The stories we know as Grimm’s Fairy Tales were actually published in 1812 as Children’s and Household Tales. “Children’s” we understand, although we wonder with amazement how anyone should have thought that the tales in their original versions, which are full of grisly violence, could have been thought appropriate for young people. But why “Household”? There is something here that is easy to pass by unthinkingly. We do not tell tales in our households any longer. We are a literate culture and may read stories by others; we are simultaneously to some degree a post-literate culture and find our stories in the electronic media. But that is different. What we lack is a member of the family telling a story to the household around the hearth, an oral story that exists only in the telling. The children’s bedtime story is all that survives of a kind of bonding experience that has all but disappeared without our even noticing it, much less contemplating what we have lost by that disappearance.
March 29, 2024
March 29, 2024
March 29, 2024
The stories we know as Grimm’s Fairy Tales were actually published in 1812 as Children’s and Household Tales. “Children’s” we understand, although we wonder with amazement how anyone should have thought that the tales in their original versions, which are full of grisly violence, could have been thought appropriate for young people. But why “Household”? There is something here that is easy to pass by unthinkingly. We do not tell tales in our households any longer. We are a literate culture and may read stories by others; we are simultaneously to some degree a post-literate culture and find our stories in the electronic media. But that is different. What we lack is a member of the family telling a story to the household around the hearth, an oral story that exists only in the telling. The children’s bedtime story is all that survives of a kind of bonding experience that has all but disappeared without our even noticing it, much less contemplating what we have lost by that disappearance.