Once Upon a Time...

by Sandra Beckett

“Little Red Riding Hood” is the world’s most popular fairy tale and a childhood favorite, but it was once a ribald, grisly tale, whose bawdy tone and course language is not the stuff of nursery tales.

In oral versions of the tale, such as “The Story of Grandmother,” a young girl, with no distinctive red cap or hood, generally meets a bzou" or werewolf en route to Granny’s. He poses a seemingly nonsensical question, asking the girl if she is taking the path of needles or the path of pins. It is now widely believed that the path of pins symbolizes a girl’s coming of age, while the path of needles implies sexual maturity, as threading the eye of a needle was a sexual symbol in the folklore of seamstresses. By choosing the path of needles, as the heroine does in some variants, the young girl appears to assume prematurely the sexuality of an older woman.

At the grandmother’s, the wolf offers the little girl the flesh and blood of the old lady, in a cannibalistic meal that becomes a rite of passage in this initiation tale. In many versions, an animal calls the girl a “slut” for her cannibalistic act. Whereas the wolf devours the grandmother raw, the girl generally eats her cooked. Sometimes the little girl drinks the blood as wine, but often it is added to the cut-up meat to create a grandmother fricassee.

The meal is followed by a lengthy, ritualistic striptease, in which the little girl removes her clothing one item at a time and throws them into the fire, before climbing into bed with the wolf. A more risqué climactic dialogue begins with the girl asking about the wolf’s hairy body, to which the wolf sometimes replies: “It’s from old age.” The confusion of granny with the wolf is explained by equating the postmenopausal woman with a hairy male.

Realizing her danger, the girl tricks the wolf by pretending she has to go outside to relieve herself, a scatological scene that has numerous variations. The wolf often ties a woolen thread to the girl’s foot, and when she doesn’t return, he asks her repeatedly if she is “making a load”. Unlike her helpless successors in the classic Perrault and Grimms’ tales, the heroine generally escapes by running away, seeking help, or courageously confronting the wolf.

Sandra L. Beckett is the author of numerous books including Recycling Red Riding Hood For All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts (just out), Recycling Red Riding Hood, and Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives (also just out).

Book of the Week: Recycling Red Riding Hood

Our book this week is on a subject near and dear to my heart: the history of early fairy tales.
My first book was on the childbirth and the fairy tale (Pregnant Fictions), and I've actually taught a semester-long course on tales several times. It's a lot of fun--but students are always so surprised how complicated the tales are, and how intense the course is.

Recycling Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts is a beautiful book, with eye-popping illustrations. By way of disclosure, I had a chance at an early copy of the book because I sit on the editorial board for the series. It's a great gig to have!

Here's some book jacket prose for you:
Red Riding Hood for All Ages investigates the modern recasting of one of the world’s most beloved and frequently told tales. Author Sandra L. Beckett examines an international selection of contemporary fiction for children, adolescents, and adults to find a wide range of narrative and interpretive perspectives in the tale and its revisions. Beckett shows how authors and illustrators from around the globe have renewed the age-old tale in a range of multilayered, sophisticated, and complex textual and visual Red Riding Hood narratives.

Midwives and Witches, oh my!

Witches can be nasty creatures...and doubly so anywhere near newborns. Just think about the evil fairies in Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. Nothing to trifle with!

If witches and mean fairies seem to be circling baptisms and childbeds in fairy tales, it has a lot to do with the fact that--according to popular legends--they were in need of supplies for their devilish rituals.

According to early-modern writers like Jean Bodin, Cardano, and Della Porta, the fat of newborns was a vital ingredient in magical flying potions. Witches were also said to make candles from an infant's umbilical cord.

Other byproducts of labor were also reported to have great mystical properties. The placenta was considered by some to be an aphrodisiac and, if eaten, could be used to treat infertility, a practice that the church condemned.

These and other concerns regarding what the midwife-witch might do with human flesh and body fluids motivated regulations in German (Wurzburg, 1555) that clearly specified how the midwife was to dispose of all biological bi-products during the delivery. Morever, frequent laws were passed in France that dictated that only woman of good Catholic faith could help a birthing mother.

Lifted from my Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France
(p. 67)

Image: The History of Witches and Wizards (1720)

Fairy Tales about Fairy Tales

By Holly Tucker

The all-so-familiar Tales of Mother Goose have decidedly unfamiliar origins. The fairy tale as a genre dates back to sixteenth-century Italy and late seventeenth-century France. The author of Mother Goose, Charles Perrault, would like us to believe that the tales were collected from rustic old ladies and wetnurses. But really, nothing could be farther from the truth. The first fairy tales were written by adults, decidedly for adults.

Let me just say this: I certainly wouldn't read some of these stories to my young daughter.

Straparola's early Italian tale, "Sun and Moon and Talia," is one of the earliest versions of "Sleeping Beauty." The problem is that Sleeping Beauty (Talia) gives birth to twins shortly after she wakes up. That's right, the Prince does a lot more than kiss her while she's sleeping.

And how about Perrault's later French tale? After Sleeping Beauty is awakened and hops into bed with her Prince, she also gives birth to two children. The narrator tells us that Sleeping Beauty is beginning to show her age; her face is not is taut as it used to be.

But this is the very least of her troubles. It turns out that Prince Charming's mother is a ogre, who would like nothing more than to eat her daughter-in-law and grandchildren while the Prince is away being Princely. To our relief and some horror, the mother-in-law meets her fate in a pit of snakes.

I have the Mother Goose tales on the highest shelves of my study--out of my daughter's reach, for now. As much as I cringe at my daughter's recent fascination with the Captain Underpants series, I do think that it's the safer bet!

[Illustration: Gustave Dore, "Blue Beard." 19th century. By far, my favorite illustration for the early tales.]

Metamorphoses

Once upon a time, when my daughter was four, she stopped next to one of the large maple trees in our front yard. She said, "shh, Mommy, listen, can you hear it?" Hear what, I said. "The tree is whispering." What is the tree saying? "Mommy, the tree is saying: Hello Friend."

History is full of tales of transformations, metamorphoses, and shape-shifting. In Greco-Roman mythology, the nymph Daphne tried desperately to flee the love-struck Apollo. Daphne prayed to the river God to save her. Her prayers were answered. Just as the voracious Apollo's hands grasped Daphne, she was transformed into a laurel tree.

Certainly my young daughter had not heard this story. Had she? I've wondered ever since if there is something in the human psyche that holds these stories of nature, human nature, and humans in nature somewhere deep and somewhere precious.

My good friend, Professor Christine Jones at the University of Utah, has been working valiantly to organize a conference on these very questions. For more information, click here. In honor of her olympian efforts, I'll dedicate this week's blogs to stories of early metamorphoses, fairies, and their marvelous worlds.