Fairy Tales

I have decided to talk about fairy tales for children this time. I think my choice is this one because when we hear “fairy tales” we usually think about Disney stories which contains a princess that wants to be with a handsome and strong prince, and that’s not totally true.

A fairy tale is a type of short story that has fantasy characters, such as fairies, goblins, trolls, dwarves, giants, mermaids or gnomes. Magic and enchantments appears in different ways. The term is also used to describe happy endings or romances, but not all the stories need to have these characteristics. The main point is that fairy tales are not true, and couldn’t be true.

This kind of stories are found in oral and literary form, but actually only the literary form can survive over generations. We have had fairy tales for thousand of years, although the term was created in the late 17^th century by Madame d’Aulnov. Many of fairy tales have variation in multiple cultures around the world.

Little Red Riding Hood is the one that I have chosen to talk about because I have seen that it has many different versions of the story, and I only knew the Disney one which was written by Charles Perrault. Grimm’s brothers have their own version called Little Red Cap and also Beatrix Potter (a writer that we have studied in this subject) has her own one called “The tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck”. The main interesting thing is that some countries have another versions, as Germany, Poland, Italia, Austria and France.

 

 

I am going to explain you one the best one for me, which is the Charles Marelles version, “The true History of Little Golden-Hood”. The story begins similar to the original one, a little peasant girl often called Little Golden-Hood has to take a piece of cake to her grandmother and come back without stopping to chatter on the way with people she doesn’t know. She has to cross a wood when she hears something. She finds a wolf who come frisking up to her like a good dog, saying that it is a friend wolf. She tells him she is going to her grandmother’s house and he replies that he shall gets before her and it is going to tell her grandmother that she is coming. When Little Golden-Hood arrives, the wolf is on the grandmother’s bed and they start talking about her arms, tongue, teeths… Finally, she starts running when she knows that she is not her grandmother and wolf tries to devour her but she only catch her little hood. Luckily, the fire-colored hood burn his tongue right down his throat. Just at this moment the grandmother arrives, returning from the town.

 

 

As you have seen, there was not hunter, the grandmother was alive, and the power is only in the little hood, which was one of those magic objects that I said before that a Fairy Tale should have.

 

See you soon!