In the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder und HausmÓ“rchen are two tales of horrifying simplicity. How Some Children Played at Slaughtering charts two stories that begin with the same scenario – children playing at ‘Butcher’, ‘Cook’ and ‘Pig’ transpose those roles quite literally into their games. In the first tale, a child is murdered but, thanks to his childish ignorance of the adult world, the ‘Butcher’ escapes punishment. In the second, a chain of death is triggered across the child’s family as the murdered child’s mother reacts in anger and grief.
The violence of these stories is blatant and shocking. And yet most of us would identify them as children’s tales. Wilhelm Grimm, in the foreword to his first volume of fairy tales, clearly linked them with the essence of childhood, ‘pervaded by the same purity that makes children appear so marvellous and blessed to us.’ The implication that they are ‘child-like’ rather than ‘for children’ does not make his message any more comforting. If his tales are emblematic of childhood, it is certainly not of the rose-tinted view most of us hold. Instead, the Grimm’s tales are filled with inexplicable menace, undefined terror, and pure unadulterated brutality.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Brothers Grimms’ most famous work. Throughout Germany exhibitions, plays and film screenings are being held in celebration – you can even follow a Grimm fairy-tale tour that features Sleeping Beauty’s spinning wheel and Rapunzel’s rope of hair. Considering the patriotic aims of the Grimm Brothers when they began their collection, the national importance of these tales is hardly surprising. The Grimms were looking to reintroduce the stories of the German Volk and assert a uniquely German identity.
But the wider popularity and influence of the Grimms’ Tales is immeasurable. Over the past year, the world has been culturally overwhelmed by fairy-tales – in large-scale Hollywood productions like Snow White and the Huntsman or Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, as well as on smaller art-house screens in Blancanieves; in plays, most recently Hattie Naylor’s Bluebeard at Soho Theatre; in ballet, with Liam Scarlett’s retelling of Hansel and Gretel. And this does not even begin to include the sheer proliferation of new translations and retellings. The range of adaptations is staggering. And it is for the brutality and darkness inherent to them, the suggestion that they may be for adults, rather than children, that they are being celebrated.
The resonance that these modern fairy-tales have found with our age is undeniable. However, in the process of making the fairy-tale modern, its ‘purity’, as Wilhelm Grimm envisaged it, has been lost. New values, our current moral, psychological and social systems, have been ascribed to and explored through them. These may differ wildly – from the simplistic heroism of Rupert Sanders’ Snow White to the feminist critique of sexual misogyny in Naylor’s Bluebeard. But by filling in the undefined gaps of the Grimms’ tales, where ambiguity and menace fester, the terrifying simplicity and boundless suggestion of the original has vanished.
Yet by comparing the fairy-tales to children, Wilhelm Grimm was identifying the absence of inculcated adult morality in them. Much more primitive forces are at work here than the value systems we recognise. The two stories of How Children Who Played at Slaughtering lay bare the root of our actions, the unadorned violence of our lives, and they are terrifying and pertinent because of, not in spite of, the child’s perspective. As A.S. Byatt, writing in 2004 for the Guardian, remarked, the implication of these tales is like ‘a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.’
There is no better image for this than the famous Wald, or forest, which is such a dominant presence throughout the Grimms’ tales. It is a place where temptation, danger and menace lie. Both visually and literally it has become a staple of our culture, an incarnation of indefinable impulses and fears. If there is anything that embodies the endurance of these tales in our modern world, it is the forest as the Grimm Brothers saw it – full of hidden possibility and threat.
