NIGHT-TALK NOV 16.
Deep, deep goes the ladder down the slopes of European folklore, and dark, violent and immeasurably tragic it gets rather quickly. The Brothers Grimm sanitized their work after angry complaints from house-mothers and other folk finding issue with the explicit violence and deep depths of cavernous human darkness often portrayed within the stories. Also, basically every sexual reference was sanitized - censored - as well. Some anecdotes and stories omitted in subsequent editions of Grimm brothers' work are straight-up bizarre in their grisly, macabre depictions of murder and despair, such as this one, my favorite:
"One day, two brothers saw their father killing off a pig. They imitated what they saw and the older brother killed his younger brother. Their mother, who was giving the baby a bath, heard her child scream and abandoned the baby in the bath. When she saw what her eldest child had done, she took the knife out of her younger son's throat, and in her rage stabbed her older son in the heart. When the mother found out that meanwhile the baby had drowned in the tub, she felt an inconsolable desperation and committed suicide by hanging herself. After a long day of work in the field, the father came home. Finding out that his whole family was dead, he soon also died from sadness."
I can understand a German 1820's housewife taking offense with such fiction published in a work that, after all, was called "Children's & Household Tales".
Bring back the old school Grimm. Apocryphal, botched Grimm tales should constitute a book of its own, as a raw and honest monument to European folklore.
European folklore lives forever, and Europe will too.
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