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The first fairy stories were never intended for children
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoI would argue that they were, and in any sense, saying stories were or were not intended for children is a modern anachronism. In preliterate times, in which many of these stories originate, these stories were passed orally, likely around a fire or during/after a meal, where the elders told these stories to the youngers. There was likely not much segregation by age, which meant that children would be among the audience, and very likely, may have even been the target of the storyteller (if you ever watch grandparents with grandkids, even when the parents are in the room, much of the conversation may be addressed to the grandkids). In addition, "childhood" as we have now is relatively recent. Likely as soon as they could walk, children were being involved in the adult activities of farming/gathering/hunting/fighting etc. Girls were often married shortly after puberty (so early teens). Young men were often inducted into the tribe of men early and trained as warriors (see Sparta for an extreme example, or the Jewish Bar Mitzvah where a boy is seen as an adult member of the community at age 13). In addition, I don't think there was the concept of shielding children from the unpleasantness of life. Death was all around them. Many of them had lost mothers in childbirth. Many if not most had at least lost 1 sibling in infancy. Thus the violence and horror in the old fairy tales which we consider "adult" today, was likely not all that different from everyday life and thus not considered unsuitable for children. As an example, think of the Roman practice of crucifixion. You could be a kid headed to market, and come upon a bunch of naked men, who were screaming in agony as they were being nailed to crosses by soldiers. Even in the modern age, hangings at Old Bailey in London were public affairs. Thus, just because a story contains themese and/or scenes that we would consider not suitable for children today, does not mean that children were not an important part of the audience when the story was actually a folk tale being told in communities.
- chongli 5y agoYou said exactly what I wanted to say but far more eloquent and thorough. I totally agree. I see so many of these articles judging the past according to modern values. It’s absolute anachronistic nonsense if you ask me. I have no idea why people keep writing articles like this, except perhaps as some kind of signaling.
- rhacker 5y agoTotally agree. The phrase "Spare the rod, spoil the child" is GONE.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- taylodl 5y agoAs an example, think of the Roman practice of crucifixion. You could be a kid headed to market, and come upon a bunch of naked men, who were screaming in agony as they were being nailed to crosses by soldiers. Even in the modern age, hangings at Old Bailey in London were public affairs. My grandmother told a story of a hanging she went to when she was 4 years old. That's here in the U.S. in the early 1920's. She says the whole town was there, children and all. That's totally possible seeing how today the town has a population of 6,200 - back then it was probably 2,000 or less. It's ironic that the gross coddling of children began with the Baby Boomer generation - the generation my grandmother helped raise. I guess between seeing public hangings and enduring both the Great Depression and WWII they wanted to make life easier for their kids.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pixl97 5y agoOn a side note that's totally unrelated, just because your town is 6000 now doesnt mean it wasnt larger in the distant past. There is one of these little crapsack towns built along the highway by where I used to live. Really annoyed me because of the low speed limit for the 1000 or so people that live there. Looked it up one day and it turns out that in the 1910s-1920s it had a population of around 15,000 based on a large coal mine that existed at that time. Once the mine closed it shrank, and you would never know it was so large.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago>> Fifty years ago, the cheapest way to keep your child quiet was to sit down and dredge up your memory of Rapunzel, Snow White or (in my grandmother’s case) the fairy tale-like plot of The Sound of Music. Well, I got The Return of The Jedi. Only my mother didn't remember Luke Skywalker's name so I knew him as "the handsome prince" until I watched the movie X)
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoYeah, I think he's wrong by 25 years or so. The cheapest way 50 years ago was still TV.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoAlso, kids 50 years ago already had ATARI consoles.
- kragen 5y agoIn 01972? Maybe Pong, but that was at the pizza parlor, not in your house. And it sure wasn't cheap.
- vba616 5y agoAtari was producing home video game machines before long, I guess, but if they sold ~x00,000 units, that was an awfully small percentage of the population. Some people had (non-kit) microcomputers ~1981, but again, that was an extremely small percentage of the US.
- Rygian 5y ago"Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad." (Quote from Terry Pratchett's "Lords and Ladies")
- technothrasher 5y ago> "if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad." Wait, so he's saying that words can change meaning but mythical creatures cannot change character? It would seem to me that those are two sides of the same phenomenon.
- monkeydreams 5y agoI think the commentary is that people who twist the meanings of words in order to charm and beguile are "bad". Like most of Pratchett's work, the subtext is pretty heavy.
- dcminter 5y agoBad, at least in British slang of a moderately recent era, can mean cool.
- ludston 5y agoIt's a quote from one of his ficticious Discworld novels that introduces elves in his specific universe.
- smegsicle 5y agoelves ("daemons") cannot be trusted beyond their own goals- humanizing them can be a costly mistake
- labster 5y agoAwesome quote. It incites awe.
- Koshkin 5y agoNor is Carnival Row, incidentally.
- melony 5y agoCarnival could have been a great show considering the ridiculously well-made set and fairly large budget (for an 8 episodes TV show). It is a pity that the storyline and plot was so dry and unexciting.
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/7MrSM https://archive.is/7MrSM
- wolverine876 5y agoTolkien had strong opinions on it. He regretted the attempts in the Hobbit to talk down to children and condemned all such approaches, including versions of old tales that removed the unseemly parts. There is an entire section on the topic in his essay, On Fairy Stories. Let us not divide the human race into Eloi and Morlocks: pretty children - 'elves' as the eighteenth century often idiotically called them - with their fairytales (carefully pruned), and dark Morlocks tending their machines. If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults. Also, he says the following. Remember that Tolkien served in WWI, losing most of his friends and his unit, and he says that during the war is when he became deeply interested, as an adult, in 'fairy stories': If adults are to read fairy-stories as a natural branch of literature ... what are the values and functions of this kind? ... First of all: if written with art, the prime value of fairy-stories will simply be that value which, as literature, they share with other literary forms. But fairy-stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people.
- colechristensen 5y agoI think “intended for children” is the source of quite a lot of modern mental illness. Your brain and body are quite plastic in different ways when you are young and become much more rigid as you grow out of childhood. Children are preparing for the world when they’re young and living in an artificial world much different than the one they will face as an adult. Those feedback loops that were programmed when young in an artificial setting then just don’t deal well with the real world presented long after their ability to adapt has diminished. Telling fictional stories that don’t pull punches which reflect the difficulties of the world might well be an evolutionary trait which helped prepare children for a dangerous world without exposing them to much of the actual danger.
- eternalban 5y agoConceptually your theory makes sense if the premise of "feedback loops" of situational awareness and effectively dealing with psychological & social & physical environment and conditions are in fact mapped out and conditioned by hearing and mental imagery alone. I would challenge that premise and I'm sure someone out there has already ran the experiment to see which parts of the brain light up when listening to a story about X vs actually acting a part in a real world X scenario.
- NoPicklez 5y agoI think a lot of fairy tales reflect the difficulties of the world, just in a way that is not devastating for children. There is usually always a struggle, sometimes followed with a reward and a moral lesson. Having said that, in life there isn't always a reward but the overall concept is healthy. Such that all aspects of life have challenges and if you follow your values and morals you will come out the other side. Better life lessons learnt than many other stories on TV. Besides, there comes a time in most kids lives there they move from fairy tales to adult movies, during the time their brains are still very plastic.
- AniseAbyss 5y agoI imagine that 1000 years ago parents too had to explain to their kids not to talk to strangers. Human society hasn't changed all that much on the basics.
- gitowiec 5y agoSo I read to my baby girl since she's 1yo, every day. Today she's 5 and ½ yo. She speaks like an adult, choosing words carefully and accordingly. She's starting to read by herself (we do not teach her purposely), she's able to write anything she wants (her own handwriting). Reading for my child is also a good time for me. I have an opportunity to read amazing Astrid Lindgren stories, I didn't know before. I believe that reading gives her a very important tool for being someone like an engineer, it's imagination.
- germinalphrase 5y agoWhat other favorites do you have?
- elevaet 5y agoThe OG Winnie The Pooh stories ar ridiculous and hilarious and my kids loved them. The language in those stories had us all in hysterics at times.
- tasha0663 5y agoI think we just didn't pull our punches, even if the story was for children, and sometimes that's a great disservice. Take the end of Little Red Riding Hood as recorded by Perrault (SPOILERS): > "Grand-mamma, what great teeth you have got!" > "That is to eat thee up." > And, saying these words, this wicked Wolf fell upon poor Little Red Riding-Hood, and ate her all up. THE END The tension builds and then the bottom drops out because the protagonist is dead. The ending is jarring. The wolf is so dangerous that he doesn't just kill Red, he kills the whole story.
- germinalphrase 5y agoYea - well, the little brat should have just listened to her mother rather than picking flowers and dawdling.
- taneq 5y agoLife was much more dangerous back then. Telling small children they could be eaten by a sneaky wolf might save them from actually being eaten by one.
- tasha0663 5y agoSee also the Three Little Pigs, wherein we note that a pig will eat anything, including a wolf that is still digesting the pig's brothers.
- kragen 5y agoYup. Lots of farm kids' lives could have been saved by paying more attention to that fact.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- labster 5y agoAnd now we live in a world where this anti-wolf propaganda costs lives through degraded ecosystems and deer overpopulation causing more car accidents.