Kosh's Shadow 10/14/2021 5:02:06 AM

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Occasional Reader 10/14/2021 5:45:15 AM

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Reply to Kosh's Shadow in 1:

buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 7:54:43 AM

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vxbush 10/14/2021 7:57:48 AM

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In #3 buzzsawmonkey said: I understand that Denmark is taking steps to reach out to its burgeoning immigrant community, and will retroactively re-name it famed storyteller "Hans Muslim Andersen."

Did all the fairy tales start before Muslims spread throughout Europe? Random question generated by your comment....

Kosh's Shadow 10/14/2021 8:04:36 AM

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In #3 buzzsawmonkey said: I understand that Denmark is taking steps to reach out to its burgeoning immigrant community, and will retroactively re-name it famed storyteller "Hans Muslim Andersen."

And Hans and Gretel will become Abdul and Aisha, and the witch will be a Jew, taking the Christian blood libel into a Muslim one.

buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 8:19:05 AM

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In #4 vxbush said: Did all the fairy tales start before Muslims spread throughout Europe? Random question generated by your comment....

Not quite sure what you mean.  The Grimm brothers were compilers, who assembled pre-existing folk- and fairy-tales into volumes in the 19th century.  Their work has been played around with quite a bit: IIRC, the story of serial wife-murder "Bluebeard" originally went under the title of "Fletcher's Bird; and there were not a few folk-tales with an antisemitic theme, such as "The Jew Among Thorns."

Andersen was not a compiler; he wrote his own tales, many of which are pretty gruesome, such as "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf to Save Her Pretty Shoes," wherein the loaf of bread she thus defiles/disrespects sticks to her feet and drags her down to Hell.  Likewise, in "The Red Shoes" (Andersen seems to have a bit of a foot fetish), the girl so proud of her red shoes is danced to death by them, and once she is dead her corpse dances on.  For that matter, when the Little Mermaid sacrifices her tongue to the Sea Witch in order to have herself changed into a human, when her tail becomes human feet she can walk, but every step is as if she were walking on knives.  Unable to tell the Prince she loves that she does love him---having sacrificed her voice to become "human"---she can only stand by dumbly as he prepares to wed another.  Her sisters sacrifice their hair to the Sea Witch for a knife which, if the Little Mermaid stabs the Prince in the heart with it, will restore her tail and enable her to return to the sea, instead of facing the fate of dissolving into foam on the waves because mermaids have no soul.

Kosh's Shadow 10/14/2021 8:31:05 AM

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buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 8:43:50 AM

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In #7 Kosh's Shadow said: Meanwhile, in woke libraries across the US, kids are taught a different kind of "fairy tale"

Actually, as I was typing out the story of "The Little Mermaid" in my #6 above, it occurred to me that it could be interesting if it were re-purposed as a "transgender" cautionary tale.   I'd been musing a while back about trying to do a "transgender" version of "The Island of Dr. Moreau"---it could make a great musical---but "The Little Mermaid" might also serve as a vehicle.    For that matter, there are two "transgender" bits of Greek mythology that would be interesting to dramatize---the year in which the blind seer Tiresias was transformed into a woman, and the time that Heracles spent as a "female" prisoner to Omphale, Queen of the Amazons.

vxbush 10/14/2021 9:26:24 AM

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In #6 buzzsawmonkey said: Not quite sure what you mean.  The Grimm brothers were compilers, who assembled pre-existing folk- and fairy-tales into volumes in the 19th century.

Right; as you note, the stories were in existence for years beforehand and they collected them. I'm wondering how old some of the stories are. 

there were not a few folk-tales with an antisemitic theme, such as "The Jew Among Thorns."

I haven't heard that one, but the others you mention I read in childhood. We had a large book of fairy tales that had lots of Andersen's work in it. 

My question stems on how old the stories are, at least in their earliest forms compared to when they were written down, and if they were affected by the Moor invasions. I know most people are not aware of how gruesome these tales are, such as the ones you mentioned above. Some have said that simply reflects how brutish life used to be before the 20th century. But I wonder if that ugly mindset relates back to the more brutal aspects of Islam. Christians could be very ugly when discussing how children could be sent to hell if they didn't behave, but the fairy tales have a different type of brutishness to them--or so it feels to me. Any thoughts you have would be interesting. 

buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 9:41:22 AM

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In #9 vxbush said: But I wonder if that ugly mindset relates back to the more brutal aspects of Islam. Christians could be very ugly when discussing how children could be sent to hell if they didn't behave, but the fairy tales have a different type of brutishness to them--or so it feels to me. Any thoughts you have would be interesting. 

It's an interesting question, to which I have no immediate answer. 

I read a lot of myths/legends/folktales/fairy-stories when I was a kid---Greek and Norse myths, Japanese and American Indian folktales, some Grimm (probably, in retrospect, largely bowdlerized), various other odds and ends, and a lot of Andersen (I bought a 4-volume "complete stories" of his when we visited his home in Odense in 1961), but the Muslim/Christian aspects of the European tales never occurred to me when I was reading these things in my youth, and I don't recall enough of them now to be able to say anything I'd consider even moderately off the top of my head.  

I don't have all the books now that I had back then---chalk that up to moving a lot and to recently breaking up the Central Archive that was my late mother's house---but I'll keep the question in mind as I revisit some of them. 

buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 9:43:16 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 9:

"The Jew Among Thorns" is one of those magic-fiddle-that-everyone-must-dance-to stories, where the wily peasant fiddles the Jew into a thicket of thorns and forces him to jump around.  As the thorns tear his flesh, he confesses that the money he has was "stolen" from, of course, deserving peasants.

Kosh's Shadow 10/14/2021 9:48:39 AM

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In #11 buzzsawmonkey said: "The Jew Among Thorns" is one of those magic-fiddle-that-everyone-must-dance-to stories, where the wily peasant fiddles the Jew into a thicket of thorns and forces him to jump around.  As the thorns tear his flesh, he confesses that the money he has was "stolen" from, of course, deserving peasants.

Wokie leftists would love that one.

Kosh's Shadow 10/14/2021 9:51:39 AM

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In #9 vxbush said: I'm wondering how old some of the stories are. 

An article on the subject:

Fairy Tales Could Be Older Than You Ever Imagined

In a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, a folklorist and anthropologist say that stories like Rumpelstiltskin and Jack and the Beanstalk are much older than originally thought. Instead of dating from the 1500s, the researchers say that some of these classic stories are 4,000 and 5,000 years old, respectively. This contradicts previous speculation that story collectors like the Brothers Grimm were relaying tales that were only a few hundred years old.

Kosh's Shadow 10/14/2021 9:53:59 AM

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Reply to Kosh's Shadow in 13:

Take the study with a lot of salt:

The findings might confirm the long-disregarded theory of fairy tale writer Wilhelm Grimm, who thought that all Indo-European cultures shared common tales. But not everyone is certain that the study proves fairy tales are that old. As Chris Samoray writes for Science News, other folklorists are finding fault with the study’s insistence that The Smith and the Devil dates back to the Bronze Age—a time before a word for “metalsmith” is thought to have existed.

buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 9:59:45 AM

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In #14 Kosh's Shadow said: other folklorists are finding fault with the study’s insistence that The Smith and the Devil dates back to the Bronze Age—a time before a word for “metalsmith” is thought to have existed.

The Biblical portion for last week included mention of the smith "Tubal-Cain," who is credited with having created metalsmithing.  I have seen things comparing "Tubal-Cain" with "Hephaestus," the "Smith of the Gods" in Greek mythology, whose forge was supposed to be an active volcano.  I have also seen speculation that the very term "volcano" is a derivative/corruption of "Tubal-Cain."

BTW, for what it's worth, the Greeks have a Flood-story too, with the righteous couple of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who re-populate the devastated Earth by "casting the bones of their mother" behind them, i.e., by throwing stones---the "bones" of "Mother Earth" Demeter---behind them, upon which the stones become people.

buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 10:18:49 AM

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Reply to Kosh's Shadow in 14: Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 15:

BTW, the Roman (Latin) name for Hephaestus was "Vulcan," as in "volcano." Whether or not this comes originally from "Tubal-Cain," I cannot say. I personally believe that the Latin word "carbon" comes from the Hebrew word "kurban," for "burnt-offering/sacrifice," but I cannot prove it.

Occasional Reader 10/14/2021 11:03:37 AM

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In #9 vxbush said: and if they were affected by the Moor invasions.

See, also, the origin of the phrase “the coast is clear”; and its much more direct Spanish equivalent, “no hay Moros en la costa”.

buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 12:31:05 PM

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In #17 Occasional Reader said: “no hay Moros en la costa”

I wonder if the word "morose" has its origin in references to the Moors.

buzzsawmonkey 10/14/2021 3:05:20 PM

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