Fairy Tale by Marina Warner

Author:Marina Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, ‘you be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.’ He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat.

The Grimms had found the story in a Berlin newspaper edited by the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, so it hardly had authentic Volk credentials, except as an urban myth; it does have analogues in folklore elsewhere, but its pitilessness aroused shock and horror in the first readers of Children’s and Household Tales, and the Grimms came under pressure to drop it. They did so in later editions of their collection. But Wilhelm protested that it taught children the all-important distinction between playing make-believe and real life. He saw the wisdom in the tales as cautionary as well as consolatory.

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