The first fairy stories were never intended for children
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
Your brain and body are quite plastic in different ways when you are young and become much more rigid as you grow out of childhood. Children are preparing for the world when they’re young and living in an artificial world much different than the one they will face as an adult.
Those feedback loops that were programmed when young in an artificial setting then just don’t deal well with the real world presented long after their ability to adapt has diminished.
Telling fictional stories that don’t pull punches which reflect the difficulties of the world might well be an evolutionary trait which helped prepare children for a dangerous world without exposing them to much of the actual danger.
I would challenge that premise and I'm sure someone out there has already ran the experiment to see which parts of the brain light up when listening to a story about X vs actually acting a part in a real world X scenario.
Better life lessons learnt than many other stories on TV.
Besides, there comes a time in most kids lives there they move from fairy tales to adult movies, during the time their brains are still very plastic.
Not at all. The modal kid never encountered a stranger. If you did meet one, not talking to him was an instinct followed by children and adults alike.
Even 8000 years ago human beings were not so distributed that they never encountered strangers. There were a few proto-cities back then with ~1,000+ people, which is enough for strangers on a regular basis.
And then as now, the urban population was not even reproducing at replacement level. The population of first-century Rome left zero genetic impact on Italy.
It was less of a problem then than now, since the urban population of the distant past was a negligible percentage of the total, whereas for us it's the majority.
A million people left no genetic impact? Are you sure about that? Seems too far fetched even for an exaggeration.
From a genetic perspective, cities are just somewhere you go to die.
(Quote from Terry Pratchett's "Lords and Ladies")
Wait, so he's saying that words can change meaning but mythical creatures cannot change character? It would seem to me that those are two sides of the same phenomenon.
In preliterate times, in which many of these stories originate, these stories were passed orally, likely around a fire or during/after a meal, where the elders told these stories to the youngers. There was likely not much segregation by age, which meant that children would be among the audience, and very likely, may have even been the target of the storyteller (if you ever watch grandparents with grandkids, even when the parents are in the room, much of the conversation may be addressed to the grandkids).
In addition, "childhood" as we have now is relatively recent. Likely as soon as they could walk, children were being involved in the adult activities of farming/gathering/hunting/fighting etc. Girls were often married shortly after puberty (so early teens). Young men were often inducted into the tribe of men early and trained as warriors (see Sparta for an extreme example, or the Jewish Bar Mitzvah where a boy is seen as an adult member of the community at age 13).
In addition, I don't think there was the concept of shielding children from the unpleasantness of life. Death was all around them. Many of them had lost mothers in childbirth. Many if not most had at least lost 1 sibling in infancy. Thus the violence and horror in the old fairy tales which we consider "adult" today, was likely not all that different from everyday life and thus not considered unsuitable for children.
As an example, think of the Roman practice of crucifixion. You could be a kid headed to market, and come upon a bunch of naked men, who were screaming in agony as they were being nailed to crosses by soldiers. Even in the modern age, hangings at Old Bailey in London were public affairs.
Thus, just because a story contains themese and/or scenes that we would consider not suitable for children today, does not mean that children were not an important part of the audience when the story was actually a folk tale being told in communities.
I totally agree. I see so many of these articles judging the past according to modern values. It’s absolute anachronistic nonsense if you ask me. I have no idea why people keep writing articles like this, except perhaps as some kind of signaling.
My grandmother told a story of a hanging she went to when she was 4 years old. That's here in the U.S. in the early 1920's. She says the whole town was there, children and all. That's totally possible seeing how today the town has a population of 6,200 - back then it was probably 2,000 or less. It's ironic that the gross coddling of children began with the Baby Boomer generation - the generation my grandmother helped raise. I guess between seeing public hangings and enduring both the Great Depression and WWII they wanted to make life easier for their kids.
Well, modern is relative but quick reading of wikipedia points out that people have been writing stories specifically for children since late 17th century, and definitely solidified as a category in the early 19th centuryt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_literature#Early-...
Picking a slightly more scholarly source we find this statement
> Already during the 1690s, Fénelon, the important theologian and Archbishop of Cambrai who had been in charge of the Dauphin’s education, had written several didactic fairy tales as an experiment to make the Dauphin’s lessons more enjoyable. However, they were not considered proper and useful enough for the grooming of children from the upper classes to be published. They were first printed after Fénelon’s death in 1730. From that point on it became more acceptable to write and publish fairy tales for children, just as long as they indoctrinated children according to gender-specific roles and class codes in the civilizing process. The most notable example here, aside from Fénelon’s tales, is the voluminous work of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, who published Magasin des Enfants (1756), which included “Beauty and the Beast,” “Prince Chéri,” and other overtly moralistic tales for children.
(When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition 2nd ed., p16-17)
One is that Basile's use of language is just visibly more complex than Perrault--Mother Goose--who presented similar stories in simpler forms only decades later: e.g. Cinderella ("The Cinderella Cat"), The Fairies ("The Two Little Pizzas"), Puss in Boots ("Cagliuso"), and Sleeping Beauty ("Sun, Moon, and Talia"). In other words, if you compare the two, you find that some fairy tales really were written for children back then too, just not by Basile.
The other reason is maybe to warn that Basile's unexpurgated stories, e.g. in Nancy Canepa's translation, may be a surprise to 21st C. adults who've only read Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, etc., because they are not only dark or whatever--they are Rabelaisian, scatological, etc., offering some fun 17th C. cultural surprises even for adults. I don't know enough about 17th. C. Naples to have an opinion on whether Basile would have been OK with using the same language around young children--like, maybe or maybe not. I'd just note Perrault didn't, d'Aulnoy didn't, L'Héritier didn't, and so on only like 60 years later.
Let us not divide the human race into Eloi and Morlocks: pretty children - 'elves' as the eighteenth century often idiotically called them - with their fairytales (carefully pruned), and dark Morlocks tending their machines. If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults.
Also, he says the following. Remember that Tolkien served in WWI, losing most of his friends and his unit, and he says that during the war is when he became deeply interested, as an adult, in 'fairy stories':
If adults are to read fairy-stories as a natural branch of literature ... what are the values and functions of this kind? ... First of all: if written with art, the prime value of fairy-stories will simply be that value which, as literature, they share with other literary forms. But fairy-stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people.
Well, I got The Return of The Jedi. Only my mother didn't remember Luke Skywalker's name so I knew him as "the handsome prince" until I watched the movie X)
Some people had (non-kit) microcomputers ~1981, but again, that was an extremely small percentage of the US.
Can you draw a schematic for me to understand how buying a TV saves money?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Jedi [1]: https://www.thoughtco.com/color-television-history-4070934 [2]: http://www.mytwodollars.com/2009/10/22/the-cost-of-living-in... [3]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek_convention
Woa, I didn't say that happened 50 years ago! I mean, you'd expect my mother to tell me the tales she remembered from her childhood, no? So you can imagine that at least a couple of decades had passed between the time The Return of the Jedi first appeared on screen and the time I heard the tale of the Handsome Prince with the laser sword and the evil knight in the black mask.
But, I'm not willing to say anything more precise about my age. Sorry :)
> "Grand-mamma, what great teeth you have got!"
> "That is to eat thee up."
> And, saying these words, this wicked Wolf fell upon poor Little Red Riding-Hood, and ate her all up.
THE END
The tension builds and then the bottom drops out because the protagonist is dead. The ending is jarring. The wolf is so dangerous that he doesn't just kill Red, he kills the whole story.