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I never heard of this one but now I need to know

'Anachronistic Fairytales' by Wnslow Pels

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A... different version of The Frog Prince.

;)

The Infamous Pond, by Maximilian Liebenwein, 1907

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'Reynard the Fox' by Augustus H. Fox, (1822-1895)

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'In 'Powder and Crinoline', Kay Nielsen , 1913

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'The moon who dreamt he was a kite’ by DD McInnes

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I am reading Borges' comments about The One Thousand and One Nights. It is very interesting

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Gustave Moreau- Death and the Woodcutter

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Undine by John William Waterhouse (1872)

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The idea that children love fairy tales because fairy tales treat them seriously and do not shy away from the violence and danger the world has in store strikes me as very correct, but the fact it is generally expressed as "it is dangerous to go alone in the woods because there are wolves there"... gives me pause.

To begin with, this is just one fairy tale narrative (little red riding hood), which is thus elevated to the rank of "quintessential fairy tale" (debatable at best); secondly, this is a (deliberate?) misrepresentation of the tale's *actual* danger, which is the wolf specifically *as it lowers the child's defenses by impersonating her grandma after eating her*. It's not about the child being attacked by a wild wolf in the forest, it's about the horror of using familiar and comforting surroundings within the family sphere as a decoy (the plan is quite an elaborate one, too). And finally, this ties into my main remark, which is that in many fairy tales (a majority? I don't know), the danger children (or more generally fairy tale protagonists) face is less related to a foreign monster than the family itself: snow white, obviously, but also hansel and gretel - abandoned in the forest by their parents, twice!; rumpelstiltskin: the heroine was sold to the king by her lying, greedy father, and risks being executed by her master for most of the tale; donkey skin (self-explanatory); bluebeard (similar forced marriage situation); cinderella (and all the cruel step-mother stories in general...) - also self-explanatory...

Fairy tales tend to admit freely that families and parents can be actively harmful to children, whose perspectives the narrative centers; which is a (well-known) fact that makes everyone uncomfortable Always. So I think it's disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst to act as though the violence comes from the wolves outside and not the family inside.

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Flying Carpet (Ковёр-самолёт) by Viktor Vasnetsov (1880)

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Indeed.

In fact, usually the "fairytales used to be darker/more violent" thing comes from three specific things that people confused and mixed together.

A) The Grimm fairytales are "darker" than the Disney fairytales, and the first editions of the Grimm fairytales are even "darker" yet (and given Disney and Grimm are the two main references of Americans, it is a VERY big thing for them)

B) The "classical" fairytales a la Charles Perrault or European vintage translations of One Thousand and One Nights are "tamer", "lighter" than their older, "original" oral/literary counterpart (all the texts of the sexuality and violence of the Arabian Nights, the research to try to find what oral version Perrault might have used and censored)

C) It is true that unlike literary fairytales, oral fairytales (collected by folklorists from the 19th century onward) tend to be cruder and ruder, with more blood and piss and swear and amorality than what people are accustomed to.

But these three specific facts, not all directly related and each part of a specific domain (fact A is mostly a chronological fact while fact C is more of a social fact and achronological), were confused and mingled and simplified into the "All fairytales used to be darker".

Oh yes, and there's also technically fact D) People refer to the popular culture perception of legendary entities (such as fairies) and how it went from dark and creepy to "sanitized and cute"

As a general rule, a lot of popular Internet misinformation is basically based on one or several specific truths, that then get squashed and synthetized into an objective lie. That's during such times that you can use the expression "Their heart is in the right place".

Any generalization of fairy tales is going to kind of fundamentally fail unless you are very specific about the definition of fairy tales (if you're using märchen or another form of categorization) and which culture(s) you're using as your basis, if your analysis is including other cultures that a given international tale might have traveled to, the biases of the folklore collectors (...particularly if you're dealing with German folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm) and the potential ways that they might have been received by the people (often though not exclusively women) who were telling them.

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'The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson' illustrated by Anton Pieck

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F*ck... The Wee Free Men was in 2003. I never noticed before. Shrek 2 wasn't even released when this novel was out and about. I keep forgetting how old the Discworld truly is.

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I did a lil fan design for The Fairy Queen of Sweet Dreams from the upcoming Cinderella’s Castle by Starkid!

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Have you ever come across the works of Katy Towell? She’s a horror creator who ranges from animation, to writing to podcasts. Since her art often centers children and takes inspiration from children’s stories, it often dips into the realm of fairy tales. She also made a podcast called "the book of skary", where she reinvents classic fairy tales into horror stories, from Hänsel and Gretel to Cinderella. "The "Scrolls" in particular turns "the three little pigs" into an epic dark fantasy story, lasting multiple episodes. I used to love her videos as a teen

I forgot to answer this ask... Sorry 'bout that!

I never heard of all this, but I'll be sure to check it out

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How many fairy tales involve evil stepmothers?

Ha ha.

Ha.

Ha ha ha ha.

HA HA AHA HA HA HA HA HA AHA AHA AHA.

More seriously, a lot. A LOT. A FREAKIN LOT.

It is like asking how many fairytales involve wicked witches, or beautiful princesses, or good third son.

If you want an exact number, you will need to limit yourself to to a specific corpus (by country, by era, by author, stuff like that).

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'Princess Cotton Grass' by John Bauer, 1915