Random Facts You Didn't Need to Know

Pertaining to Books... (Part 2)

Twisted Fairy Tales

1) The original Sleeping Beauty (titled “Sun, Moon and Talia”) is a shockingly violent narrative. To summarise the most interesting plot points- A rich nobleman was hunting in the woods when he ran across the abandoned body of Sleeping Beauty. Far from planting a kiss, the nobleman instead raped her sleeping body (for all he knew she was dead, making it doubly disgusting), which resulted in a pregnancy.  Nine months later, Sleeping Beauty gave birth to two children (naming them Sun and Moon). Whilst the babies nursed at Sleeping Beauty’s breasts, one of the children accidentally mistook her thumb for a nipple and sucked out the poison. Talia awoke from her deep sleep. Months later, the nobleman decided to return to the woods to have more sex with Sleeping Beauty’s body when to his surprise, he found her awake. The nobleman confesses that he raped her and they again had sex in the barn. The nobleman then returns home to his wife. The nobleman’s stepmother found out about the sexual encounter and ordered the children be kidnapped and cooked alive. The cook prepared the fiendish disk and served it to the rich nobleman at his dinner. As the nobleman finished his meal, the wife boldly announced “you are eating what is your own!” As it turns out, the cook had a soft heart and substituted a goat instead of the children. Talia, the children and her slightly necrophiliac rapist love interest lived happily ever after.

2) In this heart-warming tale, we hear of pretty little Goldilocks who finds the house of the three bears. She sneaks inside and eats their food, sits in their chairs, and finally falls asleep on the bed of the littlest bear. When the bears return home they find her asleep – she awakens and escapes out the window in terror. The original tale (which actually only dates to 1837) has two possible variations. In the first, the bears find Goldilocks and rip her apart and eat her. In the second, Goldilocks is actually an old hag who (like the sanitized version) jumps out of a window when the bears wake her up. The story ends by telling us that she either broke her neck in the fall, or was arrested for vagrancy and sent to the “House of Correction”.

3) The version of this tale that most of us are familiar with ends with Riding Hood being saved by the woodsman who kills the wicked wolf. But in fact, the original French version (by Charles Perrault) of the tale was not quite so nice. In this version, the little girl is a well bred young lady who is given false instructions by the wolf when she asks the way to her grandmothers. Foolishly she takes the advice of the wolf and ends up being eaten. And here the story ends. There is no woodsman – no grandmother – just a fat wolf and a dead Red Riding Hood. The moral to this story is to not take advice from strangers.

4) In the tale of the Pied Piper, we have a village overrun with rats. A man arrives dressed in clothes of pied (a patchwork of colors) and offers to rid the town of the vermin. The villagers agree to pay a vast sum of money if the piper can do it – and he does. He plays music on his pipe which draws all the rats out of the town. When he returns for payment – the villagers won’t cough up so the Pied Piper decides to rid the town of children too! In most modern variants, the piper simply draws the children to a cave out of the town where they live happily in a beautiful land, but forever out of reach of the adults. In the darker original, the piper leads the children to a river where they all drown (except a lame boy who couldn’t keep up). Some modern scholars say that there are connotations of pedophilia in this fairy tale.