Fairytales!

All into fairytales at the moment thanks to much blog reading, in particular Tales of Faerie and Grimm Fairytale reading too. Just recently read The Grandmother's Tale a darker version of Little Red Riding Hood, which only made me love it more. French and apparently one of the earliest versions of the story this features the wolf tricking Red into drinking the blood of her grandmother in the form of wine and eating her flesh as simple meat, which she cooked. The wolf then has Red do a strip tease for him. She does escape him though by pretending to go to the toilet outside and running off and then having laundresses help her cross a river with sheets and then dumping the wolf in the river when he is halfway. No huntsman hero but women hero, which makes a nice change and despite the darker and more sexual elements she still lives unlike in Charles Perrault's version.

I am still looking forward to seeing the movie but I am sceptical, I agree the trailer makes it look too like Twilight for all the wrong reasons and I just don't see Amanda Seyfried as Red, maybe because she's blonde. No offence to blondes but most fairytale heroines are blonde, perhaps because it's stereotypically pretty or it's gold and a metaphor for wealth, I don't know but it's the way of it, although most Disney princesses seem to have dark hair mind but the general fairytale princess is blonde.

You come to Little Red Riding Hood and even though her hair colour is never given in any stories and some illustrations depict her as blonde generally she is shown as a brunette and I always imagined her as one, I guess because I'm one and I related to her lol.

I will give the movie and Amanda a chance and hopefully I will be proved wrong and love this movie, maybe will even add some popularity to the fairytale, who knows.


Back to the Grimm Fairytales, just read The Six Swans, alternate versions include The Magic Swan Geese, The Seven Ravens, The Twelve Wild Ducks, Udea and her Seven Brothers, The Wild Swans, and The Twelve Brothers. The tale is basically the same though, there are several brothers, six, seven or twelve generally and a sister, all princes and a princess. An evil stepmother curses the brothers to be birds, generally swans, and only their sister can break the spell by making them shirts and taking a vow of silence (for six years in one version, with no laughter allowed, and until the shirts are finished in another.)

A king comes along, falls for her because she is beautiful, takes her for his wife and eventually has children with her. Cue evil villain number two. In the Six Swans it is the king's mother who takes the queen's children every time they are born and smears blood on the queen's mouth and frames her for murder, unable to break her vow of silence the queen cannot offer a defence. The king at first doubts until baby number three is taken. In the Wild Swans it is the Archbishop who is the villain but accusing the queen of witchcraft when he sees her gathering nettles in a graveyard (she makes the shirts out of these).

In both she is sentenced to be burnt at the stake. The swans arrive in the nick of time and the Queen throws the shirts over them and they turn back to human and she can speak once more. The evil Queen mother is burnt in her place in the Six Swans but her children are left unmentioned. One brother retains a wing because his shirt was not finished.

This is one of my favourite fairytales because it is more about the love between siblings as opposed to the tired love at first sight prince and princess stories. Of course it has that in there, it has to it's a fairytale, but the theme of the story is the princess' devotion to her brothers to the point of being willing to die for them, which is touching.

What is questionable is the relationship between the king and queen, particuarly in Six Swans, he loves her on sight and marries her without hearing in speak showing it is just superficial and based on attraction alone, then he manages to beget her with three children, still without conversation and thus presumably learning nothing of her except that she likes to make shirts. I mean are we meant to believe that this is consensual on the part of the princess? It seems more like she has been abducted, forced into marriage and then more or less raped. Of course it ends with her remaining with the king so perhaps not.

In the Wild Swans version he does not marry her immediately but takes her with him and eventually asks her to marry him and she accepts and there are no children. This seems a lot better but again it's superficial, he has not spoken with her nor she to him, and so he cannot know much about her. Was her marriage really consensual or a way to have an easy life?

The princess seems a victim and the king almost a villain, I feel she would have been happier left alone with her vow of silence and shirt making until the deed was complete.