The Dark Origins of
Everyone’s Favourite Fairy Tales
Doesn’t everyone love Disney? Those classic fairy tale
stories bought to life in beautiful animation with a level of charm and overall
pleasantness about them. However many of these stories have origins that
wouldn’t be quite as charming to us all. I’m going to take a look at some today
and afterwards you won’t quite be able to look at your favourite Disney
Princesses in the same way again.
Cinderella.
We all know this classic story. Cinderella is deprived of
any freedom by her Step Mother and Step Sisters and treated as a slave. With
the help of her fairy Godmother she goes to a ball where a prince falls in love
with her. As the clock strikes midnight she is forced to leave and losses her
glass slipper. The Prince searches the Kingdom for the girl who can fit the
slipper and they all live happily ever after. The original version is similar
for the most part, it doesn’t change until the Prince arrives with the Slipper
at the house with Cinderella and her step sisters.
The step sisters are obsessed with getting their foot into
the slipper. The first one tried but cannot get her big toe into the slipper.
The step mother handed the women a knife and told her to cut off her big toe as
once she was a princess she would no longer need to walk. Yep isn’t that
lovely? What’s better is it works. The prince goes away with the step sister
but soon noticed a trail of blood coming from her foot. He brings her back and
the second sister has a go. Her heel however cannot fit so the step mother
hands her the knife and says the same thing. She is also noticed to be leaving
a trail of blood and he comes back and Cinderella puts on the shoe. So yeah
chopping off parts of a foot and you know what, this is by far the least strange
story I’m going to talk about.
The Pied Piper
This story is pretty disturbing already and I imagine a few
of you already know it but it’s definitely worth a mention. When the town is
invested with rats the people offer lots of money for the Pied Piper to lead
all the rats away, when he does however the town folk refuse to pay up so the
Pied Piper leads all the towns’ children away.
Where are the children taken exactly? More modern renditions
say the children were taken to a cave and the townsfolk agree to pay to have the
children back which is already pretty creepy. Older versions however state that
the Pied Piper took all the children to a river. I’m sure you can see where
this is going, the Pied Piper drowned an entire town’s population of children.
All except for one, a lane boy who couldn’t keep up with the rest of the
children. Someone needs to explain to me who thought telling this as a
children’s story was ever a good idea.
Sleeping Beauty.
Sleeping Beauty is a really boring story, let’s be honest.
It’s the most generic prince rescues princess and they fall in love story
you’ll ever find. Well originally it had what we’ll call a unique twist. The
story begins in the same way, Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spinning
wheel on her fifteenth birthday and is sent to sleep by the evil Maleficent.
The Prince eventually comes across her sleeping body but doesn’t kiss her to
wake her up like what you know. Here things become completely bizarre.
The Prince for some reason still falls in love with this
sleeping princess, however he doesn’t wake her up by kissing her, he’s not even
the one who wakes her up. He becomes so in love with this sleeping body he
decides to … have his way with it. You read that right, the prince undertakes
in what is basically necrophilia. Sleeping Beauty becomes pregnant and nine
months later gives birth to twins still without waking up. When the twins are
attempting to breast feed one of them not knowing what it needs to do with the
mother still asleep suckles on her finger dislodging the splinter from the
spinning wheel waking Sleeping Beauty. Glad that didn’t happen in the Disney
version?
Beauty and the Beast.
This one is really weird as the parts cut off the original
story seem so out of place. Belle used to have 2 older sisters and her Father
was a merchant. One day her Father was going away and asked what they would
like to have bought back from his trip. The sisters asked for expensive gifts
of a necklace and earrings while Belle said nothing. However she was eventually
convinced by her Father to ask for something she says she wants 3 roses on a
single stem. He finds the first two gifts with ease but struggles to find the
roses until he stumbles across them in a garden. He takes them but runs into
the monstrous beast who agrees to let him go if he gives up his daughter to be
his wife in a few months’ time.
Belle is sent to the tower to be the Beast’s bride to be.
The Beast and Belle do not talk a whole much however they do share a bed. They
start off side by side but the Beast leads her with a kiss until it gets to a
point where she cannot sleep without him. When she sees him in the courtyard
and thinks he’s dead she weeps over his dead body he returns to his normal
self. The Beast’s Father had a sorceress transform him into a beast when he
would not marry someone he did not love and the spell could only be broken when
he was loved as a hideous beast.
It’s a little weird imagining the Beast and Belle sleeping
together but this wasn’t exactly strange, especially compared to the other
stories. The weird thing however is the story does not end there. Belle brings
her Sisters and Father to live with her after she marries the now prince. The
two sisters however are insanely jealous of Belle and they drown her in a
bathtub. Yep Belle is drowned by her sisters because she was happy. The story
does not end there however. The sorceress that turned the prince into a beast
brings Belle back to life and tells her the only way to punish the sister
sufficiently is to turn the sisters into stone columns. The only way to break
this curse and change them back is if a man can fall in love with them as stone
columns. I thought I was pretty weird but there’s no way in hell I could make
that up.
I don’t think I can quite look at some of those Disney films
in the same way again. In the meantime however thanks for reading. Please leave
a like on the Facebook page and tell me if there’s any dark fairy tales I
didn’t mention.
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