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A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

medievalists.net

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Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#31

Post by Razengan »

torben-friis wrote: post #3

Damn, that's an unreadable page. I've got ads (or white space if using ad blockers ) the height of my whole phone screen,a cookie banner that blurs the background, a close button following me around and discracting me with the filing animation, a static button for the smartphone view (that's exactly the same?), A footer that appears if I scroll up and from that point on stays in place... What else could they do to ac…

> What else could they do to actively make users run away?

Comic Sans and fellow-kids memes

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#32

Post by john_artemis »

wahern wrote: post #12
_carbyau_ wrote: post #10

My point to add is that Fairy tales are not always (maybe not often?) children friendly by modern standards. Same as modern day "cartoons". They can have quite graphic content. My wife and I were reading from a "Trove of childrens songs, fairy tales etc" to our newborn, to get in the practice of reading to our child. Simple rhyming stuff, 3 blind mice, the luminous dong, tom thumb, jack and the beanstalk. It was gett…

Grimm's Fairy Tales are already watered downed versions of the originals, edited for the benefit of softer 19th century sensibilities. Darker material gives stories gravitas as well as putting the moral lessons in starker, simpler terms. If you don't follow instructions, or exhibit some antisocial behavior, you're not just "punished", you're slaughtered. Little Red Riding Hood strayed from the path and was eaten aliv…

That's an interesting perspective, but wouldn't your theory imply your kids would also be turned off by sanitized fairy tales? Or do they like those?

I'm comparing with my own experience. I loved (modern) fairy tales as a kid, and the world wasn't that different when I grew up.

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#33

Post by olau »

wahern wrote: post #12
_carbyau_ wrote: post #10

My point to add is that Fairy tales are not always (maybe not often?) children friendly by modern standards. Same as modern day "cartoons". They can have quite graphic content. My wife and I were reading from a "Trove of childrens songs, fairy tales etc" to our newborn, to get in the practice of reading to our child. Simple rhyming stuff, 3 blind mice, the luminous dong, tom thumb, jack and the beanstalk. It was gett…

Grimm's Fairy Tales are already watered downed versions of the originals, edited for the benefit of softer 19th century sensibilities. Darker material gives stories gravitas as well as putting the moral lessons in starker, simpler terms. If you don't follow instructions, or exhibit some antisocial behavior, you're not just "punished", you're slaughtered. Little Red Riding Hood strayed from the path and was eaten aliv…

About the telling - a good fairy tale is not read, it is told. You pick up the main plot lines and tell the story which has now become yours, controlling your voice, pausing, maybe mimicking swords or long hair, etc.

I've seen that kind of story-telling in action in a Waldorf kindergarten, and it is really capturing.

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#34

Post by _carbyau_ »

olau wrote: post #33
wahern wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grimm's Fairy Tales are already watered downed versions of the originals, edited for the benefit of softer 19th century sensibilities. Darker material gives stories gravitas as well as putting the moral lessons in starker, simpler terms. If you don't follow instructions, or exhibit some antisocial behavior, you're not just "punished", you're slaughtered. Little Red Riding Hood strayed from the path and was eaten aliv…

About the telling - a good fairy tale is not read, it is told. You pick up the main plot lines and tell the story which has now become yours, controlling your voice, pausing, maybe mimicking swords or long hair, etc. I've seen that kind of story-telling in action in a Waldorf kindergarten, and it is really capturing.

As a parent reading to my kid every day I am getting better. But it is a real skill to tell a story well.

I think the "ye olde storyteller that wanders from town to town" has morphed into the modern day comedian. The comedian often tells a mundane story, but they tell it well.

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#35

Post by [deleted] »

john_artemis wrote: post #32
wahern wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grimm's Fairy Tales are already watered downed versions of the originals, edited for the benefit of softer 19th century sensibilities. Darker material gives stories gravitas as well as putting the moral lessons in starker, simpler terms. If you don't follow instructions, or exhibit some antisocial behavior, you're not just "punished", you're slaughtered. Little Red Riding Hood strayed from the path and was eaten aliv…

That's an interesting perspective, but wouldn't your theory imply your kids would also be turned off by sanitized fairy tales? Or do they like those? I'm comparing with my own experience. I loved (modern) fairy tales as a kid, and the world wasn't that different when I grew up.

[deleted]

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#36

Post by _carbyau_ »

colechristensen wrote: post #23
_carbyau_ wrote: post #10

My point to add is that Fairy tales are not always (maybe not often?) children friendly by modern standards. Same as modern day "cartoons". They can have quite graphic content. My wife and I were reading from a "Trove of childrens songs, fairy tales etc" to our newborn, to get in the practice of reading to our child. Simple rhyming stuff, 3 blind mice, the luminous dong, tom thumb, jack and the beanstalk. It was gett…

The world is a harsh place. If you raise children in a bubble of safety and only throw them out into the real world at adulthood, they have many problems. Scary stories are a safe way to introduce developing humans to the realities of the world so they are prepared for them. Biologically it is the likely source of a lot of mental illness. Basically your brain tunes itself towards the expectations set in its early env…

The world being harsh is true. And I agree that modern western society seems to simply expect bad things not to happen. Whether it is bullying, other human-human violence or "business can't be let fail". A simple look at the animal kingdom tells you this is not a sane "expectation".

In this instance, I wasn't planning to censor the story out of existence. Just perhaps wait a bit longer than the other stories would require.

Interesting theory on the mental illness. I won't entirely subscribe to it as I think there are a wide variety of illnesses with a wide variety of causes. Whether this is the "likely source of a lot" remains to be proven I think.

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#37

Post by _carbyau_ »

mlang23 wrote: post #15
_carbyau_ wrote: post #10

My point to add is that Fairy tales are not always (maybe not often?) children friendly by modern standards. Same as modern day "cartoons". They can have quite graphic content. My wife and I were reading from a "Trove of childrens songs, fairy tales etc" to our newborn, to get in the practice of reading to our child. Simple rhyming stuff, 3 blind mice, the luminous dong, tom thumb, jack and the beanstalk. It was gett…

Fairy tales need to be a bit grimm (pun intended). They are supposed to teach about hardship and the difference between good and evil. You can only show the contrast if you actually have some evil to talk about. A child dying in the flames she sparked by playing with a bunch of matches while she was home alone. The cats were trying to warn her, now they can only watch from afar as the child and house burn. A homeless…

Yeah. Now I want to track down that "refuses to eat" story because we're at that picky eater stage!

My feeling was that I would wait a bit longer for the more gruesome story than some of the others.

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#38

Post by WalterBright »

throwaway56034 wrote: post #27
WalterBright wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But my point wasn't to say that the U.S. is unsafe. But when you say the US is "exceptionally violent" that is indeed what you're saying. > they need to be taught to recognize our society's preference for conflict over cooperation, for winner-take-all strategies, Oh come on. This just reads like selection bias. Just drive to work some day, and look at all the cars cooperating so the traffic smoothly flows. They go…

>But when you say the US is "exceptionally violent" that is indeed what you're saying. Compared to present countries, not the past, the US indeed is exceptionally violent, especially given the wealth in the country. * Homicide rate is among the highest of all OECD countries, for example: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... * The US still has legal capital punishment. * The whole approach t…

> Homicide rate is among the highest of all OECD countries

First off, what is and is not an OECD country is selection bias right from the start. "Among" the highest is subjective as well, and it's far from the highest. Next, the US is a large and diverse country. There are some neighborhoods with very high homicide rates (in Chicago, for example). This is not at all representative of the rest of the country, but it averages into the statistics.

The TV series "Sons of Anarchy" is certainly entertaining, but has nothing to do with reality in the US.

The homicide rate is still very, very low compared to deaths from other causes. It doesn't even rate a mention in lists of deaths from causes. I wouldn't characterize that as "exceptionally violent".

> The US still has legal capital punishment.

28 states have capital punishment, 22 do not. In 2019, 22 people total were executed. While this is 22 too many and it needs to stop, it is statistically insignificant compared to the population of 328,000,000.

> The whole approach to the penal system being very revenge-based

I agree with that, but don't agree it makes society violent.

> The prevalence of sexual violence

I clicked on the reference, expecting to see rates of conviction for sexual violence. It's not there.

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#39

Post by jahaja »

WalterBright wrote: post #26
wahern wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The U.S. is exceptionally violent as compared to most other developed countries. There are many contributors to the origins of that culture--frontier mentality, slave suppression, etc--but what's left today is the violence. In middle-class society that tendency toward violence is kept in check by other cultural norms and, arguably, redirected in various ways, such as a harshly punitive penal system, suppression of un…

> But my point wasn't to say that the U.S. is unsafe. But when you say the US is "exceptionally violent" that is indeed what you're saying. > they need to be taught to recognize our society's preference for conflict over cooperation, for winner-take-all strategies, Oh come on. This just reads like selection bias. Just drive to work some day, and look at all the cars cooperating so the traffic smoothly flows. They go…

> Free markets are based on voluntary cooperation.

Indirect coercion due to lack of the means of subsistence is not voluntary.

> Socialism is based on forced cooperation.

It's not. Socialism is not Stalinism.

Re: A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

#40

Post by mlang23 »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #37
mlang23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairy tales need to be a bit grimm (pun intended). They are supposed to teach about hardship and the difference between good and evil. You can only show the contrast if you actually have some evil to talk about. A child dying in the flames she sparked by playing with a bunch of matches while she was home alone. The cats were trying to warn her, now they can only watch from afar as the child and house burn. A homeless…

Yeah. Now I want to track down that "refuses to eat" story because we're at that picky eater stage! My feeling was that I would wait a bit longer for the more gruesome story than some of the others.

"The Story of Augustus who not have any Soup" is the english title of "Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kasper" as far as I was able to figure out.
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