John's Fairy and Folk Tale X-perience

So far in this class, the main way we've experienced the fairy tales we have been studying has been through reading them from an anthology of tales. In the anthology, the tales have been collected, of course, in written form, a form that has been in many ways necessary to the way in which have been studying them. None of us know every fairy tale by heart, so in order to have any hope of comparing and contrasting different versions from around the world, it is necessary to have them packaged in one place. Having the tales written down also makes it easier for the reader to analyze the tale and, in some cases, it is only because it was written down that we still have access to a particular tale at all. To be sure, having these stories written down is useful, but it is also not the only way to experience a fairy tale. As we learned in the first few weeks of class, most fairy and folk tales originated in oral traditions, in which they were told, not read. Luckily, this week, we were ...

At its core, the story of "Cinderella" is a story about class mobility. In just about every culture in which some version of the story is told, a young girl is forced into a life of quite, impoverished, and yet righteous desperation, either by the cruelty of an evil stepmother or by the incestuous advances of her own father. She is then rescued from this state through a combination of her own hard work (often involving domestic chores) and the love of a prince or other powerful and wealthy character. The shape that the story seems to take is almost always that of a rags to riches tale - of the Cinderella character starting out poor and becoming rich. After having read and watched several versions of the story over the past week, however, I am starting to think that it may not actually be quite this simple. The source of this complexity arises from differences in how the Cinderella character starts off in different versions of the story. In the version of the story that we o...

This week in class, we watched an interesting music video by the German heavy metal band Rammstein. The video's story line heavily referenced the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but with several...unique...changes. For one thing, the video focuses only on Snow White and the Dwarves and does not show the evil queen at all. Instead, the "villain" of the story appears to be Snow White herself, who seems to be oppressing and abusing the Dwarves, forcing them to mine gold and serve her. The Dwarves eventually rebel and (seemingly reluctantly) kill her. They place her at the top of a mountain in a glass coffin, but an apple falls through the top of the coffin, shattering it, and releasing an apparently (and perhaps understandably) angry Snow White.  I have now watched this video a couple of times and, to tell the truth, am still not completely confident I know what it is supposed to mean. The best theory that I've been able to come up with has to do with a ...