What were once oral histories and legends retold around the fire have been written down and become known the world over as fairy tales. In German they are called Märchen or "wonder tale". Stories began, "In the old times when wishing was still effective."
The brothers Grimm spared no macabre in their telling of Cinderella. She and her groom enter the church with her older sister on their right and the younger on their left. Pigeons peck out one eye from each of the sisters and then the other eye. Thus, were both punished with blindness as long as they lived. Many of the stories have some basis in truth.
Consider Petrus Gonsalvus born in 1537 on the Canary Island of Tenerife off the coast of West Africa. At a young age, Gonsalvus was treated as an uncivilized curiosity. The hairy "wild man" was captured and put into an iron cage. For food, he was given raw meat and animal feed. He was shipped to King Henry II of France as a gift for the king's coronation in 1547.
The king allowed him to keep his birth name, Pedro González, but only if he used its Latin form, Petrus Gonsalvus. The boy was given clothes and cooked meals. He was taught to speak, read, and write in not just one, but three languages, receiving the education of a nobleman. The royal court was impressed and his social status rose. Yet, most still viewed him as less than human.
Some believe the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is inspired by the real-life of Margarete von Waldeck. The daughter of the 16th century Count of Waldeck. The area of Germany where the family lived was known for mining. Margaretha's father owned several copper mines; a majority of workers were children.
The residence of the seven dwarfs has been suggested to be the former copper mining village Bergfreiheit, now a district of Bad Wildungen that calls itself Schneewittchendorf (Snow White village). Like the fairy tale's dwarfs, the child laborers there lived in groups of about 20 in a single room house. Margarete’s beauty is well documented, and she had a stepmother who sent her away.
Three surviving letters from Margaretha to her father show that her health declined steadily over the next few years and she died at the age of 21 in March 1554. In Waldeck chronicles it was suggested that she had been poisoned. However, her father's second wife died in 1546 and he only remarried again in October 1554, her stepmother was not a suspect in the alleged poisoning case.
Unlike the 1989 Oscar winning Disney version of "The Little Mermaid" in the original tale by Hans Christian Andersen the prince marries a woman, he believes, saved him from drowning. The mermaid has no way of telling him the truth because she has no voice. She’s told, "Before the sun rises you must plunge a knife into his heart; when the warm blood falls upon your feet they will grow together again, and form into a fish’s tail, and you will be once more a mermaid …
Haste, then; he or you must die before sunrise.” The mermaid can’t bring herself to kill the prince. She becomes a “daughter of the air,” and can enter Heaven on the condition children are well behaved: “'After 300 years, thus shall we float into the kingdom of heaven, and we may even get there sooner,' whispered one of her companions.
No comments:
Post a Comment