The Grimm brothers’ fairy tales are gruesome. Heads are cut off and sometimes stuck back on again. Children are maimed, or chopped up, cooked and eaten. Broken promises are punished horribly, though a magic bird or a talking animal can sometimes make everything come right.
Yet those tender-minded parents are misguided who keep their children away from Grimms’ tales for fear of instilling terrors. Little children know about terror already because they are afraid of being abandoned, and of big strangers. With no prompting from anyone, they play games involving much noisy bashing and killing of imaginary monsters. The magical thinking of children (as of pre-industrial, unlettered adults) expresses the hopes and fears of those who just don’t have enough information about the conditions of their existence.
Most adults filter out the poetic truth of what cannot (yet) be scientifically proved; or we think we do, though Philip Pullman acutely flags his lively retelling of the tales as ‘For Young and Old’.
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