July 20, 2012
"Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him, and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth."

—

Grimms’ Fairy Tales

I had a morbid fascination with fairy tales as a child. This was because those sorts of traditional stories that started out as oral narratives frequently featured death and abuse and torture. In the original Hansel and Gretel their parents want to abandon the two children in the woods and happily do so, and in the original Rapunzel she gets knocked up by her visiting prince, the one who climbed up her hair every night. I’m sure I didn’t focus on the romantic elements of the stories, because why would you when there are children killing and being killed, and rules being broken? My book of fairy tales was a reproduction of a collection from the early 20th century, with old-fashioned typesetting and a black and white line drawing of a witch pushing a beautiful girl into the sea on the cover, and I’m sure I thought it was imbued with some sort of unearthly power.

4:59pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZEwTOyPkzEyO
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: Fairy tales New Yorker Death 
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