Nasty Fairy Tales

January 14, 2005 2:24 AM

I need to find nasty fairy-tales. For an example, in the first Sleeping Beauty, the prince rapes her sleeping body and she wakes up when she gives birth to twins and one sucks the splinter out of her finger. Also, fairy-tales that go back to the original belief that elves and fairies were nasty creatures would be useful. Either the original nasty fairy-tales or new written ones would be good.
posted by stoneegg21 to Media & Arts (28 answers total)

The Pentamerone (1634) of Giambattista Basile has what may be the original of the Sleeping-Beauty story you mention, entitled Sun, Moon and Talia.

For modern versions of fairytales, with a certain amount of nastiness, you could try Angela Carter's retellings of them.
posted by misteraitch at 2:57 AM on January 14, 2005

Anne Rice wrote a number of "erotic retellings" of the Sleeping Beauty story under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure. Lots of sado-masochism in her version! And Gregory Maguire, who's basing a whole career on rewriting fairy tales, has a recent retelling of Snow White called "Mirror Mirror". It's maybe not quite as nasty as you want, but his concept of the dwarves is much more primitive and elemental than the later Disneyfied versions. Worth a look.
posted by web-goddess at 3:23 AM on January 14, 2005

Try an edition of the Grimm's brothers tales that reprints the tales as they orginally were told. I have one, so I know they exist, but unfortunately my copy is at my parents' place so I can't give you edition specifics. But they're plenty nasty.

I also have a copy of the Oxford Book of Children's Stories, which contains some nasty stories, one of which in particular contains a harrowing tale of children who would not obey their mother. She left them, and a replacement mechanical mother with a wooden tale and one glass eye came to take her place, and the children fled the house in terror and were condemned to live by foraging in the nearby woods, cold, ragged and hungry.
posted by orange swan at 3:32 AM on January 14, 2005

This thread has some promising links.
posted by iconomy at 4:02 AM on January 14, 2005

Get yourself a book of Russian fairy tales. They pulled no punches.
posted by caddis at 4:42 AM on January 14, 2005

This collection, edited by Jack Zipes, presents each of its fairy tales in several different versions, from different countries of origin. (The French versions tend to be long-winded; the German versions tend toward the old ultra-violence.)
posted by Prospero at 5:04 AM on January 14, 2005

Oh--and Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch might be up your alley, though it's not a favorite of mine.
posted by Prospero at 5:05 AM on January 14, 2005

anne rice's retelling of sleeping beauty is pretty hot. (though i didn't get too into the guy on guy stuff.)
posted by lotsofno at 5:06 AM on January 14, 2005

oh yeah, i've always liked this short story: Snow Glass Apple by Neil Gaiman
posted by lotsofno at 5:07 AM on January 14, 2005

The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse are fairly funky as fairy tales go, although not really very bloody.
posted by saladin at 5:35 AM on January 14, 2005

lotsofno beat me to Snow Glass Apples, one of my favorites. It appears in Smoke & Mirrors if you want a print copy.

You'll never look at Snow White the same way again.
posted by schustafa at 5:52 AM on January 14, 2005

The American poet Anne Sexton's book "Transformations" is one of the most sinister, evocative and wonderful retellings of fairy tales (I think she tackles 16 or so). Rape and incest are brought into some of them, though not in a preachy or exploitive way.

Also, Terry Windling & Ellen Datlow edit a "Fairy Tale Series" (Tor Books): some are collections of short stories and others are entire novels built upon one fairy tale. Tanith Lee's "White as Snow" is one of my favorites; it weaves European pagan beliefs into a complex tale of mothers, daughters, lovers, and loss of youth and innocence.

Not sure if it's a fairy tale, but the German story of Strummelpeter (Slovenly Peter) is especially shocking and intended to warn children of bad habits. Peter never washes his hair or cuts his nails, so eventually he gets his fingers cut off and his hair set afire (I think). Is afire a word?

"The Game of Murder" I think is the title of the scariest Grimm Fairy tale, about children playing at murder. This is all I can think of now, but there's so much out there!
posted by ibeji at 5:53 AM on January 14, 2005

The unexpurgated Grimm tales are definitely the bloodiest, but Perrault undertook a similar effort to collect French fairy tales--while not quite so consistently gory, they're still a _lot_ darker than our modern idea of "fairy tales", and would definitely be another solid source for the type of material you're looking for. (Plus, you get all those amazing Dore engravings.)
posted by LairBob at 6:11 AM on January 14, 2005

You might like Arthur Machen, one of the notable 1930s pulp-fiction horror writers. Machen took Pan, fairies, the little people, and other "pagan" symbols and used them to induce a dread, a subconscious fear of nature, sexuality, instinct, and the natural forces of life and the psyche that civilised man does not really understand.

In a way he did what Christianity did, taking the horned animal, a symbol of virility and vibrant, exuberant life, turning him into Satan instead ... The Tree of Life and Knowledge becoming the Forbidden Fruit in the Bible ... The snake, once the symbol of wisdom and medicine, still used today in the form of the caduceus, formerly also the staff of Asclepius, the god of medicine, becoming the Serpent in the Garden of Eden ...

Machen kinda did that.

Basically, he did the opposite of everything I believe in, but he did it effectively, producing sometimes chilling tales full of atmosphere and foeboding.
posted by Shane at 6:12 AM on January 14, 2005

Also, fairy-tales that go back to the original belief that elves and fairies were nasty creatures would be useful.

Goethe's poem Erlkönig ("Elf-king") certainly fits. It was set to music quite effectively by Franz Schubert--find yourself a recording if you can. The page I linked includes a link to a midi of the instrumental portion of the song, but it's not the same without the vocal.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 6:14 AM on January 14, 2005

Somewhere, I have a book, Snow White, Blood Red that seems to have some good retellings of old tales. In looking it up, I found that it's one of a series of anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling .
posted by krix at 6:47 AM on January 14, 2005

lotsofno THANKS so much for that story! Wow - I loved it. And yes, I'll never look at Snow White the same again.

It also reminded me a bit of "Wicked", a retelling of the Wizard of Oz from the witch's point of view, which I didn't like half so much.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:00 AM on January 14, 2005

I really enjoyed Robert Coover's retelling of Sleeping Beauty called Briar Rose which is definitely abstract and weird and at least a littel nasty. This essay might help you find more versions of that tale. I haven't been able to track down a copy of Hayden Carruth's book of poetry called The Sleeping Beauty but I bet it would fit the bill as well. Anne Sexton also has a poem called Briar Rose
posted by jessamyn at 7:43 AM on January 14, 2005

sheri s tepper has done a number of harsh re-tellings of those sorts of stories.
posted by dorian at 8:13 AM on January 14, 2005

Junko Mizuno's Cinderalla and Hansel and Gretel.
posted by sad_otter at 8:28 AM on January 14, 2005

i've got Neil's smoke and mirrors book after reading "Snow Glass Apples," but if you REALLY want to experience the story, Sci-Fi produced an audio version for their "Seeing Eye Theatre" thing they did, back in 2001.

amazingly enough, you can still find it for free here. it's in real audio format, but amazing nonetheless.
posted by lotsofno at 8:30 AM on January 14, 2005

angela carter's bloody chamber comes to mind.
posted by ifjuly at 8:56 AM on January 14, 2005

Thanks much for that link, lotsofno. Neil mentioned it at a book signing a couple years ago and I failed to get around to it before forgetting. Very tasty.
posted by squidlarkin at 10:17 AM on January 14, 2005

1997's 'Grimm's Grimmest' comes highly recommended by several of my library coworkers, and is well worth looking for. Apparently, a new edition is planned for '05, but it's not out yet.
posted by box at 12:18 PM on January 14, 2005

The nastiness level may vary, but I've found Folktexts invaluable. And, it's free!
posted by jtron at 12:58 PM on January 14, 2005

Project Gutenberg has several books online described as 'Fairy Tales', including two collections of Grimm's stories, but I'm afraid I don't know how gruesome any of them are (a glance suggests that as both versions of Briar Rose involve nothing more than a kiss, the answer is 'not very gruesome', for Grimm at least, so I'm not sure how much help the links will be).

My thanks also to lotsofno for the Snow, Glass, Apples link.
posted by Lebannen at 3:31 PM on January 14, 2005

Don't forget Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. Sly, sexy, beautifully written retellings of many fairy stories.
posted by melissa may at 5:04 PM on January 14, 2005

...which I just remembered that I first mentioned in this thread, that should also prove useful to you.
posted by melissa may at 5:08 PM on January 14, 2005