A Timeless Fairy tale

At this point in my life I don’t remember all the bedtime stories that I’ve been read in my life. Most of the fairy tales weren’t on my families “Read to small children list”. Jack and The Bean Stalk, Little Red Riding Hood, and Goldilocks and The Three Bears were the house favorites, and I remember having all three of them read to me a handful of times. Jack had a good story, but it started off with him taking a big risk. If I was in his position it couldn’t have happened like that. My mother sends me off with a cow (our only cow) in hopes I return with a decent amount of change. In her head that change is going to get us by for the next couple weeks. Instead I return home with some magic beans… that would’ve been the end of the story right there, but Jack plants them. He somehow manages to climb this ridiculously sized stalk and grab a couple of stolen items including a goose that releases golden eggs. While holding all of this he is found out by the giant who lives there, and forced to flee and the rest is history. Classic fiction tale, but I couldn’t get fully behind it. The moral of the story was to take a huge risk and it’ll all work itself out? Maybe don’t do what your parents say and things make another path? Either way it wasn’t for me.

Little Red was similar in that I thought “What could the moral of this story possibly be”? Here there’s this little girl, who gets permission from her mother, to travel across the forest with a basket of food for her grandmother, by herself. Nothing about that seemed wrong to anyone? The girl is described as little so she couldn’t be older than twelve, and she’s taking a basket of food through the wild animal infested woods which, wouldn’t be an issue if A there weren’t wild animals or B she wasn’t going through the woods at all, but she is and on top of that she’s going to perform this feat alone. Odd but not more odd than the multiple endings. Some would have the grandmother eaten; some she would be trapped in the closet. In others, Red gets swallowed with her grandma and that’s the end; in the extended versions there are lumberjacks who cut both of them out, and in an extension beyond that they fill the wolfs belly with stones making sure he perishes. I thought “How does one fairy tale have multiple endings?”. There still was no clear moral either, and the whole story is avoided if the mother chaperons the visit, or makes the trek herself.

Now young Goldilocks was a tad different. Goldilocks didn’t even have a goal in mind when she found this bear hut in the middle of the woods. She just happened to stumble upon it, and enter when no one answered. She shows she has no proper etiquette or manners, but reading further she lacks something even more basic. She ate the food left on the table, sat in their chairs, and then proceeded to sleep in their beds after. Then she had the audacity to stay there and sleep peacefully. She was out in the middle of the woods, (by herself) in a strangers house, that she broke into and defiled, for no reason! Above all else Goldilocks lacks respect, and when the bears got there they weren’t shocked that their house had been broken into, they live in the woods. They were upset because she felt comfortable enough to break in and stay! Then she wakes up sees three bears, and quickly propels out the window before she can receive the consequences of her actions. No moral, no plan, no consequences, the whole thing left me feeling incomplete.

However, there is a fairy tale that I found on my own, and would read to myself; it had everything I was looking for. It was eerie and dark but had a purpose; of the countless tales I had read and the few that I remember Hansel and Gretel is by far my favorite. The story starts out on a false high note starting with a man with two children and their stepmother. There’s work, but soon they go through a drought and the woman exclaims the children must be rid of. They leave them in the forest, but the children find their way back using pebbles and the night sky. The man is happy, but soon after there is another famine and again the woman calls for the children to be exiled. This time they take them deep into the woods making sure they cannot get home; three days pass and a cannibal witch decides she’s going to eat them after losing them the first time. She separates the pair locking Hansel (the boy) in a cage, and forces Gretel to fix him fattening food. During this process Hansel is tricking the witch daily using a bone as his finger so she thinks he’s not fattening up. In the end the witch makes a mistake by putting her head inside the oven allowing Gretel to shove her inside, and lock the door. She frees her brother, they took as many jewels as they could and made hast towards their fathers house. They discover a fast moving river that is to wide for them to cross, but a duck tells them that a piece of wood long enough for both of them to escape is not to far. They cross and meet up with their father who had been depressed since their departure; they show him the jewels they recovered from the witches hut, and he shows them their step mothers grave. Everybody wins!

Finally a fairy tale I could read over and over that had realistic properties I could take away from. This time there was a reason for the children to be in the woods. The moral could be “Don’t marry a woman who would abandon children”. The children were kidnapped, but only because they were hungry, and trusted the witch as she was elderly and seemed benevolent. The moral could go either way, “Teach children that all adults aren’t trustworthy” or “Hunger will cloud a clear sky”. Each option works for its own reason, but there are many more that could be easily pulled out. The plans were made on the fly, but there was one, there’s a plethora of morals to choose from, and the consequences were absolute. Hansel and Gretel is still a timeless complete fairy tale that I fully enjoyed when I was a child, and that even today I can still relish.