Early Fairy Tales Finally get Cleaned Up

Early collections of tales often bore some semblance to our modern fairy tales but it was not until 1634 that we find our first recorded fairy tales.  Giambattista Basile wrote Il Pentamerone (the Tale of Tales), also known as Lo cunto de le cunti. It is written in the hard-to-translate Neapolitan dialect. Volumes 1-3 appeared in 1634, followed by volume 4 in 1635 and volume 5 in 1636.  They were published posthumously – Basile had already died by 1632.  Due to its obscure and difficult to translate dialect, the collection was not first published in Italian until 1747, German in 1846, and English in 1848.  Il Pentamerone contains many tales that are directly related to many of today’s most popular tales, including Cenerentola (an early Cinderella tale), Sun, Moon, and Talia (like Sleeping Beauty), Petrosinella (much like Rapunzel), and Gagliuso (similar to Puss in Boots).  Their existence in this collection, albeit in sometimes substantially different versions, shows that the tales did exist in oral tradition and influenced Basile’s writing almost 400 years ago.  Barring the few similar tales by Straparola, Basile provides the earliest known literary versions of many of today’s fairy tales.

Shortly after Basile’s Pentamerone was written, the Tales of Mother Goose was published in 1697 by Charles Perrault in France and contained The Story of Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and Tom Thumb.  This was followed by Fairy Tales in 1705 which included several Basile stories including The Fair One with Golden Locks.  By 1812, the Grimm brothers had assembled their famous collection of stories in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  Grimm’s Tales went through seven editions as the brothers watered down the stories to make them more suitable for children.  Early versions of Sleeping Beauty only bore a vague resemblance to our well known modern version.  The story of Sleeping Beauty, representative of the harshness portrayed in early versions of our popular fairy tales, goes as follows:

Sleeping Beauty and her Rapist

A great king was forewarned by some wise (old?) men that his newborn daughter named Talia was in great danger. It seems that a poison splinter was in the palace’s flax, and it would destroy her. The king immediately ordered a ban on flax inside the palace walls.

But, as all great fairy tales go, Talia somehow encountered a flax-spinning wheel and got that nasty splinter in her finger. What happened?

Talia dropped dead.

As a result, King Dad placed his daughter’s body on a velvet cloth, locked the palace gates, and left the forest forever and ever.

Enter the great nobleman, who turned out not to be so noble. While hunting in the woods one day, he just happened to stumble on the abandoned palace and Talia’s dead body. One would think he kissed her at this point, but no such thing happened.

Instead, he raped her.

He planted the noble seed and nine months later Talia gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Their names were Sun and Moon (which is the boy and which is the girl?) and the fairies took care of them.
One day, the boy was sucking on mom’s finger and sucked out the poisonous flax splinter, causing Talia to awake from her death bed.

Many months go by and the horny young nobleman returns to the woods to have another encounter with the princess. To his surprise, he found her alive and well. He confesses that he is the father of her children and they enjoy a hot weekend fling in the hay (Would you have a love affair with your rapist?).

The nobleman then returns home to his wife. Somehow she learns about his illegitimate children. The wife orders the capture of the children. Her cook is then told to slash their young throats and to cook a hash with their flesh.

At dinner that night, the wife gleefully watches her husband eat his meal. When he has finished, she announces “You are eating what is your own!”.

We can be sure that the nobleman did not feel too well at that moment. But then, he did rape a dead woman, so he deserves a little suffering.

It turns out that the cook had a soft heart and never slaughtered the children. Instead, goat meat was substituted.

The enraged wife ordered the capture of Talia and that she be burned at the stake, but she was saved from death by her rapist and they lived happily ever after.

Why didn’t Walt Disney use this version of the story? It is so much more interesting than the modern version.