fairy godmother, and that animals were kind of cute sidekicks, and a whole, whole different deal of the What about Snow White. You remember Snow White?

Kelly:

So I seven dwarves, right? And she went to live in the forest. I actually really think that is one of the it was one of the original Disney hand drawn animations. So

Alex:

it was Disney's first foray into feature length. It was for Disney's first feature length animated film, and it was the first of the brothers Grimms to stories to be made into a movie. 1937

Kelly:

hard to think about that as a book or a story, because the movie is so prevalent in our culture and and I think it's a beautiful movie. I mean, it's, it's just the the animation, the style of it, the music, everything. And then I think there was a Snow White done recently in like, the 2000s 2024 2023 something like that.

Alex:

It just came out, yeah, a few months ago. And I've heard, I haven't seen it, but I've heard they kind of missed the mark on everything like they've really doesn't. It doesn't satisfy the the original Brothers Grimm version, but it also doesn't. It tries to modernize it and loses a lot of the messages I again, this is only what I've I've heard read some pretty critical pieces on on it. I haven't read any good, anything good about it,

Kelly:

yeah, the first one was, again, just, just a very, I don't know, it kind of, there's an optimism to it. There's, there's a beauty to it. There's an innocence to it. The way that she looks in, the way that she is in the forest. I mean, I, you know, I recall, she goes to sleep, she eats the apple, you know, which I guess is a, sort of an allegory of almost like a Christian theme, and the prince brings her back to life by kissing her, kind of the shortcut.

Alex:

That's the Disney version, for sure. And the tough part about modernizing these things, you know, for a 2025 audience, is a lot of these are, you know, pretty sexist, like, like I said, you know, I mean the idea that a woman has to be rescued. So a lot of times, what they'll try to do to modernize them is make the hero, make the girl in the story kind of self sufficient. Well, then you're messing with the whole the structure, the whole architecture of the story and

Kelly:

the motivations. Like, if she's so independent, why does she even need this guy

Alex:

Exactly, exactly? So once you start doing that, the whole thing may fall apart. Yeah, um, in the original version, the like I mentioned, the evil queen was Snow White's biological mother, and she was, she knows, remember, she has the magic mirror, and she would say, Oh yeah, the fairest of them all. And for forever, the the mirror would always say, Well, of course, it's you queen. You're the most beautiful. And then one day, when the snow white kind of gets older, she says, Well, Snow White's the prettiest. And that was her daughter, and she was so jealous of that she hired a huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back her lung and liver as proof that she killed her like that is not a Disney right?

Kelly:

Because that's how you can really tell a person who a person is, but, oh yeah, that's Alex's lung,

Alex:

but it's her daughter too. Yeah, so the huntsman finds Snow White, and he's so like, creeped out by this that he tells Snow White to run away. He kills an animal instead, brings it to the Queen, and she eats the lung and eat liver of that animal. Snow White, in the meantime, hides with seven dwarfs, who, in the original story were they didn't have individual personalities or names or anything like that. Wasn't like, sleepy and Dopey. No, that was the Disney version, the original. The Queen tries to kill her three times, once by a corset that she pulls too tight and tries to, like, suffocate her the second time with a poison comb, and then finally, the third time with the poison apple. Okay, when in the original When the prince tries to find her, when the prince finally finds her and the dwarfs, uh, late, uh, like hiding out, he doesn't kiss her. He His servants just. Little the coffin, and the apple dislodges from her throat, and she she comes back to life. There was no kiss or anything, and then in the original at at her wedding. So the the Evil Queen goes to the wedding. She didn't know it was her daughter that was getting married, and the prince, uh, once she gets there, she discovers that, and the Prince and Snow White force the Queen to wear red hot iron. They take shoes and they put them in the fire. They're made of iron. They put them in the fire until they're red hot, and make her dance until she dies again. It's all about comeuppance, like if you are mean, you will get yours in the end. It might be a long time before you get yours, but you will get yours 100 times worse than you gave and they made her dance on with these red hot iron shoes until she died.

Kelly:

That was the original version of the Abba song, right? No. I mean,

Alex:

now you in the second edition, all they did was change it to her stepmother, and instantly it becomes a more morally acceptable story, yeah, I suppose, because nobody would do that to their real daughter but a stepmother. I guess anything goes right, yeah. And then in the Disney version, they made the dwarfs have personalities, and the prince kisses her, and it becomes much more of a kind of love at first,

Kelly:

yeah? And love conquers all kind of thing, yeah,

Alex:

that's good. Now, what about Hansel and Gretel?

Kelly:

I don't know much about them, so they fetch a pail of water. Is that

Alex:

them? That was Jack and Jill. Oh, all they did was go up a hill and then roll down. That's a real short story. Yeah, Hansel and Gretel were the ones that were in the forest and drop breadcrumbs, remember? And then the witch caught them. Oh, yeah. So Hansel and Gretel, in the original version, a couple is starving, and they have two kids, Hansel umbrell And the wife says, we don't have enough to eat. Let's leave our kids here in the woods so we don't have as many mouths to feed. So it's just going to be you and me. And then Hansel, the boy, overhears the plan and drops pebbles on on his way, so they can find his way back. So he gets back, so the wife says, let's try it again. Let's try it again. Let's try to lose these guys again. This time, he drops bread crumbs, and the birds eat the bread crumbs. I remember that then they found a house made of gingerbread where a witch lived, and the witch put Hansel in a cage to fatten him up so she could eat him, and she made Gretel do chores. The witch decided to eat Hansel, and Gretel shoves the witch into the oven. They steal her gold, and then they go back home, and they find the mother had died, and the father's alive, and he was he didn't want to go along with this. Anyways, he welcomes them back, and they live happily ever after. In subsequent versions, the mother becomes a stepmother, and again, it's the stepmother that doesn't want the kids. The father is in an impossible situation, but he welcomes them, and then all three of them live happily ever after, okay? And these constant themes though. I mean, imagine if you had a book of, you know, we're just talking about some of these stories, but if there were 86 stories after time after time after time, it's an evil stepmother and evil stepsisters, and,

Kelly:

yeah, they get a little repetitious, but that

Alex:

was probably very common back then to have step sisters and brothers and parents, because people were, you know, didn't live very long back then.

Kelly:

And as we got melded together, it's like the Brady Bunch, I don't

Alex:

even know about, melted together. But women died in childbirth a lot, so there would be another woman that would take the place I usually a younger woman, probably, probably, you know, if you go by like Henry the eighth times, you know, every wife is a little bit younger, right? True, true. Um, I could see how somebody would resent them, maybe, and, but, like I say, didn't do step parents. Any

Kelly:

face? No, no. Step parents got a bad rap.

Alex:

What about Rumpelstiltskin? No idea.

Kelly:

Nothing, isn't that? No, I'm thinking of Pinocchio, nope, no idea.

Alex:

So a Miller, and there were lots of Millers in these stores. You know what a Miller is?

Kelly:

They make flour.

Alex:

They would take like straw, yeah, yeah, they would mill. They would mill, like flour from like straw and barley and things like that. Okay? And it would have these wheels, right? Spinning wheels. Yeah, do that mill. So Miller wanted to impress a king, so he lies to him and says, My daughter can spin straw into gold.

Kelly:

Oh yeah, I've heard that saying before.

Alex:

So first of all, what like that doesn't mean that sentence doesn't make any sense. But okay, so the greedy King brings the daughter to the castle, locks her in a room with straw, gives her a spinning wheel, and says, All right, I heard that you can make this into gold. But if you have so, I'm skeptical, if you haven't spun this straw into gold by the morning you die, as kings do, right? Yeah, yeah, there's always subject consequences. So all of a sudden, a little man appears out of nowhere, and he says, I can help you. I can spin that into gold. He does. He spins it into gold and and she says, Oh my gosh, thank you. Saved my life. And he says, Well, I'll take your necklace, though. So she gives him her necklace. Next night. He does the same thing. And he says, I'll take your ring, took his took the ring next night. He says the same thing. And this time she doesn't have anything they give him. He says, Well, promise me your first born child,

Kelly:

of course.

Alex:

So the king is so impressed by all this gold that he marries the girl. She becomes the queen. Year later, she has a baby. And all of a sudden, the little man comes back and he says, You promised? She says, Please, can I keep this child? He's the heir to the throne. Please, let me keep him. He says, all right, but on one condition, you could keep the baby if you can guess my name within three days from now. Now, his name was rumble stiltskin, right? Yeah. So she guesses, and she guesses some names like Casper. No, it's not Casper. Is it Melchior? No, is it Schnoodle puff. Now this is a great story to tell your kids. You could just, at this point, just make up names, right? Yeah, yeah. So then she overhears him one day. He's out back singing, and he's singing a song, today, I bake. Tomorrow, I brew. The next I'll have the young Queen's child, probably Ryan's in German. Oh, how glad I am that no one knows that my name is Rumpelstiltskin. He's singing out loud. Yeah, Robo stiltskin, in German, means noisy little goblin. Okay, know that. I think that might knowing that, though I might have guessed that right away.

Kelly:

Yeah, it's, it's very descriptive. Like, if

Alex:

he is a noisy little Goblin, and he says, I bet you can't guess my name, I'd be like, is it noisy little goblin? And it seems

Kelly:

like being overheard is, is such a big like, several times over here, somebody overhearing something changes the plot

Alex:

dramatically. Well, you know, yeah, yeah, and that's the gods. But even in Shakespeare, that's how it happens, right? Like, that's, you know? So she confronts him, she goes, Ah, your name is Rumpelstiltskin, and he screams in rage and runs away. And that's the end. In subsequent versions, he literally tears himself into two, like he runs away, and he splits in half, right down, down the middle. I don't

Kelly:

know why. Strange amoeba or Yeah, yeah, that's

Alex:

so those. Those were the popular ones. I told you. There's, there's other ones that are just downright weird. There's one about a girl who ends up marrying like a serial killer and sets them up for, you know, and there's fingers being chopped off and salting the meat and all that kind of stuff. I mean, it's just, but we've talked about before, when, when we talked about at Christmas, yeah, we talked about those, those, it's very common to have stories where people are eaten and boiled and salted. And that was a thing that genuinely scared people

Kelly:

back. Yeah, that was, that was a horror film. You know, they didn't have special effects, so they had to pick a topic that was very visceral, but

Alex:

it's just funny, because we would never tell little kids the stories today, and that was and I think kids dug it like, I think kids are into that kind of stuff. That's why they were tougher than us. Yeah, I guess so. Now a 1785 kid could beat the crap out of a 1985

Kelly:

kid.

Alex:

So we have these common tropes of wicked stepmothers, abandoned children, talking animals, making a deal with the devil, making a deal with the goblin. Rules of three like three wishes, three tests, Three brothers, gruesome karmic justice, right? I should probably though a podcast about the Brothers Grimm probably would be incomplete if I didn't talk about kind of the anti semitic tropes. I I talked about only some of the stories that we know. There were other stories that were very, very anti semitic. You know, when they when those guys lived? In the in the 1800s this anti semitism was starting, just starting to rise in Germany, Jews were often the villains in these stories. They were repeated from times where they blamed everything on the Jews. And unfortunately, that got even worse, you know, over the next 100 years, well, Brothers Grimm weren't like I said. They were not they were scholars. They weren't fascists, they weren't propagandists. They weren't trying to propagate these stories. They were collecting stories from racist folks, bigoted people, right? Um, unfortunately, 100 years or not, quite 100 years later, when the Nazis were in charge, they deliberately use these brothers Grimm stories as propaganda tools.

Kelly:

People had grown up on them, right? So this was something that's easy to do, yes,

Alex:

very easy to do, because they've grown up with these stories and they used them, and they really doubled down on using these brothers Grimm stories in school. Hitler youth groups use these. They would have radio plays. They really got a second, like Ray's wave of popularity in the 30s and 1930s and 40s. They were German to the core these stories, you know, they were part and a country that was becoming more and more nationalistic, these stories were very comforting to Nazis and really used as tools they you know, a lot of these stories have to do with an evil outsider. Well, you know, the immigrants and Jews were seen as evil outsiders and and there were also these stories. I think the most destructive thing was these stories were all about you better be obedient as a child, or there's going to be consequences if you don't listen to what your parent if you you know you don't stop on the way home and don't do this, or you'll get eaten by a witch. So they were really teaching kids to be super obedient. Well, part of when imagine the end game of Nazis teaching you to be obedient is to the pretty fear. Yeah, it's, it's pretty chilling, right? Also, there was a glorification of suffering, right in these and these stories, and that was a very Nazi thing, too. Little Red Riding Hood, the Nazis, right away were like, the wolf is the Jews. And they would spell this out to little kids. Snow White was all about racial purity. You know, they were kind of taking what Brothers Grimm did and and perverting it a little bit to make something that was already kind of really weird and strange and scary and gruesome even into something more horrific and monstrous, right and and Hansel and Gretel was all about defeating evil through being resource.

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Alex Milam

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Kelly Shores

Host