I have read the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and this is the way they are. Who the hell reads Disney stuff to their kids?
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Whenever I come across history like this, I pause to realize how much genuine moral progress humanity has actually made in modernity (these were once acceptable children’s stories), and how bad things could actually get in the event of a true civilization collapse.
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He was a psychologist as well. Probably an expert for childhood trauma 
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To paraphrase GK Chesterton:
Some people criticise fairy tales on the grounds that they lead children to believe in monsters. This is a misunderstanding of what they do.
Children already know damned well that monsters exist. Fairy tales teach them that monsters can be killed.
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The Ratel kit loves that one. We have this rather wonderful copy:
The best part was when he started reciting the poem, only doing a good rendition of my deepest, scariest ogre voice, in the middle of Costco.
Madam Mrs. the Ratel said that anyone old enough to have seen The Exorcist basically scattered.
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I was coming here to say this. The version I read was called Sun, Moon and Talia, by Basile. Perrault adapted it, and then the Brothers Grimm adapted that one. But yeah, the king, who is already married, rapes Talia while she sleeps. She gets pregnant and has twins, still sleeping. One of the twins, named Sun and Moon, such out the splinter keeping her asleep. A year after he first raped her, the king goes back, finds her awake, tells her what happened and takes her back to his palace. His wife, understandably upset, orders the cook to the kill and cook the children. The cook swaps them for some other animal that the queen eats. The queen then goes after Talia but her screams alert the king who rushes in and kills his wife. They are reunited with the twins and all live happily ever after. Lovely story.
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Hehe. This poem is the only way I can convince my kid to eat.
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Used to be “fairy tales” weren’t a thing. And their “point” varied as much as the point of any other narrative tale. The fairy tale as a concept, along with its moral, is itself a product of that same era (in a lot of ways massaged to fit with Aesops Fables, themselves mostly a creation of the time). Sure there were folktales with a lesson going back to antiquity. But much of what we think of when it comes to the fairy tale category were stranger less specific stories.
Was explicitly conceived as porn. The fact that its ever SFW is a very, very, very good excuse.
From what I remember a lot of the tales were French, English, Irish in derivation as they talked to a lot of domestic servants to collect them. Along with some farther flung folks. Since they were visiting the classy folks and mostly in Germany/Alsace, it was unlikely that such classy fucks would hire their fellow Germans. Again off the top of my head but IIRC the order of operations for origin was French, German, Scandinavian, British Isles, and then weirder. Some Basque and Arab stuff in there.
The Grimms themselves originally published a lot of these earlier harsher versions, without lesson or moral as collected, as an academic text. But they met with push back from publishers and were the first to bowdlerize the tales. And they were both German (and thus not technically Victorian) and about 20-25 years before the Victorian era. For the headline fairy tales like snow white they weren’t even the first to collect the tales. (@hecep I think that refers to the later, complete text after the original academic 1st volume shit the bed sales wise).
The thing to remember with all of this is that the Grimms were modern. Astounding modern in terms of date… These were 19th century academics doing this as a side line. Printing press, publishers, newspapers, mass media. All of that existed, and while they sought to collect something older and weirder. It was still the 19th century.
That was a different, much earlier work IIRC. That’s the shit they were getting paid for while they embarrassed themselves talking to maids about trollies and underground kingdoms.
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Well, there are a lot of different versions of the classic “fairy tales”, but it’s impossible to say which are close to whatever bit of history inspired them and what has changed over time.
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