The 1812 version of Snow White is even worse when you consider that the girl was only seven years old in the tale (plus her unconscious body ended up being carted around by the prince until one of his servants accidentally woke her up). Also, in The Little Mermaid, the mermaid’s unable to speak because she had her tongue cut out >__<
But I’d love to see faithful adaptations of the original tales. Especially Bluebeard. We need a Bluebeard adaptation.
Actually, the original-original pre-Grimm Brothers’ stories that were passed around Europe via oral tradition are nowhere near as violent as the Grimm’s made them. Cinderella’s stepsisters were never ugly and kept their eyes, Snow White’s mother was not even a villain (instead a group of bandits were), and instead of spending the whole story napping Sleeping Beauty outwitted a dangerous bandit leader, wouldn’t let him sleep with her, and saved herself.
The original oral stories were radically changed by the Brothers Grimm to fit their personal and political beliefs. Most notably, they often added in female characters solely for the purpose of making them evil villains and took away most of the heroines’ agency and intelligence. Both brothers belonged to a small fanatical sect of Catholicism that vilified women because of the idea of Original Sin and Wilhelm in particular had a particularly deep hatred of women. The Grimms were actually pretty horrible people. Those cannibalistic queens and ugly stepsisters and the mass amount of violence against women didn’t exist until the Grimms wanted them to. Their ideas stuck so soundly though that we now assume they were in the original tales and that these terrible characters and ideas come out of some perceived barbaric Old World culture. But in truth they’re really the Grimms’ weird obsession with hating women showing through. The original oral folklore focused on the heroes’ and heroines’ good deeds and used them as ways to teach cultural norms and a society’s rules and encouraged girls to be quick-witted and street-savvy instead of passive princesses, and the Grimms promptly stripped that all away.
“Grimms Bad Girls and Bold Boys” by Ruth Bottingheimer is an excellent book on this
Something to add to my reading list.
So this guy Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth collected all these fairytales and in the 2000′s they were discovered in an attic and published. Unlike the Grimm brothers, he did not edit anything. The Grimms deliberately edited the stories to fit middle class tastes – they also were trying to create a national identity with these tales as a touchstone. Meanwhile Von Schonwerth’s goal was documenting the Bavarian oral traditions – which is why he didn’t edit the stories in his notes.
And the stories are weird and intense. Some have the classic “beginning middle end + moral” – some are just “here’s stuff that happened….”
And some of the endings…you know that story about a weary soldier who performs three tasks and gets to marry the princess? In this book, the soldier is continually rejected by both the king and the princess, so he brings an army to burn down the entire castle with everyone inside. The end, lol.
The other interesting thing is that while the Grimms tales had mostly female protagonists, Von Schonwerth’s have as many boys trying to escape nasty situations as girls. There are boys who cuddle up with frogs to discover that the frogs are princesses, there are boys called “King Goldenhair,” there are brothers fighting, and fathers sending sons out to stop being a burden on the family. In the introduction, Maria Tatar posits that the Grimms, having suffered from being orphans, may have avoided these types of stories.
Anyway, if you like fairytales, The Turnip Princess book is worth the read.
end the concept that the grimms either invented or had the ‘original’ version
Though best known for her illustrations of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Pauline Baynes (9 September 1922 – 1 August 2008) first professional commission came from J.R.R. Tolkein, who saw her work in a publisher’s office and demanded she illustrate his forthcoming Farmer Giles of Ham. He was so delighted with the results that he stated her artwork reduced his text to a mere commentary of her illustrations. She would go on to become a popular and beloved book illustrator, contributing her distinctive artwork to both the outside covers and inside pages of numerous titles, as you can see from the images we’ve presented here.
Oh my goodness, I had no idea one person illustrated all of these. A fundamental part of my childhood imagination.
Oh, wow, YES! I didn’t have Lorna Doone, but I think I had all the others! Amazing!
Narnia of course, but I also had/still have those editions of Watership Down and Tales of the Greek Heroes, and I didn’t know they were her!
oh my i had several of pauline baynes’ covers! all the narnia books, tolkien, watership down–i still have them although they’re falling the hell apart
ive been reading a book that basically explains how so-called “brain differences” between the genders is the result of gendered socialization and not the cause of it. i honestly expected the book to be very cis-centric but its actually the opposite, the author stresses that testimony from trans ppl is actually indispensable because we’ve, in a sense, “lived both experiences”
more cis feminists should have this mindset
one of the first examples that she uses to introduce her point about how perception by others can shape a person’s performance actually uses a trans woman. it explains that as a certain trans woman became to be seen as a woman more and more frequently, the ppl arond her eventually started viewing her as being ill equipped for tasks that they did not bother her about pre-transition. eventually she even found herself underperforming in these tasks herself.
I knew it was this book before I’d finished reading the first two lines. Honestly this book is indispensible if you want to debunk any gender determinism people claim is science. I can’t recommend it enough.
(Bonus bonus: I am myself a neuroscientist, and the old white men mentioned above – who are not – could not have missed the point harder if they’d actively tried. Which. Maybe?)
SOMEONE INFORM ME EXACTLY HOW I MISSED THAT THE BADASS KEW PLANT GOD PUBLISHED A BOOK ABOUT HIS BADASS PLANT ADVENTURES???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
i ordered it bc i have no self control
update: this shipped out today but it’ll take 8-12 days to get here and im dying. carlos magdalena why must u do this to me
okay so i got this book today and spent like 6 hours reading it and im almost done but i really wanna talk about this plant nerd and his many endangered plonts that he loves and protects with all his heart and soul
carlos magdalena, kew botanical horticulturalist, is honestly an unproblematic fave
also btw heres some pics of carlos with the smallest water lily in the world, which he saved from extinction. he talks in the book about how he learned later on that at the time he finally figured out how to propagate this species in cultivation, rats had broken in and killed the only other specimens in the world at the german conservatory they were being kept at, and the habitat where the 1 or 2 wild plants had been living had been destroyed for a concrete company. he had been working with the last seeds in literal existence without knowing it (he had assumed they were still alive) and the other scientists and botanical horticulturalists in germany had been living in grief over having lost this plant to apparent extinction. he originally had 200 seeds recruited for trying to cultivate the species, and by the time he realized how to cultivate it, he had been working with the last 5 seeds in the world. he didn’t know at the time. (x)
reblogging this because I just mentioned this book again! it’s available for purchase everywhere now (as opposed to when I first made this post, when it wasn’t released in the US yet).
“A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country’s favourite book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Another one not long afterwards, held this time to find the favourite author, came up with J.R.R. Tolkien. The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word favourite. That’s a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for best. But a critic’s chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment of the taste of the British public, who’d been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: ‘Look, we’ve been trying to tell you for years which books are good! And you just don’t listen! You’re not listening now! You’re just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can’t stop you! We can tell you it’s rubbish, it’s not relevant, it’s the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn’t care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!’ And once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper’s Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called ‘narrative fiction’ among the top fifty ‘masterworks’ of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings again.”
I stumbled on an article last night where some douche was ranting about how mad he was that, in the wake of Terry’s death, people were mourning and calling him a great writer when they should have been reading something sublime like Bukowski.
In the first paragraph he said he’d never read anything by Pratchett and never intended to, which is pretty typical of that kind of angry elitism.
As someone who has been deeply impacted by Terry’s ideas about character and storytelling, that article made me so mad. Livid. Terry Pratchett levels of righteous fury.
Can I tell you how happy and unsurprised I am that Terry himself wrote such a lovely takedown of that snobbish, splainy mentality.
A thing being popular doesn’t automatically make it bad, and fantastic elements don’t make a work of literature into not-literature.
“For example, we often hear that necromancy was outlawed because it was a devilish practice that depended upon the power of Satan for its effectiveness. What you do not hear is that necromancy was an aspect of ancestor worship, and that part of outlawing it involved making it illegal to bury your family members on your own land. Suddenly, you were required to bury your dead in Church-sanctioned graveyards. This effectively removed one of your most solid claims to ownership of your ancestral land. It was no longer the place where you could prove your forefathers lay buried. It made it easier for authorities to come along and kick you out of your home and take state ownership of the land your family had left to you. This also supported the ultimate goal of breaking up family clans, and the political power and wealth that often went along with them.”
— Aaron Leitch, Folk Tradition and the Solomonic Revival; At the Crossroads
“Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends. Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was. Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill. Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia. Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him. Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor. And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.”
no one talks about how rick riordan literally scammed disney
dead ass pjo was that seemingly “normal” kids fantasy series with a seemingly white straight kid saving the world and it’s a fucking success. percy jackson? iconic! ppl fucking love percy and his character and then hoo comes out? everyone is pumped bc everyone is in love with that world. the first book? two main bad ass poc characters. the second book? two more bad ass poc characters! the fourth book and there’s literally a gay character and it’s not like disney could say no. hoo ends and then there’s magnus chase and ppl are fucking pumped bc that’s annabeth chase’s cousin and in the first book there’s a muslim girl and by the second book there’s a transgender and genderfluid character. trials of apollo? a main gay couple in a happy relationship and a fucking bi character. could disney say no? no. literal 10 year olds are reading books with heaps of representation all published by disney. rick riordan played the game. you step in thinking ur just gonna get white cishets and you walk out surrounded by different cultures and rainbows.
tldr; rick started out with the basic pasty white and straight series which got hella successful and used his success to pusblish more books and allow only one (1) cishet and only one (1) white
i doubt he planned it but deadass it would be so funny if that’s what happened
I saw him speak on /writing in the UK right before (or early in on when) his series hit it big. Planned. Definitely planned.
Thousand percent planned. Also Percy? Has a learning disability. RR’s son inspired him to write bc he is ADHD and dyslexic. This was all planned. He is all about inclusivity and representation.
He also makes his books incredibly funny, which is rather rare for YA and makes them more accessible to kids who don’t really like to read. In addition to having loads of POV character who have trouble reading themselves.
For those who’ve been living under a YA rock, this is Rick Riordan:
(this was the gay character in the second series)
(and the trans character in a later series)
Let’s not forget that he has an interest in the mythologies of other countries, but instead of writing them himself promotes other writers through his “Rick Riordan Presents” publishing imprint to do so!
wupacing 