There is nothing so spooky as a good fairy tale, a truism that the producers knew when they developed that horrible Brothers Grimm movie a few years back.

The Brothers Grimm did not write these tales, they traveled around Bavaria and Germany, asking people to share the tales that they knew, that they had grown up with, kind of primitive sociologists, like Jan Harold Brunvand, only several hundred years ago.

The evolution of fairy tales is funny: they start as stories told by the fire, surrounded by the deep dark in a way that we rarely experience these days. They were visceral, violent tales, filled with horrors, and without always happy endings. But, as time passed, the people retelling them cleaned them up, Disneyfied them, until even The Little Mermaid – a story not collected by the Brothers Grimm – has a happy ending.¹

Here’s one you may not know – Disney hasn’t touched it as far as I know but it’s one of my favorites:

A king and queen have 12 sons. But then the king tells the queen: if we have another child, and it’s a girl, I’ll kill all our sons so the daughter can inherit everything. [Why on earth would a king promise this? Perhaps the 12 boys were driving him crazy.] He has 12 coffins made “and lined with death pillows”, locks them in a room, and gives the queen the key, and makes her promise not to tell anyone about his plans.

One day, her youngest son, Benjamin (ah, now we know why they have 12 sons), asks the queen why she is so sad and weeps all the time. She tells him that she promised not to tell, and tries to resist, but he keeps needling her until she reveals all. She tells the boys to run and hide deep in the forest and take turns watching her window in the castle: if the child she bears is a girl, she’ll hang a red flag from the window and they’ll know to flee; otherwise, she’ll hang a white flag and they can return.

Of course, it’s a red flag, so the sons flee further into the woods, the eldest 11 vowing to get revenge on their sister. Far, far in the woods they find a tiny abandoned cabin and decide to live there. The eldest 11 hunt and bring their kills back to their home for Benjamin to prepare. Ten years pass.

Their sister grows to be a beautiful and sweet little girl with a gold star in the middle of her forehead. One day, she is helping her mother with the laundry and finds twelve boy’s shirts mixed in [10 years later?!?], and asks her mother’s who they are. The mother, proving once again that she cannot stand up to a child’s pestering, spills the whole thing. Again. The daughter promises to find her brothers and embarks into the forest.

Pretty quickly, she comes across Benjamin who is surprised by “her beauty, her royal garments, and the star on her forehead.” Her reply, “I’m a princess and I’m looking for my twelve brothers.”

Realizing that they are brother and sister, they have a happy reconciliation but then Benjamin warns her that her brothers have sworn to kill their sister. “I’ll gladly die if I can save my 12 brothers by doing this,” she replies. [Idiot.]

When the brothers return, Benjamin tricks them into revoking their vow, reveals their sister and she is so adorable that they also fall immediately in love with her, in a brotherly sort of way. [Remember she is only 10 years old.] The princess, who so far hasn’t been given a name, and Benjamin impress the other brothers with their ability to keep the house flawlessly clean and prepare delicious feasts for them.

One day, the princess spies 12 lilies growing in the garden and, thinking to make a nice bouquet for her brothers, plucks the flowers.

And her 12 brothers are immediately transformed into ravens that fly away over the forest, and the cottage and the garden disappear, leaving the princess standing in the woods, wondering what just happened. She turns and finds an old woman staring at her.

“Why did you do that?” The old woman asks, and explains that the only way that the princess can change her brothers back would be by remaining completely silent for seven years, speaking never a word, and not laughing. However the vow carries a risk: if the princess speaks even one word or laughs even once, all of her brothers will immediately die. The princess agrees.

She finds a nice tall tree, climbs up it a comfortable fork, and sits there sewing [sewing what, you may ask – in a similar tale, the brothers are transformed into swans and the sister can only transform them back by sewing nettle shirts for them which, when she tosses them onto the brothers, transforms them back, all except poor Benjamin because she couldn’t finish the last sleeve on his shirt, and he ends up with one wing instead of an arm – but that’s not happening there].

Until, of course, a king wanders by, notices her, and falls immediately in love. He asks her to marry him and she nods yes, and they go back to his kingdom and have a huge wedding.

The Queen Mother, however, is “an evil woman” and, after several years, she begins to nag at her son: there must be something wrong with his wife, why does she never speak a word, or laugh? She must be a bad person with a terrible conscience never to laugh or say a word. The King holds out against this slander for as long as he can until, finally, he believes his mother, and sentences his wife to burn at the stake.

They pile up the wood, tie the sister to the stake, and set the whole pile aflame. As the smoke spirals up around the princess, the last moment of the last minute of the seventh year expires.

The twelve brothers fly in as ravens, alight on the ground, and return to human form. The rescue their sister from the flames and, after a joyous reconciliation, she explains the whole seven-year vow to the king, he repeals her sentence, and “they all lived together in harmony until their death.”

Oh, except the evil Queen Mother, who is put on trial, condemned to death, and nailed into a barrel filled with oil and poisonous snakes. [But wouldn’t the snakes die in the oil?]

The really scary stories are the ones with a Christian moral: like the red shoes where the girl puts on her new red dancing shoes, makes the mistake of dancing on a Sunday, and literally dances her feet off.

I love a good fairy tale.

1. In Hans Christian Andersen’s original, the little mermaid did not get the prince; so giving up her voice and her tail were for naught. And, in fact, she died. Oh, call it a happy ending by saying she went to heaven but the truth is, she’s dead. ↩︎