Famine in Fairy Tales

A few weeks ago as we were watching the opera Hansel and Gretel, it occurred to me how often many of the old fairy tales revolve around the theme of hunger. We forget while living in a land of plenty how in other continents famine is a harsh reality. In Western Europe in the Middle Ages, famine was a dreaded but occasional part of life, which is why it crept into the stories. Eugen Weber in Peasants into Frenchmen and Robert Darnton in The Great Cat Massacre explore the origins of many popular tales as being rooted in the anxieties of peasant existence. Fairy tales were a way of confronting very real fears, including the fear of starving. As one scholarly paper describes:

Peasants began telling each other stories as a mean of entertainment, but also as an outlet and alternative for their daily miseries. Fairy tales – folk tales when they were originally told by the peasants – were often vulgar and lacking in morality. The peasants told each other tales in the spinning room and the field while they were working. The tales were a form of entertainment enjoyed by all; they were not exclusively for children. In fact, a lot of the tales were told in the night, after the children had slept, so the peasants put little check in detailed episodes of violence and explicit sexual reference; they were the equivalent of late night TV shows for us (Tatar 23). The motif and themes of the tales were old, but since the tales followed an oral tradition, they changed every so often as the tellers modified them to reflect the living conditions of their audience (Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell 33). The tales projected the peasant’s perceptions of reality, and even their desire (Rőhrich 191). For them, kings were happy just to have bean soup every day, and white bread, sweetened fruits, and sugared nuts made up a real feast (188). The horrors of the tale were real too. Poverty was real, hunger was real, because famine happened; stepmothers were real, because peasant women died young and men made rash remarriages, so child abuse and abandonment were real too (Weber 94).

The older the version of the fairy tale, the more lurid the details. For instance, "Hansel and Gretel" was modified a great deal over the years. According to an article by Melissa Howard:

Hansel and Gretel is part of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm’s collection of fairy tales originally titled Children's and Household Tales, published in 1812, but now known throughout the world as Grimm's Fairy Tales. The brothers did not collect the fairy tales alone and the discovery Hansel and Gretel’s is attributed to Dortchen Wild who heard it in the town of Cassel.
In the earliest versions of the story, it was Hansel and Gretel’s mother who suggests that they abandon the children not a stepmother. Also notable is that in the earliest versions of the tale, both parents participated in the decision. During the Middle Ages, there were many disasters such as famine, war, and plague, which would cause parents to abandon their children. It would seem that in Hansel and Gretel’s case the abandonment could have easily been due to famine, which would explain the theme of food, which runs through the entire narrative.

There are other stories besides "Hansel and Gretel" in which abandoned children are forced to shift for themselves due to lack of food. Not only must youngsters in such tales deal with potential starvation, but they must avoid being eaten by evil witches or ogres. In "Hop o' My Thumb" or "Little Thumb," six children are left in the forest by their own father and mother, who cannot bear to watch them die of hunger. The siblings must then escape a child-eating ogre. The resourcefulness of the youngest and smallest boy saves the entire family. It is not a story which appears too often in modern fairy tale books. Nevertheless, in such tales of bleak desperation, small children are able to outwit their tormentors and find a better life. For all their gruesomeness, those fairy tales imparted a gleam of hope in a hard and difficult world. May all of our children's stories do the same. Share

This Explains It All

 From Tierney's Real News:

The problems we face now as a country are directly tied to the actions of Bush and Obama - who are puppets of the NWO. First, the Bush administration monitored the communication of American citizens; and, secondly, Obama’s team fine-tuned and used that system against their political opponents and American citizens - and finally Trump and MAGA. Both Bush & Obama were NWO APPROVED candidates. Trump is NOT.

The DHS, ODNI, DOJ and FBI became the four pillars of this new institution - which is the Fourth Branch of Government - THE INTELLIGENCE BRANCH. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower (military) to John F. Kennedy (CIA) to Richard Nixon (FBI) all warned against this happening.

[The coup against Trump is actually a repeat of the coup against Nixon - by many of the same players.]

The 4th Branch controls our Government and influences every facet of our life.  We The People are under surveillance. We The People are the target. This is what Trump means when he says “They aren’t after me - they are after you. I’m only standing in the way.”

The ODNI was created and originally intended for the CIA, NSA, DoD, DoS, and DIA to deposit their unique intelligence in ONE PLACE - so that agencies like the DOJ and FBI could access threats when needed to analyze threats to the U.S. This, they hoped, would ensure the obvious flags missed in the 9/11 attacks would not be missed again. However, it is now used by the Intelligence Branch to target Trump and American citizens and hide information from one agency to another. (Read more.)

Share

How Barron Was Bullied

 It's disgusting for an adult to bully a child. It's especially cruel to casually label a child as having a special need. From The Western Journal:

Simmering anger over an unfounded 2016 accusation about Barron Trump from former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell boils over in former first lady Melania Trump’s new memoir. Nothing but “sheer malice” could have motivated a tweet and video in which O’Donnell suggested Barron Trump could have autism, she wrote, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

“There is nothing shameful about autism (though O’Donnell’s tweet implied that there was), but Barron is not autistic,” Trump wrote, according to USA Today. (Read more.)

Share

Jack and the Beanstalk

While famine is one recurring theme in classic fairy-tales, another is giants. Giants who terrorize and prey upon peasants appear again and again in the tales that have been passed down to us, the most popular being the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk." Other famous giant stories are "Jack the Giant-Killer," "The Brave Little Tailor" and "Tom Thumb." According to The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature:

One of the oldest printed fairy tales in England was Tom Thumb which appeared in 1621 in a chapbook. Chapbooks were works of popular literature sold for a few pence by pedlars or ‘chapmen’ from the 16^th to the 19^th cent. In 1711 there appeared the first printed version of Jack the Giant Killer, a popular English folk tale.

Tom Thumb is born in answer to the wish of a childless poor couple, who desire a son even if he should be no bigger than his father’s thumb. Magician Merlin answers their wish and the Fairy Queen names him and gives him a hat made of oak leaf and a shirt of spider’s web. Tom then encounters many adventures. The last of them is being eaten by a fish which is then caught for King Arthur’s table; Tom becomes a knight and when he dies is mourned by the whole Arthur’s court.

Jack the Giant Killer is a story of witty and ingenuous Jack, the only son of a Cornish farmer. He decides to destroy a giant terrorizing Cornwall. Armed with horn, shovel and pick-axe, at night he digs a pit outside the giant’s cave. Then he wakes the giant with a blast on the horn and after the giant falls into the trap he kills him with his pick-axe. As a reward he gets the giant’s treasure and the title ‘the Giant Killer’. He continues in the same style and kills two more giants; he also helps king Arthur’s son to marry a lady of his heart and becomes a knight of the Round Table. In the second part he sets out to rid country of all giants and monsters and finally to release a duke’s daughter whom he then marries and lives happily with on an estate given to him by the king. From this fairy are the words ‘Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman’, uttered by a giant who can’t see Jack who is wearing a coat of darkness he got from another giant together with a cap of knowledge, a never-failing sword and shoes of swiftness.

However, most fairy tales circulated in England only in oral form. Puritan writers, who were the first to write for children, considered tales about magical wonders inappropriate for children; John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, regretted a childhood spent reading chapbook stories about marvellous happenings and in New England in America another writer, Cotton Mather, complained of ‘foolish Songs and Ballads’ on such fanciful subjects and recommended writing ‘poetical compositions full of Piety’.

In the 18^th century English translations of French fairy tales mainly by Perrault were published in England and from the beginning of the 19^th century also English folk fairy tales started to appear in print, e.g. Jack and the Beanstalk.

Jack and the Beanstalk is a story of lazy Jack, the only child of a poor widow. When she sends him to the market to sell her cow, he returns with a handful of beans instead of money. She throws the beans away and in the morning there is a huge beanstalk in the garden. Jack climbs to its top and finds there a barren land. He meets a fairy who tells him that nearby lives a giant who deceived and killed Jack’s father years ago. Jack goes to the giant’s house where he is given food and drink by his wife who then hides him in the oven. When the giant returns home and falls asleep Jack steals his hen which can lay golden eggs, climbs down the beanstalk and gives the hen to his mother. Later he makes two more journeys up the beanstalk and gets back with the giant’s money-bags and a magic harp. When stealing the harp it starts speaking so the giant wakes up and chases Jack; when he starts climbing down the stalk, Jack cuts it so that the giant falls down and is killed by the fall.

Around the middle of the 19^th century J. O. Halliwell and Robert Chambers collected fairy tales, the latter in Scotland. In 1890 were published English Fairy Tales collected by Joseph Jacobs, followed by more collections of this editor.

The history behind the giant stories has always intrigued me. Were the giants a figurative way of describing baronial tyrants or thuggish robbers? Or were there really persons of extraordinary height who used their superior physical strength to bully everyone else? Sacred Scripture certainly has several mentions of giants, Goliath being one of the most notorious. In European folklore, giants are usually seen as being the remnant of a former civilization. Most of the giant stories which involve a youth named "Jack" are usually set in either Cornwall or Wales and appear to have some connection with the larger cycle of Arthurian legend. It must be noted, however, that Jack himself is not mentioned in the early tales. As Thomas Green states in The Arthuriad:

The curious thing about Jack is that – in contrast to that other fairy-tale contemporary of King Arthur's, Tom Thumb – there is no trace of him to be found before the early eighteenth century. The first reference to him comes in 1708 and the earliest known (now lost) chapbook to have told of his deeds was dated 1711.... If Jack was a literary creation – rather than a genuine figure of folk-tale – whose tale was woven from earlier non-Jack giant-killings and traditions, this naturally raises some intriguing questions about the origins of both these stories of Welsh and Cornish giants and the actual concept of Jack as the hero who finally rids Britain of these creatures. With regards to this, it is important to note the presence of King Arthur throughout Jack‘s tale....

The solution, as I have argued elsewhere, may well lie with Arthur‘s well-documented role as the slaughterer of British giants through a combination of extreme violence, cunning and trickery....In fact, in Welsh and Cornish folklore of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries it is repeatedly claimed that Arthur was the greatest of all giant-killers, responsible for finally ridding the land of giants....

In Arthur we have a figure of genuine folklore and early British story who parallels and pre-dates Jack in both his role and the type of deeds that are ascribed to him....Jack was a new final vanquisher of the giants of Britain, designed for an England that was interested such folkloric tales but which would appear to have become bored of Arthur himself by the early eighteenth century....

This is not, of course, to say that a knowledge of the Arthurian tradition fully explains Jack‘s History... but rather to suggest that The History of Jack and the Giants deserves to be considered as a genuine part of the development of the Arthurian legend, not simply an unrelated fairy tale that happens to be set in the reign of King Arthur as a variant of 'Once upon a time.'

Perhaps we will never know exactly why "Jack" came to replace King Arthur as the slayer of giants in the popular mind. Maybe those who printed the chapbooks in seventeenth century England saw that Jack, a poor boy who, in spite of poverty, destroys a formidable aggressor, would have a more general, and highly marketable, appeal. At any rate, the various versions of the story of Jack and his giant opponent still resonate with us today.

(Artwork courtesy of Hermes) Share

Trump Wins Again

 Trish Regan has her own really informative show.

Share

Of Mermaids and Sirens

 From The Greek Reporter:

Mermaids, folkloric creatures with the head and upper body of a woman and lower body of a fish, appear in many cultures across the world. Many have traced the contemporary conception of a mermaid to the ancient Greek figure of the Siren, even though similar creatures can be found across the world. Sirens were dangerous creatures in Greek mythology. The fearsome figures, which were described and depicted as half-woman and half-bird, sat perched on rocky crags along the sea, singing beautiful, seductive songs. They hoped to ensnare nearby sailors, luring them onto the dangerous rocks with their songs, causing shipwrecks. (Read more.)

Share

Cupid and Psyche: True Love Conquers All

From Ancient Origins:

Cupid and Psyche's narrative begins as most modern fairy tales do: with a kingdom, a daughter with an insurmountable burden over her head, a trial, and a subsequent moral. It is as follows: a king and queen give birth to three daughters, but only the third possesses unearthly beauty. Apuleius' text claimed that her beauty was so astounding the "poverty of language is unable to express its due praise." 

Rumors spread of this girl, Psyche's, astounding loveliness, eventually reaching the ears of the Roman goddess Venus. Angry that so many mortals were comparing Psyche's beauty to her own—and in many ways claiming that the mortal surpassed her—Venus called upon her son Cupid to demand that he use one of his arrows of desire to ensure Psyche fall in love with a human monster. 

Obedient as always to his mother, Cupid descended to the earthly plane to do as she wished. Yet he was so astonished himself by the mortal princess's beauty that he mistakenly shot himself. From that moment, Cupid was irrevocably in love with the princess (Read more.)

Share

Democrats Use Pandemic Narratives to Bully Voters

 From The Rand Paul Review:

The next pandemic is less terrifying than the government’s control of the domestic narrative of the entire USA. Following the start of COVID-19, the federal government flexed unprecedented control over every corner of American society. According to the CDC: “The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant indirect effects on multiple areas of child development, school readiness, educational attainment, socialization skills, mental health, in addition to risks based on social determinants of health.”

A significant portion of the newest generation is under-socialized, exacerbating existing criticisms of impaired social cues from screen-time and isolation. Adults and children alike are victims to an unnecessary government takeover that is almost sure to happen again. Between 2019 and the end of 2023, the pandemic is estimated to have cost upwards of $14 Billion.

Every industry was affected, from airlines to dining to retail. Public gatherings plummeted, and the suicide rate skyrocketed. The inattention to the repercussions of closing down life for a disease that killed one-fifth of the people that obesity kills globally per year indicates that the priority was not really on saving lives. (Read more.)

Share